laceblade

Panel Description: Race and class are two identities that exist in tandem, one never really trumping the other. What are the ways they intersect, diverge, conflict? What happens when our internal race/class state differs from an external race/class assignment—and what factors go into forming internal/external states in the first place? This panel will look at the realities of how we exist within and negotiate race and class without privileging either concept.
Saturday, 2:30-3:45pm
Twitter Hash-Tag: #RaceOnMyClass
Panelists: Saladin Ahmed, Eileen Gunn, Nisi Shawl, Chris Wrdnrd (There was no moderator.)

As always, this is not a verbatim transcript. Things that seem like non-sequitors/etc. are because I couldn't type fast enough. These panelists were great. Corrections appreciated in the comments; I can edit the post whenever I'm able, but will be away from my computer for much of the day.

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NS: I helped come up with the panel.

SA: I’m a fantasy writer, my debut novel is Throne of the Crescent Moon. Arabian nights fantasy. Set in land that is like people in the Middle East rather than medieval European fantasy. Protagonists are working people.

EG: Never sure what class I am or my family is. Barbara Jensen has written a fantastic book on class. Did a panel a few years back. If you don’t know what class you are, then probably middle.

CW: Collaborated to be on the panel.

CW: A few years ago, we had a class basics panel. Class and race was shied away from, in part because it’s so large it needs so many panels.

NS: Noticed that it provides a point for conflict because you can be assigned a totally different class from perceptions of outsiders than you experience yourself. That’s an observation of mine, can’t back it up with any personal experience. I think of everyone as my equal. Anybody else have anything to say about the conflict between external assignment and internal state?

EG: I see it in the workplace. Corporations have an internal class system. Managers have upper class in structure of the workplace. How that works in interaction with them. They may not see themselves as middle class. Working class who work themselves up into corporation but see themselves as (?!). Conflict from both sides. Subordinate sees their boss as upper class, but boss sees themselves as working class. I see that a lot, also employee and employee relationship. Class based on status in the corporation.

SA: In my own experience, like race for me, what other people are thinking about me depends on context – how I’m dressed, how my hair is cut, whether I’m with my children or my wife or certain friends and other friends, whether I’m at a poetry reading of MFA students or etc. With loud relatives in a Ponderosa. Not only outsider perceptions, but emphasis in range of class positions - cycle through them a lot.

NS: Is it like code switching?

SA: It is, but it’s almost a conscious act. Been poor my life – I grew up in an immigrant enclave in a factory town, now because I’m in an MFA program in NYC. Different kind of upward mobility. Went to Uni of Michigan. I knew other working class kids, they studied pragmatic things to get out of class position they were in. My parents were artsy. Weren’t working class b/c they were artsy types. Something about it becomes automatic.

CW: One of the things that gets me about assumptions people make – I work a middle class desk job. My boss assumes that I’m as middle class as he is, he assumes that I collude with his humor. He tried to tell me one day that the decline of the English language was due to people living in trailers. It's such an icky feeling when someone assumes I’m going to share their sense of humor.

SA: That’s where race intersects hard. He wouldn’t be defaulting to the dynamic if you were black or if you wore a hijab. He wouldn’t assume you were in that club even if though you might be, if you weren’t the same race.

NS: Story I know from living in Ann Arbor. Black city council man who got stopped for driving while black. He was arrested because he didn’t have his ID on him. He was perceived as being of the underclass, but he was actually a “ruler.” Prime example of someone having a conflict between their experience, what their actual daily life is in terms of class, and what it’s perceived as. Maybe internal experience was different yet again.

AUD: My family’s well-off, I had black boyfriend. Perceptions are so different. My parents were clueless/awful, asking if he knows how to use a microwave, etc.

SA: Always fraught. I try to be a pretty nice and happy person in personal interactions. At the core, I have a dark nihilistic part of me. Thus, often find myself playing devil’s advocate – we can always have happy alliances, different agendas don’t have to be at war – sometimes they are! More recent example – the Skip Gates (Nisi’s story). I grew up in some proximity to African American culture in Detroit. When I say something – of course the cops are fucked up, etc. When I see Skip Gates, he was reacting in almost imperial manner. Part of his reaction was: of course it happened, I’m a black man in America. But he also reacted with a “how dare you” energy. Has its own class energy. “I’m not a common criminal” reaction. I grew up w/ people involved in various criminal enterprises – they’re not shitty people, either. Being mistaken for the underclass – maligning of this thing that you’ve been taken for is a mental trip. Being mistaken for Muslim. Well, that sucks, but you want me to get upset because someone called you this horrible thing? Part of me that ...race and class interact in really uncomfortable ways.

EG: You don’t become a professor at Harvard without a certain level of arrogance. Air of “I’m right/you’re wrong.” Not just classist, but a personal assumption – “I’m right!”

NS: It also can be irritating to be mistaken for the wrong race, as I can attest. Thinking of Chip Delaney. He taught a course at University of Michigan. I didn’t pay any money, just sat in. He came to class one morning furious b/c someone had been hurling racist epithets at him and they were the wrong race. He taught a very interesting class. Other thing I think in terms of race and class intersecting, is race is a much simpler construct than class in my opinion.

EG: It’s an on/off switch to many people, to people who perceive race in that way.

SA: Oh yeah, dominant narrative is that there are four boxes. In the States, we have so little to talk about class. Even now, in talking about “class warfare,” we’re not talking about it in any radical level. We talk uselessly about it a lot more. There's a lot of vocabulary out there even if shit doesn’t change (race).

NS: "MFA poorness" as opposed to "growing up poorness." How many kinds of black are there, and how many kinds of poor are there?

AUD (Mary Kay Kare): Suggestion that race is simpler is very US –centric because talk about race here but we don’t talk about class much. You would find those constructs different in different places.

EG: Didn’t think argument was going that way. Americans brought up to believe they’re in a classless society, even when they know they’re not..

SA: Not thought of as identity categories. We’ve spent 20-30 years as a culture.....people react ass-backwardsly (new favorite word) to feminism/multiculturalism but are engaging.....not happening in the same way as class is.

NS: Maybe it has to do w/many people told they can change classes. Very few people told they can change race.

AUD: Married to English man, talks about race all the time. Accents, speech, etc.

EG: Barbara Jensen’s book. Gave a talk here, talking about all the different classes and how much money your mother/father have. The class marker that's most reliable was where you kept your garbage in the kitchen. In a trash can visible next to wall, or under the sink. If you hide it, you're middle class, if it's out in the open, you're working class.

SA: So...my wife was also working class, is a psychologist now. We kept a trash can under the sink, but we never use it. We keep a loose bag hanging on the outside.

CW: .....What does worm bin indicate?

AUD (Karen Babich): The loose garbage back indicates you're a student!
In America, lazy. Visually, class is hard to pick up especially with onset of cable TV, MTV, and big box clothing stores. Race and gender are things we can assume we look and see know something about.

David Emerson AUD: Barbara Jensen: Class is internal experience. People in the working class in general have a different set of expectations about the world .....(I just stopped recording his comment, sorry lol)

SA: There was that Scalzi post about race/gaming settings and difficulty settings. Class not included, that’s preposterous to me. I can pass on class, but I am still going to be that kid (from immigrant enclave factory town). Doesn’t fluctuate to me. Garcia Marquez book – Love in the Time of Cholera quote: I’m not a rich man, I’m a poor man with money. Well, I’m a poor man with an education.

Genevieve A. Lopez AUD: As far as things like class-passing and race-passing can be very touchy to talk about, but race-passing and class-passing, what have your experiences been regarding that? What are difficulties in untangling when both of those might be happening at once?

NS: I tend to think of myself as everybody’s equal so I really have a hard time...I can see there’s a difference when I tell them I went to a Confirmation class at St. Luke’s Episcopal. Makes me a higher class than going to North Glade elementary – north side of black people. If someone knows your address, they know your class. I wasn’t trying to pass, I had an older friend who went to that church, so she had me go to a confirmation class series. I’d be treated very differently depending on where I told them. Passing unintentionally happens all the time. On a plane, someone asked me where I’m from. I said, Kalamazoo. “Oh, not India?” I had some Indian beads on. IDK.

EG: When I was younger, my partner was a black man. Lived in East Cambridge. Portuguese part of town. Having lunch in a restaurant. He made friends with everyone. He had taught himself to speak a radio announcer sort of accent, removed the accent. He could do 7 different Boston accents, could teach himself many different accents. He didn’t deliberately do anything, disturbed people.

NS: Did they think you were Portugese?

EG: People think I’m Italian. I’m Irish, mostly. Maybe just because I don’t act like an Irish person.

NS: It’s all that wine you drink.

AUD Karen Moore: Moving through class panel last night, someone made a really cogent observation that made me have a light bulb moment. Well, you know I grew up poor and I’ve been very well to do for the last 20 years and I still can’t throw out leftovers and I thought oh God, yes. Then talking about Imposter Syndrome. Even though you’ve moved into a different class, you feel as though you’re not really there. Maybe not the thrust of this panel. Talk about how class becomes internally defined thing and hold on to it no matter what you externally appear to be. Pattern keeps coming back.

EG: IDK about Imposter Syndrome, but interesting she’d think that because she had money she ought to throw out leftovers.

SA: Most cogent for friends of mine – friends with degrees, using French, taste in food has changed, etc.

NS: Grew up well below the poverty level. Money is a class marker but there are other markers, too. Survey in some women’s magazine that purported to answer the question, of what class do I belong to? How many pictures of yourself do you have on your walls? Your ancestors? We keep talking about money but I keep thinking it must be more than that. Because there’s such a thing as poor upper class people, aren’t there?

AUD: I teach high school in Chicago. Students are poor and black. Their race identity is much stronger than any class identity. Haven’t been taught to think of class. They bring in some of the stereotypes/oppressive behavior. One student starts to do well in an English class or etc., and someone says, “Stop talking white.” One thing for some students that helps is science fiction, I wish there was more with black heroes.

AUD LaShawn Wanak: I also grew up in poor black neighborhood in south side of Chicago. Didn’t think of class as growing up, knew I was different than people in my neighborhood. Made contact with old friend. I don’t consider myself rich or to-do or etc., I live on SW side of Madison, mixed neighborhood. Talking with her, I became very aware of class difference between the two of us. Normally wouldn’t have bothered me because we still like the same things. Big house, she lives w/many relatives, hasn’t been to school. Gives me a higher sense of privilege. Discombobulating.

NS: You felt different when younger...class (collision?)?

LaShawn: I liked things different than everyone else.

NS: LaShawn...ou’re a nerd. (laughter)

LaShawn: Very interesting to see how now there’s a divide between my friend and I.

NS: Is science fiction a class? Or is it a race?

SA: It’s an orientation.

AUD: It’s a choice!

AUD Isabel Schecter: What Karen said about leftovers. I have that same experience, for me it’s compounded by race, doubly so because I can pass. Grew up on welfare. I talked white, very clear to everyone in my family that I was going to become white when I grew up. I was going to go to college and marry a white man. I did those two things. Only person in family to go to college, got two degrees. Married a rich white man. If you ask his family, they’ll say he’s middle class. My family says we’re filthy rich. I have all this money, can come to WisCon, eat foofy food. I can’t bring myself to throw out the leftovers. I know I have huge amounts of privilege but I also have these really conflicted issues about race. Growing up, didn’t know poor/nefarious activities, didn’t make distinction between class and race. Assumed we were this way because we were Latino and flawed. Didn’t realize until later it was class, and socioeconomic issues. Now I’m a rich white lady, except that I’m not rich and not white. Terrifying to figure out your identity/what have I become.

AUD: Permeability of class. Permeable across 2-3 generations. I come from an upper class/middle class marriage. I know the difference in visiting my grandparents that they were different classes. In college, I thought I passed, until started seeing markers that were invisible. I knew I had transgressed some marker, still don’t know what that marker was.

SA: We don't have a moderator, so I hope I can steer just a little bit. Focus on questions that are about race and class?

NS: Can add racial overtone to that audience comment. The idea of changing class over generations has a parallel in black community of changing race over a generation. Struck by Isabel – you are going to be white when you grow up.

AUD: (I did not write anything down!)

AUD: Intersection of class and race is complicated issue to deal with. One thing that struck me is how fluid that can be and how people can perceive race and class and see one and not see the other. Grew up in Virginia, old VA city. Two classes of people in general. (I did not write the rest of this comment.)

SA: Meta level on which, when we talk about race, the class positions we’re doing it from. At WisCon: This is a literary convention, we all read. Very basic underpinnings like that. If you read a fair amount, and most people you’re talking to about race read a lot, then you’re getting a disproportionate slice. You’re only talking with some people about some aspects of race. Ways in which it intersects with race not discussed. Comes out most emphatically online. Facebook becoming a little democratized. Way more class-diverse than Twitter. Really intriguing to me. Blow-ups of controversies in [SF/F] genre happen largely online. What I see that’s missing, is people with college jobs who have time to be online a lot during the day. That’s not most people. Doesn’t suggest we go out and recruit everyone, but knowing your privilege/etc. – underpinning to that discourse has to do with access to computers, a certain vocabulary about oppression, etc. Wish we were a little more conscious about that. When someone says “Aaaa-rahb,” it’s context-specific. Knowing how to pronounce "Arab" correctly can be a class marker. The way they talk about women or queer people would not pass in our blogosphere or here. They don’t hate queer people any more than someone who knows the right words. If we’re going to have an open conversation where we’re talking across race lines as well as class lines, [I stopped mid-sentence!]

NS: I like running Internet dramas by my sister, sort of a pulse-check, to see how she reads it.

AUD: Touched on this, but wondered if you could talk about intelligence and how that is perceived across class and race. Know the same degree of privilege I have is not perceived in the same way in other people.

CW: Interesting how articulate you are can erase class lines. I’ve seen how articulate a person is can erase race lines. Black man who's a friend of my husband's got into an argument on World of Warcraft, he was playing with someone on headsets – "you can’t be black, you’re so articulate!" It’s a really big one.

AUD: Seen it do the opposite. Large black man, being articulate gained him hostility.

EG: Different people have different abilities to reposition other people’s opinions of them. Not an intelligence dependent thing, but something black people experience far more than white people. White people assumed – look at your skin/clothing/etc. Don’t have to [I missed the end of this statement!]

SA: See it a lot online. North Carolina [recent passage of amendment banning gay marriage]. So many tweets from upper middle class friends were like, these dumb fucking rednecks. If you can’t respond without “I’m pro-gay rights because I went to college, and these people are all fucking their cousins,” ....you’re perpetuating other stupid shit.

CW: Wanting to ask, when discussions of race and class happen, why does it go to class? What is behind that impulse? "If you just fix the class problems, racism will magically go away."

SA: That is an unfortunate tendency. See – every time someone brings up class in a race discussion, they are always accused of derailing. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it needs to be a part of the conversation. We have to look at each instance and look at what people are doing.

AUD: Reason that class comes up and derails, unconscious derailing – more comfortable with conversation about class than race, which makes us uncomfortable as white people.

(Nisi tried to challenge this audience member's use of the phrase "us," implying "we are all white people," but I think the audience member didn't get it.)

NS: Can’t say anything about that. Almost out of time....Growing up, we had a function called honorary whiteness, also had honorary blackness. Mostly black school. Sanchezes were there. Didn’t know what to do with this non-binary class, decided they were black, because of their class. Same clothes/shoes/neighborhood, assigned them a race based on their class.

AUD Karen Babich: Where are the good conversations happening?

NS: World Fantasy Con 2 years ago. Science fiction conventions.

The General Assembly has become a familiar practice since the growth of Occupy Wall Street. Anarchistic and radically democratic organizing processes have a much longer history, though, including the Zapatistas, the Spanish student movement, and movements in the history of feminism. For WisCon members, a familiar feeling might have bubbled up in watching, reading about, or participating in Occupy: wasn't this a bit like what they did on Le Guin's Anarres, or in DuChamp's Free Zones? This panel will discuss the possible growth of a kind of democracy other than our current party-based political systems, using the ways it has been prefigured and imagined in feminist science fiction to help make sense of radical histories and futures.
Saturday, 10-11:15am
Twitter Hash-Tag: Radical Democracy The tweets have also been Storified.
Panelists: Alexis Lothian (moderator), Timmi Duchamp, Liz Henry, Andrea Hairston

Panelist Liz Henry also live-tweeted the panel, although she tragically did not use the designated hash tag. You can find her tweets at lizhenry

Here's a link to Liz Henry's blog post, including lots more details and references and insights.

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laceblade note: The transcription is more complete for people who talk slowly (Timmi), and way less complete for people who talk faster (Alexis, sometimes Andrea). I hope I have recorded things as an accurate representation of the panel, but this is definitely not every word that was said on the panel!

Also, there are some political events/organizations that were mentioned that I have no idea wtf they were. These will be denoted with "?!", lol.

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AL: Thank you all so much for coming. It’s early, I appreciate you coming to an intense and what I hope will be exciting and creative panel. I proposed it because I thought it would be amazing to have these three people talking about these things. That was my main goal. Imaging radical democracy and thinking of ways we can imagine politics – more than Republicans and Democrats. What could democrfacy be other than that? Political agencies, actions....what the histories are of these movements.
I want to ask some questions that will solicit conversation. Want to give panelists 40 minutes before questions. Would appreciate holding your questions until they’re opened up.

TD: Hi, in terms of this panel, I would say that for most of my adult life I’ve been torn between intellectual and writing activity and political activism of various types. Always with some group or other, not as a follower but getting involved in individual actions locally. I’ve tried to balance these two and in my writing, if any of you have read my fiction, I address social and political issues all the time. The Marq'ssan Cycle (series of books written by this panelist) as a result of my activism and thinking. Wanted to imagine how we would get to a better place where everyone can flourish. Took me 5 books to do that. I found in writing those books, to my surprise, not an end utopian result, but a process. The books told me that utopia is a process. It’s a political process involving working out problems, collective problems collectively with political dialogue. It is sort of interesting that those books in a way are a culmination of all the thinking I’ve been doing in my exp as an activist but led me to a diff place. I hadn’t realized that. I knew from the organizations that I worked with and my problems with them that my problems were hierarchal. That’s why I didn’t become a full member but just participated in actions, often direct actions. Also things like petition drives, like the ERA. That was disillusioning, the practice of it. Not the goal of carrying it out, but dealing with the National Organization for Women. Put me off that. After that I worked with NARAL, same thing. Very hierarchal and top-heavy. Those of us who did actual work...hired organizers treated like dirt by the board who did all the fundraising. The organization existed to serve the fundraisers. That could put a lot of people off activism. These kinds of experiences do. That’s a part of the whole problem in the US. Bad experiences create low expectations especially with social rollbacks over the last 30 years. Creates political apathy. Political apathy is a response, not just a state of ignoring the world, it’s a state of actual response. It’s not passive even though it looks like passivity. I think what’s important about science fiction is it gives us alternatives that we can’t imagine in the US even though our history is full of tens of thousands of experiments in collective communities. All around the world, all sorts of things going on, all sorts of collective groups. World Social Forum created to make a visible example in visible space of an alternative to DAVOS, the world economic forum. All these groups converge in South America. Puerto Alegre in 2001. Followed the WTO in Seattle, not accidental. At that point that we saw that imagining alternatives had to be outside of natural boundaries. I think the whole game has changed. It’s not just 9/11, it’s globalization. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself here, you can see what my interest is.

LH: I’m live-tweeting the panel! I want to talk about some of the activism and process that I’m involved in. I agree with everything said, startingly. Somewhat in my involvement with a hackerspace in San Francisco. Want to talk about anarchist hackerspace – processes and problems. Part of the problem and solution is in narrative structures. As I sometimes talk to journalists at techy conferences or journalist conferences, which I end up as a human diversity machine, I am talking to people who can’t tell the story of Occupy or WikiLeaks or any kind of revolution or anything hackery. They can’t tell a story, don’t know how to understand the story if there’s no hierarchy or leader or puppet master or hero. Riot Girl? The idea that you’re killing rockstars, refusing to become a rockstar, so many people within this many-centered movement refused to be rockstars. They want to make someone the saint, canonized someone because they want to arrest them. Even if they don’t want to arrest someone, they don’t believe that htings could happen that way. I love the Marq'ssan Cycle for teling that story, for telling stories with multiple POVs. Teaching people through telling a difficult story. Demanding the reader engage so deeply as to understand a difficult story. Teling journalists you cannot understand it unless you are with it. You must participate. You are actually sucked in. Want to leave it there and come back to it.

AH: So participatory democracy. Grew up with it in my household. Everybody was a race man or woman. You had to do something, to change, b/c the narrative out there was false. You had to change the narrative. Narrative technology that changes what we want/need. Grwew up with union organizaers, civil rights orgs....I was a scientist. I was a little slower to organizing b/c I was a dreamer but eventually dreams woven in. I dsappointed them, but I'll talk about that tomorrow night [presumably in her Guest of Honor speech]. What I realized was that for me, one who tells the story rules the world. Therefore, we all need to. WE all need to be agents of action, all need to be storytellers. All need to be agents of action in the story.
In the past in the 19th century, Iqbo women in Nigeria had participatory democratic meetings where women spoke. They’d be anarchic or not within any...they were ad hoc. British did not understand them. Women had women’s war. Other people in the region in Nigeria understood Women’s War. Women: Look, this shit sucks, it’s fucked up, your dick is limp. They performed poetry: get your goats out of my grass. Performance in front of the offenders. Poetry/singing/dancing until resolved. We’re all leaving now, taking the babies, you take care of children. Men try to take it back [whater offense they'd given], etc., then resolve.
British thought men didn’t have the women in control, and so they shot at the women. During women’s war, they’d come out with utensils. British shot at them because they thought they’d kill them. It was at the turn of the 20th century. After that, the British told them, "You have to act like Victorian women! You don’t have a say!" (Referencing women's war): Also, could do it naked. Women would strip, run around, do this stuff. The men would be like, "Oh no, they've taken their clothes off, it’s over." The British didn’t understand the conventions/terms. They [the Iqbo] were much more democratic than British. Way of balancing power/making sure all voices were heard. You knew if you did some crap, you might have to face this. Made you reconsider. Called chaotic anarchic process. Functioned beautifully for a long without problems until the intervention of the British who wanted to civilize these savages who didn’t understand. Asked where the chief was. They didn’t have chiefs. Why do we need one? Chiefs imposed on them, women were revolting against the chiefs. Try to tell everyone that story as often as I can. Use those images in my own writing. Current book dealing with one such woman who comes to America. I’m Andrea Hairston, I don’t think I said that (laughter). I write SF/F, I’m a professor, I marched with my mother to March on Washington when I was 11. She got me on the right track.

LH: I'm Liz Henry, WisCon 20 was my first WisCon. I have a lovely book put out by Aqueuduct Press. Feminist anarachist geography. Imaginary geography. Buy my book, it’s awesome!

AL: It says a lot about how much one has to say that intros has become the panel, which I’m happy about. I love WisCon because the conversations we have here are also conversations I have in academic work but they’re jargon and filled with references, and I really appreciate the way we have them here. Couple things I hope we can bring out. Narrative, and what narratives have power/what do we expect? What are ways something else can be imagine? Appreciated Andrea’s example [of the Iqbo] – this is not a new idea. Have existed for so long, actually colonialism empire that has tried to stamp them out. Really specific example, gives us something to work with/draw on. Both Timmi and Liz touched on examples, would you like to take collectivities and tease out how that works and what are some of the important elements of it?

LH: NoiseBridge, hackerspace in San Francisco. Own little movement (hacker spaces) situate them in early Internet culture, pre-web. Then through conference in Berlin every Christmas, CCCC, people there were like, we need to establish a physical space where we can do our stuff. About making things and computer hackery things. Started a Wiki hackerspaces. Popping up instances in different cities. Patterns in software, patterns – not rules or legal structures. Patterns or anti-patterns can lead to institutional structures that are quite flexible. That came from book on architecture that’s an amazing book.

AL: Liz has a essay that explains all this in the WisCon Chronicles.

LH: Oh yeah! This is not a coincidence! NoiseBridge started by people who pooled their money. Co-op but anarchist. One rule, inspired by Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure: be excellent to each other. One rule. Leads to some very interesting meetings. Mostly works, has worked for 3 years. We’re one of the largest and radically inclusive hacker spaces. Right now we’re 5,0000 sq ft space in the mission in San Franciscoi between 17th and 18th (?!). Full of junk. Computer junk, electronics drunk, soddering irons, photography dark room, wood shop. Two classrooms. Attracted some revolutionary micologists. Shelves with plastic, people having a meeting who were growing mushrooms. People brewing/distilling. Sewing/crafting there. Acceptable project definition grew very quickly. Salting of the space with kitchen and sewing and things that were signifying....don’t have to prove you’re a computer hacker to come into this space. A lot of it is about do-orcracy. Let’s have a farm/business/etc. Trying to bring in some history of utopian history –

AUD: Louisa May Alcott – her father had a utopian farm/etc.

LH: I’m not a farmer but a lot of our fights...we have constant drama. I edited an issue of the WisCon Chronicles about internet drama. Danah Boyd paper about how people talk about drama. Specifically teenagers on Facebook and how drama has become gendered. It’s what girls do, trivial, gossipy, sort of bad. Dudes shouldn’t engage in drama. NoiseBridge has a public mailing list is drama. Someone used the kitchen…

AH: What do YOU mean by drama? You mean Melodrama.

AL: Wank.

LH: Everyone can see it (the drama). Complicated process sof a relationship in public. Not real but has some inauthenticity despite we’ve grown up mediated thorugh media. It seems natural to me that our relationships are played out in a public sphere. If you think about blog sheets and gossip, happening now. Happening when you’re 12. Happening at hackerpsace. 3-D printers. Launched a weather balloon into space. Main public face is us fighting about who to kick out and where the boundaries are. Always the process. How do we kick out the jerks? Everyone’s fighting, people doing weird guerilla actions that mock everything, making us look bad, shouldn’t you do something awesome? Meanwhile, people are homeless. We have a buzzer or you can read the Wiki and how to get in. Anybody can walk in, we’ll give a tour, you can use all tours. We had to kick out half of Occupy San Francisco. People in squats who had shelters or SROs don’t have access to running water/working kitchen. By making a space in which we’re trying to address one problem, we’re more revolutionary than we realized. Once you’re part of a revolution, you have to fix all the things. It’s very hard, very valuable it takes place in public, documenting what happens. Also really difficult and uncomfortable and don’t know when feds will come shut you down. Wanted to mention books, but can do that in next space.

AL: The drama, the fact that trying to make change is really tortorus, results in fighting and people hating each other, internet culture/drama. What wank and drama and melodrama do and why they might just not be....part of how we negotiate. We have to emerge from it. It does things that other kinds of more carefully planned politics don’t do. Even the most trivial fights can have ripples of effects that are really important to what a community does. Marq'ssan Cycle, learned more about it through reading that. And also through many other works of SF. Love that you brought that together, what you need to do in the hacker psace. How there are so many....that should not be dismissed. Why we should work that.

LH: All the Occupys ran into that. They had kitchens, and then suddenly people who were mentally ill, they had to embrace everything and was quite difficult.

AL: That was huge – the class division within Occupy. Have to look at it, not shy away.

TD: Little drops of water evaporate in dry atmosphere, need a human environment. Not just all of internal difficulties here but thes efforts are operating in a context in which we have vast problems. We have terrible collective problems and no collective solutions or collective process. These space (occupy, hacker, etc.) are besieged by that context. They can’t address them by themselves. That’s basically the problem. We sort of, what’s happening is more and more people are seeing the horizon of what’s possible but in this current environment, it’s very hard to ...you can hack out a space but you can’t put up walls, antithetical to what you want to do. Of course there’s the narrative. My own experiences were very limited experiences which sprang up in the context of doing activist things. You might not think of this as, well it is a radical democracy. My experience getting arrested during civil disob. My affinity group were a bunch of anarchists. This was in January 1990. But this started in November 1989. We were doing theatre, political theater on streets of Seattle. Someone tried to pick my pocket while I was down on the ground, it was raining, it was cold (laughing), there I was ....(inaudible t ome). One of my fellow activists caught the guy. Anyway, we were doing a series of protests and solidarity with the people of El Salvador. Massive protests, one of them shut down I-5. A lot of people were getting arrested. How to say this, okay, in response to the big crackdown in El Salvador in November 1989, priests were murdered. Experience of getting arrested was fabulous. Oceanic merging with the universe experiences. That’s why a lot of people get into civil disobedience. Part of a group, defying authority just by standing in a crosswalk or in a street, you know. We were all carted off in buses to be processed. We were in plastic handcuffs. A couple people decided they weren’t going to reveal their IDs so they couldn’t be processed. Cops went nuts. They made us sit there in this bus in the parking lot of the police station. They kept sending people higher up in the chain to harangue us. The longer it went on, the more ecstatic and experience it was because I realized they were really getting upset and they were going to have to negotiate to let us go because we were threatening if they didn’t release the 4 who wouldn’t reveal identities, that they’d have to arrest all of us. The police weren’t into mass arrest then. We were singing and talking. One of our members was a woman in her seventies and the handcuffs were really terrible for her, she had arthritis. We had to negotiate with cops to get her cuffs taken off. Then we went home and then we had meetings dealing with what we were going to do about our arrest. We were divided into trial groups. New city attorney determined to stamp out central American protestors, too many protestors, need to teach them a lesson. Decided to press charges and go for jail time and raelly each them a lesson. Of course, the court system was not happy with us. We refused to plea to one charge instead of two, we wouldn’t take their deals, we wanted trials. Boy was I glad to get a trial. One of the most enjoyable experiences of my life. We decided to defend ourselves, not just to not pay a lawyer, but for the experience. To make a statement about theway justice is administered in the United States. They put 18 of us in a group, 3 people had a public defender. One lawyer on the team to make objections and do procedural stuff. Judge saw us and learned 15 of us were [unable to parse this word, sorry], didn’t want anything to do with 15 citizen lawyers. On top of that, not enough room for us to sit at the defense table. Had public defenders at defense table, rest of us in the spectator seats. We’re the defendants and the spectators. Then the judge said you have to elect 2 represntatives to speak for you. I got to be one of them, but this wasn’t a fair thing to do. If you’re a defendant, you should be able to speak for yourself or have your own trial. We were being treated like a mass. I went into judge’s chambers, that was a kick, what the rules were going to be, etc. Then we went back and I sat with my fellow defendants. Every time I wanted to speak, I’d have to stand up and the jury was way up in the front and they were seeing this happening. Spatial arrangements and impositions were making a tremendous effect on them before I made my opening statement telling them why were sitting down in the street. So as it progressed, it turned out I was sort of this thorn in the flesh of the court system running smoothly. Judge...I wanted to call him sir instead of “your honor.” Didn’t want to disrespect him, but didn’t want to suggest he was an elevated creature ruling above us. Respectufl. Any time to identify myself, I would stand up and say, “Linda Duchamp” and then make my statement. By the time we got to the cops, it turned out...I worked out with the judge each of us could cross-examine the cop who had arrested us. The only way the cops could identify us was through the polaroid photographs taken of us. My photograph was standing there, 3 of us, laughing in the camera. One of the charges was that we were a threat to public safety. [laughter] It was a no-brainer how to go about demolishing the city’s case. The judge got so aggravated, and the jury loved it. I would come up through the gate and pass into the public space every time I spoke. It was a spectacle because I was in the audience and it made it clear that people who are on trial are passive objects, don’t have anything to do with the process. For me that was a breakthrough. I think of this as being an example of radical democracy, democratic practice. I was interacting with the jury and I was getting them to think about things, not only the case and what the US government was doing in El Salvador, but the way our system works. For me, because of where we are now, it’s that interface that’s so important. Between context we’re living in and what we’re trying to do.

LH: Interface, I was scribbling that! Utopian communities you’re making and the actual world with the legal system and etc. Always a very uncomfortable interface.

AL: Want to build on this. Story about dramatic reframing of political/judicial theater. Drama, narrative. All of us in some way artists/participants in culture. Think we can do some of that in performance, I like to make remix videos. Talk about art and radical democracy before questions.

AH: Dillusion. Can’t see what’s going on, think we live in the rules and they’re absolute and we think something wrong with anarchists rather than that’s what we need to be doing. What is the world we want and how to act toward it rather than how to keep in the process. Trying to get us to see what we can’t see – that’s a function of art. Some Latin saying, that art is to conceal. I say, art is to reveal – the point is to reveal what you can’t see. What you’ve taken for granted. Facism – trains run on time, etc. Really happy with etc. and anarchists are the problem. We have a really bad narrative for anarchy – chaos, etc. People don’t think ecosystem, biological diversity and sustainable power, but degradation and ruins. Those connections in our brains are fed by narratives. I'm a theater person – I love live theater, I don’t know what’s going to happen, even if you have a script. I know my blocking, audience comes in, audience makes me change. Every moment is alive. Feedback between me and the audience and other actors. Have to respond. All theater is to prepare you to be ready in the moment. That’s what anarchy is about. If you just follow blocking and your lines, that’s not going to work. What am I going to do that keeps me...the audience loves it when you solve the problem, in it for the live moment. Image of anarchy as negative melodrama. Good guys/bad guys. Victor Turner: Social drama is essential to humanity. I’m paraphrasing him. Have to have dramatic process in order to perform the meaning that you want. That’s what drama is. Struggle to have lived experience turn into meaning. That is a slow process. We’re stuck on things needing to be fast. Social drama takes time. Slow money, slow food, I think we need to have slow anarchy. Enough change to develop new processes/ideas. I really fear sometimes the people who don’t want to go through the process. Like, oh my god, it’s life! It’s the ecosystem to use the resources in a way that will listen to the different opinions. It really takes practice to listen to people who don’t agree with you. Really work with, what are they saying, not what do I think they’re saying? Something like Occupy/other movements. Have to learn how to do because ew’ve been in facism.

LH: Love that you’ve brought in theater, it’s lovely. Was thinking about Occupy Oakland, watching the general assembly streaming video, taking notes, someone would stand up to speak and people would tell stories or what was important to them. Sometimes it was wacky or repetitive, and I would just dismiss it. But then I'd pull back and say no, what should I be hearing? This is what's important to them right now.
Books. Books that I want to ... Constellation Games by Leonard Richardson (sp?). Exemplifies, takes anarchic process for granted. Aliens who have come in, hung out, anarchists of long standing, interesting. Direct Action by David Graeber (?) – uncomfortable meetings of activits trying to decide wtf to do. Documentation of wtf to do. Kind of like RaceFail. Inability to have difficult conversations about race and gender. Defensive reaction of freak the fuck out. That is actually one of us root crucial problems.
Kevin Carson, independent economic/political thinker. Resilient Communities, society after state capitialism. Libertarian. He’s more of an anarchist really. Huge book, with picture of guy with head up his own ass. Whole-brew industry, how industrial revolution can/will happen again. Factories in our houses. Fabricating technologies. Manufacture stuff on smaller/local scales. Footnotes everything, very long. Have to open your mind to have a long arc of thought. Quite interesting.
Also love marqassan cycle.
Illicit Passage – a book. Alice Nun (sp?). Feminist SF. She’s Tazmanian.
Science fiction of now is mid-apocalypse. Not writing post apocalypse, not first contact with aliens. The aliens are already here and they’re the 1%. They have so much power they’re not comprehensible. They’re our aliens. Tension as a part of ubiquitous surveillance. All of that is important in what science fiction is going to become.

TD: We haven’t had questions, let’s do that.

AL: Sorry for not leaving mor e time for questions. Couldn’t stop them from speaking! Love to hear questions from the audience.

AUD: I do fundraising for Dem Socialist political organization. Talk to people every day about socialism and democracy. Like theater in that every convo is totally unique. We have a myth in this country that democracy and capitalism go together, that they’re inseperable. We can see in outher countries that’s not true. Only industrialized country without socialized health care, our leaders are proud of that. Need to separate the capitialism from political system. Capitalism is a religion, you’re devout, we cannot exist without. Like the occupy movement has done. We believe 1% is totally in control. People who are oscialists still don’t get that we’re the 99% and we can control. The occupy movement doesn’t have focus, needs more structure, needs a superhero, really frustrating, talking to many people every day that still believe that they’re socialists and cpaitialism is the way we’re going to get out of it.

AH: Difference between capitalism and entrepreneurship. A lot of the economy is not in capitalism. We need to distinguish between the two. Idea of sharing the idea/etc. is changing the value of profit is the center of everything...can destroy the entire planet if you make a profit. Not the only way we can economically organize ourselves. Socialism, don’t know what to say. They’re separate. Planned communism not going to kill us. All these mythologies. People haven’t really read Marx. We waste 2/3 of food production. We could feed our entire country almost again with what we waste. Why is it called growth if we’re wasting so much? It’s marketing. They’re controlling the dialogue and putting their frame on it. Growth becomes 1% getting rich and wasting things. Why isn’t diversity and richness and fullness “growth?

LH: Utopian thinking and science fiction, deepening interconnectedness.

AH: Eco-Mind (book). She asked for help, how can we solve thes things. She asked people, how can we come up with things to do? Relationships. Things that can co-evolve. We shouldn’t waste resources, shouldn’t have to pay for cleanup, that should be their cost. Exactly what Occupy is about. Relational ecological results. If left to your own resources, you’ll waste/kill/etc., that’s just not true.

AL: Differences in opinions and etc., changing the narrative will bring it together.

AUD: Comment about journalism. Journalism, you said something about being within the process. Journalism seems to have a mindset that you have to be outside the process documenting what’s going on. It’s not really journalism, what we need are storytellers for this. Because the storytellers can be in the process but the mindset of a journalist kind of limits their ability to get into it. If you get too far into the process, people trash you.

TD: Journalists put into abox. If they stray outside of it, they’re no longer legitimate or credible. What questions they can ask/answer. False objectivity. They’re usually set up a false dichotomy, and they’re both unacceptable.

AL: Example of pennyred Covering current political (?). From the UK, writes for the Independent. Extremely successful now. Modeling a different kind of activist journalism. Also subject to mysoginy/etc.

AUD: Reframing. Struggling with it myself...Couple hundred years ago, broadly speaking, in European and North American society, there was an aristocracy being created. Somebody could own land, peole on that land, etc. Could do what they wanted with that land. Now seems alien/obscure. How could people think that’s the way things had to be? How to see capitalism when you get the right to do something b/c you own it. What does ownership mean and who said you owned it? Seems like we’re at the start of trying to break that down.

AH: Degradation of the commons has been going on a long time. In Europe, assault on the commons and then imperialists saying that wehre commons aren’t owned. Who can own the air/water/etc.? You’re crazy/insane but now that’s the reverse. Trademark everything. Humanity has evolved by the commons is a hard idea to get across to people. We need to share and trade and work with the commons. It’s like public education. OMG, can we privatize everything? Hard to get people to review that. Smoking – no longer acceptable to smoke in restaurants/etc., need to move 25 feet away from a building. In this room, the air is all of us, no one person with a cigarette can ruin it. That idea was not easy. But migraine scents, people won’t do that. We as a group of people who have commons can do it. Not impossible. We can move quickly.What is fast? We can make these changes, don’t want to depress people. We have ramps, we didn’t use to have ramps. I’m going to be 60, we’ve seen so many. Watching a vid last night of Occupy. Wonderful to see all over the world images of people who have been changed by things I experienced, and changing other things. Felt the continuum. Didn’t feel despair I feel at home watching the news. Occupy, can go in the street and see. It’s hard but it worked (civil rights movement).

LH: Reminded me I have a whole really good book – Tales from The Freedom Plow – 6 authors. Stories of 52 women involved in civil rights movement in the South. Oral histories, took huge effort to take local activists and not just the famous ones. Had the same problems we’re talking about, so many unreliable narrators.

TD: I'd like to quote an unlikely source for parting words. Augustine of Hippo: Hope has two beautiful daughters, their names are Anger and Courage. Anger that things are the way they are, and Courage to make them the way they ought to be.

(applause)

So for WisCon, I'm going to be on this panel about fairy tales in shoujo manga & anime.

In an effort to not give into the feelings of, "OMG I SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO BE ON PANELS, I SHOULD TAKE MYSELF OFF IMMEDIATELY," I'm trying to prepare instead!


Here is the description of the panel:

Some works of shoujo anime or manga (works which are marketed to females 10 to 18 years old) incorporate fairy tales. What are your favorite anime or manga that use fairy tales, either Western or Japanese? Which ones take fairy tales and play with them to achieve narrative brilliance? Works such as Revolutionary Girl Utena, Princess Tutu, and Natsume Yujin-cho may be considered.


So, I'm familiar with Revolutionary Girl Utena, Princess Tutu, & Pretear.
If you have suggestions about other anime & manga series, I am interested! Especially in ones based on/deconstructing non-Western fairy tales & tropes.

Let’s talk about what we would like to see at WisCon 36 for anime/manga programming. Post any thoughts you have, however semi-formed. We can mold them together and form mechas great panels. At WisCon, anyone can suggest panel ideas: People who run the convention, authors, attendees, or people who have never attended WisCon and never will. Thus: Please feel free to join in!

In addition to mulling over ideas, I’d like to do some wordsmithing in the comments below. Typically, the Programming Committee will wordsmith quite a bit, but I think that anime and manga panels are typically left untouched because those on Programming don’t know the terms, etc.

For reference, here is list of anime/manga panels of the recent past:

WisCon 35 had:
Looking Beyond the Gender Binary in Anime and Manga
Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ooku: The Inner Chambers

WisCon 34 had:
Teamwork: How Anime and Manga Fill A Feminist Void In SF/F
The Works of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli

WisCon 33 had:
Female Power in Shounen Manga (Spontaneous Programming)

WisCon 32 had:
Shoujo Bodies (Spontaneous Programming)