WisCon 30 Panel: Pushing the Envelope
Jun. 1st, 2006 07:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyPANEL: Pushing the Envelope
PARTICIPANTS: Jed Hartman, Aaron Lichtov, Joan Haran, Elizabeth Bear, Melissa Scott
DESCRIPTION: Melissa Scott's Shadow Man is an example of the thesis that the most cutting-edge writing/thinking about gender (i.e., about deconstructing the binary sex-gender system) is happening in science fiction, though almost no SF/F out there has pushed our ideas about sex-and-gender as radically as that book did (though some have come close). In his post-W28 livejournal, Jed Hartmann said, "I think the real-world spectrum of gender possibilities is more interesting and broader than most of what's available in SF." Sadly, that appears to be true. How do we push the envelope? How do we effectively clamor for more radical thinking/imagining about sex and gender in SF/F? What can fans do? What can writers do?
NOTES: Shadow Man was the core text of the panel, a fact which Melissa Scott seemed to find a little embarrassing, and the first question asked was: what are the silencing factors that prevent more books like SM from being written?
Melissa had one answer: SM sold very poorly.
The analytic triangle seemed to be desire---politics---performance.
Aaron had a list of aspects of gender: biology, gender assignment, gender expression, sexual orientation, cultural affiliation, relationship structure. And Jed had a list of sexualities that push the envelope (a practice which the panelists agreed is both highly subjective and, if you're doing it right, frightening): queer, poly, kinky, transsexual. So the kind of sf the panel hoped to generate (and I think this was very much a panel about trying to get more of this stuff being written and being read) is sf that rejects the heterosexist, heterocentric, biologically-determinist vanilla monogamist norm and tries to ask different questions and find different answers. It's sf that DOES NOT OTHER, that is interested in exploration instead of exploitation.
Someone (Jed?) pointed out much later in the panel that people in the norm also have sexual orientation and gender, and writing about the transgressive is a way to turn the spotlight back on the normative.
The Left Hand of Darkness was for Melissa Scott the same kind of transformative text that Shadow Man was for some of the panelists.
An audience member asked about the absense of transsexual women as protagonists in sf. This sparked a great deal of discussion about discomfort thresholds and about how much any one book can be expected to do. Also discussion about why male-to-female transsexuals tend to get scapegoated and Othered. The answer is relatively obvious, but still bears repeating: it is still true that "male" is a higher status label than "female," and therefore normative society thinks it "understands" women who want to be men. Because OBVIOUSLY any woman in her right mind would want to be a man. [/sarcasm] But a man wanting to be a woman ... that's deeply disruptive.
It is also true that discomfort is useful, and that it's better to confront it than to avoid it. But it's hard to do.
Melissa talked a little bit about the way in which writing as she does very deeply within sf conventions buys her time for the transgressive discussion of gender.
There was also a question about why sf has to engage with these problems, why we can't just write about utopias in which they've been "solved." (I am all about the sarcastic quote markes this morning.) There were several different answers.
1. That would be boring.
2. Human social interactions are always going to be complicated; if it isn't one set of factors, it will be another.
3. sf is always, in its dark and secret heart, about now ("now" being the author's subjective space-time coordinates in the process of writing the book).
Melissa pointed out that there is also room for books (quoting a librarian talking about Tony Hillerman's books) in which the underdog wins.
This panel left me with two knottily theoretical thoughts:
1. people who deploy "color-blind casting" and propose writing sf in which gender/sexuality "doesn't matter" are people who don't want to give up their privileges. Because you only deny the importance of inequality if you're the dog on top. [ETA: clarification here.]
2. personal --- political is one axis. But public --- private is also an axis. They aren't the same. (This was part of a conversation in the bar afterwards, and I can't remember the context. But it still feels important.)
PARTICIPANTS: Jed Hartman, Aaron Lichtov, Joan Haran, Elizabeth Bear, Melissa Scott
DESCRIPTION: Melissa Scott's Shadow Man is an example of the thesis that the most cutting-edge writing/thinking about gender (i.e., about deconstructing the binary sex-gender system) is happening in science fiction, though almost no SF/F out there has pushed our ideas about sex-and-gender as radically as that book did (though some have come close). In his post-W28 livejournal, Jed Hartmann said, "I think the real-world spectrum of gender possibilities is more interesting and broader than most of what's available in SF." Sadly, that appears to be true. How do we push the envelope? How do we effectively clamor for more radical thinking/imagining about sex and gender in SF/F? What can fans do? What can writers do?
NOTES: Shadow Man was the core text of the panel, a fact which Melissa Scott seemed to find a little embarrassing, and the first question asked was: what are the silencing factors that prevent more books like SM from being written?
Melissa had one answer: SM sold very poorly.
The analytic triangle seemed to be desire---politics---performance.
Aaron had a list of aspects of gender: biology, gender assignment, gender expression, sexual orientation, cultural affiliation, relationship structure. And Jed had a list of sexualities that push the envelope (a practice which the panelists agreed is both highly subjective and, if you're doing it right, frightening): queer, poly, kinky, transsexual. So the kind of sf the panel hoped to generate (and I think this was very much a panel about trying to get more of this stuff being written and being read) is sf that rejects the heterosexist, heterocentric, biologically-determinist vanilla monogamist norm and tries to ask different questions and find different answers. It's sf that DOES NOT OTHER, that is interested in exploration instead of exploitation.
Someone (Jed?) pointed out much later in the panel that people in the norm also have sexual orientation and gender, and writing about the transgressive is a way to turn the spotlight back on the normative.
The Left Hand of Darkness was for Melissa Scott the same kind of transformative text that Shadow Man was for some of the panelists.
An audience member asked about the absense of transsexual women as protagonists in sf. This sparked a great deal of discussion about discomfort thresholds and about how much any one book can be expected to do. Also discussion about why male-to-female transsexuals tend to get scapegoated and Othered. The answer is relatively obvious, but still bears repeating: it is still true that "male" is a higher status label than "female," and therefore normative society thinks it "understands" women who want to be men. Because OBVIOUSLY any woman in her right mind would want to be a man. [/sarcasm] But a man wanting to be a woman ... that's deeply disruptive.
It is also true that discomfort is useful, and that it's better to confront it than to avoid it. But it's hard to do.
Melissa talked a little bit about the way in which writing as she does very deeply within sf conventions buys her time for the transgressive discussion of gender.
There was also a question about why sf has to engage with these problems, why we can't just write about utopias in which they've been "solved." (I am all about the sarcastic quote markes this morning.) There were several different answers.
1. That would be boring.
2. Human social interactions are always going to be complicated; if it isn't one set of factors, it will be another.
3. sf is always, in its dark and secret heart, about now ("now" being the author's subjective space-time coordinates in the process of writing the book).
Melissa pointed out that there is also room for books (quoting a librarian talking about Tony Hillerman's books) in which the underdog wins.
This panel left me with two knottily theoretical thoughts:
1. people who deploy "color-blind casting" and propose writing sf in which gender/sexuality "doesn't matter" are people who don't want to give up their privileges. Because you only deny the importance of inequality if you're the dog on top. [ETA: clarification here.]
2. personal --- political is one axis. But public --- private is also an axis. They aren't the same. (This was part of a conversation in the bar afterwards, and I can't remember the context. But it still feels important.)
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no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 01:50 pm (UTC)I'm not sure I understand this. Or, I'm not sure I agree with this. But I don't want to assume the latter if it's just the former. As someone who is demonstrably not the top dog, or in a position of privilege when it comes to race at least, I still like and would employ color blind casting in most circumstances.
Do you mean approaching race or sexuality or gender in terms of "Everyone lives in harmony because we've made everyone the same (even if there are some very nominal or marginal differences, in theory)?" Because I think that's a little different.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 02:11 pm (UTC)Genuine color-blind casting is something quite different than "color-blind casting" as practiced (for example) by the producers of the Sci-Fi Channel's Earthsea travesty, who used it as an excuse to cast a white actor as Ged--who is specifically and explicitly NOT WHITE in Le Guin's books.
It's a kind of ideological appropriation: people in privilege using a smokescreen of liberalism to, hey, keep their privilege. Whereas the genuine practice of color-blind casting, or of imagining a future in which gender is no longer a contested issue, isn't about saying that race or gender "doesn't matter." It's about saying it shouldn't matter. And that's different.
I don't think I'm articulating what I want to say very well, and I apologize for being unclear.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 02:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 02:50 pm (UTC)And anyway, watching a student drama production of The Country Wife where there were two Asian actors and one black one, in a sea of unmarked white ones, I found myself trying to construct a world in which there were rich black fops in C.18 England (everything different since the Romans) and where the villains (I'm sure it was coincidence) were habitually represented as Chinese.
When it's done in SF, when they show a future in which everyone is white all bar the aesthetic trivia of skin colour it could be
a) an honest extrapolation of the trend by which Italians, Irish and Jews have in the last hundred and fifty years become considered white or
b) a desire to keep privilege if you like by extending it to everyone with no more guilt. Heinlein talks in Farnham's Freehold about the liberal desire to raise the social conditions of black people until they are just slightly below those of white people, so they can stop feeling guilty. When I read that it completely stopped me, because I am not from the US and it meant nothing to me, because I didn't understand the context that was coming from at all -- in Britain black people are immigrants and the descendants of recent immigrants, not the descendants of slaves, and the racism you encounter is completely different.
c) A lack of desire to deal with the problem in very much the same way as George Orr's dream that everyone is grey.
d) A shorthand way of saying that this is the far future and all our problems are irrelevant here are some new problems. I think this is, or can be, a legitimate bit of worldbuilding, and better really than allowing everyone to be default white. Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman books have this, I think, there's a casual line in passing about someone being very black skinned and people who have very black skin are often thought of as mysterious and sometimes affect an air of mystery -- in the same sort of way, though she doesn't say this, as red hair is in British culture "supposed to" go with second sight and other mystical crap.
e) Part of the way people don't talk about class in SF. There used to be a joke about the Socialist Workers Party that whenever you raised a real issue, they said it wouldn't be a problem after the revolution, so stop worrying about it. "What about unemployment?" "After the Revolution there will be no unemployment!" "What about class differences?" "After the Revolution there will be no class differences!" "What about relationships between men and women?" "After the Revolution there will be no relationships between men and women!" For "the revolution" read "the future".
no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 03:03 pm (UTC)I was brought up in a social setting where pretty much everyone was the same shade of pale - nobody in their right minds would have immigrated to Ireland during my childhood, for economic reasons - and am always a bit worried about talking about skin colour in fiction thereby. If it really is invisible, it's hardly going to show up in third-limited POV; going from conversations in Montreal [ which seems both as ethnically mixed and as colour-blind as anywhere else I know, at very least ] incidental comments about what colours people can best wear seem to be the only context in which it comes up with suitable neutrality. I have written a novel in what's intended to be a colour-blind setting in which the two human protagonists are very different colours, but this only gets mentioned once and without indicating which of them is darker. [ The alien protagonist is very dark green, roughly dolphinoid, and does not have a visual sense; also ungendered, and insofar as it has concerns for politeness, they are about being able to tell human pelvises apart sufficiently well to distinguish male from female. ]
no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 03:14 pm (UTC)I am so profoundly in disagreement with this that I have a hard time even expressing it. I mentioned at the panel that in Hammered etc, gender and sexuality in general is a nonissue. The feminists have won; nobody cares that Jenny is a girl or that Fred (Brigadier General Fred, I might add) is married to a man. Jeremy's sexuality is only important in that it keeps anybody from suspecting that his interest in a 16 year old girl is creepy rather than avuncular. Also, Simon's and Elspeth's and Jenny's and Fred's and Bobbi's race are not at issue in the story, except in how they culturally relate to the world and each other--in other words, exactly the same way that Gabe's culture comes into play. Razorface's is, but (a) mostly because he stands on it and (b) his self-presenting as a lower-class tough is more important than him being a man of color to the way people react to him.
I cannot see this as a bad thing.
Carnival is totally colorblind (with the glaring... er, not-glaring... exception of their being no white people. Undertow is also completely colorblind. (As far as humans go; there is racism directed at aliens.)
I have a hard time believing that three hundred years in the future, on another planet, when there's a native race to turn into second-class citizens, it's going to matter socially to anybody that Andre or Closs is dark-skinned or that Huc's ancestors came from Southeast Asia. If I were going to make race an issue in that book, I would have to build the entire book around why, as I had to do in Carnival with the issues of gender and sexuality.
...so I don't think that's me standing on my privilege. It's me saying that heritage is an artificial dividing line, not a natural and predestined one.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 03:32 pm (UTC)Oops.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 03:43 pm (UTC)It seems to me that part of the problem of a "color-blind" society is WHAT that blindness connotes. It could be that such a society simply makes invisible those who are considered different, so those who are of a different race simply are not depicted. Or the "color-blindness" is to represent an achieved equality - the distinction is no longer considered meaningful or necessary to make. But the former simply makes people of a different race into "others" that are either really alien or really subordinate. And the latter creates a lacuna of doubt - *why* is the distinction no longer meaningful or relevant?
I think for some SF writers, alien species are a stand-in for different races, so race relations gets sublimated into alien relations and first contact stories. When race relations are dealt with, it is not always handled very well.
For what it's worth, the first time I taught race and ethnic relations at the university level, many of my students in their final papers argued that the everything would be better when we all become beige. I wanted to use the scene from The Lathe of Heaven to suggest that perhaps that might not work. (sigh)
no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 03:52 pm (UTC)I think (he said carefully) that the issue might be in how to show that. Your example is a very decent case of doing that very thing. I would suggest that Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner suggests something similar (though I am now hesitating about that - have not re-read it recently and really want to read the new book.
Unless of course that being alien is simply subordinated to a larger construction of racial heirarchy, which might very well have happened. So what ends up happening is that aliens simply occupy the lowest rung on the racial ladder, instead of say, blacks. That doesn't make the social pyramid go away, it simply adds another layer. Entirely possible, especially if you consider that the heirarchy of race relations involves "othering" races that are considered inferior. Look at 19th and early 20th C. examples of using observable characteristics such as skull size and ear wax composition as justification for there being real differences between "breeds" of "man" - blacks were "clearly" inferior because they were "clearly closer" to orangutangs. It might be silly but it's how people thought.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 04:09 pm (UTC)I think that I agree with this statement insofar as it relates to the contemporary moment--at this point (at least in the US), discourses of color blindess function almost always as a alibi for the maintenence of privilege--not in the least because they want to individualize the issues and avoid the whole problem of structural inequalities altogether. One question this discussion raises is how the contemporary social world of the writer might relate to speculative fiction (and I think it could be equally fantasy or science fiction, to the extent that the distinction holds)the writer produces. I take matociquala's point above to address fiction that is grounding in what I'm tempted to call the sociological imagination (with deference to C. Wright Mills). Which is not at all colorblindness, because it thinks through questions of social structure, power, and inequality to arrive at the conditions of the fiction's world. All kinds of possibilities--potentially wildly progressive possibilities--emerge from such lines of thought, especially because they illuminate alternatives to what seems natural, inviolate, unchangeble in contemporary culture. This is a kind of utopian thinking, in the sense that much social change has a utopian component, but it's difference than the utopia of colorblind discourses which want to just wish away the problem and leave privilege unexamined.
Sounds like a really interesting discussion. Thanks for sharing this report.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 08:03 pm (UTC)I'm unsuccessfully racking my brain, trying to remember where it was I read a very moving analysis of how wrong the idea is that the absence of transpeople would be utopian. I suspect it was in LJ somewhere, and inspired by this very panel.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-01 08:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-02 01:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-02 01:35 am (UTC)I think you're right that race often gets transformed into species in sf and that it frequently isn't handled very well. There's a book being advertised in the SFBC flyer right now that seems--since I haven't read it and don't plan to--to be advocating genocide (it's THEM or US!), and I can't help working the reverse transformation in my head whenever I see that blurb. Because creating evil aliens in order to glorify wiping them out ... well, notice the word "creating." I realize I'm probably being dour and humorless, but given our species' exceptionally unsavory history, any story justifying the extermination of a population of sapient beings--I don't think we need the ideological help, is all I'm saying.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-02 07:28 pm (UTC)Huh. I'm a bit surprised. I can name you half a dozen M2F TG/TV movies and TV shows in the popular culture straight off the top of my head, but only one (Boys Don't Cry) the other way. So I'm not certain you're right about the "scapegoated and othered" thing.
Oh-- just by the way,