yonmei

yonmei @ 12:21 pm: Kathryn Cramer on "Minorities in a Large Field"
There was a panel at 10am this morning called "X, Why? Minorities in a Large Field or the Majority in our own?" which was blurbed as "Joanna Russ said in 1983: 'But remember, one can't get minority work into the canon by pretending it's about the same things or uses the same techniques as majority work." Does this mean we should think of feminist SF (or that written by gay or black people) as a separate field? How much should minority-advocacy SF speak to people who aren't part of the minority?"

I circled the panel on my first pass through the programme on Wednesday evening, and only noticed when I came to read the list of panellists yesterday that one of them was Kathryn Cramer. She was not on the panel in the first draft, still available online: Kate Nepveu was, but refused to be on it when Kathryn Cramer was invited. (We know this because the_shoshanna overheard Cramer saying so as she came in.)

I came in five minutes late, having had a discussion with ide_cyan about whether either of us was going, and Ide promised to restrain me.

I will write more coherently about this later, but here are some of things Kathryn Cramer said (based on scribbled notes made at the time):
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Everything after this except what's in brackets is based on my notes of what Cramer said: I've put it in "quotes" where I'm giving pretty much a transcription (though it may not be exact) and without quotes where I'm summarising.
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"Do we have to play the game of the publisher? What if you're going to write for someone who isn't the publisher's idea of the average SF fan?"

Australian writers mix fantasy/SF/Horror in a way that "sounds wrong" to an American audience.

"Getting into a Years Best anthology it's an advantage to be a minority because you have a different voice" but a novel publication is a different matter "What colour central character ends up on the cover?"

Betsy Mitchell - "her husband's black" - has done most to promote black writers in New York publishing.

Samuel R. Delany wrote an essay on racism in science-fiction where he pointed out that he and Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson are grouped together on panels at cons as if they have something in common.

[izzybelbooks pointed out that Delany had noted there were only panels on race at Readercon when Delany was going to be there. ]

"Many people are oppressed in many different ways"

Pulp fiction magazines sold hugely in Harlem in the 1930s - we don't know how many of the early pulp writers were not white because there was a huge concealment of ethnicity and gender in early pulp fiction magazines,

"What's supposed to happen with a character on the cover is that the cover should be a correct representation of the content"

(izzybelbooks pointed out that the panel was supposed to be about what gets into the canon, and how it gets into the canon)

"The Hugo voters are a collective" - the quality of awards is much higher from award-giving committees than from a democratic representation.

(Some conversation about paperback distribution, which Cramer had earlier said was not economically viable, and reference to e-books: the_shoshanna whispered Verbe Noire to me.)

E-books are going in the direction of a central distribution system - Amazonfic and Kindle.

"I want to return the discussion to the word Oppression" (she had earlier invited ide_cyan to join her and Henry Melton on the panel) "How does oppression work?"

"I also experience oppression in different ways"

(The following, I swear, is a word-for-word EXACT QUOTE)

"Living in Westchester is like one step short of living in East Germany - neighbours will call the cops if they see my nine-year-old son walking down the street alone because they don't think I should let him do that."