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yonmei @ : At the Worldcon: Day Four, morningIt's Tuesday again. The con's over. It was a major experience – worth the £120 I paid for membership: this and my days in Montreal were worth the £600 I paid for the flight. This Saturday I shall be wandering around the farmer's market again, this time next week I'll be back at work: but for these past days I was in another world. How do you put a price on intellectual experience?
I got up drastically early Sunday morning, posted nothing but photos, had apple-caramel pancakes for breakfast (everyone else was having scrambled eggs: my host the cook did me pancakes with “apple” written in syrup, silly and delicious, but actually I would have liked the eggs...)
I needed to get to the con before nine am because I was going to the Broad Universe panel: there was another on at 9am, “How Not To Be A Jerk Online” which also looked interesting, but
ide_cyan had suggested this one, and it looked like a good opportunity to talk about the Hugo amendment. Which it was: also it was interesting to find out about this publishing collective, founded at WisCon in 1999, with the intent (one of the founders said “World Domination 101”) of getting more women published by encouraging submissions, by fundraising for an “Angels Fund” to get women to go to Clarion, and so forth. (Sue Thomason went to the UK Clarion workshop, and I must ask her what that was like: as she noted at the time, as a writer with a couple of professional publications, I am eligible...)The three Broads on the panel (Elaine Isaak, Phoebe Wray, Trisha Wooldridge) talked about the history and success of the collective, and then invited the audience to speak: so I raised my hand, introduced myself, and outlined the Hugo amendment I'd proposed and why: making it clear that as the amendment had been proposed Wednesday, workshopped Thursday, and photocopied Thursday evening for voting on Friday morning, I certainly didn't defend it as the best possible amendment, just what Cheryl Morgan and I (with Tim Illingworth's help) had thought of at the time.
I still have to write the post for feministsf on the layers of statistical bias with citations from all-male Hugo shortlists of the past. As happened in every single discussion about the amendment, except for the non-discussion at the WSFS prelims meeting on Friday morning, the point about non-representation of writers of color was raised: I cited (via Cheryl Morgan, who knows more Hugo stats than I do) the point that while there are usually excellent women writers in the top 15, who may not have made it into the top five due to the layers of bias, the degree of discrimination against writers of colour is such that there are frequently no such writers in the top fifteen – making their inclusion in the amendment as worded tokenistic and unhelpful.
One of the writers on the panel said that she would not want to be shortlisted for a Hugo “just because she was a woman” and I said (which I strongly believe to be true) that it would be wrong to look at it that way – that she would be shortlisted (if this amendment went through) because she was an excellent writer, where the bias against women writers (we'd previously discussed the Locus reviews bias in particular) had simply meant that because she's a woman she had not made it into the top five: the amendment was meant to do something to remedy the statistical bias, and insofar as equal numbers of women and men are getting published, it would insufficiently amend it.
I'd also discussed with
ide_cyan whether we were going on to the “X, Why” panel, since while a panel based on the quote from Joanna Russ appealled to us both, there was Kathryn Cramer on the panel, and I'd originally intended just to steer well clear. (Anticipation allowed one to specify “people with whom I will not appear on a panel” and I'd specified Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and Kathryn Cramer. Everyone else, no matter how antagonistic politically, I'd figured I could handle: but the Nielsen Hayden's ugly and vehement hostility to those who did not sufficiently defer to them was not something I felt I could deal with, and Kathryn Cramer's outing of coffeeandink put her outside the pale: indeed, as I sat down next to the_shoshanna, she whispered to me “I thought you were going to boycott all Kathryn Cramer's panels”. (There were supposed to be two other people on the panel besides Molton and Cramer: neither of them showed.)Well, I was. And … I suppose in strict terms of “What do you get out of a panel?” I should have boycotted this one. Henry Molton, who said he believed he was on the panel because he had taught English literature at a university in Nambia, perhaps wisely fell silent after
ide_cyan began to ask questions from the audience and Kathryn Cramer asked her up to be on the panel. I sat notebook in hand and scribbled frantically, noting some especially cogent comments from a woman who identified herself as a Latina, who'd also come in a few minutes late. One white man sitting in front of us asked “But why do you always have to have a racial viewpoint? Can't there be a neutral viewpoint? If you're writing a novel about climate change, for example?” to which I responded “Are you saying Latinas do not suffer from climate change?”
As discussed in “Writing the Other”, a panel which I do not believe Kathryn Cramer attended, white male straight – is always considered a “neutral viewpoint”. (The more I read novels by straight writers whom I like, the more I miss their rarely – if ever – simply having people who happen to be gay: Hambly had one queer couple in her first Benjamin January novel, but thereafter, everyone in New Orleans has been terribly straight.)
The more I listened to Kathryn Cramer talking, the more I felt that she should never have agreed to be on this panel. I mean even more strongly than I'd felt I didn't belong on a panel about RPG fanfic: I may write fanfic, but I do not do RPG. She expressed a good deal of malice and nastiness during RaceFail, both towards
coffeeandink and towards others (links to her journal got diverted to malware sites, people quoting what she'd said got threatened with legal action). She mentioned specifically Samuel R. Delany as being able to have the right “tone” when writing about race - “genteel” was the word she specifically used. It is somewhat, I expect, a class thing – which is something ide_cyan and I have both discussed on and off feministsf, how SF fandom at Worldcons requires a certain level of income to participate in as equals. I didn't buy membership in Anticipation earlier because I didn't know for sure that I'd be able to afford the plane ticket. I have never nominated an author for the Hugos because I never read fiction that newly published: I buy paperbacks, not hardbacks. Kathryn Cramer is by her own account a white woman whose best example of “oppression” is neighbours who think she shouldn't let her nine-year-old son out on his own. And while I'd certainly agree that drive-by parenting is one example of sexist bias – since mothers are the ones attacked in this way, not fathers – it becomes oppression only if Kathryn Cramer's neighbours have the power to get her arrested or evicted – if they have more social power than she does, more ability to kick her around than she does the ability to ignore them and continue parenting her child how she sees fit. Criticism of parenting decisions from social equals does not constitute oppression. But all of this constitutes political disagreement: what made me outright worried about being there is that, having contributed to RaceFail, I constitute one of Kathryn Cramer's enemies: I am one of the people I have to assume she would out if she could, and of course (if she is reading this, and looks up who proposed That Hugo Amendment) she now can. Will she? Does this make me nervous? Sure: I don't want to be outed. It's not a big fannish secret: I was handing people Yonmei cards at the Worldcon. But I like people not being able to google my real name and find my pseud, which is the case at the moment, and which Kathryn Cramer made explicitly clear she feels is what “crooks and conmen” do. Was I, am I, scared of this? Yes: but it was worth risking this (I think: I may feel differently if Cramer does out me and there are negative consequences, and the risk of this happening is why I feel that – regardless of political differences – Cramer ought to be outside the pale: she ought not to be allowed access to privileged fannish information she has made clear she will not hold confidential.
A white man in the audience said “can't we write novels about a colour-blind future if we stop looking at race?” And I wrote my comment, rather than speaking it, because I preferred not to say it at that panel: Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein both did this in the 1950s: Arthur C. Clarke continued to do this in all his novels: to write novels in which people just are of any race is a courageous thing to do in 1950s publishing, but by this time it ought to be considered a basic minimum for any white science-fiction writer. That may be the least we can do, to ensure that our visions of the future are not squeaky-white: it is not a goal that we should feel proud of attaining. That's what we do when we start looking at ethnicity and race: a beginning, not an end.
the_shoshanna described what we did after the panel ended here, and discovered the Latina who had all the cogent things to say was izzybelbooks (I saw Kathryn Cramer coming up to our little group of four, out of the corner of my eye - and then saw her turn away again, perhaps realising from our conversation that she would not be welcome): and after that I spent my lunch hour writing up my first notes on the panel using the_shoshanna's laptop (the_shoshanna's friend ellen_fremendon was actually there some of time, but I don't know how much – I was focussed). Sunday afternoon was something I was really looking forward to, because there was a trifecta of panels all related to each other – I was on the last panel (Writing Gender Issues), I had originally been invited to be on the middle panel (Rainbow Futures), and I was fascinated by the first panel (Human Reproductive Variants). But, it's quarter past two: I should finish up, post this, and take my freshly-charged battery out with my camera to go on photographing Vieux-Montreal. Or rather, be damned to “should”: I want to!
PS: Went in, paid ($9.08 for my crepe and orange juice) and while the woman was sorting out change for my $50, I tipped $2. Then when she handed me my change, I tossed the 2c in the change bowl, and she said "Merci" in a way that made me wonder if she'd noticed me tipping $2. Oh dear. Okay. I was back at my B&B to collect my camera battery and post this before it dawned on me that given I'm not likely to be back, it doesn't really matter if she knows I tipped $2.02 or thinks I only tipped 2c...
