The WisCon Chronicles, Volume 2: Provocative Essays on Feminism, Race, Revolution, and the Future - Softcover

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9781933500201: The WisCon Chronicles, Volume 2: Provocative Essays on Feminism, Race, Revolution, and the Future

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1933500204 ISBN 13: 9781933500201

Publisher: Aqueduct Press, 2008

WisCon, a literary festival for feminists interested in science fiction and fantasy, has for over three decades attracted people with diverse and stronlgy held opinions. It hasn't always suffered them gladly, and it doesn't necessarily mediate the arguments that ensue, but WisCon does not homogenize their points of view, and it provides an ongoing opportunity for feminists of all stripes to get together and laugh, talk, and enrich one another.
This volume explores some of the issue of interest at WisCon 2007: gender, race, culture, revolution, and the future of thinking about those matters, and it also includes a forum on how to deal with racist and sexist material in writing workshops as well as the epistolary performance that constituted Kelly Link and Laurie J. Marks' jointly delivered Guest of Honor speeches.

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About the Author:

L. Timmel Duchamp is an sf writer and critic, author of the Marq'ssan Cycle, a series of visionary political novels, and the publisher of Aqueduct Press. Eileen Gunn is the author of the celebrated short story collection Stable Strategies and Others and editor/publisher of the Infinite Matrix webzine.

Review:

Contributors include academics, writers, fans, politicos, and undergraduates. Contributions range from some outstanding academic essays, to interesting reflections by writers, to a workshop on responding to misogyny or racism in writing workshops....

The guests of honor, Laurie J. Marks, and her editor and also a writer, Kelly Link, interview each other about fantasy writing to open the volume and conduct a dialogue on sf to close it....Writers might be interested in their description of the process of revising and editing, here in Marks's words: ''When you're editing, it only affects the particular piece you're working on, but when you're revising, if you change something it changes everything.'' Scholars will be interested in Link's description of ''communal writing,'' sf writers sitting in a cafe and writing in parallel; she cites herself, Shelley Jackson, Holly Black, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Karen Joy Fowler. At the end of the volume, in an epistolary exchange conducted by email, Link and Marks leave analysis behind and give us pure pleasure, reuminating on the nature of writing, but also on their friendship and the nature of friendship in general....

I would recommend this volume for anyone who has attended WisCon, for scholars and readers interested in the nature of conventions as a forum, for general readers interested in the liberatory end of sf, and for libraries that emphasize popular culture. While I have never been to WisCon, this volume makes me want to come and see what all the fuss is about. --Jane Donawerth, SF Studies (2009)

The second volume (Wiscon 31 - 2007) continued in this style, often pairing two or three articles/responses together so that different opinions could show how the same event inspired diverse reactions. Naaman Gobert Tilahun, finding himself the only person of colour on a panel about colonialism, honestly discusses the emotional experience of taking part in the discussion, and some of the issues it raised in his mind that the rest of the panel did not necessarily take into account. A series of pieces about a controversial ''Romance of the Revolution'' panel (featuring two male and two female panelists, three of whom were American, one British, all white) raise all kinds of fascinating issues: K. Joyce Tsai shares her shock and anger at the way the discussion treated 'white' and 'non-white' revolutions differently, particularly in discussing the agency of the revolutionaries. A partial transcript of the panel itself can be compared to Tsai's reactions, showing how different an unemotional view of the panel is to her self-confessed emotional reaction, though at the same time supporting her memories. In ''Science Fiction in the Year Zero'' panelist Chris Nakashima-Brown makes it clear what his priorities were in the panel, while female panelist L. Timmel Duchamp sums up many of the issues that were at play during the panel and many others at Wiscon, with more general analysis of how male and female panelists often approach topics differently, and how easily panels can be hijacked in the direction of the View From Nowhere ; that is the assumption by white, middle class 'first world' men that their perspective on the world is the universal default and thus both neutral and comfortable to everyone. Anyone who has ever tried to discuss the messy issues of racial and gender perspectives as they pertain to SF Convention Panels would really benefit from reading Duchamp's fascinating essay, which looks at how hard it can be to maintain feminist discourse in a discussion panel, even at a feminist convention.

Another fantastic feature of volume two was a collection of short responses collected from a variety of writers who were asked to answer the question of how to deal with racist and sexist material when faced with it in writing workshops. The --Tansy Rayner Roberts, As If

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