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Con Day ThreeMay 28, 2006 NB: After trying and failing and trying and failing to find the time to compose this report, I'm finally getting around to it on June 8. My notes have gone stale, which is to say not only that they're not very exciting; they're almost incomprehensible. So this is about 85% hindsight. For what it's worth . . . Fundamentals of FeminismI moderated this one. We were in one of the small conference rooms on the second floor, but the place was packed. I'd much rather have an SRO audience in a small space than the same number of people in a Great Big Hall. The energy was great! In my introductory remarks, I noted that "fundamentals" -- basic principles -- were important because they help keep on track despite the temptations and seductions of concepts like "post-feminism" and "humanism." Not that humanism isn't a laudable goal, but an intensely sexist, racist (etc., etc.) culture had got to bring all the excluded and silenced humans into the discussion before it can speak of being "humanist." This is the stage that The Furies addresses in Suzy McKee Charnas's Holdfast Chronicles. It can be ugly and violent and chaotic but until it happens a whole lot of crap gets swept under the rug. I mentioned Matilda Joslyn Gage, whose Woman, Church and State I reread when it was reprinted around 1980 by Persephone Press. Gage was a first wave pioneer activist and thinker. She was the co-author, with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, of the multivolume history of women's suffrage. She was forgotten, I think because her ideas were too threatening, too indigestible. What struck me hard when I read Woman, Church and State for the first time was that Gage knew how women's work and women's history got erased, and she bent over backwards to make sure it wouldn't happen to her and her work -- but it happened anyway. And I said that I thought it was important that feminist first principles be flexible enough to adapt to their own circumstances. Otherwise feminism would remain, at least in appearance, the property of women of a certain class, a certain country, a certain race, a certain generation. The panelists introduced themselves. Jan Bogstad works in academe and has been active since WisCon 1. She talked about how WisCon was founded in part to give feminism a place to flourish between fandom and the academy, and that could draw on both. (Rambling around WisCon 30, I have to say it's done that, among other things.) Diantha Day Sprouse has considerable experience in male-dominated jobs, including landscaping, and in Alabama no less. Lucy Sussex is a New Zealand-born writer, editor, and researcher whose specialties include women's crime fiction of the 19th century; she noted how many such writers who were well known in their own day have been completed forgotten. And Samuel R. "Chip" Delany probably needs no introduction to those even peripherally familiar with fantasy/science fiction, African American writing, or gay writing. Chip said that though there are men who believe that male-female relations should be radically changed, there are no male feminists, any more than there are white black-power advocates. I wanted to get up and hug him. Feminists have been quarreling over this for years; we've long been at a point where only men can get away with saying it. It's still startling, and I think it's still true. It's not about hating men (or white people), or insulting men (or white people), or about saying that we don't welcome allies of all persuasions. It's asking (I believe) whether any of us can really put the interests and experiences of a group to which we don't belong in the foreground. I suspect it's not possible -- and if it is, it's a helluva lot harder than most of us think. Discussion ranged over many issues. Consciousness raising -- a process "second wave" feminists devised to pool the experiences of individual women and from them identify problems, create theories and then develop plans for organizing and acting -- came up several times. Letting CR die out was a big mistake. Time to rekindle the fires. Language was emphasized as both a tool for repression and a tool for liberation. Jan recommeded Dale Spender's Man-Made Language as a good introduction to the issues. Also recommended was Donna Haraway's Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. In post-con discussion, the anthology Feminisms, edited by Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (Rutgers University Press), was recommended as a good introduction to contemporary feminism. The Making Shit Up PanelThis looked promising: panelists, led by that master of improvisation Ellen Klages, were going to make shit up in front of a live audience. As the Pocket Program description noted: "So many of us get caught up in thinking too hard about what to write, or considering what we 'should' write -- for money, or career, or just because it would look cool -- that we forget that joy often drives us. Joy powers the creative urge. So why don't we just, y'know, make shit up and have a blast?" So Ellen called for an adjective, a noun, and a verb from the audience -- and one panelist took off on a two-minute riff. On one hand, it was awe-inspiring; on the other, like so much virtuosity, it was an impossible act to follow and it pretty much shut the improv down. The panelists moved on to various techniques for breaking up blocks, revving the engines, and generally getting through the sludgy places. This was good. The logs jammed into a curve in my head began to shake free and I swear I felt some tectonic plates moving down under the river. The Joanna Russ Interview
Probably the single event of the con I was most looking forward to. Why? Not just because Joanna Russ wrote some of the most essential, most enduring f/sf of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, and not just because her lit and culture criticism, most of it published in the '70s and '80s, is still challenging me to get off my intellectual duff and think. Joanna Russ has been out of literary commission for (how many? I'm guessing) at least 15 years because of chronic fatigue syndrome. At first her voice was conspicuous by its absence, but for many years now I've taken its absence for granted. How to assess the loss caused by the absence of something, or someone? All I can say is that it's huge. Russ's role was more than crucial; it was unique. She linked f/sf, especially feminist f/sf, with feminist theorizing, especially lesbian feminist theorizing. She wrote from both the academy and the grass roots, combining the rigor of one with the grounded vitality of the other, and had all of us running hard to catch up. Sinister Wisdom, founded in the mid-1970s as a journal "for the lesbian imagination in all women," took its name from a line in Russ's The Female Man. What a perfect symbol of Russ's role as a bridge between two worlds with so much to offer each other. Unfortunately, there were few other such bridges, and none of Russ's stature. There's still traffic between the worlds, but most of the travelers are sightseers, oohing and aahing at the wonders on the other side but unable or unwilling to follow Russ's lead and synthesize the two. I was disappointed by the interview. First I blamed it on the technical setup, and on Chip Delany's less than incisive questions. I got pissed off at the audience because for many of them the high point of the interview was when Russ said she loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer. No problem with loving Buffy -- plenty of my friends do, and I probably would if I had a TV -- but when Buffy is the high point of an interview with Joanna Russ, something is out of whack. I noted my own high points in my journal book: Chip Delany noting that "feminism is to Joanna Russ as Marxism was to Brecht." Joanna Russ identifying the "double bind." "It's not the writer's fault," she noted; "it's the economics of publishing." For so many writers, she said, the early stories are the best. But those successes lead to pressure to produce, especially when the writer wants or needs to make a living from writing. "Stories should be felt through," she said. When you're cranking them out to a succession of deadlines, this becomes difficult (impossible? unnecessary? Why pour your guts into a story and give it the time it needs if a so-so version will fulfill the contract and earn the check?). The alternative is to keep your day job and get exhausted. This is what Russ did, teaching first at Cornell and later at the University of Washington. I'm fighting hard not to make illness into metaphor. The metaphor I'm fighting against is "circuit breaker." But in the English language, not to mention my own life, "exhaustion" and "fatigue" are not unrelated, and Russ has been suffering for years from chronic fatigue syndrome. Russ, speaking of the niche marketing of contemporary publishing: "You used to have to make do with what was written, and some of it was crummy -- but not this kind of crummy." Russ again: "Writing takes an enormous amount of energy, and concentration." She used to wonder why she was so exhausted after writing. She said she hadn't done any writing in about ten years, and that the cessation came after eight or nine years of attempting to write.
I wrote in my journal book right after the interview: "All I can think is that if Joanna Russ had been able to remain active in the field, the lesbian feminism would have been stronger and the feminism more pungent. She was a bridge between f/sf and feminism both grass roots and academic. Her essays were right up there with those of Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde and Marilyn Frye in opening my eyes and snapping my head around and generally kicking my butt. She talked about the double bind -- that the writer has to choose between writing for the market in order to earn a living or keeping your day job and taking forever to finish anything. She also faced the bind of being both deeply feminist and deeply f/sf, which some on both sides see as oxymoronic." Of Joanna Russ's voice I wrote earlier that "for many years now I've taken its absence for granted." That's not quite true; it stopped being true the moment I read in one of the WisCon progress reports that this phone interview was going to happen. I desperately hoped -- on some level I even assumed -- that Chip Delany was going to interview the Joanna who disappeared under the hill many (some multiple of 7, of course) years ago; that she was going to emerge from Elfland and read us the riot act. It didn't happen. We're on our own, kids.
Joanna Russ, The Female Man |
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