![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I am still exhausted from Worldcon, and I was only there two days. I think my favorite part was the Kaffeeskatsch with Sarah Monette. I will attempt to capture its hilarity in a later post, though you probably had to be there; it featured two bagpipers, a cosplaying Jesus, and Sherwood Smith using the phrase "chocolate scrotum."
The single most significant thing that would have improved the con was for moderators to have moderated. Most panels I was on, the moderator passed around the mike without asking any questions first, then took questions from the audience. As audience questions tend to be five-minute monologues followed by an uninteresting or unanswerable or off-topic question, this was not a successful strategy for getting a lively discussion going. Also, panelists are better at answering specific questions than being required to speak extemporaneously on a general topic.
The first panel I was on, "Forgotten Favorites of Childhood," was not-moderated by Amy Thomsen. However, Garth Nix was on it, which made up for a lot. He is smart and has a mellifluous voice. A number of women mentioned mentally switching male characters into female as children, a topic which could have been explored further, but was not.
My first anime panel, "Anime 101," was with Fred Patten and Tom Schaad. They were both very nice and knowledgeable, but wow were we coming from difference perspectives: I'm female and young-ish, they're male and over fifty; I'm a new fan, they'd been fans for many years; I'm mostly into the newer stuff, they liked Rumiko Takahashi and went back in time from there. Furthermore, they mostly discussed the business of anime, a topic which I know nothing about. Tom, the moderator, kindly asked me questions about the art of anime that I was capable of answering, which was nice since otherwise I would have been sitting on my ass silently the whole time, but the effect was of two separate panels running in tandem.
Imagine my joy when I was on another anime panel with the same two guys (plus Paul Cornell, whom I later realized writes "Dr. Who") the next day. However, that one went differently, since one minute before it started we all realized that no moderator had been assigned, and Tom and Fred stuck the mike in my hand and said, "Here." Let's just say that when the moderation is in my hands, phrases like "the female gaze," "problematize," and "feminism," are a lot more likely to crop up in discussion. Paul, who I think is about my age, seemed a hell of a lot more comfortable than the other guys with the discussion that followed when I brought up the topic of female desire, female fantasies, and men as objects of desire in manga and anime created by and for heterosexual women.
Which brings me to Buzz Dixon, on Sherwood Smith's YA panel, who claimed that men of my generation, who watch internet porn, are unable to relate to women and so the relations between the sexes are worse now than they have ever been in all of history. Sherwood pointed out that porn has existed throughout the ages, and was clearly about to say that relations between men and women have historically been much worse than they are now in American and other places where internet porn is available, like, for instance, when women had no legal rights, but before she could get more than one word into that, he said, "AND THEREFORE..."
I must say, if internet porn produces men who are comfortable with discussing whether or not the male gaze on women in art can be positive and non-objectifying and still be sexual in nature (Hi, Paul Cornell!), then I am all for internet porn.
It was cumulatively weird, by the way, to be on two panels on anime and one on Octavia Butler, and to have every panelist on all of them be white. The anime panels particularly suffered from the lack of diversity, as there seemed to be a lot of interest by both Japanese and American fans as to how the media is perceived in each country, and the panelists could only give the American perspective. There were a number of fans from Japan present at the con, and it would not suprise me if some of them were manga/anime fans who could have talked about the other side, but they, alas, were not on the panels. I would hope that at Worldcon in Tokyo next year they do a panel specifically on audience and interpretation of manga and anime in the Japan vs. other countries. Anyone know where I could make such a suggestion?
Has anyone else blogged about Worldcon? Comment if you have!
The single most significant thing that would have improved the con was for moderators to have moderated. Most panels I was on, the moderator passed around the mike without asking any questions first, then took questions from the audience. As audience questions tend to be five-minute monologues followed by an uninteresting or unanswerable or off-topic question, this was not a successful strategy for getting a lively discussion going. Also, panelists are better at answering specific questions than being required to speak extemporaneously on a general topic.
The first panel I was on, "Forgotten Favorites of Childhood," was not-moderated by Amy Thomsen. However, Garth Nix was on it, which made up for a lot. He is smart and has a mellifluous voice. A number of women mentioned mentally switching male characters into female as children, a topic which could have been explored further, but was not.
My first anime panel, "Anime 101," was with Fred Patten and Tom Schaad. They were both very nice and knowledgeable, but wow were we coming from difference perspectives: I'm female and young-ish, they're male and over fifty; I'm a new fan, they'd been fans for many years; I'm mostly into the newer stuff, they liked Rumiko Takahashi and went back in time from there. Furthermore, they mostly discussed the business of anime, a topic which I know nothing about. Tom, the moderator, kindly asked me questions about the art of anime that I was capable of answering, which was nice since otherwise I would have been sitting on my ass silently the whole time, but the effect was of two separate panels running in tandem.
Imagine my joy when I was on another anime panel with the same two guys (plus Paul Cornell, whom I later realized writes "Dr. Who") the next day. However, that one went differently, since one minute before it started we all realized that no moderator had been assigned, and Tom and Fred stuck the mike in my hand and said, "Here." Let's just say that when the moderation is in my hands, phrases like "the female gaze," "problematize," and "feminism," are a lot more likely to crop up in discussion. Paul, who I think is about my age, seemed a hell of a lot more comfortable than the other guys with the discussion that followed when I brought up the topic of female desire, female fantasies, and men as objects of desire in manga and anime created by and for heterosexual women.
Which brings me to Buzz Dixon, on Sherwood Smith's YA panel, who claimed that men of my generation, who watch internet porn, are unable to relate to women and so the relations between the sexes are worse now than they have ever been in all of history. Sherwood pointed out that porn has existed throughout the ages, and was clearly about to say that relations between men and women have historically been much worse than they are now in American and other places where internet porn is available, like, for instance, when women had no legal rights, but before she could get more than one word into that, he said, "AND THEREFORE..."
I must say, if internet porn produces men who are comfortable with discussing whether or not the male gaze on women in art can be positive and non-objectifying and still be sexual in nature (Hi, Paul Cornell!), then I am all for internet porn.
It was cumulatively weird, by the way, to be on two panels on anime and one on Octavia Butler, and to have every panelist on all of them be white. The anime panels particularly suffered from the lack of diversity, as there seemed to be a lot of interest by both Japanese and American fans as to how the media is perceived in each country, and the panelists could only give the American perspective. There were a number of fans from Japan present at the con, and it would not suprise me if some of them were manga/anime fans who could have talked about the other side, but they, alas, were not on the panels. I would hope that at Worldcon in Tokyo next year they do a panel specifically on audience and interpretation of manga and anime in the Japan vs. other countries. Anyone know where I could make such a suggestion?
Has anyone else blogged about Worldcon? Comment if you have!