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fandebate.I commented at Henry's, and will post links back to this post both places. The discussion is sort of slow at both places (I am sure it will pick up over the weekend), and I figured we might want to talk it over here as well.
First a reference back to a post I made July 1 with a range of links to fairly (I think) credible evidence about institutional sexism in academia which exists in tandem with institutional racism and homophobia, and the longer I hang around academia (and I am from a middle class background) I realize classism.
I have not been as actively reading the discussions posted since August because of workload, but I've been skimming, and was reading actively before then, and I am noting a real pattern of the male academics (not all but a majority) and some female academics deflecting any questions of institutional gender exclusion/marginalization that might affect us all, not to mention that it was about two years worth of ongoing (locked) discussions among women aca-fen talking about their experien of patterns similar to that we experience in other academic arenas (and by using that word, I mean to emphasize associations with gladiatorial games, yes, indeed, I do) that was the impetus to this whole project!
The latest male participant has sort of become the last straw for me when he implied that anybody claiming that marginalization exists is delusional (he references "tin hats" which is an insult in fandom (although many of us might use it of ourselves in an ironic manner).
Specifically, Josh Green said: I'm not convinced, however, that to point to that particular incident as evidence of a marginalization of female academic practice necessarily does anyone a service. While I think some good has come out of that moment, there was a particularly sour taste left all round, I think, with regard to the way the issue was raised which seemed sometimes to suggest an intent to exclude, or if you like tinfoil headwear, marginalize.
Exclusion was easier in some ways to handle: when universities had written policies excluding women. Those policies could be a focus for the activism. Women could think that when the policies/laws changed, then the problems would be solved.
Now, when universities can pat themselves on the back for being so inclusive (although that inclusion has primarily benefited white middle-class women rather than minority women), it's possible for individuals in the dominant group to protest they are really nice, and we're (meaning: women) insulting them for daring to suggest they might possibly *want* to exclude or marginalize women, even though, well, that's what they're doing, according to the women. As somebody who began her graduate work during the seventies, worked as an adjunct during the eighties, and got her Ph.D. in 1993, and had to fight attempts to deny me tenure and promotion at my university despite doing more than male colleagues at the same level (and seeing other women treated the same way here), I can attest: it can be crazy-making because in fact, these are all pretty nice guys. They're not Snidely Whiplash or Voldemort or even Darth Vader.
Their relative niceness or not is *not* the issue. Their intentionality is *not* the issue.
The results are what need to be looked at, in terms of what is being done or not being done.
The fact that nearly fifty years after the Second Wave of feminist movement began in this country academic men (generally considered to be more "liberal" than the general population in this country) are still so defensive about discussing their own male privilege strikes me, and I suspect a few others, as more than frustrating.
It also confirms my sense that building old girl networks is a much better strategy than trying to crash the old boy's network--because social change does not take years or decades; it can take centuries. And I am not going to spend a whole lot of my time teaching Feminism 101 unless I'm being paid for the class.
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robin_anne_reid- robin_anne_reid
- Tamarisk and Terebinth
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WORD.
That marginalization needn't be intentional or with malice aforethought in order to be effective, pervasive, and painful should really not be rocket science in this day and age. :P
But having heard myself argue (and learned, consequently, just how wrong I was) that a point would be better made if it were couched in more conciliatory language, it's almost kind of ironic to now be the person who leaves a "bad taste" merely because I dared call attention to something.
Privilege is something insidiously hard to become and remain aware of--and it's hard on both sides...except that in the end only one side can "afford" to ignore it!
In contrast to such comments as that, though, at least from my tasting table, there's no bad taste about your comments, Kristina. What there has been is tastes that I'm not quite used to, and that need processing time. My online postings can occasionally be the equivalent of the initial reaction to the taste, not the product of greater reflection. Perhaps this is the case with several guys. And while I think some of what Cornel and Josh in particular have said was either misinterpreted or mispoken, at the same time, if either was elected to speak on behalf of all men, I don't think I was invited to the meeting where that happened, and many other guys weren't either.
Kristina, I hope your point about learning you were wrong to make your point in conciliatory, olive-branch-y language is exaggeration. Since you weren't at all wrong. Indeed, I've heard as many men express admiration for and agreement with your comments as I've heard women say it, and if Melissa was able to redub Team Pink/Red "Camp Busse," that's a testament to the central role you've played in brokering understanding. I disagree with Robin that perhaps the best strategy is to just leave the guys out, since the ripple effect from your intervention has been sizeable and significant, even if not all it could/should be. And fan studies doesn't really have an *old* boys network, so you've done an excellent, much-needed job at reminding some of us to change the rules of the club before it becomes one.
Re: personal attacks. Since Josh was the first to make a personal attack not only on Kristina but clearly on others of us who agree with her, I hope you will chastise him equally! If he is going to call women academics tinhats, he should not be surprised if some of us consider him bad at his job (or potentially bad at his job).
Re: Cornel and Josh and misinterpretation. I do not think I, or any comments I've read, have said they were speaking for all men.
What I have said, and others, is that what they say is *very* similar to dismissive comments made by other men that we, as women, feminists, academics, and fans have dealt with. Could you please point to specific examples of where they were treated as "speaking for all men"? Maybe you see the two distinct positions above as the same, but I do not. From the start, I've tried to place examples of behavior/speech here in a larger context, and I admit that can at times be misunderstood as overgeneralizing. However, I see it as gathering more data.
My strategy (for the Purple Team) is *not* to leave the men out. And I can assure you, there are no men lined up begging and pleading to be included and being ignored/excluded!
My strategy is that it is more worth spending time and energy working with the growing number of women in academia, my fields in particular, mentoring them, and creating our own networks rather than spending time bashing our heads against the "old boys" network. I believe that in a still primarily male academic world, female graduate students are often not mentored equally with men (this may be changing in some departments, and I know that some individual women graduate students I know have received superb mentoring as well as the classes they pay for; I also know some women graduate students who have been treated shoddily by males in their departments, ditto junior women faculty). LJ offers an excellent means of mentoring, and the networks here extend into academic conferences and further.
I see my strategy as a completely different argument, set of assumptions, and goals from "keeping men out." My strategy grows from decades of exclusion and marginalization in academic cultures, starting in the 1970s.
Kristina and I have discussed these issue at length--for several years now. We do not agree on some key elements. We do not have to agree, either as women aca-fen or as feminists. I find it interesting that you sing her praises here, in my LJ, as if you are singling her out as the Exceptional Woman (feminist?) who is so much better (nicer?) than the rest of us. Interesting rhetorical strategy.
There are a number of males in my networks (why, yes, I am planning on taking over the world), but they are men who are invested in working in feminist, anti-racist, and anti-homophobic ways, and you can see that in their scholarship and their interactions with women. They work on being aware of their privilege(as men, as whites, as straights) in the system. You rarely see them appearing only on all-male sessions at anything (more likely, they are the only male on a panel consisting otherwise of females).
And while the media/fan studies network may not be old, it certainly strikes us as a boys only treehouse/clubhouse, and it certainly replicates the older power structures, as has been extensively commented on both among fans I know (who questioned the issue of Chris Williams being willing to speak to Henry Jenkins and not to a major female fan, and the lack of female fans/academics who were out and could speak for fandom in the way Henry could) as well as academics.
I clearly had a bad evening, posting unclearly. I apologized for this on Henry's blog and do so here. Anonymous is Jonathan Gray, btw (name not withheld intentionally -- I'm just used to posting where my name is already recorded as such). Let me respond to a few things:
My comment about your strategy of leaving the boys out was a response to your comment, "It also confirms my sense that building old girl networks is a much better strategy than trying to crash the old boy's network." That read to me as a sign that we should just be given up on, and I wanted to insist that there's hope in us yet (even if some of my posts give little reason for that hope). It wasn't a comment directed at anything else you've said or done, just simply at that line.
When you say "Re: Cornel and Josh and misinterpretation. I do not think I, or any comments I've read, have said they were speaking for all men." No, and apologies. I didn't mean to imply you had. What I meant to say was simply that they don't. When Josh says he has a bad taste, that's Josh speaking, since many guys I know think this discussion needed to happen, and are happy that it has. Again, this was in part a response to the above quote that suggested a throwing up of the arms, and my point was that I didn't want people thinking that the postings online are wholly reflective of the discussions and thoughts offline. I don't mean that defensively (in a "look, we really are good kids" kind of way); I mean it informationally.
You write: "I find it interesting that you sing her praises here, in my LJ, as if you are singling her out as the Exceptional Woman (feminist?)" Not at all. Once more, I took my lead from the suggestion (whether intended as a more generic comment about the debate or not. As I'm reflecting on here, my own comments are clearly defying intention), that "building old girl networks is a much better strategy than trying to crash the old boy's network," and in this regard, it seemed to set up Kristina's initial post-Flow Conference act of demanding that the boys listen in contrast to a frustration with the unlikelihood of the guys ever bothering to listen. I saw more hope in Kristina's intervention, and hence singled her out.
*However*, I've since realized, through conversation with Kristina, that her comment referred as much if not more to the race debates on LJ, of which I wasn't a part and wasn't aware until today. So clearly my own post was going to be read very differently to all of you who knew that context. I'm doing a lot of apologizing, but clearly need to. Sorry.
I understand the confusion of being used to having your name assigned to your comment: it's one of the different practices here in LJ. However, I'm sure you also understand the ambiguity of an apparently anonymous (unsigned in any way) comment.
I think you and Kristina do have a more positive take on the possibility of some of the male aca-fen listening; my cynicism could be in part due to being nearly 52 and, as an academic brat, being around academic circles my entire life.
I hope to see more evidence myself!
So why not get yourself a LJ and jump in over here with us? The water is not entirely full of sharks, and the racism debates on LJ are important enough that it might be worth participating.
Meanwhile, I wanted to respond to your post on Henry's blog over here, partly because my apology that got posted alongside your response to me (at Henry's that is) reflected on my poor choice of timing at bringing up those issues, so I'm not sure my continuation with them there would be wise.
You're right to say that I didn't bring up race before, so you're equally right to slam me for bringing it up only at this point. I didn't mean it to be a "hey, look over there" kind of comment, nor a ploy to shift the ground under speakers' feet. Rather, since I (and many other posters, it seems) had had a lengthy hiatus from much posting at Henry's (in my case because I was on holiday, then madly finishing a book), and the project's nearing it's end, and a lively discussion about privilege was occurring, I wanted to insert a shout-out for other intersecting lines of privilege. As your Tonto quote points out, I hardly get to adopt new ground in a discussion of race and privilege either. From that experience, I'm not sure how much I could add to a discussion about racism in fan studies, beyond my rather paltry "let's talk about this", but I'm certainly interested to seek this discussion out now and to read/listen to it.
I understand about time crunches: I'm in the last spasms of editing an encyclopedia that was due Jan. 1. We're all too busy, as is the lot of academics, especially humanities academics. (Underpaid too).
I'm not having much luck juggling both a fan LJ and a pro LJ either--not posting as much as I'd like in either one, not really responding as much.
Am eating a 4:00 lunch apple and typing with one hand right now....I do not think it's really reaching the end, only because I know two friends of mine are on the list for a November posting as soon as partners are round. I really wonder if Henry will be able to keep up the male/female pairings through to the end....of if he might have to break down and vary the pattern. He did post an open invite, and people did respond, but due to the need to set up a schedule and his own horrendously busy schedule, the names haven't been posted.
I went over there and posted a link to the 3rd People of Color in SF Carnival that was just posted, came up on my flist here, as an example of the (I think) growing number of activist/engaged fans of color in LJ fandom). As with other areas of fan production (the debates over what slash stories featuring female/female pairings might be), a lot of the smart thinking and first analysis is taking place in fandom itself, something I learned when I let my white privilege blind me and posted a rather ignorant post a while ago on this journal.
You know, one issue that some of us were tossing around is how many of us (not all female aca-fen, but a batch of us who know each other) are in LJ and active in fandoms via LJ, compared to the blogs that seem to be mostly produced by male fans; some are authored by female scholars--I was looking at Nina Baym's a while ago. What they seem to have in common is a more academic focus. It's interesting and worth while to start moving academic work onto the internet, but, I find the split between the use of LJ for those of us active in fandom while being scholars an interesting one, and it seems to be largely gendered. That is, while there are women aca-fan who are not in LJ, I don't know of any male aca-fen who were here prior to this discussion (so far, I think Derek and Sean have created LJs, although I may have missed others).
No real sense of where it's going, but it's another gap or space or something that seems interesting. Of course in the wake of the pedophile purges on LJ, a lot of people in fandoms are moving to other journal services.
Even if you do not intend to participate often in LJ conversations - GET AN LJ! It's free, easy, and quick to sign up for a basic LJ account. You don't have to deal with any bells and whistles.
Benefits of an LJ account:
a. You don't have to worry about posting things anonymously - and that avoids another whole can of worms. Anonymous comments are really, really potentially problematic on LJ, far more so than on most blogs, IMO. There's a long history of trolling by anonymous commentors on LJ, particularly in women's LJs when the topic is feminism or racism. The level of sexually explicit invective in anon comments can be extreme. That means that for many LJ users, just seeing that the label anonymous on a comment sets up expectations that a troll has reared its ugly head. So if you do make an anonymous comment, triple check that you sign a name - and it's helpful to put it at the beginning, e.g. Jonathan here, then the comment.
b. Many LJs do not allow anonymous posting; it's up to each LJ owner or LJ community moderator. In those journals, even if you are willing to sign you name (thereby rendering an "anonymous" post not really anonymous), you won't have the ability to comment.
c. Some LJs are friends-locked to varying degrees: occasional posts, specific themed posts (e.g. highly personal items, quasi-legal issues like downloading or vidding), or entire journals. Assuming that a journal owner is willing to allow you to read their locked posts, without a LJ, there is no way for that to happen - unless they email you privately with the info and that removes any posibility of responding to the LJ post conversation.
d. Having a LJ means that you can easily set up your "friends list" which is the equivalent to a LJ-only RSS feed. It makes keeping up with those on LJ much easier since you don't have to go out to each LJ; the LJ flist brings the content to you. Adding and deleting LJs on you flist is easy. The LJ flist can also be filtered (by any theme or grouping you want) so that if you are short on time, you can pick the filter(s) you're most interested in and skip the rest.
e. Keeping up with conversations is much easier if you have a LJ, because you can receive comment notifications and specifically track posts and threads. With an LJ, you can be notified (by email with the text and the link back) when someone replies to your comment. Granted, LJ's notification system does fail on occasion, but it's quite useful. If you have a paid account, you can also have copies of your own comments emailed to you; free accounts don't offer that. With an LJ account, you can track a specific LJ post, having LJ notify you (via email or texting) any time a comment is made, whether or not it is in reply to a comment you made. Free accounts can only track the entire post; paid accounts can track individual threads.
Keep in mind that while LJ, like any other social interaction venue, can suck up enormous amounts of time, having an LJ doesn't mean that you must post things in your own journal. Some people - myself included - have an LJ to make commenting easier and to keep track of others on LJ via a flist, but never post in their own LJ. For me, that's a way to manage my time while still allowing me to participate in LJ-based conversations that I find interesting and important.
I'm extremely sympathetic to issues of time management; no one can be fully engaged in all discussion venues on all topics - it's just not physically possible. But I'd also point out that how we choose to prioritize our networking and discussion venues does have political implications, even if sometimes unintended. There's been a lot of interesting discussion about how different networking services (LiveJournal, blogs, Facebook, MySpace) attract different audiences and are coded differently in terms of professionalism and gender and race and class. It's worth considering how diverse your usual discussion circles are.
Might take a while to get up and running with other stuff, though. My sense (perhaps totally wrong) with livejournal is that it all moves so much faster than the somewhat slower blog world. Livejournal seems, too, to facilitate conversation better, but precisely because it does that, it seems like it would be ruder to be AWOL from a livejournal for a while, whereas i can dodge blog reading for a while without feeling as rude? I'll try, though if i don't visit enough, please read it as my techno-unsavvy, mixed with me trying to get my blog running in its infancy so spending online time there. And I'm a 6 finger typer, so online time takes time for me. But truly, thanks for the info and background on LJ
I think we all know about lack of time affecting our LJ life (dang, since I started doing scholarship on fandom, my slash writing time has suffered). I think the really bad problems only occur when a very provocative or controversial post is made, and then the OPer (original poster) has to be offline for a day or a week or something--but yes, I strongly agree, it moves faster in LJ. And a lot faster than in the APA I was in where I'd get my monthly fix, spend a few days reading, and typing like mad (emcees!), and then send off my 'zine and have a few weeks off. I had to break the APA-expectation that I'd comment/reply to every comment because the internet and LJ are 24/7. So I think people do understand gaps.
We all have them.
(Oh, btw, I friended you since you mentioned you were reading over at my fannish journal--just in case you want to see some of my more personal mutterings. This journal will be pretty open all the time, but my fan journal is most flocked for everything except fics and general commentary/reviews, etc.)
I was very struck by this sentence of yours, and the emotion that you express in it-- and the answering emotion that rises up in me when I read it.
Doesn't it feel horrible and frustrating-- the notion that you might be left out because of an accident of birth? You have just put the feminist experience into a nutshell.
I know in all my multicultural classes, undergrad or graduate, the one constant was white students asking "why are *they* so angry?" and saying that "they would do so much better if they weren't so violent." I would say: they are writing. They are not throwing bombs. Let's talk about issues of anger....
The whole "but I'm a nice guy, I can't possibly be sexist" way of framing these discussions is infuriating to me. It took me a while to learn that lesson in terms of racism, but I did learn it, because it was important to learn. If more people in positions of privilege can't be arsed to work on themselves in this manner, they've got to be told, loudly and often, that their so-called "good intentions" don't mean a damned thing.
I have been working on this since I got to my doctoral program prepared to write on feminism and was assigned the feminists of color writing critiques of 70s feminism (which I'd read on my own, you see, becoming a feminist that way, after a few "click" moments). It was hard to deal with, and I had to write my dissertation about that very topic. But yes.
Good intentions can lead you straight to hell, so claiming them, or claiming lack of intentionality isn't an out.
That was better than the Americanists in my undergrad program during the 1970s who felt free to announce they didn't want women students in their classes. American literature, so manly you see.
When I read Leslie Fiedler's essay, I died laughing....(my undergrad work consisted mostly of British literature, taken from one of the two women faculty in the department, and one of the two gay male faculty in the department), and creative writing (two poets, both male, but desperate for bums in seats for their new program).
As an anecdotal sidenote, when I was doing my undergrad, my soon-to-be MA supervisor was teaching the 300 level survey course in Victorian Lit. Not quite halfway through, she had to take maternity leave, which meant someone else had to step in and take over the class. That person was a gentleman whose wife already had a position with the department, but was new to the university. It was, in short, a complete disaster. Among a number of other missteps, the class was made up of about 80 to 90% women, and the contrast between our first (female) instructor and our second (male) instructor was shocking. He may have had all the best of intentions, but he very clearly privileged the male students, calling on them for input and answers far more often than the women, agreeing with and providing positive feedback to them far more often than to the rest of us, and even stepping in and altering the set outline to eradicate a number of the female writers on the list and replace them with male writers. It was so bad that a large chunk of us ended up having to go to the department to complain. Sadly, I don't think we would have organized so well or been so proactive once the problems started if we hadn't been in a position to experience the change between female and male prof in such a clear way.
Of course, this is a very long way of saying that even with the best of intentions, it's fairly hard to get past one's own internal prejudices, and when called on them, the first response is almost always a defensive posture. I find it incredibly telling that some of the people who most fervently push for eradication of prejudices in certain areas are very entrenched in protecting their own privilege in other areas. I can certainly say I've seen that sort of gatekeeping up close and personal recently in my own attempts to continue on my chosen academic career path, and it's not pretty.
With apologies to the Dr. Robin Anne Reid, who started this conversation with a clear statement that we should focus on effects and not intentions – and I would agree in a pinch), I wanted to note that the question of intentions keeps coming up anyway, and seems important to part of the initial issue behind this discussion: namely, what happened at Flow, when a panel of men academics was scheduled to compete with a panel of women academics. And the men were more “high powered” and thus likely to draw those listeners who might otherwise attend the panel of women? Thus further perpetuating their existing privilege?
I don't understand why the distinction (or, better, I think, the relationship) between an intended exclusion and a mistake isn't relevant in this case. My own view is that if the organizers were questioned and they maintained that they never considered the ramifications of their scheduling (so, that it never occurred to them that it might be a bad idea to have the panel of men and the panel of women in contest for auditors), and that they had simply made a “mistake,” this would be quite different (I’ll leave it up to everyone else to say if it would be worse) than a deliberate attempt to marginalize academics who are already marginalized. The very word “mistake” is so wrapped up with intentionality, even if by negation. Certainly to make a mistake is not to act in the absence of all intention. Is there any really unwitting act? We can seem to act unwittingly when in reality our actions manifest clear, though perhaps unconscious, desires. And we can act unwittingly and in a way that seems to have nothing to do with our desires, but then our actions and choices can still arise from deep-seated biases. We may even want to fight against these biases in ourselves! But there they are, staring us in the face after the fact/act, and it is darn hard to admit them once they’ve been unearthed. As someone interested in the nature of human behavior, I just can’t bring myself to agree that there is no interest in the question of the distinction (OR NOT) between willful, controlled, deliberate action and unconscious expression of hidden biases.
More on topic: I’ve often thought about this issue of the politics of conference panel scheduling. Whenever I’m at a big conference and I see all the bodies filing in to the see the expected big name stars, I always want to go and see one of the other panels, because the star system is of course the star system: a totally self-justifying and self-sustaining system that needs to continue to draw power and distinction to certain figures whose modes of thinking and working become the standards against which we negotiate our own statuses and our own claims to authority and expertise. The problem is, of course, that because these people get to dictate the rules of the game, it is hard to step back from that initial impression that they are the big names because they are the “best scholars.” Once we can see that the category of the “best” is not a natural one, but constituted over time and implicated in all kinds of exclusions, we’ll be somewhere. And then we’ll have to try to figure out how to make that influence the way academia operates.
I agree with you about conference scheduling, and while the panel was one originating discussion, it's clear there were others as well, i.e. a series of missteps, if you will, and then add to it the responses of some of the male academics in the discussion as well: I don't think it's just one session, and it wasn't ever only one. I recall two years' worth of friendslocked post detailing a number of incidents (some very positive, but a number of small things adding up to enough anger and frustration among a group of us for it to come out in the open). One incident involved all the women I know who were at the conference going to the guys' panel (which wasn't scheduled against theirs, so it was a different conference), and none of the male scholars coming to theirs--again, one event, but part of a series observed at a number of scholarly venues. In each case, I'm sure reasonable reasons can be given (I think they were in one of the many series of post about this--lunch with friends, or I only go see my friends' sessions, etc.)
I can’t bring myself to agree that there is no interest in the question of the distinction (OR NOT) between willful, controlled, deliberate action and unconscious expression of hidden biases.
I guess I'm not really understanding the basis upon which this discussion can take place. Does anybody ever come out and say, oh, yes, I was intending to marginalize X group? Doubtful. This discussion focus assumes people have a way of clearly distinguishing when they are acting between unconscious and conscious choices, or even after the fact, when questioned by (in my case, I admit, snarky and cynical) interlocutors: I don't know that I agree with that assumption.
But I'm willing to talk more about it. After supper!
I was pretty cynical from the start about the futility of this endeavor, and I have to say, since I have low expectations, I'm actually probably happier about it than some of my friends who (younger? fewer years in academia?) are surprised/frustrated by the results.
Flow sent around a circular to its past columnists, inviting them to pose panels, and encouraging them to group up to do so. Will Brooker, Derek Johnson, and I had been discussing some of this stuff amongst ourselves, as had Jason Mittell and I, so I forget who posed the idea, but Will, Jason, and I decided to buddy up. We hoped for the best and asked Henry too, who agreed. Somehow Flow's initial encouragement for groups to pose a panel was either misread by us, or not taken up by others, so we ended up the only panel with a base of 4 columnists. Flow were keen to get producers and business people too, so we asked Henry to find someone. He checked with a bunch of his contacts, and ended up with Joel being the only person available. Then Flow was supposed to add the final two. But since Derek had been part of the discussions from the beginning, we had put in a request for him. We also explicitly asked that our final member not just be another white guy, aware of the problem. At first, they told us Louisa Stein was in the group. Then they took her away, for some unknown reason, and Daniel Chamberlain became the last member.
On one hand, I think the popularity of the panel had a lot to do with Henry being on it. But definitely we should've done a better job to involve a range of speakers. This was the first time I got a "big name" on a panel with me, and I now know that especially in such situations, there's an increased need to make a panel more diverse, since the big name *will* make it a "big panel." Flow spiked us somewhat too, though, especially since we were all thrilled to have Louisa with us ... till she was taken away. Beyond panel constitution politics, though, this might also point to extra questions of the politics of who wrote/writes columns for Flow, since that was the pool from which we were initially restricted to picking from (by this, I don't mean to suggest nobody else writing for Flow was a woman, or non-White, of course, but it's an intersecting issue). Non-attendance of other panels is another issue, but I wanted people to have access to how this catalyst panel all happened.
I have to be careful here to avoid coming across as the Big Ugly Academic, but I've organized sessions for Popular Culture Association (I was the area chair for SF/F division during the early nineties), for International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts (both on my own, submitting feminist sf sessions to Rob Latham, then Division Head, because I was determined to get more coherent sessions, so I put together paper sessions, and then as the Division Head), and I'm now organizing Tolkien at Kalamazoo sessions.
These are all academic conferences, ranging from huge/interdisciplinary (PCA) to more focused (Tolkien). All the conferences welcome undergraduates, gradutes, and independent scholars. PCA was the biggest (about 2000 overall then, with the SF/F division mustering 18-20 events; I think it's grown since then). Tolkien at Kalamazoo which I just took over is the smallest (only 7 events for 2008). Only TaK is small enough to avoid similar events being scheduled against each other. (And there are always complaints, everywhere I've been, about similar events/topics being scheduled against each other, always!)
One thing I've learned overall is to spread out the big names (especially important to put them at end to avoid the people walking out after first speaker), as well as to keep an eye on the topics. One wants a coherent session, but in groups as diverse as PCA, I might only get one paper on author X or tv show Y. I would occasionally get all male or all female sessions--the feminist sf ones, of course, tending heavily toward all female. There were a few years at PCA where there were three-four paper sessions just on cyberpunk which were amazing in a train wreck sort of way to watch: only males, with some real hostility to questions being raised by some of us about gender issues. After the first one or two, I stopped attending. Eventually one of the organizers put together a "what were we thinking" retrospective roundtable session which I attended which was v. interesting. Those, too, were all organized by friends. There might be something said for a system where one person organizes by topics, not by friendship (although I say that knowing that the past three, four, years, I've presented at ICFA with two of my closest friends on LJ, all on some aspects of LOTR online fan fiction).
Again, I don't know there is any way to judge intent. What you describe sounds very common--a bunch of friends talking about a topic, presenting a proposal for a session. But the shifting of Louisa Stein, for whatever reason, seemed to lead to the result that fits what I was hearing discussed about at least two different conferences: the impression of the two big name scholars (I don't know if Matt Hills was at this one or another) spending a lot of "public" conference time with young male scholars in the field, while women in a closely related field of scholarship, were not.
Now, both Matt and Henry wrote fantastic reader evaluations for our anthology, and I am in no way (despite what I've been accused of) accusing them of being sexist, or hostile to women, or in some deep conspiracy.
Just--a series of missteps over time, as I said in another post, leading us here where, we can all hope, people can understand more about not only what happened, but the perceptions about what happened.
Individual paper proposals can come in or session ones--yours seemed to be a session, but in another sense, you weren't really in control of it. Every conference is different, with a different culture and set of expectations, but
Matt, btw, usually gets *really* excited about young scholars, and it's usually one per conference. He was positively giddy when telling me about Louisa Stein once, then the same about Derek Johnson. He's very supportive of younger scholars (indeed, I was a grad student when he asked me to co-edit Fandom with him).
In case anyone's interested, and near Philly in March/April (I forget when. oops), Jason, Louisa, Kristina, and I have put together a panel, which I hope will get accepted at the big Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference (it got sponsored by the tv studies caucus, so it better). Louisa and I are looking at producer-end paratexts, while Kristina and Jason are doing fan-end ones. SCMS requires registration, but you can always just walk in and nobody will stop you (i've never seen an academic bouncer).
And yes, gatekeeping can be complex and multi-layered, not simply based on gender or ethnicity. For one thing, as I noted in another comment, since people in the same field/publishing area can equally be seen as competitors for the limited number of slots in grad programs/publications/grants/etc., it's impossible to assume any natural brotherhood (or sisterhood!) among people just because we share a publishing and perhaps teaching interest.
So as to avoid being anonymous: my name is Sarah Brouillette and I work at MIT. I am reading through this debate because I'm currently teaching a course in CMS on Popular Readerships, and as it progresses my students and I will be spending a lot of time thinking and talking about fandom and gender.
Have you also talked to Joshua Green (or posted on the thread in Henry's blog or in the LM mirror) debate about his first rhetorical move which was an insult of women aca-fen who have pointed out the marginalization of women in academia, and in this the related fields of fan and media studies (I have lots of links, especially to MIT that I've posted in my journal before).
He called us delusional. The term "tinfoil hat" or tinhat is an insulting one in fandom. Academics engaged in serious discussion of depth and significance are generally not encouraged to call those who hold an opposing viewpoint crazy.
That said, I agree that issues of "center" and "margin" are complex and well worth discussion, but if you have not called Josh on his insult just as you called my friend on her insult, may I ask why not?
Thank you for the welcome. I will direct my students to this resource later in the term.
I am teaching an online graduate seminar in New Media Literacies--would you like to find a place/space here where our students could talk?
My class was inspired and modeled in many ways upon Henry's work, Convergence Culture (although eventually my main theory text that was assigned was one that dealt with issues of race and gender, which wasn't in CC).
Women and comics--do you know some of the feminist blogs on comics issues? Or have you been linked to cereta's fantastic post on male privilege in comics fandom (which arose out of conflict on "Scans Daily," a LJ community for posting scans of comics, that started out as slash oriented?).
If you'd like some other links for your class, let me know. I'm not a comics fan (my father supported science fiction, which I was reading as a kid, but he put his foot down at comics, and took away the ones my brother and I were reading in the early sixties, and I never got back into them), but have been reading the feminist critiques of comics and sexism and yes, comic book stores!
I remember one lecture we had on Modernism in New York - every single name was male, and there was one black (male, of course) artist. All this from two female academics to a room full of female students; I think there might have been one male student there.
My current bibliography for 'Critical Approaches to New Media' has one book on it by a female author; in the first lecture, the (male) lecturer made a joke about 'chavs' (insulting UK slang for white working class people), and in the second the other (male) lecturer suggested we take advantage of our research privileges to look up 'pornography' or 'lingerie' so we'd 'enjoy our research more.' All the while showing us sexy shots of female celebrities - no male celebrities at all. The students? Two males, eight females.
As a white, working class, female, disabled, mature student, I honestly don't know whether to scream or cry. I am close to making a formal complaint, except my essay counts for 100% of my mark. I might do it anyway if they carry on like this.
Equality? What equality?