Conventions: The Simple, Step-by-Step Approach for Handling Disability at Cons
I posted a truncated version of this on Rose Lemberg’s post about some of accessibility problems at Worldcon this year. Apparently one of the Worldcon staff members thought blaming people with disabilities was a better idea than simply saying “yeah, we screwed that up and we’re sorry and here’s how we’re going to fix it.” Well, I’ve got an idea for how to fix it. It’s called the Simple, Step-by-Step Approach for Handling Disability at Cons for Convention Staff (or Sad Cocos for short). It goes something like this: Send emails and notices to all attendees requesting anyone with mobility issues to contact you. Send those notices again shortly before the convention (a week ahead, perhaps) just in case the first message didn’t arrive. Keep a list of all equipment requirements for various panels and events at the con. You should know where things need to be and when so you can properly coordinate. Before the convention starts, go through all of the areas where attendees are allowed to go. If any areas are not accessible, fix it right away. Make sure you have enough ramps based on past attendance (I would say three is a bare minimum, but I could be really wrong there) Tell your registration staff to be mindful of people with mobility issues. They should check names against panelist rosters when folks come to register to make sure everything is covered. I wouldn’t recommend drawing attention to anything (this is where folks who actually have disabilities should jump in with an opinion — please!) If someone comes to the registration desk who is on a panel and has mobility issues, the staff should double check that ramps and what not are pegged to go to X location at Y time. If you didn’t know that this individual needed ramps, you should make a note of it on your schedule and update relevant staff about the change right away. If for some reason you don’t have enough ramps at a given time, consider getting another (if possible) OR finding a way to maintain that individual’s dignity without making everyone aware that there’s a ramp issue (perhaps move all of the tables to floor level between panels or something). If someone complains about mobility problems at your con, you should contact them for specifics, apologize, and tell them you will try to fix it next time. Don’t argue about it. Don’t blame them for not getting in touch. You’re in charge of the damned event, so it’s up to you to make sure everything is accessible. That’s it. Seems pretty simple, no? Note: it seems as if Worldcon stopped somewhere around step 3.
The Rubric of Apologies: Demanded Apologies
Here’s a context-less story to set the stage for this post: Recently, I got into an argument regarding a popular SF/F character and sexism. From my perspective at the time, certain features associated with that character were undeniably sexist and, by extension, ridiculous. I still think there’s a lot of sexism involved with this character, and most of the historical details that came up in the argument simply complicated what I was saying by getting rid of all the black and white, but I would be lying if I said my argument and perspective didn’t change. During that argument, I also made a rather flippant comment to an individual. This led to someone else calling me a bigot and the offended individual’s eventual demand for an apology. I ended up closing the discussion thread and blocking one of the trolls. One of the things that makes me uncomfortable about otherwise uncomfortable situations (redundancy much?) involves that demand for an apology. It’s not that I don’t think apologies are necessary in situations where you’re wrong — quite the opposite. Rather, I think apologies must be arrived at from an honest introspection of self. An apology made by demand is no more valuable than any statement made as a result of coercion. For me, apologies should not be made in intense emotional states OR in response to an intense emotional state; doing so strips away comprehension and understanding. So when I was told I had to apologize, I refused to do so (non-verbally). Why? Because I knew I wouldn’t mean it at the time. There’s no way I could. With all the accusations of bigotry and trolling, I was undeniably in an intense emotional state when that apology-demand was made, and that meant I couldn’t think clearly about every aspect of the situation. Apologies must be honest. You cannot coerce apologies if you want them to mean anything. In some cases, demanding apologies doesn’t actually solve the issue (an offense), but simply provides a self-righteous barrier between the transgressor and the transgressed. I, for one, don’t seem much value in that. What do you all think about demanded apologies?
Worldcon Recap: The Nonsensical Version
I got back from Worldcon yesterday night. Things are still a bit of a blur. My mind has been dragged every which way by so many good feelings. Truly. Honestly. So what follows is a recap of things I can remember right now, in a completely random and nonsensical order. If I forgot you for some reason, please smack me in the comments. Friends! I went to Worldcon with my besterestestest friend ever! On top of that, I met a lot of folks I consider to be friends, but whom I have not met in person. Friendship is wonderful! Yay! General Reaction I’ve never been to Worldcon (or any straight SF/F convention), so I didn’t really know what to expect (I suspect the same is true for Jen, who came with me, but I can’t speak for her). Sure, a few folks offered a lot of opinions about it, but since we’re all a little different, I didn’t know exactly what to make of it all. There were also those worrisome bits involving The Song of the South and what not prior to the actual event. That said, I had an absolute blast. I’ve been to anime conventions before, but since I’ve never been embedded into the anime world, I always felt a little like an outsider at such places. At Worldcon, the tables had turned. I actually knew people. More surprising was the fact that some folks knew me. Nothing could really have prepared me for that. In a weird way, Worldcon felt like the kind of place at which I belonged — a literature-heavy SF/F/ bonanaza! Would I go again? Yes. And if I can afford to do so next year, it’ll happen. Podcasting We recorded a whole bunch of interviews and discussions at Worldcon. Expect them to appear on The Skiffy and Fanty Show soon! Needless to say, it was awesome. WSFS Meetings After hearing about the horror show on the first day of the WSFS meetings (from Rachael Acks), I decided I’d rather spend my days talking with people who won’t make me feel like stabbing myself. There’s a podcast about this stuff coming soon… San Antonio It sucks. The Alamo is about as unimpressive as the giant ball of twine in Cawker City, Kansas. I get that you’re not really supposed to leave the hotels and convention areas, but San Antonio made it so you never had a reason to anyway. Maybe that’s kind of the point. Greycon I’m not sure if this is normal, having never attended before, but the average age of a Worldcon attendee seemed to be in the area of 55. More 20s-30s seemed to show up over the weekend, but they were insanely outnumbered by older folks. We talked about this very thing in one of the recording sessions at Worldcon, which will show up on The Skiffy and Fanty Show page eventually. Whitemalecon There were an awful lot of white male folks at Worldcon. Perhaps that has something to do with the venue, or maybe it’s just a normal occurrence. All I can say is this: it’s just weird. That’s how I feel about it now. I spend my workdays surrounded by women, people of color, etc. So going from a relatively (though incompletely) diverse space to one that seemed, at least from my view of things, nearly monolithic in form…well, it was just plain weird. Programming I’ll break this down into mini sections: I was genuinely surprised to see so many panels about SF from elsewhere in the world. Based on some of my interactions with certain factions of the SF/F community involved in Worldcon, I seriously expected the world to get ignored. Future Worldcons should certainly do more, but I applaud the effort. The combat panel with Elizabeth Bear, Elizabeth Moon, etc. was quite interesting, though Jen and I were both surprised at the weird gender split: this particular panel featured all women; the other combat-related panel featured all men. I don’t know what to make of that right now. In any case, the panel was awesome. I think we went to every panel on which Tobias Buckell was a panelist. He was awesome. Myke Cole did a stint as Lou Anders for a panel featuring authors I happen to really like. He was hilarious. Why were Scott Lynch, Nick Mamatas, Myke Cole, and so many other authors and professionals absent from the programming (with the exception of Myke, who moderated a panel)? Seriously. The most annoying thing about programming at Worldcon: all the folks who have no business being on a panel about X because they are not reasonable authorities about X. Jen and I went to several panels in which one or two of the panelists either didn’t know why they’d been pegged for that panel or simply didn’t belong. Case in point: the panel on the future of the US-Mexico border featured absolutely zero Mexican and/or Hispanic panelists (as far as I could tell). Apparently what counts as “qualified to talk about the US-Mexico border” are “folks who live or lived near or crossed a border somewhere on the planet.” This is probably the worst example, but we also saw a lot of panels about science or subgenres or writing that featured folks who simply didn’t fit in. There were so many professionals and knowledgeable folks at Worldcon, so it doesn’t make much sense, to be honest. Would it be possible to stop having panels about subjects SF/F peeps have been debating pointlessly for decades? And can moderators start cutting these questions out from consideration? Why are we still talking about the definition of space opera or loose explanations for the connection between science and genre? People The list of people I met, however briefly in some cases, is so long that I’m still drawing blanks. That said, I’d like to thank all of these folks for talking to me, even if only for a few moments (in no particular order): Julia Rios (for putting
The Fan: Discussing a Definition (in Dialogue w/ Jonathan McCalmont & Justin Landon)
I’ve been inspired, you might say, to talk about something I’ve had the itch to talk about since I started reading the Hugo Awards voting packet. I blame Justin Landon and Jonathan McCalmont for daring to talk about stuff, especially since they have a skill for ruffling feathers (with love, of course). Over at Staffer’s Book Review, Landon criticizes the SF/F convention circuit for, as he puts it, privileging the voices of those without credibility; though Jonathan McCalmont appears to agree on the issue of quality, his post at Ruthless Culture takes a somewhat different track, arguing in the end that the problem with fandom is its insularity: On the other hand, I feel that traditional fandom has become so attached to its own history and institutions that it would rather see those institutions die than allow them to change in a way that would encourage younger people to join them…I think that genre culture should start reclaiming the word ‘fan’ and use it to denote not some inferior species of genre-lover but someone who actively participates in making genre culture a more interesting and vibrant place despite having no professional skin in the game. Fans are not passive consumers… they are the people who keep the conversation going. First, I recommend reading their posts in full. I’ve, perhaps inaccurately, summarized their points rather briefly, and I’m certain Mr. Landon will despise me forever for having failed to quote from his article (sorry, Justine!). Second, I see my own view of fandom falling somewhere within McCalmont’s; my criticisms of what qualifies as fan culture have always been informed by my own perceived contribution to the field in the capacity of a non-professional. But my contributions are not explicitly non-professional, and it is here that I think I diverge from most definitions of fan culture. One of the things that bothered me about the special Blade Runner edition of Journey Planet (included in the Hugo Awards voting packet) was the editorial perception of fandom: “However I never wanted this issue of Journey Planet to be another crop of academic articles about Blade Runner. JP is a fanzine, after all, and I wanted to gather articles that give voice to the less academic side to the film’s wide fanbase” (5). Though the latter half of the quote appears to provide a reasonable motive — we wanted to explore the non-academic side of things — the emphasis on fanzine implies that there is something distinctive between the two categories: fan and academic. I am all of the following: a published academic in the genre field, a fan, an aspiring/publisher writer, and a geek. These are not mutually exclusive categories. The problem with assuming that they are is the same problem with trying to categorize genre fiction in general: the distinctions do not exist in any stable form. It is, after all, entirely possible to write academic articles as a fan, with the perspective of a fan in mind, primarily because an academic does not automatically cease to be a fan by engaging in academic discourse, nor does his or her contribution fall outside of the domain of the fan simply because their contributions are related to their possible profession.* These seem like distinctions made by people who have an agenda of their own, or who derive some form of use value from maintaining a strict separation, as if keeping academia out of fan production would protect the latter from the former. Whether Justin Landon and Jonathan McCalmont realize it, their previous posts about fanzines and/or the Hugo Awards have contributed to this very discussion. Yet the term “academic” has its own fuzzy internal distinctions. Some academics are actually professionals, engaging with their chosen field in an explicitly professional manner (i.e., they make a living doing it); others are perhaps professionals in trade, but their contributions are informed by their love for a particular thing; and still others may simply find that the culture of academia, particularly in genre fiction, offers its own kind of fan community. I see myself as a combination of these. Though I expect to pursue a career in academia, my contributions have always been informed by my love of genre. I would not have become an English major and pursued science fiction if I had not already developed an interest in the subfield. There is also the fact that academia is an inherently curious discipline, though it certainly has its own problems of insularity. To illustrate what I’ve said thus far, I turn to the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (commonly known as ICFA). Though the vast majority of the content at every ICFA could be called “academic panels,” few who attend the conference would say it exhibits the stereotypical functions of academia: stuffy, fusty scholars who drone on for 20 minutes about yadda yadda this and yadda yadda that. In the two years that I have attended the conference, the atmosphere has always been vibrant. Fans (in the traditional sense), academics (who are often just fans who like to think endlessly about the meanings within literary work), and professionals (authors, critics, and so on who, well, are actually published or otherwise notable) all attend this conference. As I’ve said before, however, these distinctions are far from absolute, so the types of people who attend are often mergers of supposedly rigid categories: professional writers present papers; traditional fans head panels about their favorite authors; critics and authors discuss their own work or the work of others; and so on and so forth. You might say ICFA is a little incestuous… I’ve attended and presented at the conference for the last two years (and the Eaton Conference in California the year prior). There’s a reason why I’ll keep returning: this is one of the few conventions where I actually feel at home as a fan. The discourse of the convention is my discourse. I can rant aimlessly about my love of Battlestar Galactica just as I can
Jim Carrey, Guns, and Kick-Ass 2 (Late Thoughts)
I said I would throw in my two-cents on this Jim Carrey story. I realize I’m late to the party on this one, but I feel compelled to talk about the entire issue. Instead of trying to summarize the whole damn situation, I’ll just block quote something from the Guardian: Carrey, who has been an outspoken proponent of increased gun control in the wake of the shootings by gunman Adam Lanza in December, tweeted on Sunday that he could no longer support the film. He wrote: “I did Kick-Ass 2 a month b4 Sandy Hook and now in all good conscience I cannot support that level of violence. My apologies to others involve[d] with the film. I am not ashamed of it but recent events have caused a change in my heart.” Scottish comic-book writer and Kick-Ass 2 executive producer Mark Millar, whose original work forms the basis of the sequel, today responded on his own blog, pointing out that Carrey, who plays a character named Colonel Stars and Stripes, knew exactly what he was letting himself in for. “Like Jim, I’m horrified by real-life violence (even though I’m Scottish), but Kick-Ass 2 isn’t a documentary. No actors were harmed in the making of this production! This is fiction and like Tarantino and Peckinpah, Scorsese and Eastwood, John Boorman, Oliver Stone and Chan-wook Park, Kick-Ass avoids the usual bloodless bodycount of most big summer pictures and focuses instead of the CONSEQUENCES of violence … Our job as storytellers is to entertain and our toolbox can’t be sabotaged by curtailing the use of guns in an action movie.” While I understand Millar’s frustration with Carrey, I do think he misses the point here. From Carrey’s perspective, film violence leads, at least in part, to real world violence. I don’t know how recent of a development these thoughts are for him, but it is quite clear that recent events (Newtown, etc.) have “inspired” him to take a more aggressive approach to the gun rights issue (see his comedy music video, “Cold Dead Hand“). The position is guided by a particular set of principles, which suggests that supporting gun violence in media begets violence in the real world. Within that perspective, life is viewed a sacred, and any action which might lead to the death of others (at the hand of a gun) must be opposed. I understand this position and even agree with Carrey on many counts. The notion that guns are, on their own, innocuous entities is specious at best and a downright lie at worst. There are cultures attached to them, and some of those cultures support or foment violence, whether directly or indirectly. Some of those cultures, of course, do nothing of the sort. Millar, however, takes the position that the film is pure fiction, and that nobody was actually hurt. That information is a given. You can’t intentionally kill people on film without violating the law, so the issue isn’t whether people are actually hurt, but what impact the violence might have on the general public. Carrey seems to believe that film violence — at least, in some forms — contributes to the problem of violence in our culture. Considering how fervently he has supported the gun-restriction side of the debate in the last year, it shouldn’t surprise us that he might have problems with anything perceived as connected to that very issue. Carrey had a change of heart. So sue him. That doesn’t make Carrey correct, of course. There are two positions he has taken: Guns and gun culture contributes to violence in the country Violent media contributes to violence in the country (already mentioned) These are relatively extreme positions, of course, and ones that are not necessarily supported by reality. While there are some studies that suggest violent media increases aggression and violence, there is no scientific consensus about the issue. Likewise, while gun culture, in my opinion, does little to curb gun-related violence, and may actually contribute to it (however unintentionally), the argument that guns themselves, or the people who use them, are directly responsible for violence is specious. The gun rights issue is about as grey as you can get. Any time someone tosses out European statistics to support their position, they tend to ignore the different cultural conditions and all of the examples in Europe that contradict the argument in question. The U.S. has a different culture, geography, and history from everyone else. Carrey doesn’t acknowledge that as often as he should, which makes it easy for people to look at him as a left-leaning soundbite machine. However, despite how much I understand Carrey’s position — let alone agree with it — I do think he has shot himself in the foot here. His career likely won’t suffer much, but he will piss off a lot of fans — and for good reason. He chose to take a role in Kick-Ass 2. While I won’t say he must support the film no matter what, I do think he should take into account that everyone else involved in the production, whether actors, directors, gaffers, or what have you, may actually suffer based on his actions. If people do refuse to see the movie, that could affect other people’s careers. I understand the importance of one’s principles; I have principles too, and I try to stick by them as often as possible. But you also have to think about those around you.* Carrey may not have anticipated his change of heart — how could he? — but he can anticipate how his actions will affect others. In fact, since his argument against guns is largely a causal one, he should understand causality quite well. Personally, I think he should shut up and donate his Kick-Ass 2 salary to an organization that represents his interests. He can take a step back from publicity for the time being, too (if you’re heart isn’t in it, then there’s no point trying to promote something anyway — that would
The Vigilante in American Mythology (Brief Thoughts) #monthofjoy
(Note: due to an inordinate amount of spam comments, I’ve disabled comments on this post. If you really want to post a response, you can send me an email and I’ll figure something out. It’s irritating, but the other option is to have to deal with 100+ spam comments a day on this page alone…) While reading my Hugo Awards voting packet, I came across this post by Gilbert Colon on Person of Interest and Nolan’s Batman movies (somehow I missed this last year). After taking in the first couple of paragraphs, I had to stop and start writing a post in response to the following: To begin with, Person of Interest was created by Jonathan Nolan, who wrote The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises with his brother Christopher (the Trilogy’s director) and veteran comic-book adapter David S. Goyer. The parallels between Person of Interest and the Trilogy run deeper than the surface fact that the heroes in both are vigilantes. “A vigilante is just a man lost in the scramble for his own gratification. But … if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they can’t stop you, then you become something else entirely.” Some of Person of Interest’s similarities may be due to the archetypal characters it seeks to depict. The series’ crimestoppers are altruistic protectors derived from the Old West, the private-eye genre, and modern television reinterpretations (The Equalizer, Stingray, and Hack come to mind) of which Batman, “the Dark Knight Detective,” is one. Nolan confessed that he’s “always liked characters who … operate on the edge of the law” and said he “was interested in writing something … dangerous. I’ve always been drawn to that aspect of Batman … maybe we are tapping into some of that.” One cast member (Michael Emerson) hypothesizes “that American audiences have a hunger for avengers … — the vigilante, the lone operators that will cut through the red tape and set things right … That’s such a strong theme in the States, and it’s part of what we are delivering. It goes back to cowboy movies and everything like that.” Why do Americans like these vigilante types so much? Why Batman and Superman and the X-Men and so on and so forth? What about these individuals who take matters into their own hands is so compelling to American audiences? I’ll admit that if there is a field of academic study on vigilantes, my knowledge about it amounts to nil. I, too, fell in love with vigilante types, from Tim Burton’s Batman movies to Nolan’s masterpieces. And as a reader of comics in my youth, these figures have been central to my life in a way I never noticed before. In fact, if you look at the sea of science fiction narratives that have dominated the screen in the last fifty years, it’s rife with examples of people going against the grain of society in some crucial way. Even Star Wars, commonly heralded as “that thing with which many of us grew up,” is a relative of the vigilante narrative, albeit with a far more revolutionary feel — vigilantes, in my mind, are far more isolated than the Rebels in Star Wars. Vigilantes are Batman, Riddick, half of Marvel’s superheroes (even Magneto), and on and on and on. In thinking about all of these characters and their narrative purposes, it dawned on me that American audiences are drawn to these figures because of some deep desire for a fantasy of action. So many of us live our lives trapped in a space we feel we cannot change, and most of us don’t have the willpower or ability to fulfill the role of the vigilante ourselves. And in the real world, the vigilante almost never wins: he or she almost always dies and the media campaign against the vigilante almost always succeeds. When you look at the political landscape of the United States, you can see the walls of the trap and how they function. Whatever you might think about America’s political parties, one can’t deny the fact that Congress appears incapable of any serious action. They say the system is gridlocked — trapped between two parties with drastically different political interests. The trap of American life extends from the directly political to the indirectly political. Young people have been faced with the stark reality that many of their futures have been forfeited, or at least put on indefinite hold. They can’t get jobs, or the careers they set out for have withered away or stopped growing. My mother faced this reality first hand: when she got her paralegal certification, the economy had tanked, flooding the paralegal jobs with applications from law school grads. There wasn’t anything she could do but find a job in another field. For a lot of Americans, there is a very real sense that nothing we do as individuals will matter in the long run. We feel stuck or lost. Some of us have lost hope (something with which I’ve battled over the years — largely from a political perspective), and day by day, we hear about criminals getting away with horrible crimes, the police failing to do their jobs, governments cutting funding to programs that actually save lives (firefighters, for example), and on and on and on. In my mind, the vigilante becomes a cathartic release, a way of living out the inner “us” that longs for change.* All the things that are wrong with our world — albeit, within a particular perspective of “wrong” — seem beyond our control. It feels good to watch Batman take matters into his own hands.** When you look in American film, the list of “true American” vigilante-type heroes is a mile long. In that list, I would include people like John McClane, Rambo, Erica Bain (from The Brave One), Hit Girl / Big Daddy / Kick-Ass, Batman, Punisher, Jack Burton, Dirty Harry, Foxy Brown, and so on and so forth. None of these figures are political neutral, of