into the world

On Saturday afternoon, I attended “Steampunks, Neopagans, and FailFen: Ethnography, Economics, and Engagement in Fan and Fantastical Communities,” a somewhat eclectic combination of papers tenuously linked by the theme of fannish subcultures’ ideals and interactions with outgroups.

The first paper, by Barbara Lucas, was the one that had initially drawn me to the panel. Her “‘It’s Not My Job To Educate You!’: FailFen and Social Justice as Fandom” worked to delineate how social justice politics could be mapped onto the traditional structure of Western media fandom. Lucas began by acknowledging, but ultimately moving beyond, Fiske, Jenkins, and Bacon-Smith.

Social justice in fannish spheres has been a rising and controversial topic for the past two years, but those involved in social justice within fandom object to being labelled as a fandom themselves. They find the label of “social justice fandom” to be unserious and unsuited to their objectives of critiquing media canons and fannish interactions. Yet, Lucas argues, they share many of the same traits and tendencies. They consume social justice writings in many forms and have a regular, repeated emotional investment in it. They have core beliefs and a sense of self connected with the social justice work that they do. Just as online communities develop around a particular fannish object, so too does social justice follow the same patterns of organization, creating communities to discuss their interests.

Social justice fans have similar goals around seeking social capital as well. They share premises and consequences. They are recognized from out-group members as a distinct subset of fans. Western media fandom has social dynamics built around investment, consumption, and production and encourages power geeking centered on demonstrating superior knowledge of the fannish object. Similarly, social justice fans gain cred through oppression olympics; bolster their positions by talking about and disclaiming their own privilege; cite academic texts as a means of power geeking; and demonstrate the “bitter old fandom queen” attitude of decrying n00bs’ involvement by saying “it’s not our job to educate you.” Lucas concludes that social justice fandom, like Western media fandom, creates a hegemonic consensus and seeks to oppress minority opinions (in this case, those that do not agree with social justice goals) through structured discourse and patterns of silencing. Therefore, Lucas contends, the influence of fandom on the social justice movement should be considered in future studies.

Lucas’ paper brought up some excellent parallels, but if there was an area it was lacking, it was connecting the fannish social justice movement to the broader confluence of online bloggers invested in social justice and equality. While it is true that Western media fandom shares many of the same social dynamics and organizing principles with social justice, these aspects of in-group delineations are common in many subcultures. I hope Lucas works to answer the question of how fannish social justice is different from other social justice movements in her later work. Otherwise, I believe the generalizability of subculture formation undermines her conclusions about these specific groups.

The second paper was Sara Brunkhorst’s “Making an Alternative Past: Steampunk and Participatory Consumerism”. Brunkhorst spoke about the aesthetics of steampunk, not simply as an art/craft form, but as a response to modernism through a return to an earlier, Victorian style. Steampunk gives modern technology an alternative look, using brass, marble, clockwork, and leather. Brunkhorst argues that steampunk is not merely about surface appearances, but about a return to a “simpler” time. Crafting is about having control over one’s life through do-it-yourselfism. Steampunk avoids dehumanisation of the creative process and reclaims technology by humanizing it. It is not ultimately about reviving Victorianism but about melding its best traits with modern capabilities. Steampunk aficionados have reinvented a style and identity inspired by early science fiction, but they are progressive rather than reactionary. Bronkhorst claims that steampunk doesn’t reaffirm the values of Victorianism; it is simply a celebration of arts and sciences of the Victorian era through art and sculpture.

Brunkhorst’s paper did an excellent job of outlining the steampunk aesthetic, and her conclusion that steampunk is a counterculture that rejects consumerism, because it is about mindful living through crafting, is an interesting one. However, I found her argument that the ideals of Victorianism are not at the heart of steampunk weren’t adequately supported. Steampunk reaffirms the values of “speaking and dressing well”, goals only obtainable by the upper classes. To my mind, steampunk celebrates the upper classes of Victorian England as much as it does the aesthetic of the time. Classism, and through it, imperialism, are inextricably bound up in the steampunk aesthetic. Steampunk encompasses “engines of war” such as dirigibles, clockwork planes, and weapons, yet steampunk rarely addresses who these creations are to be used against. The aesthetic is one of refined wealth, a wealth which, during the Victorian period, came inevitably from colonialism and imperialism. Brunkhorst addressed this only briefly, and, while I appreciated the mention, I would have liked to hear a more in-depth analysis of how class and race are simultaneously foregrounded and erased within the steampunk aesthetic. While I realize this was not the ultimate aim of Brunkhorst’s paper, nevertheless, I believe it’s an important issue to address when writing on a counterculture that is so dependent on an imperialist foundation. Modern steampunkers rarely acknowledge this problematic aspect, but I think it is worth investigating more deeply.

The panel’s third paper, “Fantasy Fiction and Embodiment: An Ethnographic Study” by Cade Bourne, studied the practice of Wicca through a cultural anthropology lens, with a focus on how fannish texts have influenced neopagans’ sense of their religious practice. Paganism exists against a backdrop of secular modernism, and was originally defined as “other than” Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Now, neopaganism has a multiplicity of definitions and many different traditions.

Bourne conducted his ethnography at two annual Pantheocons, held near San Francisco each February. It’s an area that is quite distinct, for the population’s intense social activism and socially liberal attitudes. Participants in the convention had an array of beliefs and practices, but shared a feeling of marginalization from the larger culture. Many wore costumes, including corsets, armour, staves; they seemed to be drawn from various folklores, both taking from and adding to fantastical imagery.

Bourne detailed a conversation he had with a Druid, about how he constructed his practice of druidry. The Druid used creative visualization, created and cast spells, and based his presentation on a collection of archetypes. He used fantasy fiction, as well as history, as some of his inspirations. Many at the convention were from different schools of magic that could be related to fictional formats: Le Guin’s Roke, Rowling’s Hogwarts, Pratchett’s Unseen University. Bourne noted that people who felt marginalized in one dimension often sought out like-minded fans. People who had mystical experiences and were marginalized for such might be drawn into fantasy fiction and fannishness as a way to find others with similar mindsets. Love of the genre became the basis for self-expression as well as community. Bourne concluded that there is a dialectical relationship between Pagan practices and fantasy fiction.

Bourne’s ethnography had many examples from people he spoke to and events he attended. While the data was mostly preliminary and anecdotal, it was fascinating to listen to. I’d be interested to see where Bourne takes the work next, especially if he pursues the fact that the crossover between fiction and practice is evident, but its meaning to the various community participants is very different. Some appreciate having the imagery of fantasy to draw on, while others resent it and find it demeaning. I’d want to learn how and why the different attitudes accumulate.

And these have been The Panels That Interested Me At ICFA this year! Thanks for sticking around for a few months while I wrote up all my notes. It’s been great to revisit the panels after taking some time to think them through. I hope you’ve enjoyed this very extended con report. Next week: book reviews! I’m looking forward to them.

For my Saturday morning panel of choice, I attended “Creative Differences: Tensions Between Creators and Consumers in Fannish Communities.” The three papers on fannish engagement with creators worked well together, and I enjoyed the discussion afterwards.

The first paper was Karen Helleckson’s “Fandom Kerfuffles as Expressions of Agency.” She began with a big disclaimer about what she meant by “fandom” in her talk; she was addressing specifically Western media fandom on Livejournal, before the formation of Dreamwidth, and talking about the event Strikethrough07.

Strikethrough07 was the name given to the series of events when Livejournal suspended around 500 accounts because of complaints from an internet watchdog group, the Warriors For Innocence, described by some as a “pedophile-hunting vigilante group.” This happened on the Memorial Day long weekend, when supposedly Livejournal believed it wouldn’t be noticed; they didn’t even tell their users what they’d done or what they intended. Instead of fading away quietly, the event made the news. Users were incensed. Literary and artistic privileges were at stake. Fannish infrastructure wasn’t safe. Fans had assumed their own autonomy, but this act of censorship cut it away. As a result, fans worked together emergently. The fannish values of privacy, giving credit to creators, and non-profit were reinforced, as were the consequences of violating the terms of the fannish social community.

Helleckson began by talking about what a “kerfuffle” is to fans. Whereas its traditional meaning is a small dustup, in fandom, the connotation is of a huge battle ending in anger and despair. Yet, it also allows fandom to exert agency and make moral judgements. Helleckson argued that kerfuffles are emergent from initial conditions, and they facilitate fans’ self-reflexivity rather than action, as a general rule. They are divisive discussions, and when they fade away, most often few changes are made. Norms are enforced, factions are bolstered, and nothing is resolved.

Strikethrough07, however, was so broad in its implications that it resulted in action. The Organization for Transformative Works and Dreamwidth were hatched from ideas to realities. Collective action took place, not as a result of agreement and planning, but through ad hoc collections around a large, common concern. Actors with numerous different priorities were involved, and though no single hand or voice guided the changes, rational voices tended to prevail, and the common cause was advanced. Advocates for inclusion, agency, and autonomy were privileged within the discourse. As a result of Strikethrough07, fans worked to gain control over their own infrastructure in order to maintain their artistic integrity. By acting collectively, fans had motivational commitment to their mission, showed resilience to adversity, and accomplished independent actions that showed their emergent agency.

The second paper of the panel, “Revisiting Representation: A Retrospective Analysis of Fan Reactions to Depictions of Fandom on Supernatural” by Breanne Armstrong, focused on the character of Becky, the super-fan, on Supernatural, as fandom’s avatar on the show itself. The show’s fandom has a large contingent of fans who write about the incest between the main characters, and in a particular episode, the show’s creators have the brothers discovering fan fiction about their epic romance. Armstrong argues that this shows the importance of the crosspollination between the show and the fans. The fourth wall is definitively broken — in fact, it is permeable in both directions.

Armstrong conducted an online survey to determine fans’ reactions to the character of Becky and the show’s acknowledgement of its fandom. It received more than 250 responses, which volume, Armstrong says, is indicative of the show’s impact and intensity. The responses dealt with the balance of power between the fans and the show, both positive and negative.

On the negative side, fans said that outsiders tend to exaggerate and stereotype fannish behaviours. Outsiders give an implicit, disdainful critique of fandom, and use fans as the scapegoats for truly deviant behaviours. Fans with negative views found Becky to be a caricature, inaccurate and unflattering, displaying women as hysterical and over-sexualized. She was evidence that the show’s creators were displaying fandom as crazy and desperate.

75% of the responses, however, were positive. Fans described a feeling of inclusion. Becky was an affectionate gesture by the creators demonstrating their familial ties with their fandom. They were recognized rather than shut away. Fans had earned and honour by being supportive of the show: their own reflection in the show’s canon itself. That the show acknowledged slash (and even incest) was a positive, reinforcing portrayal, despite the characters’ own negative reaction to it within the episode. The creators love the fanbase, especially slashers, since they were overtly mentioned.

Many fans don’t read about the character of Becky. They claim to have nothing in common with her; Becky is an “embarrassment to fans” because she’s written as over-the-top. She is connected to fans’ ideas of the aggressive enthusiasm of groupies at conventions. Such fans exist, but, fans claim, are not the norm. These opinions reveal fans’ thoughts on what is “good” versus “bad” fannishness. Indeed, Armstrong mentioned that fans subverted the purpose of her survey in order to police each other’s fannishness. She asks: are fans othering Becky the way outsiders other fans? Using her as a scapegoat for fans’ worst qualities?

Ultimately, Armstrong found that the character of Becky wasn’t a determination of fans’ enjoyment of the series, which is largely independent of the canon and emergent from the fannish activities that have occurred before. The idea that the creators are mirroring fandom back to the fans is a fascinating one, and will be even more interesting to follow as more shows acknowledge or try to include their fanbases in the shows themselves.

The third paper in the panel followed even further along these lines: from fans’ own agency, through creators’ portrayal of fans, to fans’ portrayal of creators. Casey Williams presented “From Creator to Character: When Fans Fictionalize Authors,” in which she presented a case study of authors’ Twitter personas becoming the characters in a fan’s story. Williams argues that rather than fan fiction being innovation bound by tradition, it could in fact be rewriting the ways in which story is presented. After all, interesting developments in narrative are more likely to occur on the periphery than at the center.

Dawn Johnson is a realistic and comedic writer, and also a creative and prolific twitterer. She creates a fictional world through her tweets which presents her readers as “brains in jars” with whom she speaks. In May 2009, she joked she would die of flu before finishing her current manuscript and needed a ghostwriter. Other YA authors with whom she regularly interacted volunteered to fill the vacancy, and the joke was propagated back and forth. This resulted in a contest, hosted by Dawn Johnson on her blog, for her readers to predict the plot of her next book. The winning entry was a speculative script, involving many YA authors as characters, who all vied to finish Johnson’s book, each in their own style. The fourth wall is once again broken, and this time the creators are on the viewed, rather than the viewer’s, side.

Williams responded to Reynolds’ argument that fan fiction can only respond to canon and is written for feedback. This script did these things but was also original; it created a new narrative pathway. It included twitter as story, a fictional version of the authors, and wrote them within their own online personae. The authors’ online performed selves had no deep personal connection to their offline selves and provided fodder for the fan’s creative endeavour.

Thus, Williams says, fan fiction is a site of potential change in how and what we write, bringing fan fiction forward into published work. Reading, the passion for canon, is what gives fans confidence in their interpretations. Thus, this script is a critical reading of online selves, which allows both portrayal and parody. The fan’s script encourages us to ask how we read blogs and tweets, and proves that authors aren’t immune to readers’ rereadings.

The three papers were all quite strong, and the discussion was excellent afterwards. One thing that stuck out for me was when Jack McDevitt, who was sitting next to me (unbeknownst to me until that moment), stated that fan writers’ ultimate goal had to be getting their names in print. He pretty much articulated the argument that fans are only writing “for practice” and inevitably want to become pro writers (a very common argument for pro writers to make). I remember when this was my stance as well — that fans must want to improve their writing, for the writing’s sake, and to get published. I realized when McDevitt said this, however, that I now understand that fan writers have their own motivations completely apart from the publishing industry. I can see how far I’ve come, and wonder if some day more people than fans might realize that fan works might be goals in and of themselves, and worthy ones at that.

And that was panel 105! I have only one more panel with notes to share, which I’ll hopefully be doing shortly.

Although it’s been several weeks, I’ve still been thinking about some of the panels I attended at ICFA 32. The three posts I have in mind may be less detailed than the ones I wrote at the conference, but I did want to note down some ideas around the papers given.

I think my favourite talk from the conference was Andrea Hairston’s scholar guest of honour speech at the Friday luncheon. She performed a wonderful deconstruction of the racist and colonialist tropes in District 9, a subject I’d very much felt but hadn’t been able to articulate nearly as well. In addition, Hairston placed the film within a context of a Nigerian frame of reference, reaching back to the pre-colonial traditions of the Igbo people, the ways in which British colonialism affected those traditions, and how stereotypes of Nigerian people play out in cultural products today.

Hairston’s talk began with the Igbo tradition of women “sitting on” the men. When men failed to perform their duties, or were abusive, or didn’t uphold the social contract in some way, the women would gather around their houses to sing satirical songs about them, detailing their flaws. These songs used the griot tradition of singing about a person’s strengths and virtues ironically, and were greatly feared. The ridiculous was used as a tool and a weapon in the women’s hands; although they didn’t necessarily have temporal power, they did have the power of satire.

The British had no understanding of “sitting on the men” traditions. When, to protest the colonists’ taxation of women’s markets, many Igbo women used dance, song, storytelling, and acting to stage a “revolution” — in actuality, a satirical, non-violent response aimed more at Igbo men than at the British — the British feared that they were in the middle of a genuine and violent rebellion, and they killed fifty women, wounding many more. They could not perceive the performative nature of the women’s satire.

Satire is “complex play”. It resists definition, being born of the liminal edge between the rational and irrational, the dangerous and the frivolous. Satire can only be effective in a context that is understood by both satirists and audience as a twist on the everyday; an ironic role-reversal. Those who don’t understand are simply by-passed by the satire and its power to be self-referential, humourous, and pointedly directed at a society’s flaws.

District 9 exists in a troubling (post-)colonial space. It shows a human society that is magically “equal”, and while it attempts to displace contemporary racism onto the Prawn aliens, it in fact gets caught in the same colonialist traps that it critiques. Like Avatar, District 9 is part of the minstrelsy tradition that includes Birth of a Nation and Squaw Man. It was hailed as an action adventure, a science fictional romp, a satire; yet once again it shows aliens (the Other) as helpless and rescued by a (white, male) human. The aliens have “lost their way”, but the question of how such pathetic aliens ever reached Earth in the first place isn’t addressed. They are oppressed, forced into concentration camps, and killed. Yet, like many movies about race (metaphorically or not), this is not the aliens’ story. It is the story of Wikus van der Mewe, one of their oppressors. He finds his humanity by becoming the other, and his suffering is the focus of the movie.

Meanwhile, though the story is set in South Africa, there are several Nigerian characters. They are thugs, prostitutes, and scam artists. The thugs’ leader wants to use the aliens’ power to “go native”, and as Hairston says, thus confirming what the audience “secretly suspects about the animal nature of Black males after a hundred years of story assault.”

The Nigerians in the film are entirely caricatures, and this was defended in various ways by saying that “it’s just a film”; the creators “weren’t trying to say anything”; “all the characters are equally bad”; and, of particular note, “Nigerians are really like that.” No, Hairston contends: stereotypes of Nigerians are really like that.

Blacks and women are given no voice in this film that is ostensibly about oppression. Africa, and Africans, are merely backdrop. Despite claims that the film was a satire, in fact, there was no understanding of Nigeria or Nigerians underlying the film’s colonialist point of view. Without understanding, without context, satire falls flat. It simply repeats a particular racist gaze, repeating that the Nigerian characters are the monsters they are portrayed as. There is no twist or irony; therefore, as satire, District 9 fails. Satire, as Northrop Frye says, “is militant irony,” and the audience must be able to be in on the joke — to see the contradictions hiding in plain sight. Without knowledge of Nigeria, there can be no successful satire of it as a country or a culture.

Hairston says, “Black thugs are cinematic; complex black characters with agency and points of view are not.” We are not narratively equal. In addition, the science fictional setting of the film proves that ahistorical human nature is seen as more comforting than real human history. Actual racism is erased or undermined by showing unreal (and unexamined) xenophobia. The film claims that predatory capitalist imperialism is our nature: is that true? Is that the sum total of humanity? Or are there other voices, other perspectives, and other cultures that would benefit from a thirty million dollar budget to examine?

Hairston’s final line pulled together her whole talk wonderfully. She suggests that somebody should sit on our culture’s film makers until they begin to understand their responsibility to the social contract, and start telling more stories than the oppressors’.

Due to my experience in the fan vidding community, I was a panellist for #65: Mirth, Mischief, and Mystical Melodies: Music Fans and Communities, moderated by Kyle Stedman. I think it’s the panel I’ll have the most difficulty describing, since I was part of the conversation for the most part, but I also think it’s the one that most deserves describing, because our audience was only two members strong, and the rest of ICFA clearly needs to know about it!

The panellists, in addition to myself and Kyle, were Cade Bourne, an anthropologist and dj; Daryl Ritchot, a Lady Gaga scholar; Isabella van Elferen, a musicologist studying music and media; and Rebecca Testerman, an American cultural studies student and filker. Our audience members were Deanna and Maura, both fen and filkers. Since the panel outnumbered the audience by 3:1, we all gathered in a circle for a bit of a free-for-all conversation, sometimes straying widely from the topic at hand, but always returning.

We began with a discussion of filk and its community-driven, context-dependent definition. The very ambiguity of defining filk seems like a lure to academics, I believe! Filkers bring intense engagement to their subject and create a collective experience during filksings. Music acts as a social glue, and filk benefits from being highly participatory. A song might be a filksong during a filksing, even if it isn’t original or an SF rewrite of a familiar tune. Conversely, a song that sounds like it might be filk, lyrically or melodically, might not be filk if produced independently of the filking community and produced professionally.

We segued to a discussion of pop idols, starting with Lady Gaga. Daryl described how fans “speak back” to Lady Gaga by dressing up at her concerts. They may have their photos taken to be displayed on her website. They text Gaga during concerts in the hope that they will win a return phone call from her and perhaps some more intimate, one-on-one interaction time with her. Daryl described these as ways in which Gaga’s fans build a community both among themselves and in reaction/relation to Gaga herself. Maura described this as a way to project oneself into the experience of one’s idol. Isabella noted that Gaga as an idol is someone with whom the audience identifies, but she also has a distance. She’s a tabula rasa on whom the audience can project their own interpretations. Every act of Gaga’s is performative, as Gaga herself boasts.

Kyle mentioned Girl Talk, a dj and remix artist who begins alone on stage but, by the end of his set, is surrounded by his dancing, participating audience. Cade mentioned the reciprocal energy a dj must develop with his audience, picking from among a pool of songs to guide the build of a concert’s mood over the course of the set. Djs are themselves extreme fans, sharing their fannish engagement with others, though they may become idols themselves.

I brought up the ways in which idols interact with their audiences, such as the apparently genuine twitter feeds maintained by bands like My Chemical Romance, The Young Veins, Panic at the Disco, and others. Isabella argued that these are inevitably performance; in this case, perhaps a performance of authenticity with which the audience can identify. “Fandom is sincere; fandom is serious,” she said, and fans have an intense desire for authenticity. Yet the authenticity of tweets is nevertheless constructed; idols must remain both “real” and “fantastic” in their fans’ eyes.

I spoke briefly about fan vidding, especially the ways in which vidders use a vocabulary that they have developed within the vidding community, a rhetoric informed by song choice, clip choice, editing style, and layered effects. Rebecca suggested a filksong as a song for a vid, which I believe has been done, although rarely. Cade spoke about the ways in which video and audio artists play off each other, in a riffing, jazz-like style at concerts played at Burning Man, among others. Isabella wondered if vids might cause a concretization of visual vision to go with a song: that a video might “fix” a particular meaning onto music.

As a member of the vidding community, I would have to disagree (although I didn’t get a chance at that moment to express this). The video clips chosen are just as much a part of the conversation as the music. Clips don’t fix a song’s meaning, just as conversely, the song doesn’t fix a clip’s meaning. Both have meanings that are fluid, malleable, and inconstant, though layers of meaning can accrete to a particuarly powerful clip that is often used by different vidders. Nevertheless, a wrenching re-contextualization of a clip can be very powerful in a talented vidder’s hands, recreating its meaning entirely. The same is true of songs, which can be used in vastly different fandoms, as well as different emotional or tonal contexts within a single fandom.

I think this potential of vidding wasn’t recognized by the other panellists, not through any lack of theirs (except in experience with vids). It was simply that their own contexts led them to consider music to be foundational, the source for meanings. I, on the other hand, have the experience of meaning arising initially from clips and video. The media canon inspires the song choice; the narrative supplies the seeds of meaning that fans construct by weaving clips and music together.

We move on to discuss how music is used in films, starting from the orchestras that accompanied silent films. This is called “Mickey Mousing”, as when a fast piano plays for a chase, a sad trombone sounds for upsets, and strings signify romance. These connotations are accumulated over time. Early talkies, for instance, wouldn’t have any music at all unless it was provided by an onscreen, literal, and evident source.

Isabella talked about how music doesn’t have any intrinsic meaning. The meanings that accrue are entirely cultural. Music is associative: it brings forth connotations through variation on parameters like timing, dynamics, instrumentation, and vocalization. Within that context, contravening expectations can become a musical critique. Isabella described how texts on musical rhetoric were used by Bach, among many others, to imbue meaning in their compositions: certain keys or notation sequences had theological meaning and had to be used together to create relatable contatas. Though broad descriptions and categorizations were available, people remained bewildered by sheer talent. Anyone could put a contata together with the proper rhetorics, but creating an immortal piece of music was something else again.

We moved on to talk about how a story can inspire a piece of music or vice versa. cade talked about instrumental pieces that inspire imagined narratives, like musical inkblots, and I talked about how fan mixes codify a fan’s experiences of a text in musical expression.

Our final topic was the legalities of vidding and sampling. I felt I couldn’t adequately describe the grey areas in copyright law that the Organization for Transformative Works argues makes vids fair use, but I mentioned their battle to have vids recognized as critiques and/or parodies. Cade spoke to the limitations on sampling in remixes. The feeling was that fans and remixers should (or at least must) remain below the radar if they want to continue. I finished our session by mentioning the symbiotic relationship between fans and creators in terms of creating publicity for a media text, and how vidders exist in the liminal space, approved of when they follow the creators’ vision, hounded with cease and desist letters when they transgress against authorized meanings.

Overall, it was a very fun discussion that covered a lot of ground. I enjoyed the chance to talk with everyone, the audience included, and it made for a very interesting examination of different approaches to music fans and fans using music — not always the same thing! Kyle moderated very well and the panellists all got a good opportunity to share their own viewpoints. It was exactly the kind of stimulating discussion that hones the appetite for lunch, which was where I headed next.

My second full day at ICFA was even more busy than my first! I chaired the first panel of the day and sat as a panellist on the second. Then I attended the scholar Guest of Honour luncheon featuring Andrea Hairston. My next series of posts will about each of these three events.

There was pretty good attendance at panel #48: Creeping and Shambling Horrors: Dreadful Delights in Convergence Media and Literary Mash-Ups, considering it began at 8:30 in the morning the day after St. Patrick’s Day. I first introduced Jessica Eberhard from the University of South Florida and her paper, “Crossing the Blood-Brain Barrier: Zombies Go Viral with the Campus Craze Humans Vs. Zombies.”

Humans Vs. Zombies is a game played on college campuses across the U.S. and in many other countries around the world. It combines social media with the physical space of the campus, with certain areas designated as safe, and others infested with lurking and lurching zombies. It lasts for seven days, on which humans must go out into the world to complete daily missions in order to survive. A zombie is stunned for fifteen minutes by the strike of a nerf gun dart or a sock grenade, but a human is instantly turned into one of the shambling undead by the deadly tag of a zombie. Zombies survive by feeding on one human every twenty-four hours. The usual conclusion is a complete zombie takeover by the end of the week, followed by the celebratory Zombie Prom.

Zombies are referents for disease, infection, and detachment from ordered sociality. Jessica elaborated on the zombie as a metaphor for an allegedly apathetic generation sitting in front of video games and showed how Humans Vs. Zombies combats the very metaphor it is named for. She spoke on how communication practices can reshape spaces — from the hallowed halls of learning to an infected, apocalyptic landscape. Participants create physical as well as digital communities for the duration of the game; deaths are recorded online, but all game encounters occur in the campus space. The game becomes a means to outgoing, physical encounters, new relationships, and engagement not only with other players but with the connotations of zombieism in the modern world.

Jessica’s paper used Bahktin’s concept of carnival to delve into the performative dynamics of Humans Vs. Zombies. The week-long game becomes a participatory festival of disorder. The near-sacred (though secular) space of academia becomes an irrational, non-linear arena for spectacle. Bahktin’s carnival was a social practice in which the folk celebrated the cycle of life: the low over the high, the ridiculous over the orderly, and the non-authoritative over the enforced mores. Thus, college campuses become the perfect location for such a disruption: a specific moment in time in which a story of survival is performed by hundreds of people who want to imagine a more “primitive” world of revelry and adrenaline-fueled battles with the metaphor of disease, infection, and a fate worse than death.

Jessica’s talk was lively and well-supported with video of a Humans Vs. Zombies as well as strong references to theory. Her own enthusiasm and engagement made the game and its cathartic outcomes feel all the more real. I was personally inspired to see if my campus celebrates Humans Vs. Zombie week, because it sounds like a fantastic time for all involved.

The second paper of the panel was Dr. Mads Haahr’s “Chasing the Ghost: Reinventing Gothic Horror in a Location-Based Mobile Game.” Mads’ game, written and produced by a small team, was the polar opposite of Humans Vs. Zombies in terms of tone and mood, but was equally fascinating and conceptually engaging.

A location-based mobile game takes place in the real world using GPS or other location-tracking devices. The player’s own movement through a space is necessary to encounter the different aspects of the game, which are triggered within the environment around her. Examples include Pac-Manhattan, in which Pac-Man and the ghosts are player characters racing through a grid of streets in New York, and Can You See Me Now, in which players in a physical space track down their online counterparts moving through the same space virtually.

The game developed by Mads and his team takes place at Falklands Castle in Scotland, about an hour north of Edinburgh. It is a story-driven and historically-grounded narrative that uses the grounds of the castle as a launching point for a paranormal ghost hunt. Participants use a smartphone app that “detects ghosts”, which may be visual or auditory. The ghosts move through the space, and, using GPS tracking in their phones, participants can find and interact with them. The ghosts appear on the phones’ screens or speak through their headphones, and participants can photograph them within the setting, including their own friends and family as well as the ghost in the resulting picture.

The story has several branching points: players can help Mary, Queen of Scots (who truly was an occupant of the castle) exorcise a banshee nature spirit haunting the grounds, or they can help an old woman’s ghost find her child, lost in a fire (which truly did destroy the castle’s east wing). Mads’ team created the narrative and the idea of the ghost hunt by reinventing the Gothic: the castle setting, the fragmented narrative structure, the temporal transgressions of the ghosts on the present, the spatial transgressions of the players’ interactions with the ghosts, and the liminal object of the smartphone-as-paranormal detector, all aid in this task. The emotional immersion in the game is slow, intense, and horror-filled.

Mads’ presentation was a fascinating look at game development and technologically-mediated engagements with space. His team consciously followed the theory of the Gothic in the creation of the game, all of which added to its appeal. The general consensus of the audience was that they wished it had been implemented in more locations so that they could interact with it, and I agree that any trip to Falklands Castle now wouldn’t be complete without searching for its fictional, digital, Gothic revenants.

The panel’s audience was highly engaged and clearly felt drawn to both game types. The discussion meandered from ghost walk tours to the possibility of participating in Humans Vs. Zombies as part of an assignment for rhetorics students. The questioners were lively and engaged, which made moderating the question period a treat for me. I’m very glad I got assigned to chair it, as I would have missed two fascinating papers if I hadn’t. ICFA certainly has more than enough reasons to brave the early morning panels!

Continuing my quest to review and/or react to all the ICFA panels I’ve seen! I’m much helped by the fact that there are only four sessions a day, and today I went to three–one of which was my own, whose evaluation I’ll leave up to others if they’d care to! That leaves two afternoon panels to account for, and this afternoon the second one was #47: Finding Jobs.

This was a panel for, I assume, graduate students who need to be once again forcefully disabused of the notion that they will ever find a good (well-paying, benefits-having, interest-piquing, geographically-convenient) job in Academia. As such a grad student myself, I felt it behooved me to attend! Also David Hartwell was one of the participants, and I’ve enjoyed him on panels in the past. The other panellists were Michael Furlong, Karen Helleckson, Rob Latham, and Jeffrey Weinstock, with Taryne Jade Taylor moderating.

Taryne asked the panellists to each briefly describe their jobs, how they got them, and how audience members might go about getting similar jobs, in terms of qualifications, interest, and interviewing. Afterwards, the floor was opened for questions.

Michael Furlong is an academic research librarian, so he described some of the tasks he’s asked to do in his day-to-day life. He talked a bit about which MLS programs are accredited, and some of the benefits (no grading) and drawbacks (always giving the same 101 lecture to new students about research) in his job. For people interested in SF, it seems like the best thing about being a librarian is if you can get the freedom to build a collection that reflects your interest.

I was familiar with Karen Helleckson’s work as an independent scholar in fan studies and her work with Transformative Works and Cultures, but I didn’t know about her day job as a freelance copy editor. I learned a lot about the requirements of that job, and also about how to succeed with a Ph.D. who isn’t interested as in teaching, and leaves the university system. Karen largely recommended punctuality and reliability as top qualifications for any job, and said that the autonomy she gets from freelancing is what really drew her: her advice was to find a niche that fits your personal values and work your way into it.

David Hartwell’s anecdotes were really well-told and humourous, but his advice was perhaps the least relevant, since first, he got his introduction to publishing in the 1970s, and second, he got his chance from a friend’s father. Obviously, “who you know” is very important, and that’s true today, but it’s difficult advice to follow, because you don’t know which “who you know” will end up being the decisive one! Networking, of course, is crucial. His other advice, “Live in New York,” is another difficult one to implement pragmatically. However, his stories were the best ones!

Rob Latham is a professor of English. He applied to 70 positions after getting his doctorate. He advises targetting yourself at the proper job market — in his case, science and technology in literature — and got his job mainly through luck, he believes. He advises making your interest in SF into something recognizable by search committees, because SF on its own isn’t a marketable concentration. It’s often a secondary qualification in many job postings.

Jeffrey Weinstock probably had the best and most pragmatic advice. He’s an American Literature professor has been on several search committees and he talked about the regimented process: what he looks at first (CVs) and what can ruin your chances and cause you to fail the slush pile test (mistakes in your cover letter). He advised insisting on teaching experience at the Ph.D. level. Publishing is key, and might distinguish your application from a dozen others. He also recommended researching the departments where you get interviews, and mention how your skills would complement the courses and syllabi they already offer. It shows that you’re aware and interested more than just superficially. Also, have something to talk about as your next project; you can’t live off your dissertation alone. Get recognized people in your field to write your letters and sit on your committees, even if they’re known to be harsh.

I enjoyed Jeffrey and Rob’s advice, and felt that they were the panellists getting the most to the heart of the matter. However, that could be because they’re the two working in and affiliated with universities, which is where my ambition lies. However, the other members of the panel also answered most questions well and, with prompting from the audience, were able to give more specific and practical advice as well.

The best question, I thought, was “Are people with disabilities likely to be hired?” Unfortunately, it seemed to catch the whole panel flat-footed. Everyone seemed eager to disclaim any prejudice against disabled candidates, but nobody had any advice for a disabled job-seeker. Rather half-heartedly, some panellists tried to reword their previous answers, but the answers didn’t change: you need to be able to perform to certain standards, under given conditions, and no mention was made about how or whether those standards or conditions would allow for accommodations for disabled people. I was disappointed that neither Jeffrey nor Rob really addressed that question at all. It remained largely unanswered.

In the end, the panellists’ advice wasn’t new or surprising: graduate students should network, publish, research the positions they’re applying for, and have plans for future scholarship if they want to stay in academia. They should take into account their preferences in terms of teaching, research, and job skills, as well as how willing they’d be to move or do something outside the field in order to get a job. The job market hasn’t gotten any better, and it doesn’t seem likely to, so do your best to make contacts and develop relationships with people who might be able to give you a hand up later. Hopefully, a conference like ICFA will pay off in the future!

I’m attending ICFA in Orlando this week, so I thought I might do a series of reviews or at least reactions for the panels I attend.

First up this afternoon was #32: Indigenous Futures on Film with Grace Dillon from Portland State University. It was meant to be a screening of Indigenous Futurism short films, which I was really anticipating! I was very much hoping to see films that were written, directed, and performed from a First Nations viewpoint, especially about science fiction, which I (probably ignorantly) hadn’t thought about as a common genre for First Nations cinema. Unfortunately, Ms Dillon wasn’t able to be there because of travel problems. I really hope I’ll be able to find her and talk to her before the end of the convention, because I’d love to get a listing of the films she’d intended to show, so that I can watch them independently.

As a substitute, Rich Calvin of SUNY Stony Brook showed Pumzi (2009), written and directed by Wanuri Kahiu. This is a Kenyan post-apocalyptic short film set thirty-five years after World War III, “the Water War.” It is, in a word, gorgeous. The cinematography and direction are excellent, and use both setting and actors to their best ability so that the most is made of the film’s 36-minute length. The world-building is absolutely exquisite. I was blown away by the way this future world is revealed to the audience through perfectly-chosen details that are filmed with a poignant, delicate touch.

Asha (Kudzani Moswela) lives in a city that is entirely enclosed because the world outside is dead. The inhabitants must recycle every drop of water, from urine to sweat. They must run on treadmills in order to supply the city with its 100% self-sufficient power. Computers are ubiquitous, encouraging citizens to contribute their share of literal person-power, and with texting (overlaid with voiceovers) taking the place of any direct dialogue.

This next paragraph contains spoilers! Skip to the next paragraph if you’d rather. When Asha, who works in a natural history museum, receives a mysterious package containing a viable soil sample, she’s advised by a friend to dispose of it as dangerous. Instead, Asha uses it to germinate a dessicated seed. She uses her own personal water ration to keep the resulting sprout alive. When she is refused permission to seek out the soil’s source, Asha defies the ruling council to find a place where the seedling can have a chance to survive.

This movie comes from a tradition of eco-feminism, in which women are seen as nurturing, the “mothers” or “seeds” for a reborn world. (Another example of eco-feminism that immediately sprang to mind for me was Sheri S. Tepper’s The Gate To Women’s Country.) The film essentially shows Asha rebirthing the natural world. I loved that all the major characters are women: Asha, her confidante, her secret helper, and every member of the society’s ruling council. Men are shown powering the city with their bodies, and as destructive, violent soldiers. They are nameless and voiceless, a position women have too often been relegated to in films. I loved seeing Asha’s power and agency, and the three distinct relationships between Asha and other women, absolutely none of which involved men in any fashion.

Asha’s ultimate destiny is ambiguous. It’s not clear if she’s dreaming, succeeding, or failing in her quest, or whether her quest is futile, or perhaps already accomplished by someone else. The audience at the screening had a lively debate about which was most plausible!

Overall, the discussion during the panel was excellent, although one comment was rather egregious, I thought. Someone mentioned that they were “surprised” that a Kenyan filmmaker was so “literate” in the rhetorics of science fiction films. I could only think that it’s far more likely that a dedicated filmmaker would be aware of those conventions than, for instance, someone like me — a big science fiction fan and even academic, but by no means someone educated in film studies. The tenor of the comment seemed to be that Kenyans wouldn’t know American/Western SF, and I thought that it’s far more likely that this film was made to cater to American/Western sensibilities because it was the film’s only hope of being read even remotely correctly by the film’s American/Western audience. As the saying goes, it’s the less privileged group that must, by necessity, know the privileged group intimately. It’s American/Western privilege to be patronizing about how well this film used science fictional conventions and tropes. In the reverse, for instance, I’m sure I missed many nuances and references to Kenyan culture, though Rich Calvin pointed out a few. It’s far more likely that American/Western audiences read this film as solely science fictional because we are ourselves ignorant of any other traditions imbued in it and unable to “see” them.

I enjoyed Rich Calvin’s short introductory talk about the director, Wanuri Kahiu, and her work both as an environmentalist and filmmaker. He situated the movie in the contest of Kenya’s film industry, which mainly focuses on telling local, realist stories and documentaries. He also mentioned Kahiu’s desire to turn Pumzi into a feature film or at least have it more widely distributed, which I would absolutely love to see. There’s so much about Asha’s world that could be further explored, not to mention the fact that, as one audience member put it, “We don’t know if this film is the end, or the beginning, of the story.” I’m only saddened by the fact that I’m too cynical to believe that Pumzi will ever go the way of District 9, which also began as a short film shot in Cape Town. For the very reasons I loved it — the strong female characters and relationships, and the focus on Asha’s journey rather than her conflict against anybody — I believe major film production companies and distributors will disdain it. That’s a very sad commentary on the world, but, I fear, a true one.

I hope to be able to find and watch more of Kahiu’s work, now that I’ve been introduced to her.

Continuing with book-blogging Cybersexualities, Jenny Wolmark’s collection of essays on SF, feminism, and postmodernism. Part 1 is entitled “Technology, Embodiment, and Cyberspace,” and the essays in this section address the contradictions inherent in body-machine interfaces. The essays trace the impact of virtual reality and other technology on the concept of spatiality and temporality. Wolmark notes that there are many masculinist assumptions inherent in the ontology of science and technology that should be examined by feminist theorists.

The first of these essays is Mary Ann Doane’s “Technophilia: Technology, Representation, and the Feminine.” Continue reading →