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kaberettThis was great, but again my laptop ran out of battery power partway through. The thing that really got to me about LonCon in contrast with OSBridge (... aside from the bit where OSBridge was actually better at inclusivity, by and large) was that unlike OSBridge LonCon3 didn't have extension cables everywhere so people could charge during talks.
Panel to be introduced by reading a bit from the article. Then panelists have opinions, then questions, then more questions.
Reads out introduction.
Rebecca Levene: works on Zombies Run. Making sure there's at least gender parity in Zombies Run! Observation that you get the best characters when you write men then switch them to women... ugh this is a conversation I want to have with Jane.
Liesel Schwarz: writer, Chronicles of Light & Shadow, doing PhD in creative writing at Brunell. Talks about how it's the kind of article you keep going back to - I wonder how different my experience is because Lashings? I am having All Of Us Have Been Here All The Time feelz.
Kristina Knaving: played a fighter in a historical society - had to do a lot of research to justify the things.
Rachel Coleman: "hi mum, thanks for coming along" :-) Reads & consumes lots of genre fiction; always excited when she sees a woman. Spent a lot of time in the air cadets as a teenager, considered joining officer training corps at uni, decided not very good at being told what to do! On reading the article, feels like the llama.
Moderator question: favourite example of people or women you've come across, who were missing from school or whatever, and got you excited?
KK: 1600s swordswoman Julie [something] la Monpane? - don't know much about these people, and when unusual you usually get challenged more as to whether she really did it. Story goes - her father taught the king's pages and also trained her, after a love affair with her father's boss she went out on her own, challenged a lot of men, seduced a girl who was sent to a nunnery, burnt down the nunnery & escaped with the girl, and was hunted as a man, then became one of the first mezzo-sopranos at the Paris stage, then did more dueling and had to flee to Brussels having duelled in spite of the edict... because the king said "not sure the edict applies to women???" Of course I am now twitchy about trans folk...
RL: documentary called cocaine kings -- woman who brought first shipment of cocaine into the US, plotted to assassinate the president
LS: became fascinated by female airship pilots because she writes steampunk - not just Amelia Earheart, also Lady Mary Heath, biplane pilots in the Wars...
RC: I was going to mention the Night Witches, but they've already been covered!
JG (moderator): during WWII, planes being built in Texas & SoCal had to be brought up to the East Coast in order to be taken over to Europe - so huge group of dozens of women who would hop the planes up to the East Coast; stop overnight in cornfields etc, stop in little villages where people could not cope with the idea of women wearing aviator uniforms (stole the plane!!!) so they disguised themselves... D: trans erasure
LS: lots of women in aviation history! First person to fly from Europe to the US without landing was a woman... Hemingway disliked her because she was competent and assertive about it.
JG: one of the points of the article is that stories are written with narrative forms, of which one is The Great Man Narrative. By structuring history into stories that are "acceptable", "important", we miss all sorts of other narratives, other stories that would cast light on other lives, that get hidden in the darkness and lost. Panellists, would you like to talk about other narrative forms you've seen in literature or that you'd like to propose?
RL: My genre's very prone to ignoring details, being the history of the upper class - behaving as though the only people who have agency and agenda are nobility, trying to write about people with aims that don't match those of the other classes, have other impulses
KK: Ironically, history is often very much about warriors - believing that the people who fight are the people who get to determine history, erases lots of people. Women of Sparta - put women into military service, make sure slaves don't have uprisings, women get left behind and do all the management - crops, farmland. You can't have managers who aren't competent, so they were probably more *relevant* to Sparta than the soldiers.
LS: biographies are quite interesting - look at how many military biographies there are, most of them about men - and biographies about politicians, movers & shakers, who run countries - again, they're men. I'm glad that this is starting to change, people are finding women and writing about them...
RC: I think it comes down to what stories are judged as interesting. Longstanding argument with Tony - prefers plot-driven over character-driven, not these fluffy romances - R says what's more valid about your plots about people killing each other than my plots about people choosing to overcome differences and get together to raise children? "Well, they're stories, but they're not REAL stories, not IMPORTANT stories" - who gets the food, keeps the house - and half-naked heroes running about are more valuable?
RL: Shakespeare comedies less serious
JG: hard vs soft SF - privileging/qualifying types of SF.
RC: Ann Leckie's AJ owes enormous amounts to sociology, social justice, rather than the handwavey faster-than-light - astonishing how many people are so focussed on "hard" SF in fiction that involves breaking two fundamental laws of physics
KK: lots of romantic tropes and writing style in "hard" SF - there are spaceships, that doesn't mean it - it's "okay" to like romances
RL: AJ is or at least contains a love story, but we're able to overlook it Because Spaceships.
JG: Dazzle of the Day by [] - story about a generation ship - happening on outside skin of ship is desperate race to fix a doodad... but inside ship are hundreds of thousands of people living daily life who read about this thing, hoping it will all get sorted out, but mostly what they're dealing with is getting the kids to school on time, making the meals, ... daily stuff of life! Love stories & interactions of these people gradually grab attention. Stereotypical exciting space opera on skin of ship retreats from importance [US-centrism about fuckin' AFGHANISTAN rather than CLIMATE CHANGE is the obvious parallel) - when history gets written, daily life (including of heroes) gets lost
LS: eco-dystopia stories written by a woman, set in what used to be in Alaska - survivor of ecological disaster - quite hard SF. New imprint started a few years ago, LS is at the vanguard of this brand new imprint - Ede Swift is the above. Exciting to be part of the group, very refreshing to talk about kissy bits & science *at the same time*!
RC: we've talked a lot about the exclusion of women from narratives - what about class, race? A lot of the Great Man Narrative is about white man going out and killing other men with a different skin colour - we're just over the river from the East India Docks. Could do with hearing more from those backgrounds as well.
RL: agree, what I did in the latest book, didn't set out to but got to the end and realised that none of the viewpoint characters were Straight White Men. Not that there's anything wrong with them, but they're not really a viewpoint character for me...
RC: Not like they have a lack of visibility in culture!
JG: language assists in the burying or obscuring of women, PoC, homosexualities/multiple sexualities - when we say "soldiers", for most people this means "men". Tells the joke about the surgeon; enemies always given names that dehumanise them (easier to kill people who aren't people). Want to talk about the way language obscures...?
LS: Commercial airline pilot - meme that went around a while ago about a pilot, there are still to this day people who will not get on a plane if they know a woman's flying it. One of the last bastions of male domination (???).
KK: I would like to mention the concept of one of the - when you talk about "unusual women", you usually have to be more sure of yourself, because people will challenge you. A female pirates in China (Madame Ching?) - one of the greatest pirates with a tone of "AND A WOMAN" - but if you take her fleet & the other 9 most successful pirates - her fleet would swallow them ALL up. She managed to blackmail the Chinese government into giving her + most pirates a reprieve - relatively luxurious life w/ no hangman's nooses. If male, people would say "the most successful pirate", not "one of the" or "the most successful female pirate" - assumption that most successful female less successful than man - always ends up this way when women better than men at something! (cf the football recently...)
RC: one of my little bugbears since the last couple of years - "women's football" versus "football" - England women's football team was great, men's shit - the real sport versus the women's sport - can't even book the women's cricket team tickets online.
RL: gendering of language can have pernicious, pervasive effect - essay by Douglas Hofstadter - generic is male, specific male + specific female, generic male--->specific male broad line, thin line between the other two. Wrote piece, took how we gendered language, instead separated by race rather than gender. White lady saying "race analogy is exact equivalent of how we deal with gender!!!"
LS: "protagonist" vs "strong female protagonist"! Related anecdote - apart from being a writer, LS had real job - lawyer - qualified as barrister - keeps getting mail to Mr Liesel Schwarz - at beginning of bar had an incident. Instructing solicitor came in to see her, thought she was an assistant/clerk, asked her to make him a cup of tea - she did so, sat down opposite him, said "now let's talk about your case".
RC: binary that excludes anyone who's intersex, anyone who's genderqueer... need to not be so concerned to get women represented that we kick everyone else under the bus.
JG: How To Suppress Women's Writing fits in well here. Short story by James Tiptree Jr, The Women Men Don't See - one of the Tiptree award winners this year - talking about exclusion/hiding of women in life
KK: "she wrote it but she had help" - actually men&women teams saying "him and her", but usually say just "him" - and the second shift etc etc! If women write more likely to give credit to their husband - Wendy&Richard of Oedipus, she writes & draws, he edits - she's very careful always to edit him
JG: how does opening up new narratives improve literature? Restricting writing & reading to images of women & people that fit stereotypes diminishes the literature - it's lazy & prevents
Panel to be introduced by reading a bit from the article. Then panelists have opinions, then questions, then more questions.
Reads out introduction.
Rebecca Levene: works on Zombies Run. Making sure there's at least gender parity in Zombies Run! Observation that you get the best characters when you write men then switch them to women... ugh this is a conversation I want to have with Jane.
Liesel Schwarz: writer, Chronicles of Light & Shadow, doing PhD in creative writing at Brunell. Talks about how it's the kind of article you keep going back to - I wonder how different my experience is because Lashings? I am having All Of Us Have Been Here All The Time feelz.
Kristina Knaving: played a fighter in a historical society - had to do a lot of research to justify the things.
Rachel Coleman: "hi mum, thanks for coming along" :-) Reads & consumes lots of genre fiction; always excited when she sees a woman. Spent a lot of time in the air cadets as a teenager, considered joining officer training corps at uni, decided not very good at being told what to do! On reading the article, feels like the llama.
Moderator question: favourite example of people or women you've come across, who were missing from school or whatever, and got you excited?
KK: 1600s swordswoman Julie [something] la Monpane? - don't know much about these people, and when unusual you usually get challenged more as to whether she really did it. Story goes - her father taught the king's pages and also trained her, after a love affair with her father's boss she went out on her own, challenged a lot of men, seduced a girl who was sent to a nunnery, burnt down the nunnery & escaped with the girl, and was hunted as a man, then became one of the first mezzo-sopranos at the Paris stage, then did more dueling and had to flee to Brussels having duelled in spite of the edict... because the king said "not sure the edict applies to women???" Of course I am now twitchy about trans folk...
RL: documentary called cocaine kings -- woman who brought first shipment of cocaine into the US, plotted to assassinate the president
LS: became fascinated by female airship pilots because she writes steampunk - not just Amelia Earheart, also Lady Mary Heath, biplane pilots in the Wars...
RC: I was going to mention the Night Witches, but they've already been covered!
JG (moderator): during WWII, planes being built in Texas & SoCal had to be brought up to the East Coast in order to be taken over to Europe - so huge group of dozens of women who would hop the planes up to the East Coast; stop overnight in cornfields etc, stop in little villages where people could not cope with the idea of women wearing aviator uniforms (stole the plane!!!) so they disguised themselves... D: trans erasure
LS: lots of women in aviation history! First person to fly from Europe to the US without landing was a woman... Hemingway disliked her because she was competent and assertive about it.
JG: one of the points of the article is that stories are written with narrative forms, of which one is The Great Man Narrative. By structuring history into stories that are "acceptable", "important", we miss all sorts of other narratives, other stories that would cast light on other lives, that get hidden in the darkness and lost. Panellists, would you like to talk about other narrative forms you've seen in literature or that you'd like to propose?
RL: My genre's very prone to ignoring details, being the history of the upper class - behaving as though the only people who have agency and agenda are nobility, trying to write about people with aims that don't match those of the other classes, have other impulses
KK: Ironically, history is often very much about warriors - believing that the people who fight are the people who get to determine history, erases lots of people. Women of Sparta - put women into military service, make sure slaves don't have uprisings, women get left behind and do all the management - crops, farmland. You can't have managers who aren't competent, so they were probably more *relevant* to Sparta than the soldiers.
LS: biographies are quite interesting - look at how many military biographies there are, most of them about men - and biographies about politicians, movers & shakers, who run countries - again, they're men. I'm glad that this is starting to change, people are finding women and writing about them...
RC: I think it comes down to what stories are judged as interesting. Longstanding argument with Tony - prefers plot-driven over character-driven, not these fluffy romances - R says what's more valid about your plots about people killing each other than my plots about people choosing to overcome differences and get together to raise children? "Well, they're stories, but they're not REAL stories, not IMPORTANT stories" - who gets the food, keeps the house - and half-naked heroes running about are more valuable?
RL: Shakespeare comedies less serious
JG: hard vs soft SF - privileging/qualifying types of SF.
RC: Ann Leckie's AJ owes enormous amounts to sociology, social justice, rather than the handwavey faster-than-light - astonishing how many people are so focussed on "hard" SF in fiction that involves breaking two fundamental laws of physics
KK: lots of romantic tropes and writing style in "hard" SF - there are spaceships, that doesn't mean it - it's "okay" to like romances
RL: AJ is or at least contains a love story, but we're able to overlook it Because Spaceships.
JG: Dazzle of the Day by [] - story about a generation ship - happening on outside skin of ship is desperate race to fix a doodad... but inside ship are hundreds of thousands of people living daily life who read about this thing, hoping it will all get sorted out, but mostly what they're dealing with is getting the kids to school on time, making the meals, ... daily stuff of life! Love stories & interactions of these people gradually grab attention. Stereotypical exciting space opera on skin of ship retreats from importance [US-centrism about fuckin' AFGHANISTAN rather than CLIMATE CHANGE is the obvious parallel) - when history gets written, daily life (including of heroes) gets lost
LS: eco-dystopia stories written by a woman, set in what used to be in Alaska - survivor of ecological disaster - quite hard SF. New imprint started a few years ago, LS is at the vanguard of this brand new imprint - Ede Swift is the above. Exciting to be part of the group, very refreshing to talk about kissy bits & science *at the same time*!
RC: we've talked a lot about the exclusion of women from narratives - what about class, race? A lot of the Great Man Narrative is about white man going out and killing other men with a different skin colour - we're just over the river from the East India Docks. Could do with hearing more from those backgrounds as well.
RL: agree, what I did in the latest book, didn't set out to but got to the end and realised that none of the viewpoint characters were Straight White Men. Not that there's anything wrong with them, but they're not really a viewpoint character for me...
RC: Not like they have a lack of visibility in culture!
JG: language assists in the burying or obscuring of women, PoC, homosexualities/multiple sexualities - when we say "soldiers", for most people this means "men". Tells the joke about the surgeon; enemies always given names that dehumanise them (easier to kill people who aren't people). Want to talk about the way language obscures...?
LS: Commercial airline pilot - meme that went around a while ago about a pilot, there are still to this day people who will not get on a plane if they know a woman's flying it. One of the last bastions of male domination (???).
KK: I would like to mention the concept of one of the - when you talk about "unusual women", you usually have to be more sure of yourself, because people will challenge you. A female pirates in China (Madame Ching?) - one of the greatest pirates with a tone of "AND A WOMAN" - but if you take her fleet & the other 9 most successful pirates - her fleet would swallow them ALL up. She managed to blackmail the Chinese government into giving her + most pirates a reprieve - relatively luxurious life w/ no hangman's nooses. If male, people would say "the most successful pirate", not "one of the" or "the most successful female pirate" - assumption that most successful female less successful than man - always ends up this way when women better than men at something! (cf the football recently...)
RC: one of my little bugbears since the last couple of years - "women's football" versus "football" - England women's football team was great, men's shit - the real sport versus the women's sport - can't even book the women's cricket team tickets online.
RL: gendering of language can have pernicious, pervasive effect - essay by Douglas Hofstadter - generic is male, specific male + specific female, generic male--->specific male broad line, thin line between the other two. Wrote piece, took how we gendered language, instead separated by race rather than gender. White lady saying "race analogy is exact equivalent of how we deal with gender!!!"
LS: "protagonist" vs "strong female protagonist"! Related anecdote - apart from being a writer, LS had real job - lawyer - qualified as barrister - keeps getting mail to Mr Liesel Schwarz - at beginning of bar had an incident. Instructing solicitor came in to see her, thought she was an assistant/clerk, asked her to make him a cup of tea - she did so, sat down opposite him, said "now let's talk about your case".
RC: binary that excludes anyone who's intersex, anyone who's genderqueer... need to not be so concerned to get women represented that we kick everyone else under the bus.
JG: How To Suppress Women's Writing fits in well here. Short story by James Tiptree Jr, The Women Men Don't See - one of the Tiptree award winners this year - talking about exclusion/hiding of women in life
KK: "she wrote it but she had help" - actually men&women teams saying "him and her", but usually say just "him" - and the second shift etc etc! If women write more likely to give credit to their husband - Wendy&Richard of Oedipus, she writes & draws, he edits - she's very careful always to edit him
JG: how does opening up new narratives improve literature? Restricting writing & reading to images of women & people that fit stereotypes diminishes the literature - it's lazy & prevents