WisCon 2022: Day 0
My first foray into plane travel since January 2020 seems to have gone well enough. Both flights were uneventful, which is about as much as you can ask from a plane flight; I could wish that the mask mandate hadn't been struck down, but I feel like I made the best of it. I decided to skip out on the GoH reading, because I got to the hotel only 10 minutes before it was supposed to start, it was raining pretty hard, and I was really ready to be in a no-mask space for awhile. So I watched the livestream on Zoom, and enjoyed both the reading by Sheree Renee Thomas and especially the Q&A with her afterwards. After that I picked up my badge, considered attempting to find some dinner, but decided that I wasn't up for braving the rain without a jacket or umbrella to find a restaurant with outdoor covered seating. So I ordered room service and have been turtling up in my room ever since, and I'm 100% okay with that. I'll go join con space tomorrow.
That said, I've already run into a couple of friends (including ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
justira!), and it felt so good to see them and know I'll be spending the next few days with them, so I'm really happy I'm here.
10am Saturday - Defragging Feminist SFF: The history of SFF by women and other marginalized people is constantly being erased, and it means that in the great conversation that is SFF those voices are muted and their contributions fragmented. Still, reading older SFF can be fraught for many readers, as older works can contain dated terminology and unexpected micro-aggressions. Let's talk about how we can make the conversation more continuous, and recommend some of our favorite works by marginalized people from more than ten years ago.
1pm Saturday - Problematic Magical Matriarchies (Online): Many popular sff texts depict powerful magical orders whose members are by definition women. What are the limitations of these portrayals? To what extent do they subvert and play into social expectations of women? (ie, how often must the power be exercised in secret/by manipulating men?) Is it possible to adjust the idea of gender-based magic systems to be inclusive of non-binary and trans people, or is best to scrap this kind of gender essentialism altogether?
4pm Sunday - City As History/City As Liberator: Cities have long served as both the nexus of existing power structures and a space where they can be transformed. SF writers from George Orwell to Samuel Delaney to Charlie Jane Anders have imagined how physical and social architecture interact to create spaces for both oppression and liberation. How does fiction inform how we envision our cities? How has the pandemic affected our cities and how we think about the future of cities? How have urban crises of the last few years (uprisings against police violence; homeless encampments; neo-fascist provocations; Democracy protests in Hong Kong) affected how we think about cities, and the way we tell stories about cities?
10am Monday - Let's Do the Time Loop Again: Time loops are a tried and true staple of speculative fiction. From characters experiencing repeating loops in Russian Doll and Groundhog Day to the audience experiencing iterations over and over in Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, what makes time loops so popular? What narrative issues arise, and what storytelling anxieties do they address? Why does this trope endure, and what would we be excited to see happen with it in the future? (Or come back from the past!)