more on the culture wars

[totient]

So you may have noticed a culture war in SF fandom. I have not been surprised to see an echo chamber forming at NESFA; Rene was a friend of theirs. (He was and is a friend of mine too, but it's easier to circle the wagons than it is to realize that your instinct to do so is the very reason why you must not.) But I have wondered at how all the women there have gone along with this. I got a little bit of a clue last weekend when a more recent female NESFA member didn't go along -- and remember that for NESFA "recent" is anyone who joined in this century. But the real clue is in the second to last paragraph of this post:

Keeping [the community] definition narrow and making sure it discourages newcomers also guarantees that you'll keep a staunch set of female allies. For those of us who had to mortgage significant parts of our identities at the door, it's hard not to see the new generation of geek girls as interlopers, getting a free ride where we had to laboriously claw our way in. When you're part of an underrepresented group, it's easy to fall prey to a reductive fallacy that there's only room for one way to be female (or Black, or disabled, or queer, or...) in geek culture, and anyone who approaches that identity from a different angle threatens your claim to it--not so different from geek culture's own struggle to maintain a discrete identity as our iconography and media bleed their way into the mainstream. If those people can be geeks, what will be left for me? And if the tent is that big, what, ultimately, is membership worth?

If you're keeping a culture wars reading list, this is worth adding to it. For me, it's another piece in a larger puzzle: what, if anything, do I want to do about the culture of conventions like Worldcon? Should I help push it kicking and screaming across the divide, or let it fade into irrelevance?

Comments

[londo]

The impression that I get is that this is not, strictly speaking, limited to women. It's the third largest geek demographic in circles we travel in, and worthy of attention, but... the impression that I get is that a generation ago, being a geek was so overwhelmingly important that it overpowered anything else, and instilled everyone with this sense of "our fellow geeks can do no wrong, we must preserve the tribe at all costs because there are so few of us, and everyone else despises us so we must band together."

The tribe has since grown, and the old generation hasn't acclimated to this yet.

[(Anonymous)]

I've been thinking in circles about this for ages. On a personal level, I don't think I'm old guard or new guard and I can't tell if that's because I'm circling the wagons or because I'm setting them on fire. Or have I already rejected a culture that rejected me and have no investment in guarding or storming the gates. (on a personal level.)

On a conceptual level, I want everyone to be able to come along, and for the assholes of any stripe to be jettisoned as we go.

[omnia_mutantur]

Previous comment not intentionally anon.

[paradoox]

I'm thinking you are vaguely referring to something that happened at the meeting(s?) last weekend.

FWIW, my attempts at a anti-harassment or let's act like adults policy wasn't even vaguely directed at the recent Readercon incident. And I can fully see NESFA / Boskone taking what happened at Readercon and saying "Move along, move along, this isn't our problem". And there is probably no way that NESFA would ever ban a big name author even if he was a and got coke poured all over him. I was merely trying to deal (or be able to deal) with someone who is most often the subject of the sentence "What do you mean, you are still letting X come to your con?"

Sometimes one has to pick which battles to fight.

Of course, once NESFA adopts some sort of policy, I probably do need to bring up banning X from Boskone for at least a year.

Because we are letting him hurt innocent people and thus hurt ourselves.

[totient]

There are two kinds of harassment policy. One is focused on the harassers and under what circumstances they can be punished. One is focused on the attendees and how we can make the con a safe space for them. I would love to see the second kind of policy at as many cons as possible, and on Sunday a woman whose name unfortunately I did not catch proposed just such a thing for NESFA. But OMG could you imagine someone at a Boskone trying to get any backup from anyone on the concom?

I'm glad to see you being proactive about this and I hope you don't get jumped on for it.

[paradoox]

She was sitting the middle / back towards the archway to the Flynn room (and was looking for some moving unloading help at the end of the NESFA meeting)? I think that was a newish person. Susan something maybe? It would be obvious from the minutes.

[milktree]

Maybe I'm too young, or not enough of a ... geek? Nerd? whatever... but I have no idea what a "fake geek girl" is. Does "fake" modify "geek"? or "geek girl"?

Is there some honor or pride in being a 'geek' that's different than being a "Bostonian" or "man" or "woman" or "left wing hippie socialist libertarian gun nut"?

There's clearly something I'm missing.

[i_leonardo]

check out Italo Calvino's "The Dinosaurs" from the Cosmicomics short story collection: http://www.ruanyifeng.com/calvino/2007/07/ch_9_the_dinosaurs.html

without getting into an extended analysis, i read it as a parable about identity, belonging, comfort. fear, and tribalism and particularly the challenge of letting go of a self-definition that may no longer be useful.

[deguspice]

It makes a bit more sense if you start with this blog post from John Scalzi (note: the text at the top is quoted text that he's responding to)

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/11/14/when-gut-boys-attack/

[milktree]

Dear lord... What an asshole. I find it mind boggling that Tony Effing Harris represents enough people that he isn't immediately dismissed as a nut-job.

[infinitehotel]

I posted on Facebook a few days ago that watching the current battle over the term "geek" has me wondering if this is how Irish people feel watching Americans on St. Patrick's Day. Not because I have any ancestral or historical right to the term or who gets to self-describe as such. Just that most of the people running around making all the noise and wearing the funny hats don't look much like the folks where I come from.

I'm still formulating a less pithy, more cogent unpacking of my feelings on the subject, but the short form is from the time I arrived in Boston, I always perceived the term geek as less about what you consumed (whether books, comics, media, or technology) and more a badge granted because of your desire to create or interact in one of those spheres. There's a whole interiority/exteriority conflict to that; sometimes knowledge for knowledge's sake is fine in and of itself. Still, I tend to think of geeks less as read-only media; they're not exclusively about what they take in but rather what they do with that input. In that context, I can see it as a source of pride. And actually, by that metric, I could see any of your other terms above working as sources of pride as well.