Fail here there and everywhere

[sqbr]

I am feeling sick and grumpy but also chatty. So, some links from metafandom with rambly commentary.

Failboat! The Cruise Ship of the Damned Sails On summarises a bunch of stuff.

veejane asks what sff fandom is going to do about this crap.

On safe spaces talks about, well, safe spaces.

Re the Will Shetterly/Kathyryn Cramer vs coffeeandink thing(*): outing someone under their real name because they disagreed with you and banned you from their lj? Is unbelievably low. Dismissing the opinions of everyone who disagrees with you "because all their IPs come from Ivy league colleges"? Low and stupid. Arguing against the use of pseudonyms on the internet? Just..argh. The stupid burns.

Also, given that Worldcon is in Australia next year I find myself putting together my opinions on aussie fandom with all this stuff going on in international fandom. I feel a bit stymied about what I can do personally to try to cut down on the fail, though, apart from trying not to contribute to it myself and encouraging anti-fail.

So since coffeeandink asked people to focus on positive things: I am currently reading "Devil in Blue Dress" by Walter Mosley after being recced it on 50books_poc. It is quite good, even if it's not spec fic :)

(*)People are avoiding saying their names because apparently they google stalk and harrass them, but if NOONE says their names noone will know whose been talked about. I feel too obscure to be worried, but incase they do: seriously, you're going to pick on a no-name australian rambling while sick? This will not help your PR.

Comments

Re: A burst of predictable curmudgeonry

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

Is Australian fandom as bad? In amongst all the noise, it certainly seems as if we have a bit of a problem. As far as making race something we talk about, making something we address, we should do what we can to fix it by making it part of our dalog. Will it make enough of a difference? I really don't know.

I know that discussing literature and TV that doesn't come from an exclusively white UK/US POV is something I genuinely welcome -- I think it helps the racism debate, but I also seek out a lot of such work to consume for pleasure anyway. I think panels that talk about racial issues should be part of the program. I think we need to be racially sensitive in our con planning. I think, in general, we should not tolerate people being as obnoxious as the RaceFail debate.

I honestly don't know, however, if all this will make much difference to racial makeup on fandom, or really how welcoming it is to new fans. Maybe fandoms intrinsic middle-class-ness makes it intrinsically statistically whiter than the average population, and maybe the root cause of the problem is that the middle classes are disproportionately full of clueless white people. Or maybe we simply bear the historical brunt of a genre that has so far been dominated by UK and US white writers, and so we get white fans. Either of these situations would give both cause for optimism and pessimism -- pessimism that we can do much to change fandom by making it more welcoming, optimism that it will change anyway (demographic shifts due to later waves of migrants becomng middle class in the former, changes due to different patterns of media consumption in the latter).