ConMunity Engagement: Feminist Fandoms p2 More than "Women in Comics"

This blog comes in response to a tweet from yesterday:

Dear conventions: could you please include women creators in panels along with or other than those Women in Comics panels? Thanks.

— Colleen Doran (@ColleenDoran) October 22, 2017

GeekGirlCon, its existence and its success, demonstrates how unnecessary and belittling the “Women in Comics” panel is. There are women creators throughout the industry, you can have an all women panel that does not center on gender identity. It’s gotten so absurd that some (perhaps many) women creators no longer accept invitations to be on such panels.

But how do you fix this Paulina?

Easily, by not being dumb. Also by having panels that reflect the reality of the industry aka changing from manels (man-exclusive-panels) to all gender panels or by picking topics other than “what’s it like to be a woman” to have a group of women talk about. All of the panels I have organized have been all-women panels and none of them centered on gender. It’s possible I promise. Now go think of some.

Haven’t thought of any? Here are a few I thought of in the last thirty minutes, with full panelist rosters and links to those creators:

Witchcraft and Wizardry in Comics

Short Description: Magic is a regular theme in comic books. What are the commonalities, what are the differences, whose magical inspiration do you draw from, and why do you think this is such a powerful method for storytelling.

Suggested Panelists: Kate Leth, Ming Doyle, Wendy Xu, Caitlin Kittredge, Nicola Scott

Epic Romance in Comics

Short Description: Love is a driving factor for many characters. Let’s talk about some of the epic romances that have taken place in comics and how that acts as motivation for all sorts of events.

Suggested Panelists: Marguerite Bennett, Ariela Kristantina, Fiona Staples, Catherynne M. Valente

What does it take to be a hero?

Short Description: Comics are filled with heroism. Whether they are people with superpowers or people who just want to do the right thing. Why is this a theme people want to keep reading about and what defines a hero in comics?

Suggested Panelists: Kelly Sue DeConnick, G. Willow Wilson, Mariko Tamaki, Gail Simone, Roxane Gay

The Final Frontier: Space as setting

Short Description: What does it mean for a piece to be set in space? Why does space as a concept and as a place tickle our storytelling senses. What do we agree exists in space and what do we debate? How does real science and astronomy play into these ideas? Can we consider "space" to be a character in its own right?

Suggested Panelists: Kelly Sue DeConnick, Nicole Perlman, Marguerite Bennett, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Hometown heroes

Short Description: Sometimes the problems we face aren’t going to affect the world but they do hit a close to home. Who are these hometown heroes and where do they come from? How does reading about solutions to day-to-day problems help us learn more about being good citizens and people.

Suggested Panelists: Brittney Williams, Hope Larson, Pamela Ribon, Kiku Hughes

Road Trip!

Short Description: Every day thousands of us end up on the road. So what defines a road trip and what is it about those events that make them great for storytelling. Are there tropes on the road trip or is it just the heroes journey. Can you have a road trip without roads?

Suggested Panelists: Kate Leth, Shing Yin Khor, and Megan Levens

What these topics prove are that in most cases, any panel you could staff with all men (particularly if it’s all white-dudes) you could staff with all women. You might need to tweak the topic slightly, if you happen to have picked a historically sexist topic or maybe just one that’s always been done by white-dudes (google writers of Superman), but if that’s the case maybe don’t have that panel or have a bigger name woman moderate it. Women have been a major part of the comics industry since it’s inception, it's time convention-panels reflected that.

ConMunity Engagement: Feminist Fandoms part 1

I like millions of other people went out on 21 January 2017 to participate in the Womxn’s March. Though I already had my feminist apocalyptic-chic outfit chosen my friend and I sat down to make a sign each and I chose the simple NC from Bitch Planet. I’ve started to use this as a sort of default for creating things now, aka there is only one Halloween pumpkin design, which seems both ironic and appropriate. If everything is non-compliant then it means nothing (there is no compliance bar) but it’s also a simple and powerful symbol. I knew there were probably many other non-compliant womxn out there at the march but I was not in a large city, so I got a few questions about what “my symbol meant” but that meant I got to share more about Bitch Planet.

I like the many other people with fantastic, empowering, and sometimes hilarious signs, I chose NC very deliberately. I chose it because I wanted to showcase my particular brand of Nerd-feminism and to highlight the simplicity behind the idea of non-compliance. One of the reasons I love Kelly Sue and Val’s concept is because non-compliance can be simple or complicated, many or one thing. It simply does not comply. And when I talked with people about the concept it made them think about the millions of things that women are taught that make them un-feminine or can feminize a man. That simple concept can apply to anyone and makes this comic-book-based-feminist idea so powerful. This is also why I chose to fill in the letters with pink and black. For me the use of the color pink is associated with femininity. I had growing up disliking pink and disliking many of the other associations with femininity that came along with it but as I have gotten older I’ve become more welcoming and almost fiercely attached to pink. I’ve taken it up again and paired it with black because it is a color of resistance and power. Black helps connect us to other, and greater, movements of resistance.

What I also like about the symbol is that Bitch Planet is part of a feminist movement in comics and in Fandoms, which have the potential to be feminist havens. For me the intersection between my nerdy interests and feminism was another way place that feminism has to be entrenched. For me, my nerdy interests need to be feminist. Not all fantasy has to help us to be better people but as tools for teaching, it is integral to making us our better selves. Also for so long being a nerd was almost exclusively coded as male and what more recent fandoms have done, by the increase in cosplay and crafting, is incorporate women and transform nerd-dom visually, emotionally, and intellectually.

More than ever at conventions, particularly at conventions like GeekGirlCon, I see people talking about mental health, inclusion, and a myriad of other issues that have made nerd communities more inclusive and cognizant of society’s problems. Before Nerd-dom has a history of being welcoming to women but it, like many professions, has gone through an anti-woman hump that only recently has had a fierce and purposeful restructuring. This has involved opening nerd islands of insolation and discussing how even nerd friendships were unhealthy. Controlling nerd knowledge was just a different form of bullying.

The increase in the number of women and women’s spaces in Nerd dom has meant a re-negotiation of these behaviors. While some have turned from bitter nerds into members of the alt-right, those same feelings of alienation can be used to unite people against the things that reject us. Being part of a persecuted group does not exclude you from negative behaviors but we have a common enemy and those are hate and feelings of loneliness. Additionally, so many works of fiction that create fandoms, whether or not they identify as nerds, are built on ideas of being true to one’s self, cooperation, and resistance to negative forces. Because of that intersectio-nerd-feminism is a must.

For me, nerd-dom is linked to my interest in science-fiction and “nerdom” because it has in many ways helped me formulate and understand my identity. It is a community I participate in and it must be held to the same standards that I require of the rest of the world.