#readingdystopiaindystopia

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Dance Apocalyptic: Dystopian Fiction and Media In a Dystopian Age - WisCon 41 panel write-up

These tend to be long to click the clicky to read.

Disclaimers:

I hand write these notes and am prone to missing things, skipping things, writing things down wrong, misreading my own handwriting, and making other mistakes. So this is by no means a full transcript.

Corrections, additions, and clarifications are most welcome. I’ve done my best to get people’s pronouns and other identifiers correct, but please do let me know if I’ve messed any up. Corrections and such can be made publicly or privately on any of the sites I’m sharing these write-ups on(tumblr and dreamwidth for full writings, facebook and twitter for links), and I will correct ASAP.

My policy is to identify panelists by the names written in the programming book since that’s what they’ve chosen to be publicly known as. If you’re one of the panelists and would prefer something else - let me know and I’ll change it right away.

For audience comments, I will only say general “audience member” kind of identifier unless the individual requests to be named.

Any personal notes or comments I make will be added in like this [I disagree because blah] - showing this was not part of the panel vs. something like “and then I spoke up and said blah” to show I actually added to the panel at the time.

Dance Apocalyptic: Dystopian Fiction and Media In a Dystopian Age

Moderator: The Rotund. Panelists: Amal El-Mohtar, E. Cabell Hankinson Gathman, Lauren Lacey

#ReadingDystopiaInDystopia - for the livetweets and comments 

(I think I missed jotting down some introductory stuff as my notes just dig right in - sorry about that!)

Amal talked about how dystopia crosses over into issues of immigration, and Cabell posed the question - “dystopia for whom?”

Lauren discussed teaching Octavia Butler’s Parable series during the November election and then teaching Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale this spring. 

Rotund asked the panelists to define dystopia and mentioned the twitter quote about current generations not being promised a future of flying cars, but rather a cyberpunk dystopia. 

Amal talked about conflating dystopia with post-apocalyptic, but that the two function differently. They can intersect, however. Dystopia is allied with ideas of oppression - the severe marginalization of a large swath of the population.

Cabell added that this kind of dystopia is somebody else’s utopia. People with privilege don’t want to lose it - that’s dystopic for them.

Lauren discussed anti-utopias, such as 1984, where the audience identifies with the people being marginalized. Compared that with a critical dystopia where there is a horizon of hopefulness - such as Parable.

Rotund brought up the positioning of Firefly as allegorical confederacy and asked how do we deal with that?

Cabell answered - fanfiction.

Amal discussed how she had not connected Firefly to the confederacy due to the lack of themes of slavery, particularly child slavery. As a Canadian, that just wasn’t her first go-to when watching it. There were so many other examples of imperial or hegemonic control without the slavery aspect in her mind - specifically Lebanon, where her own parents had fled from civil war.

Amal talked about playing with this iconography of rebellion without the ugly context of the confederacy. There’s something interesting to play with about these heroes who were on the losing side, but she acknowledges that her perspective is different than those from the U.S.

Cabell stepped in and said “hashtag socialist killjoy” but, the themes of colonization in Firefly were there even without the confederacy angle. For example, the heavy Chinese influence of the culture but we don’t actually see any Chinese people. What are the implications of that?

Lauren said that one interesting part of dystopias is getting to identify with the rebels. This can lead to an unthinking identification with resistance - the idea that all power is bad, all government is bad. This constant identification with outsiders can be dangerous. She added that Octavia Butler does a good job with the complexities of these themes in her works.

Cabell brought up prepatory vs. cautionary dystopias. Putting the spotlight on collaborators. 

Amal discussed some of Canada’s issues with how it’s dealt with it’s Indigenous cultures with truth and reconciliation commissions. An issue in Firefly is that we have no idea of any Indigenous life on the planets that are taken over and terraformed. 

In some ways, Firefly reflects America’s colonialism with the frontier themes, but what does that look like without any Indigenous populations? Canada’s attitude for a long time was “well, our treatment of Indigenous people wasn’t as bad as what the US was doing...” and that was a fantasy to make themselves feel better about it.

Rotund pointed out that people like to feel like rebels.This was the foundation of Trump’s campaign. It’s a distressing use of the dystopian narrative.

Lauren brought up Handmaid’s Tale and how despite the complexity of it’s historical notes, there were still problems in the ways many marginalizations were ignored.

Amal talked about the appropriation of resistance terms and used MRA’s use of feminist language as an example. Just as a group is gaining a voice against the powers over them, their language is taken from them and used against them. Then the people in power get to have this fantasy of being the oppressed ones.

She brought up Mad Max as this lone man trying to survive the apocalypse and how unrealistic this trope is - we need community to survive. 

(I have in my notes in the sidebar for the next page or so that I missed a lot that was said so bear with me if some of this seems extra jumpy from topic to topic)

Cabell discussed the Wisconsin cocaine mom laws that sprang up during the 90′s paranoia about crack babies (which it turns out is not even a thing, the affects were due to poverty not drugs). This was highly racialized. In 2014, California was found to be forcibly sterilizing female inmates - mostly women of color. 

The point of this discussion is that we’re already living in the reproductive dystopia. People are in situations where they’re needing to ask themselves how to stay safe in a system that is unsafe for them.

Amal brought up a conversation she’d had that day with a taxi driver when he found out she was Canadian and he immediately started talking about how badly we need socialized medicine here in the U.S. To Amal - the idea that everyone deserves health care as being radical is dystopic! She gets worked up and apologizes and Rotund says - don’t apologize for being mad at dystopias.

Lauren talked about Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time as an example where it’s not just about the privileged suddenly being in a dystopia. There’s a theme of complacency, of not paying attention to what’s happening to others. It’s a cautionary dystopia. 

Cabell brought up the SNL video of white people just in a constant state of screaming until finally there’s 2 black people and one asks what’s happening and the other answers - oh they’ve been this way since the election. 

Amal replied that she noticed a lot of people feeling sort of apocalyptic after the election, but many people of color were more like “oh, it’s Tuesday. Maybe a little more Tuesday than usual but...”

She also talked about how she saw a lot of people from the U.S. saying online that they needed to leave the country, while other people were angry at this notion saying - how dare you leave when we have work to do? Amal, coming from the perspective of her own parents having fled their country, acknowledges that the people in that first group are thinking more about survival. 

Amal found herself agreeing to let friends from the US come and stay with her as needed, while also members of her family were working on taking Syrian refugees in. “You think you’re safe until you’re not” - in Handmaid’s Tale, the main character waited too long to leave. 

[My own thoughts on the anger about people fleeing is that this is primarily directed at people who do have quite a bit of privilege choosing to leave instead of staying to fight for the people who really can’t make that choice. Example: the whole Amanda Palmer thing ugh]

An audience member asked about the common video game trope of going alone into the woods to survive after a dystopic or apocalyptic event. None of the panelists like that type of game. 

Amal really wants a game like that, but about community building. Cabell would pay lots of money for an MMO in that style.

An audience member recommends the game This War of Mine as doing community building well, and asks the question of if the panelists have noticed the need to upgrade security recently.

Amal discussed how she was detained on her way to the states this time and how horrifying of an experience it was. No one did anything particularly bad to her, but it was still awful and invasive. It did make her think both about the idea of state security and “what am putting out online?” 

She talked about how she has always self-censored, and the investment her family has put into respectability politics as a means of survival. She’s now opening up more, and finds that she’s angry all the time “that’s my secret - I’m always angry”. And yet she still tempers her rage and fury because she doesn’t want to lose the support of white liberals. 

Cabell replied to Amal’s experience about being detained and said - sure they all felt bad but they did it anyway. The idea of collaboration and following orders. When laws are unjust, the moral thing can be to break the law. 

She added that the best person to hide undocumented immigrants is someone who has never publicly said that we should be hiding undocumented immigrants, which makes it tricky. The need for networks and cells for this kind of thing.

Amal addressed that the reason the people involved with her detainment were so embarrassed had a lot to do with how she passes, has lighter skin, etc. 

(I have a whole chunk of something I wrote down that Lauren said that I added a bunch of question marks to, so not sure I got it down correctly but it was about how increased need for security has affected academia and the sense of witch hunt-ness involved in people speaking their minds freely.)

An audience member asked about examples in dystopian fiction of that use of appropriated language of the oppression.

Lauren brought up that in Parable, published in 93, the president really used the slogan “make America great again”. Also the Aunts in Handmaid’s Tale use appropriated language.

Cabell talked about another real life example, which was the laws created to protect fetuses and how proponents of it said it would never be used against pregnant women, but it ended up doing just that - specifically against women of color.

Amal talked about the idea of needing to protect men from women’s temptation and said that her story Seasons of Glass and Iron has an example of this. She also talked about how in The Hunger Games, punishment becomes entertainment.

An audience member asked about the appropriation of dystopian language and does this happen because the stories are too vague? How do we protect against this?

Amal answered that you can’t stop people in power from appropriating narratives. But you can become aware of it and try to check it when it happens. (and then a whole thing I sadly missed about exogenous settlers/immigrants)

The panelists wrapped up with some recommendations. 

Lauren: The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi, Elysium by Jennifer Marie Brissett, and Kate Wilhem’s early stuff.

Cabell: Trouble and Her Friends by Melissa Scott, and a title I did not catch ... something Chronicles by Barbara something (real helpful I know, sorry)  [Edited to add from Cabell: "Darwath Chronicles by Barbara Hambly! Very fantasy alternate universe; not a "realistic" dystopia/post-apocalypse."]

Amal: the song Miami 2017 by Billy Joel and the poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven