Wiscon panels I want to propose
You like? Anything that I should change before I do, flist?? I thought about suggesting another internet drama panel, but... I'm too scared of inducing drama. Oh, irony.
Their images, our stories: vidding as feminist critique
Mainstream TV and film aren't generally very receptive to feminist and social justice concerns, especially in science fiction. Women, especially queer women and women of color, appear as stereotypes, are portrayed and treated as less than human, and are killed off disproportionately--if they appear at all. As well as highlighting all the things we love about SF on screen, of the things that fan appropriations of media can do is to redress and challenge the media industry's lacks. This panel will discuss and showcase vidding--amateur re-editing of TV and film to make music videos that reframe their source footage--through the ways it can function as a feminist use of technology. The second of two vidding panels proposed for WisCon, it will mainly show vids made in the last couple of years.
Robots from the future (and the past)
Man-made beings have been a favourite science fiction theme since Frankenstein. In the reimagined Battlestar Galactica and Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles, earlier representations of robots and cyborgs are updated for the twenty-first century, and they frequently appear as female figures. As robot apocalypse narratives shift focus from oversized metal horrors to sympathetic and/or devious human simulacra linked by wireless networks, what anxieties about the way we understand the human are being worked through in these shows and other cyborg-centric futures? What histories and (science) fictions do they invoke? And what do these narratives signify when it comes to gender, race, and class?
Anarchy!
Anarchist politics and practices have a strong presence in contemporary social justice movements from the Zapatistas to European social centres to grassroots organizations in the US. Their representation in the media is still largely framed in terms of chaos and violence, however. Thirty years after Le Guin's anarchist utopia The Dispossessed, how is anarchism represented in science fiction? What are the connections and contradictions between anarchistic practices in social justice movements, anarchist subcultures, and the representation of anarchism in science fiction?
ETA I submitted them! Hope there isn't horrible problem in the descriptions that I missed...
Their images, our stories: vidding as feminist critique
Mainstream TV and film aren't generally very receptive to feminist and social justice concerns, especially in science fiction. Women, especially queer women and women of color, appear as stereotypes, are portrayed and treated as less than human, and are killed off disproportionately--if they appear at all. As well as highlighting all the things we love about SF on screen, of the things that fan appropriations of media can do is to redress and challenge the media industry's lacks. This panel will discuss and showcase vidding--amateur re-editing of TV and film to make music videos that reframe their source footage--through the ways it can function as a feminist use of technology. The second of two vidding panels proposed for WisCon, it will mainly show vids made in the last couple of years.
Robots from the future (and the past)
Man-made beings have been a favourite science fiction theme since Frankenstein. In the reimagined Battlestar Galactica and Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles, earlier representations of robots and cyborgs are updated for the twenty-first century, and they frequently appear as female figures. As robot apocalypse narratives shift focus from oversized metal horrors to sympathetic and/or devious human simulacra linked by wireless networks, what anxieties about the way we understand the human are being worked through in these shows and other cyborg-centric futures? What histories and (science) fictions do they invoke? And what do these narratives signify when it comes to gender, race, and class?
Anarchy!
Anarchist politics and practices have a strong presence in contemporary social justice movements from the Zapatistas to European social centres to grassroots organizations in the US. Their representation in the media is still largely framed in terms of chaos and violence, however. Thirty years after Le Guin's anarchist utopia The Dispossessed, how is anarchism represented in science fiction? What are the connections and contradictions between anarchistic practices in social justice movements, anarchist subcultures, and the representation of anarchism in science fiction?
ETA I submitted them! Hope there isn't horrible problem in the descriptions that I missed...