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pantryslutFirst came the "Canon That Dare Not Speak Its Name" panel. This was the most fun.
I wrote the panel description, so it's all my fault. Here is what it said:
"Feminists are engaged in challenging dominant cultural paradigms, and so, tend to be allergic to the idea of a canon. At the same time, there is often a desire for a common body of work as reference in discussions of certain issues. Is there a feminist SF/WisCon canon? Is this a good thing or a bad thing? What might it consist of?"
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imnotandrei moderated. badgerbag was also on the panel, as was my fellow Tiptree juror Michael Levy. I decided early on that my role was to interrogate the notion of a canon in the first place. "Although I have already engaged in canon formation, as a Tiptree juror," I said in my intro, "so you can feel free to dismiss me as a hypocrite at any time."
Liz and Mike were very into the idea of a canon. Mike is an academic, so that's not too surprising. Liz (please correct me, btw, if I misrepresent your ideas) is very into the idea of multiple, flexible, particpatory canons, canons for different purposes and with different foci.
I decided that canons are OK if a) there are more than one, b) the criteria for their formation is transparent, and c) we can continually interrogate the process of their formation.
Because otherwise, we end up with a small recapitulation of the same problems a traditional literary canon possesses: the list can become closed, tokenized (at best), nonrepresentative of what's actually being written.
I understand that people want to know what to read, and I am not (as I was accused of in the at-con newsletter) against recommended reading lists. I just want to talk about what criteria we make our decisions on, and I do not want *a* recommended Feminist SF reading list for everyone attending WisCon.
Also, I find that canons (and canon-favorers) tend to give too much weight to the historically significant over the contemporary and accessible. My friend Bill Henry pointed this out when he noted that our 5-minute canon, assembled early in the panel, were all books from the 70's and early 80's. This is why we weighted our later list generation (the list I posted earlier) in favor of works from the 90's. The historical is just one way to approach learning about a genre, after all.
Somewhere during this panel, someone from the audience said, "but how will people learn about the conventions of the genre without a canon/recommended reading list/similar guiding tools?" I pointed out that I learned that stuff by reading not the classics of the genre -- I still haven't read many of those sorts of books -- but by reading boxfuls of crap.
Liz set up a wiki, and you can find it (and add to it) here: http://www.sneakyfrog.com/~lizzard/femsfcanon/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage
I wrote the panel description, so it's all my fault. Here is what it said:
"Feminists are engaged in challenging dominant cultural paradigms, and so, tend to be allergic to the idea of a canon. At the same time, there is often a desire for a common body of work as reference in discussions of certain issues. Is there a feminist SF/WisCon canon? Is this a good thing or a bad thing? What might it consist of?"
imnotandrei moderated. badgerbag was also on the panel, as was my fellow Tiptree juror Michael Levy. I decided early on that my role was to interrogate the notion of a canon in the first place. "Although I have already engaged in canon formation, as a Tiptree juror," I said in my intro, "so you can feel free to dismiss me as a hypocrite at any time."Liz and Mike were very into the idea of a canon. Mike is an academic, so that's not too surprising. Liz (please correct me, btw, if I misrepresent your ideas) is very into the idea of multiple, flexible, particpatory canons, canons for different purposes and with different foci.
I decided that canons are OK if a) there are more than one, b) the criteria for their formation is transparent, and c) we can continually interrogate the process of their formation.
Because otherwise, we end up with a small recapitulation of the same problems a traditional literary canon possesses: the list can become closed, tokenized (at best), nonrepresentative of what's actually being written.
I understand that people want to know what to read, and I am not (as I was accused of in the at-con newsletter) against recommended reading lists. I just want to talk about what criteria we make our decisions on, and I do not want *a* recommended Feminist SF reading list for everyone attending WisCon.
Also, I find that canons (and canon-favorers) tend to give too much weight to the historically significant over the contemporary and accessible. My friend Bill Henry pointed this out when he noted that our 5-minute canon, assembled early in the panel, were all books from the 70's and early 80's. This is why we weighted our later list generation (the list I posted earlier) in favor of works from the 90's. The historical is just one way to approach learning about a genre, after all.
Somewhere during this panel, someone from the audience said, "but how will people learn about the conventions of the genre without a canon/recommended reading list/similar guiding tools?" I pointed out that I learned that stuff by reading not the classics of the genre -- I still haven't read many of those sorts of books -- but by reading boxfuls of crap.
Liz set up a wiki, and you can find it (and add to it) here: http://www.sneakyfrog.com/~lizzard/femsfcanon/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage
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no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 06:24 am (UTC)I decided that canons are OK if a) there are more than one, b) the criteria for their formation is transparent, and c) we can continually interrogate the process of their formation.
An extensible canon, how incredibly geeky! How great!
no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 04:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 05:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-10 10:02 pm (UTC)I agree with your 3 main points, and I think there should be a Database not a Canon. Then - instances of canon can be generated for a particular situation and time and purpose. If the structure of the database and weighting criteria are open, then assumptions about canonicity and literary quality are exposed. It would be an open source tool, not a static thing produced.
for instance you could query it (with some kind of menus, or slider bars, or check boxes, or keyword input?) for something like, "I want a list of books with strong women characters, written from the 1950s to 70s, in which the women have telepathic companion animals." Or - "the list of books that academics cited most often in the 1980s" or "books by women that sold the most copies" - or "feminist books that mention other books, with links to the books they mention."
Well - this miracle database requires someone to spend time building the software - the web interface - and then a team of people to figure out what to put in and how to mark up each book, which would be most of the work of the project and also where its major weaknesses would lie. It would be useful if we made it despite the flaws that should be fairly obvious...
But I think imagining this database and its criteria is a useful exercise in itself. The questions that arise become the point - How do I know what's feminist? How much am I weighting a 'literary quality' that is nebulous, undefined? What exactly is a "strong woman character"? What fits in the genre? All the boundaries are fuzzy.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-10 10:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-09 04:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-09 09:15 pm (UTC)