geekdom

Ian Sales is worried and upset about the Hugo Awards:

First, a bunch of right-wing scumbags campaigned to get some of their right-wing scumbag friends onto various of the shortlists. And they mostly succeeded – of the twelve people on their “ideal ballot”, seven made it onto the shortlists. What they did was perfectly well within the rules, and similar campaigns have taken place in the past – although none have been as successful as this one. Let’s be clear about this, however – this wasn’t because they wanted to see their friends on the shortlists, this was a direct attack on a part of genre fandom. And yes, it’s an attack on the part that exhibits the qualities genre fandom should exhibit – inclusivity instead of misogyny and homophobia, diversity instead of racism and marginalisation, progressiveness instead of regressiveness… you know, the qualities associated with civilised human beings.

Worse, this was a revenge attack for what happened with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, which cleaned up its act this year and gotten shot of some of the rightwing loonies cluttering up its publications. Vox Day and friends had problems with the SFWA, so they took revenge by pushing a political slate of nominations on their readers designed to annoy the liberals in their head. So in order to “punish” the SFWA they’re wrecking the Hugo Awards, which have nothing to do with that organisation. What they’ve done is legal even if it goes against the spirit of Hugo nominations. It’s a typical rightwing tactic, trickled down from how the Republican/Tea Party abuse of congressional procedures in real life American politics.

As such, it’s therefore much more of an attack on the Hugo Awards than the nomination of the Wheel of Time series, which misguided as you think it may be, is done out of a genuine love for these books, without any political undercurrent. This has happened before and will again, the only novelty being that an entire series has been nominated under the idea that it is a complete work, just like the Lord of the Rings books would’ve been had the Hugo existed then. Whether this argument holds merit for this particular series is debatable, but it’s not a problem for the Hugos as a proper, non-political award, unlike Vox Day’s stunt nominations.

Apart from the fact that Day is trying to punish SFWA by meddling with the Worldcon/Hugo Awards, the real problem is the politicalisation of the Awards, which hasn’t been done to the Hugos before, or at least not on this scale and this successfully. Of course, they imagine that they’re in a war with a leftist-liberal conspiracy to make science fiction politically correct, but we sane people do not need to encourage that delusion. It does make it harder though to solve this problem, when one faction thinks it’s in a war for the very soul of fandom while the rest of fandom just thinks it’s nominating the books and writers they like.

Even if there were an organised faction to oppose these chuckleheads, it couldn’t engage in the same tactics without destroying the awards. You can’t remove their slate form consideration because how it was nominated was all done according to the rules, even if the intent clearly goes against the spirit of the Hugos. At the same time, this slate should not be treated as normal nominations either, to be judged on merit, as S. L. Huang explains. The only thing left therefore is either to boycott the awards entirely and leave the wingnuts their victory, or to consistently vote No Award above the wingnut candidates. That latter would at least neutralise this attempt to game the Hugos. Unlike Ian, I have no real worries about the credibility of the awards outside this particular context; the Wheel of Time nomination or the idea that a couple of lesser books by popular writers are on the list doesn’t break the Hugo because that has always happened.Sometimes they even win.

Update: according to Feòrag, it’s better to list what you want, then No Award and not list the rightwingers, so their votes can’t be transferred.

Foz Meadows aks, if we’re so annoyed at how mainstream media portrays nerds and fandom, why do we do the same when it comes to determining who is the real geek:

Whenever mainstream culture stereotypes geekdom as a bunch of greasy, cheeto-stained white guys in sweat pants mouthbreathing in the basement of their parents’ house, we bristle collectively, because we know it’s unfair and inaccurate – a caricature some forty years out of date. But when we ourselves make assumptions about what the “average geek” looks like, we still tend to picture some variant of this same guy, with his Boba Fett statues and Kirk v Picard t-shirt, and treat him, if not as a yardstick, then as genesis: the archetypal Patient Zero who first spread the disease of dorkness to his likeminded fellows. We think of women and POC as interlopers, latecomers, erasing the history of their participation in fandom in a bid to reassure a particular resentful, insecure cluster of white men that, even if they’re not the only fans around, they’re still the most important, because they were here first: that men like them were solely responsible, not just for fandom as a concept, but for all those geeky fields – like computing, video games, movies, science fiction and fantasy – with which it’s now associated.

To be honest, I should be the last to complain about this, as being a fat, bearded and ponytailed speccy bastard I’ve certainly profited from this image, being taken far more seriously at work or in fandom than I’ve sometimes deserved, just for looking the part. And I’ve certainly been guilty of assuming that fandom is mostly white and male, even when I should and did know better.

It’s a trap that Joanna Russ warned us about already, in How To Suppress Women’s Writing. If women, if people of colour, keep on being seen as new to fandom, even by those who welcome them to it, they never quite become part of fandom, regardless of how long they’ve objectively been a part of it. It’s that constant surprise that women are reading science fiction, playing games, writing fanfic, the privileging of supposedly masculine hobbies (videogames, roleplaying) over female ones (cosplay, fanfic) and the rewriting of history that excludes or minimises those who aren’t white men. Half the time it’s not even done consciously, just a reflection of the culture fandom moves in.

The struggle to make fandom as a whole more inclusive, more welcoming, might therefore (temporarily?) make those women and/or people of colour already in fandom feel less included as well as empower them, if the focus in such struggles remains on the novelty of having such exotic creatures in fandom. Or alternatively, if the onus remains on women, on people of colour or LGBT people to prove that they belong in fandom, have history in fandom. What we (white men) need to do is not just welcome, but embed everybody else’s history in our own, to take the Russ pledge: The single most important thing we (readers, writers, journalists, critics, publishers, editors, etc.) can do is talk about women writers whenever we talk about men.

Because we have been here before as fandom, in the sixties and seventies and we did try and be inclusive, be more welcoming. But what happened was that we got the “women in comics” panels, but then those became all any woman was invited to appear on. We need to move beyond feminism 101 and inclusion 101. How to do that? I’m not sure, but I still believe voluntary quotas are part of the answer.