A Short Comment on the Genre and Subculture of Science Fiction in the Wake of George R.R. Martin's Worldcon Comments

            The recent controversy around toastmaster George R.R. Martin’s repeated lauding of controversial editor and author John Campbell has produced a renewal of the ‘canon’ controversy. Most folks who I have seen respond to this have taken a fairly sensible approach. There’s no particular need to have read any particular set of science fictional texts to be a ‘fan’ of the genre. It’s hard to argue with the logic, particularly at a moment where one can spend a lifetime exploring a particular aspect of the genre, whether that be military science fiction, space opera or feminist science fiction. The textual production of the genre is so extensive that you are inevitably not going to have read some particular text that falls into some community’s ‘canon’, whether that is Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, or any number of significant figures.

            In a sense, one could very easily stop at that moment of critique. It pretty effectively neutralizes the demand, but I want to explore a different level of the assumptions embedded in the claim of canonicity and the demand that one must read a set of subcultural figures to establish your authenticity of a fan. This obvious act of gatekeeping contains an important set of assumptions that the circle of fandom is somehow coextensive with the circle of science fiction and fantasy, or at least that it should play some significant and outsized role in defining science fiction. At this point, that illusion is fairly well shattered. We live in a world where thinly veiled slash fiction is sold at Target and figures such as George R.R. Martin and J.R.R. Tolkien are multi-million-dollar industries. Figures such as Philip K Dick and Octavia Butler are parts of significant academic conversations that only have tangential connections to fandom at best as well. At this point, their cultural relevance is no longer controlled by the subcultural fandom for better or for worse. The next book produced by George R.R. Martin is probably going to sell like hotcakes even if the most recent incidents cause the archipelago of the subculture to turn their backs on him.

            But I want to push that dimension further and argue that science fiction never was the sold domain of fandom. The genre has its origins before the creation of this subculture and it always exceeded the limits of the subculture. Hugo Gernsback may have given the genre its official name and he may have played a significant role in creating the subcultural community that celebrates that name, but the conventions of the genre were coagulating before his intervention and authors and publications had made their names in its construction before him. We can point back to a number of obvious names, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe, and aspects of the utopian tradition. We can even point to a fairly significant pulp tradition that shapes the work of Gernsback and others. Most of these authors, who still define the literary conventions had no connection to the subculture or tangential connections at best, such as Wells’ frustration at the reprinting of his work by Gernsback without royalties. If one looks at the debates between Wells and Verne, one can see that they were able to debate the definition and limits of the genre without him. I don’t want to entirely dismiss the distinction between science fiction and the scientific romance or the fantastic voyage, but they are frequently less distinct than the disjunctures that exist within the subcultural world of science fiction itself, a world that includes Doc E.E. Smith, Isaac Asimov, Pamela Zoline, and Octavia Butler.

            Even when we move into the era of the 1930’s, 1940’s, and 1950’s, we can find significant works of science fiction that fall outside the narrow confines of fandom. The work of Karel Capek comes immediately to mind, along with the dissident works of Soviet critics such as Yevgeny Zamyatin and Mikhail Bulgakov. In addition, we can add to the list the works of Olaf Stapledon, George Orwell, and Katharine Burdekin. Within the United States, we can think of significant figures such as George Schuyler who has only recently been recognized as a significant science fiction writer and others. Through this massively incomplete list, we can see a world of science fictional narrative production that both falls largely outside the circles of the subgenre and that often plays a significant role in shaping the literary production of the subgenre, whether in the form of the word ‘robot’ introduced to the world by Capek or the dystopian conventions of 1984 and Brave New World. That continues with the work of authors such as Stanislav Lem, who was antagonistic to the subculture, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, and others. We can also include Margaret Atwood, who until recently has tried to distinguish her dystopian production from the genre and the subculture. Science fiction as a generic form has always exceeded the grasp of the science fiction subculture. It has never fully defined the readers of the texts and it has never defined the literary production of the genre. There are worlds of science fiction that don’t connect to that subculture or only tangentially connect to it.

            That isn’t to deny the real creativity and labor within the subculture. It has after all produced significant authors, modes of criticism, and very real communities. Members of the subculture have done a lot of the work to discover obscure texts that later define the conventions in the genre and have often done significant translation work. As maddening as it frequently is, it has created a rich language and a fascinating legacy. I can see why people want to preserve it and, in many cases, to break down the racialized and gendered walls of exclusion that often defined it. Within the latter context, decentering the narrative of fandom in the larger field of science fiction can play a productive role. Figures such as Campbell and Heinlein are significant within specific communities of literary production, but they don’t define the wider field of the genre. We can think of the ways that the subculture benefited from that larger world even as it frequently excluded it. We can track down other literary and historical narratives, which will be undoubtedly defined by their own flaws, contradictions, and promises. We can also follow paths of translation as subcultural narrative approaches are translated and transformed. The subculture has always played a part in this narrative, but it has never been the narrative in its entirety.

 

A Short Comment on the Language of Fandom

      I've found myself reading quite a bit of fan discussion during the recent conflict over the Hugo awards.  The pages of File 770 have become my lunch time reading for the past few months.  That process of reading has really reminding me of the very subcultural behaviors of the group, particularly around the construction of language.  It struck me that a dictionary of fandom might be a very interesting literary and sociological project.  Not surprisingly, there are a number of efforts already in existence on the internet, and I suspect probably quite a few in book or magazine form as well.  Most of these efforts cover both the types of short hand developed in fan circles, such as the now fairly ubiquitous fanfic and slash, as well as specifically fannish language such as ghu and fugghead.  Additionally, such publications will often give definitions for the often obscure acronyms such as SMOF (Secret Master of Fandom).

       Clearly, this is relevant and interesting work if you want to develop an understanding of the fractured and conflictual subgenre, but, for me, it misses out on another dimension of language that you find in fannish conversations, which is not found in specific words or terms, but in conventional turns of phrase.  One clear example that I have found over these last months is the phrase, "It bounced off of me."  The phrase is designed to accomplish a couple things.  1.  It indicates that the commenter didn't particularly like the book or film. and 2.  It makes that dislike a matter of personal preference, one that indicates more about the particular tastes of the reader, rather than the quality of the book or film.  At an immediate level, the phrase is an indication of the commitment to pluralism and relativism within fandom.  It insists that one's personal taste is not universal, and that a book may have qualities that are simply not appreciated because of the limitations of the reader or viewer.  This set of particular commitments is often expressed sentiments, such as "We are all fandom" and the Vulcan phrase, "infinite diversity in infinite combinations."

     I don't want to dismiss that commitment, but it is a commitment that is often undermined by the frequently explosively agonistic nature of fandom.  After all, we are talking about an archipelago of people who enjoy argument and frequently get into explosive conflicts that lead to the splitting of organizations, and to long standing enmities.  Fandom is certainly pluralistic, but that pluralism is fraught with rivalries, rants, insults, arguments, and lengthy diatribes that define the lay of the land.  Rather than being a recent phenomenon, we can find these fights at the origins of the formal existence of fandom, and in the Amateur Press Association, which is probably the closest antecedent to that formation.   In this sense, we see a second pole to the structure of pluralism so celebrated by fandom, one that is already implicit the word 'fan' itself, which simply shortens the term 'fanatic'.  While on the surface, this may seem like the unpleasant underbelly of fandom, it's important remember that the forms of intolerance found within this pole often challenge deeply disturbing aspects of the subculture, such as the forms of racism and sexism found in the genre.  Tolerance, after all, often becomes a form of complacency within the context of an unjust system.

      It also adds a second and unspoken dimension to the statement, "It bounced off of me."  Within the context of a subcultural group that so often descends into futile and bombastic argument, the phrase becomes a way of avoiding such conflict.  That is to say, the pluralism and relativism of fandom becomes a way of both regulating and temporarily avoiding the stasis that lays at the heart of its formation.  In a curious sense, fandom is defined by stasis, precisely because so little as at stake.  It is, after all, not a form of citizenship, an ethical system, or anything other than groups of people who share nothing in common but to enjoy a literary form, an act of enjoyment that millions engage in without any need for a subculture or even a community to do so.  Perhaps, within that context, we can give a third definition to the term, and see it as a form of deferment.  "I bounced off of it" becomes a way of say, "We're not going to agree on this one, but rather than getting into a heated discussion, let's wait and see if there is something to discuss that we will both find amenable."  The statement then becomes a sort of rhetorical border, a way of marking what is open for discussion, and what is not, as well.  In a curious manner, the process then mirrors the production of genre that is its reason for existence.

On the Hugo Award finalists

     I thought I would write a very brief update to the comments that I posted on Tuesday, March 21st, while on spring break.  Within that post, I noted that I planned on writing about the upcoming Hugo Awards, notably discussing my voting process.  I also expressed my hopes that the award finalists would not be as affected by the chicanery of the Sad and Rabid Puppies, two groups of conservative fans who had previously attempted to manipulate the nomination process through slate voting.  Both groups attempted to present their manipulation as an effort to bring forgotten and suppressed works back on the finalists list, either in the name of traditional science fiction or in the name of a suppressed politically conservative science fiction, but both groups tended to create their lists based on group identity, nominating friends of the primary organizers of both groups.  The work itself ranged from mediocrity to abject failure with a small number of exceptions.

      I was fairly optimistic that we weren't going to see the same kind of influence that we saw in the past couple years.  The Sad Puppies had abandoned the slate process last year and embraced a largely ineffectual and unpromoted recommendation list  They even abandoned that pretense this year, and presented no recommendations.  The Rabid Puppies didn't entirely abandon the fight, but presented a list of recommendations that only included one or two recommendations per category.  With both groups ending their efforts to choose the entire slate of finalists, it was fairly probable that, barring some secret and highly unlikely cabal of slate organization, we were going to see a list of candidates that more faithfully represented the interests of science fiction fans and readers.  Now that the finalists have finally been released, we can see that the influence of the puppies is fairly minimal.  Only sixteen of the list of twenty-two Rabid Puppy nominees were nominated, and three of those were disqualified. (look here for a more thorough analysis)  Additionally, it would be easy to imagine that the work of a number of the endorsed nominees (for instance, China Mieville and Neil Gaiman) would have received nomination without the influence of the slate, which further reduces the impact of the slate.  A number of people have given credited the recent reforms in the voting process for the reduced impact of the slates, but if there was an impact, it was more in its encouragement to abandon the practice of slating than in its actual impact on the vote totals.

     The resulting list of finalists is fairly exciting, and I'm looking forward to the process of reading the works.  For the most part, it's material that I have not read yet, although I read N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, which her recent nomination, The Obelisk Gate is a sequel, along with the first two books in the series by Cixin Liu.  I've also seen all of the nominated films, except Hidden Figures, and have been a fairly faithful reader of Ms. Marvel, which received another nomination. However, it's material that seems to have received primarily positive critical attention, and looks like a distinct step away from the tedium that defined too much of the last couple years of nominations.  I'm currently in process of placing the novels available at the library on hold.  Additionally, I'm hoping that this breadth of quality works will also translate into a more interesting competition.  My voting choices over the past year were also largely chosen by the majority of other Hugo voters.  I think that this is less a sign that my views are representative of that majority, and more a sign of the lack of meaningful choice among the nominees.  I suspect that the introduction of some real competition will lead to much less predictability in the winners, which will also make the process more interesting.

     You can still get involved in the voting process if you are interested.  You just need to get a supporting membership for $40 and you can vote.  Recently, voters have received electronic packets with some of the nominated material, a process which will probably be repeated this year.  You can find information here.

A brief comment on the Rifftrax commentary on Twillight

      I've been a big fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 since its beginnings in the Minneapolis suburbs. I have a vague recollection of seeing one of the original episodes on UHF television, and watched the show through its full run on Comedy Central, watching it shift from the Joel Hodgson years to Mike Nelson. Like a lot of folks, I didn't see a lot of the episodes on the Science Fiction Channel, but I was pretty excited to hear that the break up of the group led to not one but two new groups, a group with Joel called Cinematic Titanic, and a Mike oriented group which has produced material at The Film Crew or Rifftrax. That group features Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett.

     For those who don't know the concept behind Rifftrax, its a revision on the original project set up by MST3K. Rather than offering commentary on a film that has entered the public domain, or is available for very little money, Nelson, Corbett, and Murphy simply offer commentary tracks for sale, which you can sync with your DVD. This allows for the group to comment about contemporary films, rather than old films, so you get material on obvious targets such as the Star Wars prequels and the Twilight films. It's a pretty nifty idea, and the guys get a few bucks for the material.
     So far, so good.  I saw Cinematic Titanic a couple years ago, and I had a great time.  Pretty much my favorite folks are involved in the process, Joel, TV's Frank, and the Dr. Clayton Forrester guy.  But more significantly, I enjoyed the entire ensemble. (I had been suspicious of Mary Jo Piehl's role in the later years, but I've had to rethink that prejudice, and looking back at the later episodes, she was really funny).  My response to the Nelson, Corbett, and Murphy group has been a lot more mixed.  I've seen a number of the episodes through Neflix, and there has been some good material, but the absence of censorship, something kind of nasty has been revealed.  This initially came out in the material contained in the commentary on the film, The Giant of Marathon, which slipped into an increasingly tedious series of gay jokes, referring implicitly to the sexual practices of Ancient Greece, as well as the naked and oiled torsos of actors.  It became pretty obvious that far from playing with a set of repressed signifiers for comedic effect, that is satirizing the strange repressed, homosocial nature of the film, the guys needed to distance themselves from homosexuality.

     When I got the Rifftrax commentary on Twillight, I had hoped that phenomenon had been an anomaly.  Unfortunately, I was mistaken.  The guys clearly felt the need to distinguish themselves from the audience of the film, through both juvenile homophobic commentary* and often misogynistic commentaries about the teenage girls that make up the audience.  The former was marked by tedious 'that's gay' comments as well as mocking several of the American Indian characters for have 'girly' hair, and the latter was marked by both insults and the need to instruct young women the expectations of young men in dating practices.  I'm not going to go into further detail than that, but it was notable that many of us began to respond back to the podcast half way through the film because of our frustration with the material.  More than anything, it indicated the insecurity of the group.  That insecurity translated into a sort of comedy of hatred that I had never expected from a group of artists that I have attempted to follow and support, and perhaps more significantly, have loved over the years.  It genuinely upsets me to see these talented artists waste their talents in the service of the hatred of women and gay men, and really puts me in the position of asking whether I want to support such artists.

       Before I end, I want to indicate that despite these substantial problems, there were some genuinely funny moments on the podcast.  The guys made a number of sharp comments about the abusive dimension of the budding 'romance' between Edward and Bella, the ridiculous dialogue and camera angles, poor acting, etc.  It  was also clear that the guys had done their homework, and brought some comments in from the books.  None of this stuff is meant to excuse the material I discussed above, nor is it meant as a way of leavening that criticism.  I mention it because this is the sort of material that makes me want to watch their stuff, a continuation of the quality material found in MST3K, material that didn't legitimate bigotry and hatred.  I hope that Nelson, Murphy, and Corbett can return to this tradition, and perhaps more significantly, recognize the phobias that have led to this material.  Until then, I guess I still have the work of Joel, Trace, Mary, Frank, and J. Elvis to fall back on.

*I want to make the point that I have no problem with juvenile humor in and of itself.  A lot of very funny moments of the show are juvenile, just not homophobic

Addendum to the Elizabeth Moon Posting

      In my polemic against Elizabeth Moon's comments about Islam and the Islamic Community Center in New York, I had also offered a critique of the WisCon board's decision to uphold her status as the Guest of Honor for next year's WisCon.  It looks like there may be some movement on that issue.  SF3 (Society for the Furtherance and Study of Fantasy and Science Fiction), the 'mother corporation' of WisCon has passed a recommendation motion on the issue.  The motion recommends that the the GoH invitation should be rescinded, along with a recognition of the committee's work.  My hope is that the committee takes up this advice.  I fall into the all-to-American (a very, very problematic idiomatic way of saying that I fall into the trap of a lot of white U.S. citizens.... feel free to list them.  I'll probably miss a couple) love of redemption narratives, and would love to see a thoughtful Moon thinking critically through her own discourse in the name of an anti-racist project at a future date, but I think that her actions should have consequences.  That should mean losing the ability to claim a privileged space within a feminist project (at least temporarily.)  I don't envy the committee's responsibility to make this decision, but I don't think that I am alone in hoping that they will follow the recommendation of SF3.

Update: The invitation has been rescinded, and Moon has accepted this decision.  There has been a bit of backlash directed towards the board and SF3.  You might want to go over to their sites and express your support.  I'm glad that this decision was made and thank the folks who made for taking this important decision.

Contributing to the chorus on Elizabeth Moon and WisCon, plus a few thoughts on the concept of the "safe space"

         I'm not sure to the extent that my audience is aware of the conflicts that occur within fandom, but a recent blog posting by science fiction author Elizabeth Moon, dealing with Muslims, citizenship, and the Islamic community center has created such a conflict.  There has been some thoughts on the topic from a number of sources, most notably a set of very good posts by K. Tempest Bradford, but it made me think of a few things that fall outside of those posts.

       The basic situation is pretty easy to explain.  Moon posted a long, rambling post that took on the controversy surrounding the proposed Islamic community center in New York. In her response to that controversy, she reproduced a problematic set of assumptions about Muslims, the religious tenets of Islam, and the history of immigration in this country.  Through those faulty assumptions, Moon goes on to make a set of claims about why the community center in New York should not be built.  These blog postings became a significant controversy within the fan subculture of science fiction because of Moon's status as an author, but probably more significantly, because she is going to be a guest of honor at the largest feminist science fiction convention, WisCon.  I'm not going to directly link to her blog post, but I'll give you a sense of the rhetoric through two of the paragraphs in her missive.  

Moon states,

"When an Islamic group decided to build a memorial center at/near the site of the 9/11 attack, they should have been able to predict that this would upset a lot of people.  Not only were the attackers Islamic--and not only did the Islamic world in general show indecent glee about the attack, but this was only the last of many attacks on citizens and installations of this country which Islamic groups proudly claimed credit for.  That some Muslims died in the attacks is immaterial--does not wipe out the long, long chain of Islamic hostility.   It would have been one thing to have the Muslim victims' names placed with the others, and identified there as Muslims--but to use that site to proselytize for the religion that lies behind so many attacks on the innocent (I cannot forget the Jewish man in a wheelchair pushed over the side of the ship to drown, or Maj. Nadal's attack on soldiers at Fort Hood) was bound to raise a stink.   It is hard to believe that those making the application did not know that--did not anticipate it--and were not, in a way, probing to see if they could start a controversy.  If they did not know, then they did not know enough about the culture into which they had moved.  Though I am not angry about it, and have not spoken out in opposition, I do think it was a rude and tactless thing to propose (and, if carried out, to do.)

I know--I do not dispute--that many Muslims had nothing to do with the attacks, did not approve of them, would have stopped them if they could.  I do not dispute that there are moderate, even liberal, Muslims, that many Muslims have all the virtues of civilized persons and are admirable in all those ways.  I am totally, 100%, appalled at those who want to burn the Koran (which, by the way, I have read in English translation, with the same attention I've given to other holy books) or throw paint on mosques or beat up Muslims.  But Muslims fail to recognize how much forbearance they've had.  Schools in my area held consciousness-raising sessions for kids about not teasing children in Muslim-defined clothing...but not about not teasing Jewish children or racial minorities.  More law enforcement was dedicated to protecting mosques than synagogues--and synagogues are still targeted for vandalism.  What I heard, in my area, after 9/11, was not condemnation by local mosques of the attack--but an immediate cry for protection even before anything happened.   Our church, and many others (not, obviously all) already had in place a "peace and reconciliation" program that urged us to understand, forgive, pray for, not just innocent Muslims but the attackers themselves.   It sponsored a talk by a Muslim from a local mosque--but the talk was all about how wonderful Islam was--totally ignoring the historical roots of Islamic violence." (Moon)

       The problems with this statement should be fairly obvious, but I'll take some time to work through those issues.  The first and most obvious problem is that despite Moon's insistence that she isn't doing this, she takes the behavior of a few Muslims and allows them to stand in for a complex religious belief system of two billion people, a belief system that far from unified, is defined by debates, factions, and radically different approaches to textual exegesis.  The reduction of a group of people to a small, static group of features is, as critical theorist Stuart Hall notes, at the very heart of stereotyping, the logic of racism and empire.  Any attempt to define Islam as a form of unified other, is, at its heart, bigoted.  The violent actions that lead to her fantasy of a 'long chain' of an essentialized  Islam need to be understood within the complex history of the region, a history of European domination and colonialism.  None of this excuses any particular action, but it demands that any act of judgment focus on particular conflicts, political formations, etc.  Islam, as such, does not exist.  It is as multiple as liberalism, marxism, or Christianity.   (Another point that should be made is that Moon also is taking up a common trope of Islamophobes, that is 'racialization', collapsing the figure of the Muslim and the Arab together to further the project of demonization.)

      The particular narrative that Moon is offering has a long history, one that has legitimated systemic racialized domination of large sections of the world.  It operates not only by the logic of stereotyping discussed above, but it's system of classification operates through a logic of the absence of coevalence.  Anthropologist Johannes Fabian noted that the discipline of anthropology operated through a logic of positing a temporal difference between the anthropologist and the 'primitive' subjects that he studies.  That subject is not formed within the social relations of the modern world.  He is not modern.  He operates within a different time than our own, the past, which is primitive and less formed than us.  He instead can only be understood as a operating within a logic of our past.  Moon takes up this logic when she implicitly argues that acts of violence can be discussed outside the context of the global political forces that shape those actions.  She, in effect, argues that the Muslim can only be understood within her or his 'primitive' and 'violent' roots, rather than as modern subjects shaped through the very modern forms of violence and domination that exist today.  Her particular attempt to deflect this criticism by posing the good moderate or liberal Muslim against the bad fundamentalist has its own colonialist legacy, operating neatly besides the binary of the good and bad colonial subject, defined by a set of narratives of assimilation.   If you are looking for more material, I would recommend both Edward Said's Covering Islam, and his more academically oriented, Orientalism.  Although both are over ten years old, they are still the strongest analysis on the topic.

        There is another, more subtle thread of resentment that runs through her narrative as well, though.  Moon seems to feel that Muslims have been coddled by liberal society, that they have been allowed to hold onto a set of particularities that the 'rest of us' have had to abandon.  Rather than recognizing the extraordinary measures of certain institutions as a necessary response to often violent forms of racism, Moon sees these as a form of 'forebearance' of peculiarity that other immigrant groups have not received.  It is narrative of immigration that ignores the long history of foreign language papers in the country, of separate cultural institutions, etc.  Unfortunately, this is an all too common fantasy of the immigration process.  The narrative of assimilation that she takes up throughout the piece has two basic problems.  The first is simple.  The narrative of assimilation is false.  The ostensibly voluntary immigration patterns of any particular group (this is a set of claims that doesn't work very well when thinking about the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, although as James Baldwin points out, most immigration into the United States is not as voluntary as it has been represented) has never been defined by simple assimilation.  Instead, we can invariably see a dialectical interaction, in which the synthesis is something quite different than what came before.  (I can say more about this if you want.)

        The second problem is the more serious one.  The narrative that Moon is drawing on, a narrative that is both false and extraordinarily powerful, is precisely the narrative of the assimilation to whiteness.  The demand of assimilation has always been defined by a legal definition of citizenship that operated through the logic of whiteness as property (See Cheryl L. Harris)  In addition the work of David Roediger and James Baldwin through their work have shown the linkage between the acceptance of European immigrants as white and the acceptance of those very immigrants as citizens, a process that operates through their acceptance of the exclusionary logic of that racialization.  (In effect, it is a process that simultaneously shifts and reinforces whiteness, while reinforcing the exclusion of the racialized other, the alien.)  In effect, Moon's criticism can only be understood within this racial economy.  Her anger that the Muslim population (once again, ignoring that Muslims in the United States are not simply Middle Eastern immigrants) have not assimilated is built upon an unconscious expectation that those populations embrace these forms of white citizenship.  Although she would not recognize it, she is angry because the immigrant populations cannot or refuse to conform to a set of expectations of citizenship based on whiteness.

      Within this context, it is very difficult not to be disappointed in the decision of WisCon's organizing committee not to revoke Moon's invitation.  Certainly, the committee has acknowledged that Moon's word were offensive (Here is their response.) But, it's also a very unsatisfying response, primarily through its recourse to the language of 'difficult conversation.'  I think that posing the need for dialogue with positions such as the one that Moon has expressed is disagreeable at best.  WisCon was organized for explicitly political purposes, to create a feminist space for fandom.  I believe that expressing the kind of bigotry contained in Moon's piece excludes her from that conversation, in the same way that most feminists have recognized that the sorts of transphobia expressed by Janice Raymond should exclude them from that space as well.  This refusal is at the heart of any genuine intersectional analysis.  I support difficult conversations, but a commitment to some meaningful form of anti-racism needs to be an expectation of that conversation.

         This brings me to my final section.  I suspect that much of what I have already said is a tad academic for a lot of folks who are (potentially) reading this.  But, I think that this section may be a little less obvious.  If you take a look at Tempest's posts, the primary subject that is being worked through is the question of 'safe spaces.'  Tempest is troubled by who such spaces are for, what kinds of comfort are relevant, which forms are not relevant.  Her posts pose the question of why it is important to create a 'safe space' for some people, while its equally important to challenge other forms of 'safety.'  Without criticizing Tempest (who's position, I suspect, is close to mine) the larger conversation around the concept seems to have mystified this very concept.  'Safe Space' seems to have moved from a set of tactics (speech and behavioral regulations) that are designed to shift who has access to a particular community or are designed to allow for previously excluded forms of conversation into an end itself.  It has moved from a mode of re-imagining the political to a neutralization of the political, per se.

       The problem is that the form of neutralization imagined by Tempest's opponents (within this logic, Tempest is simply a representative of a set of networks of anti-racist fandom, a problematic form of representation, but not really mine) is itself a form of political inclusion and exclusion in and of itself.  It re-formats a set of techniques designed to fight exclusion (racial, gender, class, etc.) as techniques to reinforce a particular mode of exclusion, whiteness.  Her opponents do not want to face the discomfort of having this challenged.  This is why its really important to recognize that the creation of a space space is always a technique directed towards another end.  It can be used to create powerful feminist and anti-racist spaces, but we should recognize that misogynists and racists use these very techniques to create the opposite.  It's use is always simultaneously an act of inclusion and exclusion, that is, a consciously political act.  

     The question then becomes what kind of political community will those actions produce, who will be excluded? who will be included?  Every community consciously and unconsciously makes these decisions.  From Schmitt's perspective, this is a very mild form of separation, after it's a separation of groups of people from tasty treats, gin and tonics, and conversations about C.J. Cherryh, not life or death.  Our use of this technique should always have that political dimension in mind.  Every formation of community at this point is constituted through modes of inclusion and exclusion, and one has the choice of reaffirming a community built on whiteness or patriarchy or attempting to disperse that community for another community formation.  The purpose of the action is to combat bigotry, to produce experiments directed towards imagining a futurity without such forms of oppression.  

Update: The invitation has been rescinded, and Moon has accepted this decision.  There has been a bit of backlash directed towards the board and SF3.  You might want to go over to their sites and express your support.  I'm glad that this decision was made and thank the folks who made for taking this important decision.