The Problems With Geek Girl Con – And Some Solutions
By Guest Contributor Christina Xu
A few weekends ago, I trekked out to Seattle for the first ever GeekGirlCon, a convention “dedicated to promoting awareness of and celebrating the contribution and involvement of women in all aspects of the sciences, science fiction, comics, gaming and related Geek culture”. Regina Buenaobra, a Filipina-America community manager at ArenaNet, had asked me to speak on a panel about race and gender in geek communities way back in May.
In her initial email to the panelists, she wrote:
The main reason I’ve sought to try and put together a panel like this is because the voices of POC should be heard in fandom circles, and there isn’t enough of this happening at larger nerd-oriented conventions. Since GeekGirlCon is a new convention, if they accept the submission, it has the potential to help set the tone of what kind of panels may appear at future incarnations at the convention.
Our panel was incredibly ambitious; we were promising to cover an impossibly enormous topic (race AND gender in ALL geek communities?) and, after Racialicious Editor-In-Chief Latoya Peterson canceled, we were left with an ironic lack of racial diversity among the panelists (though we were split between Filipina-American and Chinese-American). It took us a bit to get going, but by the end I was pretty pleased with the ground our panel had covered.
We touched on concepts like privilege, cultural appropriation, racial tourism, exoticism, intersectionality, and turning racism from an out-group attack into an in-group issue. It was a blast, though there were moments of tedium, a la Leigh Alexander’s article about being a person and not just a woman, and it was apparently pretty well-received. It was also, unfortunately, one of the few panels at the Con that had any women of color on stage, so extra props to Regina for having the foresight to organize something like this.
It’s no easy feat to put together a huge con, and GGC was extremely well-run. Staff seemed to be in all the right places, everything was orderly, and lines were manageable. As someone who’s been behind the curtains, this is nothing short of a miracle for a first time effort — the experience, professionalism, and passion that the organizers poured into the con was palpable. The vast majority of the attendees were very friendly, respectful, and intellectually curious; how else could you explain a line forming 10 minutes early for our panel about race & gender? Overall, I’m very glad that GGC exists and that this year’s success guarantees that will be many more to come. However, there were also a few frustrations I encountered over the weekend that could be ameliorated in the future.
1) Feminism didn’t stop with Betty Friedan
For the last few years, I’ve artfully dodged involvement in a number of “geek feminist” movements and events because of my severe allergic reaction to second-wave feminism. In my experience, a lot of the rhetoric and discussion at “women in tech” events was severely dated and favored an ill-fitting “pan-woman” unity over newer goals like a breakdown of the gender binary in general, or acknowledgement of intersectionality issues.
So, I was sad but unsurprised to discover that several of the panels I attended at GGC followed this pattern. At one panel about how we should be nicer to our fellow girl geeks, the six(!) white female panelists generalized wildly about gendered behavior (“A lot of men actually…” “Women tend to…”) and casually dropped the phrase “both genders” like there weren’t a number of transgendered individuals in the room. One panelist lamented that there were just so many definitions for feminism, can we all agree on one before we move forward? Another asserted that she had always advocated for a “Men’s Studies” department in college because she didn’t understand how men worked at all. The concept of privilege went unmentioned. I went to lunch.
Solutions:
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