The following is a list with (abstracts) of the academic-style papers
being read at WisCon next month. I thought it would be of interest to
many of the people on this list.
Mike Levy
Friday 5:00-6:30 pm
Conf. 3
1. Laurie Marks
Telling Stories: On Creativity in the Academy
This paper tells stories about how the telling of stories and other
creative acts are forbidden and marginalized in institutions of higher
education.
2. Philip Kaveny
The Reception of Science Fiction In American Public libraries 1977-1987
This paper explores the converging popular and academic reception of
science fiction as an emergent body of literature during a carefully
specified period 1977-1987. Kaveny argues that a group of marginalized
accademics by breaking off from MLA (The Modern Language Association) in
1971,and forming their own professional association known as the the
Science Fiction Research Association(SFRA), were able within a hand full of
years to gain professional jurisdiction over issues of litertary quality,
as it related to public library selection within that genre. The results
were problematic for both the vitality of the genre, and its
respesentationwithin public library collections through out the United
States.
Saturday, 9:30-11:00 am
1. Billie Aul
Rumaging in the Closet: Women Writers and Their Gay Male Characters
This paper looks at slash fan fiction and the academic attention such
writing has received. Aul's interest is in whether the fan authors,
writing in a non-commercial, women-dominated community, are able to play
with the gender roles of their gay characters in ways no available to women
authors working in commercial science fiction and fantasy. Aul uses the
Bem Sex-Role Inventory as a jumping-off place to explore gender role
assignment in a variety of slash stories and in three commercial stories,
Marion Zimmer Bradley's _Heritage of Hastur_, Ellen Kushner's
_Swordspoint_, and Maureen McHugh's _China Mountain Zhang_.
2. Cynthia Zender
Breaking the Gender Confines of the Appropriate
In _Toward a Recognition of Androgyny_, Carolyn Heilbrun presented a
methodology to determine whether or not a fictional character was an
androgynous character. Heilbrun's essay concentrated on "classical" and
"mainstream"
literature. Yet, there is an explicit assumption in the SF/F field, (the
Tiptree Award) that the SF/F genre is where androgynous works _do_
appear. This paper uses Heilbrun's methodology to examine several novels (
_The Shadow Man_ by Melissa Scott, _Godmother Night_ by Rachel Pollack,
_The Forbidden Tower_ by Marion Zimmer Bradley, and _Left Hand of Darkness_
by Ursula LeGuin) in the SF/F genre to determine whether Heilbrun's
methodology is relevant to the genre and whether the genre is, in fact,
producing androgynous
fiction according to Heilbrun's (and by extension, "mainstream") standards.
Saturday, 5:00-6:30 pm
Conf. 3
1. Sandra Lindow
Inner Space in Ursula K. Le Guin's _Catwings_: A Study of Trauma and Recovery
Ursula K. Le Guin's Catwings series has been criticized as being too
frightening for its intended audience. Indeed, the winged kittens
experience parental abandonment and severe emotional trauma. _Wonderful
Alexander and the Catwings_, the third volume in the series, includes a
particularly poignant description of post/traumatic stress disorder in
early childhood. This paper will examine Le Guin's text
based on the latest findings and scholarly research on childhood trauma.
2. Michael Levy
Ophelia Triumphant: The Depiction of Adolescent Girls in Two Recent SF Novels
The recent success of Mary Pipher's book _Reviving Ophelia_ has brought
considerable attention to the particular problems faced by adolescent
girls in contemporary American society. In this paper I propose to apply
Pipher's theories to two recent science -iction novels, Octavia Butler's
_Parable of the Sower_ (1993) and Jack Womack's _Random Acts of Senseless
Violence_ (1993), both of which involve adolescent girls growing up in a
decaying, enormously violent, near-future America. I'm also interested in
examining these novels within the context of the bildungsroman tradition,
both in it standard articulation and in various more recent feminist
re-visioning.
Sunday, 9:30-11:00
Conf. 1
1. Janice M. Bogstad
Can Men write Feminist Utopias?
In the last handful of years, a number of male authors have written novels
in the utopian tradition which feature either female-dominated societies or
female protagonists who are central to the society constructed. Focusing
onThe Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson, The Remote Country of Women by Bai
Hua, China Mountain Zhang by Maureen McHugh, Glory Age by David Brin,
Against a Dark Background and Complicity by Iain Banks and The Shore of
Women by Pamela Sargent, this paper compares the feminist utopian novels by
male writers to those of female writers. Style, social scope and
comparison of characterization of women and men in relation will be the
primary areas of analysis.
Monday, 11:00-12:30 pm
1. Lisa Yaszek
"Unusual Stories": Production, Reproduction, and Sexual Identity in the
Industrial Era
This paper attempts to provide a context forthe current controversy
surrounding the technological mediation of reproduction by examining the
relationship between nineteenth-century medical and industrial practices,
focusing on the similar ways in which both fields historically have
authorized (masculine) control of the (feminine)
laboring subject. Finally, this paper considers the popular response to
this situation by briefly examining images of male and female reproductive
subjects in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Freud's Oedipal theories of
sexual development.
2. Rebecca Holden
The High Costs of Cyborg Survival: Octavia Butler's XENOGENESIS Trilogy
This paper investigates the range of cyborg positions in Octavia Butler's
XENOGENESIS trilogy and the high costs of taking on any cyborg position.
While Butler's early cyborg fiction investigates the usefulness of cyborg
positions for bringing difference and women of color into feminist sf, her
later cyborg fiction further complicates Donna Haraway's cyborg fix for
feminism and feminist sf by focusing on the practical problems involved in
accepting cyborg positions and making those potent connections with those
who are truly different.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:08 PDT