Wiscon panels I am on

[firecat]

These are the Wiscon panels I'm on. I've never been on a Wiscon panel before. I would welcome any comments about these panel topics and any ideas you would like to see addressed at these panels. And if you're at Wiscon I hope you come, but if there's something else fascinating going on at the same time, I hope some of you go to that instead, so I can find out what happened!


Romancing the Beast
Sat 4:00 - 5:15PM, Conference 4
Moderator: Vito Excalibur. Panelists: Catherine Cheek, Stef Maruch, Heidi Waterhouse, Janine Ellen Young

Paranormal romance almost always features the hero as a paranormal being and the heroine as an ordinary human. How does this resonate with gender relations and power relationships in our society? And is it emblematic of women seeing men as Other?

I wanted to be on this panel because the disparity has always bugged me. To give an example that has nothing to do with paranormal romance, I refuse to see Cyrano de Bergerac in any form because I'm not aware of any gender-reversed version.


Dealing With Your Male Answer Syndrome
Sun 10:00 - 11:15AM, Assembly
Moderator: John H. Kim. Panelists: Suzanne Allés Blom, Moondancer Drake, John Helfers, Stef Maruch

Although it's not absolute, there's a strong tendency among masculine people to always want to have the definitive answer for everything, even if they don't necessarily know. In panels and elsewhere in life, it can be hard for men to admit they don't know things. Why is this? How can men deal with the pressure (either internal or external) to always have the right answer? How do women and other non–masculine folks deal with Male Answer Syndrome? If you think the answers to all these questions are obvious, then you need to come to this panel!

I wanted to be on this panel because it's All Answer Syndrome All The Time at my house...and the XY person in the relationship is not the only person participating. So I have experience from multiple sides. I also have funny stories and techniques that you'll want to know about!


Wish Fulfillment in Fiction
Sun 2:30 - 3:45PM, Assembly
Moderator: P. C. Hodgell. Panelists: Beth Friedman, Anne Harris, Stef Maruch, Caroline Stevermer

What is the role of wish fulfillment in fiction? If you're a writer, what personal wishes do you want your stories to fulfill? Are they the same ones you want to read about? How do our fictitious wishes affect our everyday dreams?

I wanted to be on this panel because I fundamentally don't get wish fulfillment fiction, and I think that has something to do with why I find it difficult to write fiction, so I hope to provide an alternate viewpoint and I also hope it will shake something loose.

The OH is envious that I get to be on a panel with P.C. Hodgell. (He isn't going to Wiscon this year.)

Comments

[flarenut]

MAS here: the tiny sample of paranormal romances I've seen (fingers of one hand) seem to go the other way -- woman as second-sighted or otherwise weird, man as either normal or also a closeted weird. But looking at those I think that a lot of it is about implicit viewpoint character and hence who has the authority to see someone else as Other, which makes sense with the way you're portraying things. The crucial thing is that having talent, in the usual storyline, both puts you up on a pedestal and makes you secretly broken in a way that only your Twoo Wuv can fix.

Cyrano: The Truth About Cats and Dogs?

[firecat]

Well said. Do you remember the titles of those paranormal romances?

I'm mainly aware of paranormal romances where everyone is paranormal. E.g., the Anita Blake series, the Underworld movies. The only one I know that fits the panel description is Beauty and the Beast.

Thanks for the movie tip.

[flarenut]

Ah, finally jogged my brain: a horrific piece of crap (with sequels) called "The Smoke Thief". This is what you get when your spouse reads from the local used book store. Neither of us could get more than 20 or 30 pages in.

Another data set would be time-travel romances (someone once put Sci Am on their review-copy list), which is a sort of subset of paranormal. Although for the plots to work it pretty much has to be the woman who is the traveler, so that the man can rescue her blah blah blah. (Diana Gabaldon would be the best-known version of this, although the men start getting the gift there too...)

I was also thinking of Doc Sidhe, although in a way that's not fair, because in a world where everyone is eldritch the mundane will be the marked one...

[firecat]

Oh yes, Diana Gabaldon...(I only got halfway through the first one, so I didn't get to the part where the men get the gift.)

Actually the classic Fairy Queen steals a young man story.