Geek Girl Con Reflections: The good, the bad, the WTF

I went to Geek Girl Con this weekend, and it was all sorts of amazing. It was a creep free con, which pretty much doesn't happen, and most of the panels were actually relevant to my life as a geeky, social-justicey woman. It was pretty freaking fabulous.

As I continue to review, keep in mind that we fans are toughest on the things we love. Think of it as having high expectations-I expect the world of things and people who should be able to achieve that.

Let's start with the good (mostly. I get kind of tangental):

-CREEP FREE WEEKEND. Thank you, that is all that needs saying, except it isn't. At other cons I'm afraid to cosplay, what with objectification and the sheer creepness of people who are threatened by a nerd girl or whatever their issue is. I didn't feel objectified or leered at even a little. Awesome.

-Oh my gosh, I could have spent SO much money in the vendor's hall. If you've never seen Surlyramics, you are missing out. There was so much geekery I couldn't entirely handle it.

-It was more diverse racially than pretty much every con I've ever been to. It was still predominantly white, but there were a lot of women (and men, for that matter) of color there, which I find extremely cool.

-Speaking of Teh Menz, there were way more than I expected. That's kind of awesome, because it means that there are, in fact, men who are interested in going to a con that explores a lot of feminist themes.

-HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE AS EXPLAINED BY WONDERWOMAN. THANK YOU, THAT IS ALL.

-The Women in Science and the Skepchick panels were made of amazing. Oh my gosh, I am such a freaking fangirl. Bitch Magazine had a few people there too, so...well, I'm a fangirl, I guess.

-There were so many families there with their kids. And this is really very cool-it's fantastic for the little geeklets to meet each other (and they were oh so cute-all these little kids in costumes, including a Dr Horrible who couldn't have been more than 7). It was also really rad that GGC made a decided effort to be accessible to parents.

-Speaking of kids, an elementary school student asked how to start getting into science now. Right on! And a young girl-I'd estimate age 8-10ish-corrected an adult on the Women of Harry Potter panel about Professor McGonnagal standing up FOR, not AGAINST, Professor Snape. Yeah, that's right, be certain in your knowledge. It's important for kids to challenge adults, I think.

The Bad:

-I got lost repeatedly. There wasn't enough signage for those of us who are directionally impaired.

-I bought a pair of kitty ears from a vendor. They fell apart before I ever got home. I am disappoint. They were super cute, but clearly the antithesis of, y'know, actually functional, even as a decoration.

-As a woman with a disability, I felt pretty damn under-represented on panels and such. If any of the panelists were neurodivergent, they passed pretty well. If there were presenters with any disabilities at all, I didn't see or hear of it. There were probably other under-representation issues as well.

-Some views expressed by a couple panelists were...problematic. This isn't GGC's fault even a little, but I was still kind of shocked to hear a panelist say "well, that's normal and a happy ending and Harry needed a happy ending" when a woman asked what the panel thought about the extraordinarily heterosexist and family makin' ending of the HP series. Also on that panel, stating that "no one deserves that, but if anyone does, it's [Umbridge}" when someone asked how the panel felt about Umbridge being thrown to the centaurs. Yeah, that one almost fell under WTF. Another one actually does.

The WTF:

-I was in the bathroom and a woman who used a wheel chair told off someone who was using the chair-accomodating stall as a changing booth. That's right, make sure she knows. That's awesome. Less awesome? Brain-breakingly awesome? Said chair user had strobey shit on her wheels. Um. Uh. What?

-The Big Problem that nearly ruined Saturday for me: Geek Girls in Popular Culture panel. I was so excited about this panel. It consisted of 4 women and one man, Javier Grillo-Marxuach. Apparently he's done a lot of important work on Lost and The Middleman and Charmed and other shows I've never watched. Whatever. I don't care.
What I care about is that in an unfortunately not-shocking display of privilege abuse and cluelessness, this guy totally dominated a panel about geek girl characters at a con that was supposed to be woman-centric. Fun Fact: INDIANA JONES IS NOT A GEEK GIRL. HE CANNOT BE YOUR FAVORITE GEEK GIRL CHARACTER. IT IS NOT POSSIBLE. If you're going to dominate the damn conversation and talk over the female panelists (including 2 who seemed quite introverted) at least listen to and answer the actual question. Talking about your work on whatever and bringing it back to teh menz is not, in fact, feminist. Even if you can use the word "problematic" correctly in a social justice context, you can, in fact, still be problematic! A transcript color coded to see who said how much on that panel would be interesting, I think.

Overall I freaking loved Geek Girl Con. I will be back. I expect that as GGC grows, it will get better in addition to bigger. I can't wait to see what next year brings.

Loving Lamposts

"He knows he used to have autism and that makes him sad."

This statement in the documentary Loving Lampposts has been haunting me. It is among the most tragic sentiments I've ever heard. My heart aches for that child-not because he 'had' autism, but because who he is is seen as shameful. His brother was described as "having some of the same thought processes as autistic children...but if anything, he's gifted."

And attitudes like that, attitudes that autism is a horrorshow and we're all doomed to utter incompetence, is why Loving Lammposts gets happy flappies from me.

Why?

This documentary leaps in where angels fear to tread: Todd Drezner interviewed people on all fronts of the autism wars. He talked to Jenny McCarthy. He talked to people selling quack treatments. He talked to cure-oriented parents buying those treatments. He talked to true believers in the vaccine hypothesis. He talked to scientists, experts, and 'experts.' He talked to acceptance-focused parents. And he talked to autistics.

Representing all factions in the often heated discussion about autism is no easy task. How can it be, when one group is convinced another is malignantly misguided, and another is convinced that their opposition wants their kids to fester, and more people are convinced an autistic isn't an autistic if they have an opinion on autism? It's hard enough to wrap your head around the idea-now try presenting all viewpoints in a respectful manner in a fairly short documentary. Yeah, like that's possible.

Except apparently it is, because Loving Lampposts is exactly that. Everyone has their say. Even we have our say, which doesn't happen in the autism world much.

Through interviews, Drezner put human faces to all the views on autism. That's something that gets lost in the heat around autism-that everyone involved is a human. The parents who are frantic to fix their 'broken' kid are human. Those kids? Also human. The parents who are striving not to fix but understand? So human that I wanted to reach out and give some hugs. And their children? And the autistic adults? Three dimensional really real people.

I've been anticipating this documentary since I met the production crew at AutCom in 2007. It was worth the wait-I've been recommending it to everyone who wants to know about the autistic community, the autism communities, and their relationships to each other.

Loving Lampposts is a slice of getting it that exceeded my expectations. A++, would watch again (and again...and again...and again).