WTF WFC?

[davidgillon]

A wee bit of a twitter firestorm broke out earlier when the World Fantasy Con panels were posted and one of them was called "Spicy Oriental Zeppelins" Apparently the title was based on a 'joke' that had only every been made by the WFC Head of Programming, Darrell Schweitzer, and he'd been repeatedly warned it wasn't funny in advance.

With just about every SFF author on twitter going WTF WTC? that was quickly changed to "Outrageous Aviation Stories, Flying Pulp Oddities."

What got a lot less attention, and has been more subtly changed was another panel:

"7. Freaks, Sideshows, and Human Oddities. From “Hopfrog” to Freaks to Geek Love. Is this the last taboo, the final frontier of bad taste, or something (perversely?) alluring even yet?"

Which became

7. Freaks, Sideshows, and Human Oddities. From “Hopfrog” to Freaks to Geek Love. Is this the last taboo, the final frontier of bad taste, or a persistent archetype in literature?

Schweitzer had been warned in advance about this one as well, and specifically that it was ableist. I'm glad to see it has been changed, but I still think it's deeply problematic and I'm horrified something so negatively objectifying about disabled people ever made it out as a formally released program item.

And it's not as if this is the first issue WFC has had with disability in the last year. WFC 2015 had major access fails, never mind they had a disabled guest who had talked to them about her access needs, and then earlier this year WFC 2016 instituted a significant price rise despite disabled people telling them they couldn't book until they had published their disability access policy. The price rise had no sooner gone into effect than they published their access policy, which looked to have been written in five minutes on the proverbial back of a fag packet. I got the distinct feeling that was sheer spite.

ETA : File 770's on the story:  Outrage Greets 2016 World Fantasy Con Program

Comments

[sovay]

"Spicy Oriental Zeppelins"

Is that some kind of joke about dumplings? Do I probably not want to ask?

[edit] Sorry, this one actually took me a moment to parse:

Freaks, Sideshows, and Human Oddities. From “Hopfrog” to Freaks to Geek Love. Is this the last taboo, the final frontier of bad taste, or a persistent archetype in literature?

Then I couldn't find anything to say about it that wasn't boggling. There is absolutely room for a panel about the use of so-called freaks or human oddities in speculative fiction (I'd probably start talking about Theodore Sturgeon's The Dreaming Jewels (1950), which I read when I was eight: it took me years to notice that it was a novel whose romantic heroine is a woman of color with dwarfism) and all of the ways that intersects with objectification of disabled people, but the panel shouldn't recapitulate the problem itself!

[davidgillon]

Apparently he was riffing on Spicy Tales, Oriental Tales, and Zeppelin Tales, which were all Pulp mags, and full of the problematic depictions you would imagine. I knew about Zeppelin Tales, so could guess, but as someone else said, it's a joke that depends on your knowledge of 80yo pulps to get, and it isn't funny when you do.

I absolutely agree there's good grounds for a panel in sideshow culture. It's the objectifying and sexualizing* language that is the problem.

*Disabled people absolutely need to be seen as sexual, but not solely as a sexual fetish.

[sovay]

Apparently he was riffing on Spicy Tales, Oriental Tales, and Zeppelin Tales, which were all Pulp mags, and full of the problematic depictions you would imagine.

Yikes. I read some eighty-year-old pulps and the degree of non-interest I feel in anything called "Oriental Tales" is difficult to overstate!

Disabled people absolutely need to be seen as sexual, but not solely as a sexual fetish.

"Perversely alluring" not helping any there, no.