Panel Idea time for WisCon: Kink Bingo / Being Politically Sex Positive

[sasha_feather]

j00j and I are doing idea generation for a proposed WisCon panel on kink. Please comment! We need to come up with a description, and possibly suggest people for the panel and things to discuss.

Being politically sex positive: Kink Bingo, Fandom, and understanding Kink through fiction

Points to indclude:
kink is a lens through which you can see the world
it can be an oppressed identity
No kink-bashing, everyone's kink is OK, kink as an umbrella that includes infinite things
define terms: squick, BDSM, others
Intersectionality

ETA: Thank you for leaving comments; I may not respond to all comments. This panel is being planned partly in response to a disappointing panel at Think Galacticon entitled "Dangerous Sexuality".

Comments

[naraht]

I think this is a very important thing to talk about and I would be disappointed if it only came up in questions. There's been so much discussion about social justice and so much discussion about "everyone's kink is OK" and I've never seen a satisfactory discussion about how or if the two intersect. It's just so fraught but I don't think we can go on avoiding it forever.

Does "your kink is OK but you can't talk about it in this context" count as kink-shaming, do you think?

[holyschist]

I don't know.

I've definitely seen some discussions I found satisfactory in pieces (I suspect there are no Answers as far as I am concerned) on kink blogs and whatnot, but they're hard to find, unless it's a googlefu issue. Anyway, I don't think everyone's avoiding the topic, and I don't mean to suggest that.

Argh, way past bedtime, apologies if I'm not making any sense.

[naraht]

No worries!

See, I actually do think that fandom at least is avoiding the topic. But perhaps I'm not reading in the right places.

[sasha_feather]

Does "your kink is OK but you can't talk about it in this context" count as kink-shaming, do you think?

I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but it seems like a silencing tactic, and not OK; OTOH, there are sometimes conflicting needs within a community, which I am familiar with from other spheres. Sometimes you need different types of safer spaces for different types of people within your community.

[naraht]

As a random example, I'm thinking of the OH JOHN RINGO NO> thing. It seems like Ringo was putting a lot of his own kinks into the book and that this was what people were objecting to.

So would it be OK to say "you know, it's OK for you to have this kinks and to write them down but maybe you don't want to put them into a published book"? Or were hradzka and others wrong to comment and say "wow, some of the stuff in this book is really fucked up"? Or what?

That's the sort of thing I'm thinking about. Maybe John Ringo isn't the best example but I can also think of other male SF authors who have been critiqued for their whole rape-fantasy vibe.

[sasha_feather]

IMO, people are responding here to a problematic approach and problematic texts, not to a problematic kink. They are not saying it's wrong to have rape fantasies or even to write about and publish them. They are saying that John Ringo did a really really bad job of it.

[j00j]

Yeah, if the discussion were "John Ringo wrote about his personal kinks and that's gross," or "John Ringo's kinks are gross," that would be problematic (mind you, I wouldn't be surprised if that had come up at some point; I haven't read the OH JOHN RINGO NO post recently, so I can't recall if it does there). I think we can critique problematic tropes in John Ringo's work (or Stephanie Meyer's or Anne Bishop's or Mercedes Lackey's, to come up with a few writers who may be writing some personal kinks into narratives which contain some problematic tropes) without criticizing personal kinks. Sometimes it is hard for commenters not do do this, or for writers not to view criticism as criticism of their personal kinks, though.