The words been out for some time now that were living in post-feminist times. And yet the worlds largest feminist science fiction convention, held annually in Madison, Wisconsin, which many of the genres luminaries attend, has become so popular that the ceiling limiting attendance to 1000 participants often tops out months in advance. People attend to meet up with friends from other parts of the country (or the world) whom theyve come to know online; they attend because the programming goes far beyond the feminism 101 that is the most they can hope for from most other science fiction conventions. But above all they come to experience the kind of community they cant get elsewhere. Some participants even characterize it as four days of feminist utopiaa reference to the communities created in the most famous feminist novels of the 1970s.
This volume explores some of the issues of interest at WisCon 2008: the politics of the intelligibility of stories, internet drama, and feminist fandom. It offers a selection of thoughtful essays and analysis, dialogues, comments, arguments, meditations, and appeals to reason, collected from participantswriters, bloggers, activists, and fans, some of them WisCon veterans and some attending for the first timeincluding L. Timmel Duchamp, K. Tempest Bradford, Nancy Jane Moore, Alexis Lothian, Sue Lange, Victoria Janssen, and many others.