WAM 2009: Gender, Non-conformity and the media

I’m happy to be able to share the video from my session at WAM 2009: In/Out of Focus: Gender, Non-conformity and the Media.
I unfortunately don’t have a transcript and the live twitter feed from the session (the tag was #wam09gnc) seems to have expired. My apologies to folks who are not able to listen to the video. Here are a few links to a few liveblogs from the session:
Susan Mernit
Kerri Kanelos
Jill at Feministe
Anna J. Cooke
Chicks Rock Blog
Mikhaela Reid drew this cartoon in response to the panel
I was really excited to be part of this conversation with Jack Aponte (of Angry Brown Butch and Feministe), Julia Serano and Kate Bovitch. Our hope was to focus on the issues of gender non-conformity within feminist spaces like WAM, feminist blogs and feminist media. I think we got a really interesting conversation going.
I’ve been reflecting a lot on this panel lately, since there has been conversation (and criticism) about how discussions about trans issues go down on feminist blogs, in particular ours. I think what it reiterates for me is how important these conversations about gender and gender non-conformity are to feminism and how difficult they are to have, particularly online.
At the WAM panel we never had issues with people asking questions that were offensive, or off-topic, or derailing in the way people talk about our comment threads. Maybe that’s because the panel was a self-selecting group of people, or because people with those kinds of comments/questions didn’t feel comfortable asking them in such a public way.
I’ve made some mistakes in how I’ve begun these conversations at Feministing, particularly on the Focus on the Family post. I appreciate those who called out these mistakes in a constructive way. I’m definitely learning from those moments and I’m committed to continuing this dialogue, both on and offline.
The criticisms about comments at Feministing are well heard, and, as I’ve said before, we’re hoping to revisit and revise our comment policy at our upcoming retreat at the end of May.
For those of you who have time to watch some of the video (the session was an hour and a half) or check out the liveblogging, I recommend it. Again, sorry about the lack of transcript!
UPDATE: Some other videos from the WAM conference are available here as well.