Hopepunk and Asexuality - the world is changing

After an exhausting journey I finally made it to Dublin Worldcon last night.  And I pitched right into the programme straight away.

The first panel I went to was on hopepunk.  Hopepunk is a term invented by Alexandra Rowland in 2017.  "The world was a grimdark timeline" she said, and she wanted an antidote to all that darkness.

Interestingly, she took issue with people 'softening' the term, as she put it, focusing on the 'hope' part  of the definition.  Her conception of the term is tougher.  She sees hopepunk as a story about people acting against the establishment, about resistance, about people doing things.  She sees the 'punk' part of the definition as being about characters who fight back and resist the darkness, while giving a sense of uplift to readers.

My use of hopepunk does veer towards the 'hope' side of the definition.  I want more gentleness in my stories - something editors have criticised me for before.  I want people like my conservationist characters who quietly work to resist the destruction of the natural world.  They're people who quietly go about conserving and reintroducing species and restoring habitat.  Their resistance isn't loud, and this chimes more with other definitions I've seen of hopepunk.

The second panel of the evening was one of those I proposed and was appearing in, Making the Asexual Textual.  I'd expected about twenty people in the room, but the room as absolutely packed, I would guess around 100 people.

In my day to day dealings with people I meet very few who are asexual - at least, asexual people who have come out publically.  But it quickly became clear that a lot of the people in that room identified as asexuals.  We had a great discussion about whether we should make characters' sexuality explicit in our stories, or whether we should just show them getting on with their lives,  we also discussed the awkwardness of dropping labels like 'aromantic asexual' into a narrative about the future.

I think these two panels taken together are a hopeful manifesto for the future.  Hopepunk encourages us to look for the good in the world, while asexual characters provide a challenge to our patriarchal hyper-sexualised culture.  Those panels were a good start to the con.  I'm looking forward to the next four days