Some thoughts about #MLA21 now that it's over and I can return to something like sanity in the form of a tangled thread about some pros and cons; (please ignore if you don't care about these things, like, for real, block me or whatever you need to do)

There are some obvious, big pluses. The ease of access for people who simply cannot afford to travel and pay for accommodation made virtual attendance possible for so many scholars, esp. precarious / grads / ECS , for whom conferences are otherwise just not on the table at all.

The ease for users in this being "softpants MLA" (I forget who coined that #onhere, sorry!) avoided the expense & hassle of "professional clothing" and the classist / sexist gauntlet of needing to "look the part" of an academic. Plus: espresso breaks / bathroom breaks whenever.

A conference that is normally so all-consuming suddenly shrank down to something on a tiny screen that had to compete with, & accommodate, the tidal flow of obligations, carework, ongoing life-maintenance. #MLA21 wasn't a vacation or a holiday or a pilgrimage. It was more Zoom.

It was tempting to try to "multi-task", i.e. watch an MLA session while getting on with, you know, the everyday tasks of life. (I tried to watch a panel while cooking a fairly ambitious French dish & then a caregiving emergency for my mother kicked off and uh things got hectic.)

Two nights in a row, I watched MLA panels w @lordmcess because I wanted to see friends speak & BOTH nights we wound up hearing papers about Fradubio's imprisonment in a tree in Spenser's "Faerie Queene" so now my husband is convinced that my entire field concerns magical trees.

I loved the democracy of MLA being on Zoom because when a panel is super popular & roadblocked and everyone's sitting on the floor it's pretty miserable tbh. In this case the super-popular panels were just longer fields of little squares with names on them. No more sweaty scrums.

I felt bad for scholars who presented because instead of that instantaneous thunderclap feeling of applause moving the air in a room w others, there was just this chasm of absolute silence after each of them spoke. Whether you pounded reaction emojis or not, it felt deflationary.

I absolutely missed material collisions and thingly swag: seeing friends in hallways, running to things, the headnods on escalators, the awkward and sweet meandering about the bookstalls, and the hoarding of review copies that publishers give out, the tote bags & fridge magnets.

of course the weirdest thing of all was the sheer, wrenching contrast between an unfolding act of racist violence & this community joined by a commitment to careful writing / thinking / arguing in which we are supposed to try to express generosity and care amidst disagreement.

I "attended" panels on premodern critical race studies, Descartes, Spenser, Milton, Afropessimism, disability studies, & presided over one on "the poetics of class" in Shakespeare studies. Some period / key author, some methodological state-of-field surveys, some random choices.

Everyone seemed rattled by the Capitol insurrection, at once in shock and trying to carry on with papers, some written long before, some not. Some scholars found ways to address it within their remarks, but I didn't see cheap "reaching for relevance" anywhere (& I was looking).

In retrospect, I think a less expensive and more accessible #MLA is a better convention, and is better for our field in some obvious ways. It's easier on the planet's resources, it's more affordable, it's thus more diverse and more accessible. But . . .

We as a profession have to actually follow through w things like access copies. For example, in my panel I sent copies of remarks in advance to the designated ASL interpreter but when it was time for our panel, nobody showed up to translate into ASL. Awkward, and disappointing.

I don't want to be a hypocrite who handwaves at things like disability access without really following through. I saw some panels with ASL and perhaps things were just stretched thin for my timeslot, but I'm probably not alone in feeling like there's further room to improve.

Ok, time to stop ranting about an academic conference and return to my lair in the sacred grove of magical trees. Until next year . . .