Can't make it to Bellingham? We will be streaming two of our panels from 1:15-3:10 PM Pacific on Saturday, April 25th! You can register here for $8 to virtually attend “An Asexual Autist’s Feminist Musings on The Lord of the Rings” by Tolkien scholar Dr. Robin Anne Reid, and "A Queer History of Star Wars" by Pride Squadron founder, Katherine Winchell.
Robin Anne Reid is a retired English professor who continues to publish on science fiction and fantasy, especially J. R. R. Tolkien’s legendarium, as an independent scholar. She discusses how she began to discover her feminist queer politics when she read The Lord of the Rings for the first time in 1965 when she was ten and fell in love with Middle-earth, Éowyn, and Frodo. After feeling weird and isolated during her childhood and adolescence, she found fandom communities, especially the online Lord of the Rings fandom groups that flourished on LiveJournal during and after Peter Jackson’s film adaptations, where her weirdnesses were welcome. Robin’s current scholarship on Tolkien includes an edited collection (with Christopher Vaccaro and Stephen Yandell), Queer Approaches to Tolkien: Essays on the Many Paths to Middle-earth, which was published in 2025, and a second collection, on racisms and Tolkien, which is due out in 2026. Her next Tolkien project will be The Web of Women: A Feminist Reception Study of Tolkien’s Legendarium. She is the Series Editor for the new Critical Exploration of Tolkien Studies at McFarland.
The original director of WWU QueerCon is coming back to give the Keynote for our tenth anniversary! Katherine is a member of several of the global Star Wars charity costuming organizations, and a lore keeper of queer representation across the many Star Wars books, comics, and other media types! In 2017 WWU QueerCon was also the origin of Pride Squadron, the queer affinity group for the Star Wars costume clubs. She will be joining us to discuss queer Star Wars characters, creators and fans.