Home

Advertisement

Customize

Tenured · Fangirl · -- · the · fullmetal · analyst


Literary Analysis of Anime, Manga and other forms of pop culture

Recent Entries · Archive · Friends · User Info

* * *
Questions from [info]izuko. behind the cut )

Comment if you'd like me to ask you questions.
Tags:
* * *

If you think you might be interested, let me know. This conference is local for me.

CF: Gender, Bodies and Technology
"Gender, Bodies and Technology"

http://www.cpe.vt.edu/gbt/http://i.ixnp.com/images/v6.7/t.gif

Proposals are invited for an Interdisciplinary Conference

April 22-24, 2010

Roanoke, Virginia

Sponsored by the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Virginia Tech

Proposal Deadline: September 15, 2009

We invite proposals from scholars in the humanities, social and natural sciences, visual and performing arts, engineering and technology for papers, panels, new media art and performance pieces that explore: the technological production of gendered and racialized bodies, historical and contemporary feminist appropriations of technology in aesthetics and representations of embodiment, and the gendered implications of technology in contexts ranging from classrooms to workplaces to the Internet. We construe technology broadly to include material culture and the apparatus of daily life, such as writing, books and the built environment.

Specific topics might include, but are not limited to:

-Technological production and control of classed, racialized, aged and gendered bodies

-Work, healthcare, education and activities of daily life as produced through technologies

-Performance, new media and other creative expressions as sites for engaging/enacting/destabilizing conventions of embodiment and technology

-Biopolitics and medical engineering of reproduction, sexual identity and gender

-Personal narrative and oral history as sources of embodied theorizing

-Surveillance, containment, in/security and militarization

-Identity and technological design, production and use; gender, race, age, class and sexuality in SET (sciences, engineering and technology) fields

-New media art and feminist aesthetics

-Technologies of development and sustainability; eco-feminism

-Activism, participatory decision-making and issues of technological citizenship

As an assemblage of people and technologies we see the conference itself as enacting the conference theme. We welcome innovative uses of technology and creative session formats, including performance and interactive presentations, as well as traditional paper presentations. Using the form attached, please submit a proposal of up to 300 words for each individual presentation, including not only the scholarship you will engage but also the format that you wish to use. For panels, include an abstract for each presentation. Please specify in your proposal any special requirements for technology or space that you anticipate. Proposals will be reviewed by Virginia Tech Women's and Gender Studies faculty/affiliates with appropriate expertise and notification of the outcome will be made no later than October 15, 2009.

Proposals should be submitted via our website at http://www.cpe.vt.edu/gbt/http://i.ixnp.com/images/v6.7/t.gif.
If that is not possible, or if you have questions, please contact:



Sharon Elber

GBT Conference Co-Planner

STS/Women's and Gender Studies (0227)

Virginia Tech

Blacksburg, VA 24061

selber[@]vt.edu

* * *
I've been buying DVDs of classic Who lately, and I decided to go back to the beginning to "The Unearthly Child". Most people who talk about the storyline focus on the first episode, in which Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright investigate their strange student Susan Foreman, and there are certainly interesting elements there, including the first mention of a John Smith. But I found myself more intrigued by the storyline after the group leaves Totters Lane.  They find themselves back in time, captured by a cave tribe in the midst of a power struggle. The previous tribe leader was a firemaker, but he did not pass the skill on to his son Za, who is being challenged by a rival named Kal for leadership of the tribe. The rivalry echoes the conflict between the Doctor and Ian over leadership of their little group, so we get a lot of machismo going on. We also get an old woman who doesn't trust this newfangled fire, and a young woman who is to belong to the leader, so she's working hard to maker sure choice comes out on top.
The next episode I have is "The Daleks", so I'll watch that next. I do have to wonder though. I'm sure someone somewhere has written One/Ian slash. :-)
* * *
1. Anyone who looks at this entry has to post this meme and their current wallpaper at their LiveJournal.
2. Explain in five sentences why you're using that wallpaper!
3. Don't change your wallpaper before doing this! The point is to see what you had on!

My wallpaper )
Tags:
* * *
I'm not a car buff. I don't enjoy driving. It bores me and makes my back and knees hurt. My car is one of the most boring cars alive -- a 10-year-old Camry with just over 60,000 miles. And yet I have become addicted to Top Gear. I don't really understand it. But it's such an incredibly funny series that I really enjoy it. For those of you who haven't seen it, it's a cross between Car Talk, the Paris-Dakar Road Rally, and The Red Green Show. And it's very macho, in that car otaku sort of way. There's no reason why I'd be addicted to this show. But I am.
Tags:
Current Mood:
amused amused
* * *
I hate day-long workshops in bad chairs.
Current Mood:
sore sore
* * *
For [info]neifile , Five fandoms that you think changed what fandom can do (in writing, meta, art, whatever).

1. Sherlock Holmes

I have a book called The Game is Afoot: Parodies, Pastiches, and Ponderings of Sherlock Holmes. I also have a copy of The Seven-Percent Solution in which Sherlock Holmes is treated by Sigmund Freud. Holmes is the first great fandom -- the one that spawned fan fiction before there was such a thing, and the one of the first to spawn a campaign to revive a character the author wanted to kill.

2. Star Trek: The Old Series
Star Trek fan fiction gave us both Kirk/Spock slash and the Mary Sue. Without them fandom would not be the same.

3. The Lord of the Rings

Without The Lord of the Rings we wouldn't have the modern genre of fantasy fiction. So many fantasy writers started out writing thinly veiled LOTR ripoffs. Many remained hacks, but the best took the genre new places.

4. Anime/manga

Anime/manga fandom brought a significant cross-cultural element to fandom as fans taught themselves another language in order to spread the love. They also brought the awareness of copyright and intellectual property law to a whole new population.

5. Star Wars

Why does it matter that Han shot first? It matters because at that point the fans asserted a moral ownership over the text in opposition to the author.

* * *
1. Michel Foucault
Foucault has been a profound influence on my work. When I was working on my dissertation, his books Discipline and Punish and Madness and Civilization were incredibly useful as important studies of the effect of the interrelationship between the human sciences and methods of organizing power over people. These days "What is an author?" is the essay I always assign when teaching literary criticism.

2. Roland Barthes
In the work that I'm doing now, Barthes' essays "The Death of the Author" and "From Work to Text" have been very influential in terms of examining the ways that fans assert themselves in relation to the text.

3. Mikhail Bakhtin
It's really hard for me to rank my top three. I could shuffle the rankings of Bakhtin, Barthes, and Foucault, and it would still reflect the influence they've had on me. Bakhtin's notions of discourse in particular have been very powerful for me in terms of looking at Internet discourse.

4. Henry Jenkins
Most non-academic fans, if they've heard of any cultural theorist, they've heard of Henry Jenkins. He's the father of fan studies and brought it a legitimacy that allowed the rest of us to follow along behind him.

5. Matt Hills
If Jenkins is the father of fan studies, then Hills is perhaps the oldest son -- a bit defiant, but on target in his critiques. He developed some very valuable concepts that I hope for my work to build on -- particularly hyperdiegesis and endlessly deferred narrative. I feel that these two concepts are critical to understanding the kinds of stories that result in the strongest fan engagement. (Hyperdiegesis refers to the world-building that goes on and endlessly deferred narrative refers to the lack of closure. Both mean that a story has a potential world and history that extends beyond that provided by the author.

* * *
Ask me my (fannish-or-non-fannish) Top Five [Whatevers]. Any top fives. Doesn't matter what, really! And I will answer them all in a new post. Possibly (but probably not) with pictures.
Tags:
* * *
Thoughts on family in seasons 1 )
More thoughts to come, with regard to Seasons 2 and 3.

Tags:
* * *
Okay, so I've been working on this book project for the past year, still only partway through. Now that my sabbatical is over, I'll need to figure out how to keep working on it in the midst of a busy semester.

But that's not the only issue. As I've posted before, Playing with Stories: A Study of Serial Narratives and their Fans is looking at fandom in relation to narrative theory, with particular attention to the triangle of author, text, and fan.  I had already planned to discuss the conflict over "Han shot first" as well as having one's fan fic Jossed, in particular the idea that fans often see themselves as "guardians of the text", protecting the narrative from commercial interests.

Any media fan who has been on LiveJournal or Twitter over the past few weeks knows where this is going. This summer a nice fat example of fan engagement with serial narratives dropped into my lap. Yeah, I'm talking about Torchwood: Children of Earth. How can I not use this as a case study when so many of the issues I'm examining in my research have surfaced in this fandom? Especially since I'm such a die-hard TW fan myself.

So here I am. I pledge to write a fair, analytical account of this summer's controversy to the best of my ability. I may (will most likely) contact people in the fandom to ask if I can quote them, though I don't know exactly when. The rest of my job is pretty hectic right now and will remain so for a few months. I'll also post here about various aspects of the ideas I'm exploring. I like LJ for  how it enables me to work through ideas and get feedback.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to figure out how much to explain about Season 1 and 2 of Torchwood for the benefit of non-fan readers of my book. What are the key things people should know in order to understand the context of the fan reaction to Children of Earth

Current Mood:
thoughtful thoughtful
* * *
A sudden thought on John Frobisher and Bridget Spears:

From Death of a Salesman ... )

Tags:
* * *
* * *
I've been thinking a lot about Sherlock Holmes lately,
Thinking about Torchwood )The Holmes fandom was the first great fandom, and I don't think it was a coincidence that it existed in the context of the Victorian serials. The more I study fandom, the more convinced I become that the seriality of narratives are what result in this huge investment in characters and their lives. As I wait for the opportunity to watch Children of Earth on my television, from my own sofa, I think I'm going to go back and reread the Holmes stories. Posts to come.



Tags:
Current Mood:
contemplative contemplative
* * *
It would be nice to manage at least one day this week without a headache. Two days would be better.
Tags:
Current Mood:
sore sore
* * *
I'm trying to put together a survey for my college students this fall. What kinds of software do most students learn to use in high school? What kind of technology can I expect most of them to be familiar with?
Tags:
* * *
If we hadn't already learned the lesson with anime, Torchwood has made it clear that fandom knows no region coding and preserves no release date. Tonight's season finale aired on the BBC, and it seems utterly impossible to be a Torchwood fan and remain spoiler-free until it airs locally, in my case, in two weeks on BBC America. Even if the BBC's copyright force is monitoring Youtube for episode uploads, and I'm sure they are, the spoilers are out, and they can't be put back.
Early on, there was talk of a simultaneous release for TW in Britain and the US, but that didn't happen, probably for technical or marketing reasons within the company. However, it seems clear that in the future that high profile series will have to plan for global release.
I'm not going to comment on the TW events until I get to sit down and see them in their entirety, which won't be until they show up on BBCA. I know the biggie. How can I be on LJ and twitter and not know? But I'm not ready to analyze them.
What I am ready to begin analyzing, in a preliminary sort of way, is the fan response. More later.
* * *
Torchwood is starting to remind me of the prime of my anime fandom, when everyone but me knew what was happening with the latest episode of Fullmetal Alchemist or Bleach but me. I am resisting the torrent, even as Children of Earth reaction posts erupt all over my f-list. I am trying to hold out for the American telecast, but who knows if I'll be able to last that long.

I've been sick since Saturday with some sort of virus that left me mentally and physically exhausted. I'm feeling better now in that the mental exhaustion seems to have lifted. I'm not sure the physical fatigue has lifted yet, as I can't seem to stop yawning.


Tags:
Current Mood:
tired tired
* * *
Ganked from Neifile: Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you. (Please note: If you simply wish to comment on something I've said but don't want to participate in the meme, that is fine. I will only give you five words if you specifically comment you with 'Words!')

And Neifile gave me the words scholars, serial fiction, OCMS, power play, and Virginia.
  1. scholars -  For me, being a scholar is a calling, rather like a religious vocation. It's about being committed to the pursuit of knowledge, but also the transmittal of knowledge. A scholar both researches and teaches. Nine years ago I earned my PhD and came to work here. I can't imagine being in any other line of work, even with what I'll be saying about power play.
  2. serial fiction - What happens after the last page? What happened to those character between that scene and this scene? The thing that fascinates me about serial fiction is the way that the answers to those questions are negotiated between the writer and the reader (or producer and viewer) because the story hasn't ended yet. The writer still tells the story, even as the audience anticipates the future within the narrative or asks that the past be filled in.
  3. OCMS - The great thing about Old Crow Medicine Show concerts is that you get a string band concert with a light show that leaves you deaf for a while afterwards. I love string band music, and I especially love that OCMS bring a punk edge to the sound.
  4. power play - One of the reasons I love the work of Michel Foucault is that he understood power as an ever-shifting relationship between people involved in a situation. (Hmm, I wonder if anyone has done a study of fanfic kink using Foucault's History of Sexuality.) Any given situation is going to involve a play of power, especially the workplace. Just the other day I was in the grocery story, and a younger man in a tie and dress shirt and an older woman in a store uniform were carrying a table. The act of carrying a table looked egalitarian, but the difference in their clothing and the fact that she addressed him as "sir" spoke to the play of power. The play of power is unavoidable, and it can be one of most upsetting parts of my job.
  5. Virginia - I'm not really sure yet what Virginia means to me. I've lived here for nine years now in the Appalachian corner of the state, which is different from the DC metropolitan area, from the patrician central part of the state, from the coastal, naval regions. I grew up in Kentucky, which actually part of Virginia before becoming a state of its own in 1792. So it's not exactly home, but I recognize the culture and the landscape. Several of my colleagues are from New York or New England, and they experienced a bit of culture shock down here. One thing did strike me when I moved here though. Where I'm from, Appalachia is about the politics and economics of the region, especially the mines and the drugs. Here it's much more about the culture, especially the music. And I really love the music.

Tags:
* * *
I wrote this little essay this morning, and I plan to use it as a sample paper for a course I'm teaching this fall. But I found myself trying to articulate why the deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson mattered to me as someone who grew up in the seventies. So here it is:

Why does it matter to me that Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett Died? )

Tags:

Current Mood:
pensive pensive
* * *

Previous

Advertisement

Customize