In an earlier post this
semester, we announced some of our every own SDSU faculty, staff and alumni were participating in the 2014 PAMLA conference held in Riverside, CA. Fortunately,
two of the presenters were able to share their experiences and what they presented on for this year's conference .
Alya Hameed presented on
the film Paranorman through both a Gothic and a feminist angle. “The
presentation examined Norman's queerness as one that both subverts and
systematically upholds heteronormative and patriarchal structures.”
This was Alya's second year
presenting at the PAMLA conference. However, not only did Alya present her brilliant ideas but she was also
able to sit as chair to two panels, both on the topic of Children's Literature.
“As a panel experience, my paper thematically flowed with the other papers (one
on Coraline and Meg's on The Sleeper and the Spindle). Those
discussed female protagonists contending with different experiences of
entrapment and conscription (whether by the narrative or my socialized feminine
standards).” Alya explains that she was able to guide the conversation in a
direction that discussed the male protagonist “with an explicitly emasculated
or feminized heritage.” Together the panel was ultimately able to cover the
question of gender and selfhood within the concept of child-identity.
“Chairing is also a great
experience,” Alya says, “offering an opportunity to be active on the other
side--no presentation needs to be prepared but you are actively listening and
possibly preparing questions to garner discussion, especially if you have a
quiet audience. I recommend graduate students consider opportunities to chair
at conferences (as well as present, of course) if and when possible.”
Meg Mardian, a current graduate student at SDSU, presented on the
socio-cultural issues that come about from the depiction of female beauty as an
inborn virtue found within the young female heroines of fairy tales. The main
focus was Neil Gaiman's "The Sleeper and the Spindle,” a combination of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. Since both stories portray young,
beautiful girls who are punished by evil, old women, Gaiman rewrote them into a
Gothic twist in order to critique current day female anxieties surrounding
beauty as well as age. “My main argument [was] based on the critical work of
Naomi Wolf, called The Beauty Myth, wherein she talks about why the
patriarchy propagates unreasonable beauty ideals for women as a way of keeping
them under control.”
Interestingly, Meg points out that women over the years have focused
aggression towards one another more so than trying to fight the oppression that
defines gender roles. Once the female hero can assert her independence she is
able to “pass on the torch—or in this case the bloody spindle.”
However, it gets better. Meg says her favorite part of the paper was
discussing the absence of older strong and beautiful women, pointing out that
they are normally portrayed as bitter old women who hold resentment to the
younger beauty in the story and as a result wish to steal these qualities
from them. Quoting Wolf, she states, “To airbrush age off a woman’s face is to
erase women’s identity, power, and history. To show children that wrinkles are
not beautiful means to show them their worth is only skin deep” and it allows
the patriarchy to maintain dominance, which is why women should be fighting
against this.
After Meg's presentation a man asked if she thought the gender of the
author (Gaiman) mattered in the these new types of fairy tales that do
challenge the patriarchy's agenda. To this she replied that it shouldn't make a
difference what the gender of the author is, in the same way it shouldn't matter
what the gender of the person reading is. “These types of texts, if they are
meant to defy status quo, should be aimed at all audiences… I can't say if a
woman could have done it the same way or better, just that Gaiman succeeded in
creating a new fairy tale that makes the reader question their own expectations
and roles in society.”
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