Slayage! Part Four

OK, sorry for the delay, folks! So, day 2. (Yeah, four posts in and I'm on DAY TWO. Cripes.) The opening day keynote was Lorna Jowett, and sadly, I missed it (it's now my biggest regret of the conference.) Everyone in our party was completely beat and wanted to sleep in, still suffering from the travel and I'd been up late working for the week leading up to it, so I was absolutely exhausted, and we slept in. But everyone who went said it was absolutely amazing (she's the author of Sex and the Slayer: A Gender Studies Primer for the Buffy Fan, a book I picked up and read after the last Slayage conference). Her keynote was called "Stuffing a Rabbit in it: Character, Narrative, and Time in the Whedonverses." Time? Rabbits? I probably should have gone... sounds like it might have had a lot to do with Lost!!

The first panel of the day featured our traveling companion Ryan Warden (yay!) doing his paper, "Dead and Still Pretty: The Subversion and Subsequent Elimination of the Final Girl in Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Another excellent paper, it looked at the trope of the "final girl" in horror films, the last girl standing, who is usually a brunette, smart, and has a boy's name (Stevie, Marti, etc.) On the other hand, you have the blonde ditzy girl who usually has sex and then dies near the beginning of the picture because she's an idiot. He talked about how BtVS turned this trope on its head and the blonde girl wasn't the ditz, but the saviour, and the smart girl with the boy's name -- Will -- was the one constantly in trouble and having to be saved by the blonde. The paper pulled in Third Wave feminism and showed clips from the series, and I loved it.

The second paper by Shiloh Carroll was "Maturity in Buffy the Vampire Slayer," using Maturity as a synonym for feminism in a way. It talked about how maturity was viewed on the show, with Dawn's irresponsible behaviour being acceptable because she was a teenager and Giles and Joyce's behaviours in Band Candy not being as acceptable because they were adults, but then again it was swept away because they'd been under an influence.

The final paper was fascinating. Given by Joe Valezquez, it was called "Skies of coupled colour: Humor and Fright in BtVS" and it offered a new methodology of looking at BtVS (and any show, really) by using philosophy. It's a difficult one for me to describe, so I'll just keep it as basic as I possibly can, but he first defined value, which is everything that is meaningful, and not just good things: love has value, but so does hate. Security has it, but so does fear. The paper talked about how the show can reconcile that it represents a world that is so horrible, and yet so funny. These are opposite emotional values. They're like oil and water; they shouldn't mix, but they somehow do on the show. So he created a value chemistry to show how these values could come together. We're good at showing how things can be separated, but not how they come together. He used the example of chess-boxing (a real sport, apparently!) where two people sit and play a round of chess, then they box for a round, then they play chess, etc. He said the game involves strategy and violence, BUT never together. They never actually integrate and it just turns into two separate things that don't come together. Football, on the other hand, integrates strategy and violence into one sport. So he looked at the functional relation of the two to see how they'd come together. The functional relation creates value, then the reaction to the value changes it, and then metaphor imposed on it changes it again. His example was silly humour, often punny (like, "We're going to poop your party" or "bump your goose") doesn't belong in this world. BUT this horrible world cannot stomp out these moments. Evil can't be blotted out, but it can be crowded out, he quoted MLK Jr. The metaphor imposed on it, then, is grace, where the moments of humor are (and I wrote this quote down because I loved it), "tiny moments of pentecostal fire." He expanded this method to pull in other things, and you could tell everyone in the room was pretty much hanging on every word, but the chair began pushing him to hurry up and drop the last part of his paper... and then we sat there with very few questions being asked and half an hour to go and part of me just wanted to raise my hand and ask if he could be allowed to finish! But obviously that wouldn't have been fair to the other panellists who had managed to keep their papers within the timeline.

I do have to quote Joe one more time, though... in the Q&A period he said, "Any aesthetics theory that cannot explain bullfighting should be rejected out of hand." HAHAHA!! (you had to have been there for that to have made sense! Still. Funny.)

While I was in this panel, my paper partner, Matthew Pateman, was in another panel (the one I wished was at a different time so I could have gone) where David Kociemba and Cynthia Burkhead were both presenting, and apparently Kociemba referred to something as "Patemanesque," thereby earning Matthew's undying devotion. ;)

Then it was lunch. We wandered over to a cafe near the college that served Starbucks (there weren't any obvious Starbucks around, but many cafes that claimed to brew Starbucks coffee, which was odd) and I just had a drink and we chatted and Jennifer Stuller was there, and then Ian and Ryan and Sue went back to Schmagel's Bagels to grab lunch to go, and I headed back over to the student centre with Jennifer. I was heading back early because they'd asked authors to be involved in a book signing, but when I got to the table I realized they hadn't actually ordered in ANY copies of my book. Not one. They didn't have Bite Me!: The Chosen Edition The Unofficial Guide to Buffy The Vampire Slayer ( Seven Seasons One Book) and they didn't have Once Bitten: An Unofficial Guide to the World of <I>Angel</I>Angel (which features an exclusive interview I did with Alexis Denisof... get your copy now!!). It was a shame, because at the last Slayage my books actually sold out. So it was a bit of a downer; I was there because I absolutely love it and love reading the papers, but while the profs and academics can put all of these papers on their CVs, the only thing I can do is promote myself to sell my own books. And so I work on a paper for 8 months, come and present it, it seems to be a hit... and my books aren't actually there. Ah well. Mini-rant over.

So I sat nearby chatting with someone else and didn't sit at the table, because why would I sit there so I could sign nothing? Odd. Any of the signings that happened didn't really have anyone come to them simply because you know the person at the conference, and if you have their book, you'll just walk up to them and get them to sign it.

Next panel was Sexuality in the Whedonverses. I chose this one because I had been SO PREPARED for the plethora of papers on the comics and then this panel seemed to have the ONLY paper on the comics that I could find. And it was excellent. The paper was by Hélène Forhard-Dourlent, and it was called "Buffy/Satsu: Pure Genius or Out of Character? Complicating Fan Responses to Modern Narratives of Sexuality." It was about (spoiler if you haven't read the comics) the fact that Buffy had an affair with one of her female officers, Satsu, and the responses that fans had to it. She first outlined the homophobic ones, which said that they couldn't believe Buffy was a lesbian and they were officially no longer a fan. They'd never watch another Whedon show, etc. etc. She said these people saw her homosexual encounter as a threat... that she'd been turned into a lesbian in the same way she could have been turned into a vampire. But almost as problematic were the ones who said, "I don't care if it's a woman; it doesn't matter if it's a woman or a man, just that Buffy's in love." She said that was undermining that fact that it WAS important Buffy was with a woman, as addressed in later discussions with Willow about the fact she'd been with a woman, and that the other lesbians in the comic seem to know Buffy is experimenting and hasn't been "turned," but that it's important Buffy address within herself why she did it. She referred to it as "heteroflexibility." She talked about "sex-blindness" as being like colourblindness. She said what's important is that Buffy is the general and Satsu her underling, and in the end Buffy returns to bossing her around and tells Satsu there's really nothing she can do, and the relationship of the heterosexual to the homosexual was not an equal one but one of domination and subordination, one that strengthens homosexuality. It was a fascinating paper.

This one was followed by Kai Shuart's paper, "I Kissed a Boy: Depiction of Male Fluid Sexuality in the Buffyverse," looking at the fact that female sexuality is OK, but not male. She uses the idea of how in popular culture we smile and buzz about Madonna French-kissing Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears, but the moment Ryan Lambert kisses his male keyboard player he has GONE TOO FAR. She then extended that into the Buffyverse to look at how the males were treated.

The final paper was Ananya Mukherjea's "Men Are Beasts, Women are Pussycats: Gender, "Nature," and Animal References on Buffy." It focused on the S3 episode Beauty and the Beasts, looking at the wild nature of the man. She also quoted Matthew Pateman... I thought maybe I wouldn't mention it to him to avoid the giant head that might result.

The next session I wanted to head to featured a paper called, "Exploring the Fantastic Mundane: A Comparison of the Works of Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman"... like come ON how awesome is that?? But, it turns out, there was a group of people at the conference who were conducting interviews for an upcoming documentary on the academic world of the Whedonverse, called "Whedonversed." So I was scheduled to be interviewed at the same time as this paper and I missed that panel altogether.

I went into a small room where I was asked a series of questions, and it was a lot of fun (and then everyone who was interviewed all got together to compare how we answered each one!) I was slightly different than the others because I wasn't an academic, so they skipped over the teaching questions for me, obvs. They're heading to Comic-Con this year to conduct interviews with fans, so keep an eye out for them!

Next up: The featured speakers panel!