PCA/ACA Conference: Day 1

Alright, I know. In traditional academic fashion I requested (and received) an extension from myself for this report on the first day of the conference. My mom and I are sharing an internet connection (which, even in the Marriott we're staying in, costs fifteen bucks a day...more on that later). Anyway, a lot to cover, so let's get to it.

A great way to start a conference; I attended two presentations based on that most adorable of animated movies: Wall-E

“Performing Gender, Performing Romance: Pixar’s Wall-E”

I got to the room a bit late because it was on the mysterious 4th floor, to which the elevators do not go. However, once I got myself situated, I found this really interesting. The presenter focused on the way(s) that Pixar took two gender-less, inanimate objects (the robots, Wall-E and Eve) and imbued in them a gender for the sake of the love story. I'm not sure if she ever used the term 'hetero-normative', but that's what I thought of immediately. Though, I certainly don't blame Pixar, because a heterosexual relationship would probably be the simplest way to present a love story which abounds with various other confusing factors, such as the theme that Wall-E (a robot) shows the humans in the movie how to be human again. I wish I'd been there for the whole paper, but it certainly opened up a world to think about with regards to Wall-E.


“The Future is Fat: Wall-E and the Fear of a Fat Planet?”

This was in a fat studies panel and the other papers being given we're also very interesting. In this case, the presenter opened up the floor to comments and questions throughout her talk, which I really liked because it really helped to expand the conversation. In short, the focus of the paper was on the depiction of '"fat = evil" in the semi-dystopian future of Wall-E. In fact, the director, Andrew Stanton, said that the adults in Wall-E are supposed to be sort of like "big babies" and that they consulted NASA on the effects of long term space travel. However, inaccuracies abound, like the reference to "the effects of micro-gravity" having produced these large pudgy adults. It would seem, in the movie, that gravity aboard the Axiom (the spaceship) is roughly equivalent to Earth normal since Wall-E and other characters seem to fall at the same rate we would naturally expect. Even if you believe that there is less than Earth gravity, there's no reason that they would grow so fat. They passively accept food (such as cupcake in a cup) which I would imagine is a pleasantly flavored supplement filled with proteins and vitamins. I could write forever on this subject (and maybe I will, at some point), but the end result is that the people who produced Wall-E may have been tapping into our prejudice against fat people to set up the transformation from evil (idleness, passivity, sloth, gluttony) to good (an agrarian culture, activity, agency, etc.)


Finally, I attended a session on Internet Culture which focused, more or less, on Social Network Sites (Facebook, mainly) and Personal Media Devices (iPods, iPhones, etc.) and their possibly application in education. Each of the four papers had their merits, and there were a lot of interesting insights. For instance, encouraging students to use laptops and to google information and to look things up on Wikipedia and to roam the internet in a way that enhances the educational experience. The most controversial paper was, surprisingly, the chair of that Session and the only presenter over 30. He spoke about the "culture of illiteracy" on the internet. Basically, that people don't know how to "read" websites and that creators of websites compound this problem by ensuring no one has to read to understand their website. I found this to be "a load of hooey" (source unknown) because he seems to see everything in life as some form of text to be read. Why doesn't he get irritated by movie makers not including paragraphs of text to accompany their stories? How can he enjoy an opera that doesn't offer the libretto (script, kind of) for him to read at the same time? These are all different media and they don't work in the same way and people don't use them in the same way. For a person who, in his words, is the "tech guy" in his department, he doesn't seem to be very "with" the times, culturally.