PCA/ACA Conference: Day 3

I know, I know. Late post, blah blah blah. This one will be a little shorter because I went to more sessions which were outside my normal area of interest and I didn't feel like taking notes that I would understand later. In fact, I only have one paper to report on, then I'll move on to the conference as a whole.


“Beyond the Gaze: Eroticization and Identification with Lara Croft”

This was in the first Undergraduate session I attended and I was really glad I did. The only difference I saw, despite rumors indicating otherwise, was that the presenters were more timid and it was more like seeing a paper being read in class. More on this below. The first half of this paper, given by a student from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, was rather trite and went over all the ways in which the creators of the Tomb Raider series objectified women by making Lara Croft so sexy. She talked about how her identity is "obscured" because her face is rarely shown. However, this is a convention of third-person shooters and not intended to rob Lara of personality. She moved on to the curious phenomenon of Tomb Raider, being one of the first and certainly the most successful video game with a female protagonist, that is the user (almost always male) having control over the female avatar. This was more interesting because it conjured issues of "agency" which is a major subject of scrutiny in feminist theory. However, she still had a curious way of framing everything as abuse towards the character, as if exploiting a cheat code to make Lara Croft naked was equivalent to forcing a live woman to be naked. Finally, she questioned the kind of role-model Lara is with her body type and exploits being so unrealistic. For the most part, this paper made me question a lot of stock American Studies and feminist jargon. In general, I agree with the vague assertion that Lara Croft objectifies women, but if the only way to not do that is to give the player a realistic idea of what being a woman in our society is like, then it won't be in the form of a video game because earning 75 cents to the dollar in middle management isn't very action-packed.


I had a vague idea of writing some sort of wrap-up for the conference here. It's hard to say how I feel about it, seeing, as I do now, through the haze of retrospect. I don't know if I had any concrete expectations going into it, though I suppose if I did, then they probably weren't met. As I said back in the "Day Zero" post (linked above), I've spent a lot of time crusading for the kind of things that would've allowed me to present at this conference and I was happy to have other people who were more interested in doing it than I was. After it became clear that there would have been nothing to stop me from presenting had I just submitted an abstract to a different area, I became increasingly uninterested in the issue. Getting to just chill out and absorb information at the various sessions had its own perks, including many ideas for future blog posts. In the end, the conference just made me start thinking about my own future.

The real kick in the old crotch in this regard, though, was Facebook-friending a grad student from Delaware, who had given a rather brilliant paper on Stephen King's The Dark Tower series, and finding out that she was born in 1986 as well. I know, I transferred and only started in American Studies in my fifth year, and I'm cool with all that, but having been in a place where some people, at least, clearly valued the kind of work she's doing so much as to exclude the lowly work I'm doing made the difference seem that much greater. In the end, I'm grateful for the experience and New Orleans is always a treat.