More Power to Ya

In addition to my own panel, I attended the Keynote, “Tell It Like It Is”, and “More Power to Ya!” For the blog, I’m going to focus on “More Power to Ya!” because I enjoy unnecessary exclamation points.

“More Power to Ya!” was a gender-themed panel that included a positive assessment of Princess Mononoke as a feminist text, a defense of Jack Kerouac’s gender politics, a Butlerian reading of Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, an examination of/advocacy for powerful yonic imagery that rebels against Freudian thought, and a analysis of the victimhood of female characters in V for Vendetta.

I really liked the presentations for the most part, but a lot of them left me with questions. For example, the presenter of the Lifeboat character seemed to me to imply that the gender representation in the movie was progressive/empowering because the female lead was able to get what she wanted by oscillating on the gender spectrum, becoming more masculine or feminine depending on the situation. However, the author of the paper didn’t address the fact that there is a long-running trope of negatively defined female characters that become more or less feminine to manipulate the men around them. And the author of the Princess Mononoke paper seemed happy with the egalitarian couples in the film wherein which both members behaved in a traditionally masculine way, but didn’t address the problematic aspects of potentially repudiating femininity in the process. The presenter on yonic imagery was a friend of mine and she devoted a whole paragraph to explaining why her paper would only address the needs of cisgender individuals, but I was really curious whether/how a trans* author could use sexual imagery to empower themselves. Of course, my friend is cisgender, so she couldn’t really provide that perspective, but it still left me curious. Which is a good thing.

Anyway, I really enjoyed seeing friends/classmates/acquaintances present at panels.  

- Jack