jlh | Phoenix Rising: Panels. Also a poll

For the benefit of Miss

mistful there will be a post tonight on panels.

09:00-9:30: Shipping the Velvet. The day before there had been another of those "why do you slash" panels and as a topic I can't think of anything less interesting; it's like, why do you play basketball or something. I'm not sure why we think there will be some kind of aggregate answer that would actually be meaningful. Which isn't a digression, but a means of saying that this panel … was not that panel. There was a lot of stuff in here, like the effect of slash on more mainstream erotica and some allusions to the fanboy/fangirl thing, but mostly I would say: listen to the podcast. Which I need to do, actually, as I had to skip out on the panel for the middle hour.
09:30-10:00: The Goblin Financial Monopoly, from malachan. It was awesome! He talked about stagflation, which I had actually just taught the week before! There was a chart! Basically, the Goblins have the Ministry by the balls and vice versa and there may be a supply side shock. I don't actually have enough economics under my belt to talk about everything he was laying out, but it was pretty excellent.
10:00-10:30: Goblet of Colonialism. All about how GoF reflected the after effects of the British colonial project, in the depiction of British xenophobia, the eroticised Other (Cho Chang, Padma and Parvati Patil, the Beaubatons girls), the scary Foreign Man (Krum) after our non-sexualized British women (Hermione). The paper was fine, used a lot of Said of course, and it would be interesting to see how much further, if it does, the paper would go than the presentation, as there are places to go. But what was even more interesting, especially in the current fandom climate, was how resistant some in the audience were to using race itself as a category for analysis. Particularly, when talking about how Cho and the Patils were eroticized, while Hermoine and Ginny were not, they said, well, if he'd only liked white girls, we'd be arguing about that. The reply to which, of course, was that what we actually needed were non-white girls that were NOT eroticized.
10:30-11:00: Back to the slash panel.
11:00-11:30: No Mary Sues in Slash, aka, the paper with the bad abstract that got everyone's panties in a bunch. I noticed with some displeasure that while everyone wanted to post about how much they were angry about it, once those of us who were there posted that there was nothing to worry about, everyone was silent. Anyway, the woman who presented the paper wasn't trying to speak for all slashers, but a segment of them that self-report to be writing the girls out of the stories because they cannot conceive of a romance with a power balance that is heterosexual, and ultimately how hopeless that can feel.
11:30-12:00: The paper writer had to run, but bookshop, elements, wordplay, Dr. Jenkins, and some other folks stuck around to have a really interesting discussion about the issues brought up by the paper and what, if any, responsibility slash writers have to the young women coming in who haven't fully formed their sexualities. As Carrie noted, where is the positive portrayal of female sexuality on the page, rather than as understood through the simple act of writing? Aja and I also noted that HP slash has always been a little less female than it might be in other fandoms, with tons of big name slashers like Alex, John and David.
14:00-15:00: kitsune13's awesome paper about recursive literature. Since it was full of literary theory that I'm familiar with, I doubt that I can appropriately lay out her categories here, but one distinction that I found interesting was that she said that fanfiction is specifically distributed through non-capitalist channels.
15:00-15:30: Acquiring a Magical Literacy. While I liked what this presenter had to say, I think she pitched her paper a little too low, and kept stopping to teach things as one might in an undergraduate classroom, so in the end I didn't hear anything I didn't already know, like how Harry gets his literacy from Hagrid and then from Ron, Dumbledore, etc.
15:30-16:00: The Not So New Ginny Weasley. This paper said things we've all heard about where the Ginny characterization comes from, but there were two interesting points I hadn't heard, one stronger than the other. The weaker one was admitting that the characterization was tell, rather than show, but attributed this to JKR wanting the reader to have the same surprise about Ginny that Harry has. True, but she probably still could have done that one better. The stronger one was tracking Ginny's initial greetings to Harry in each of the six books, where you can see how Ginny is gradually growing in confidence re Harry. Interesting, but while I still don't have the big problem with Ginny that others do (except for that final speech in HBP, which was crap and seemed to deny the entire characterization that we'd seen in the last two books) I agree that it wasn't particularly well done.
16:00-17:00: sistermagpie's kick ass paper about Draco, which was awesome, which I can't even begin to summarize, and which everyone will just have to get when the papers are released.
18:00-21:00: Keynote on fan to fandom. The one thing that I found truly interesting in this panel was Dr. Jenkins talking about how HP as a new fandom that brought new kinds of people into fandom actually created new ways to do things and new spaces to play—that this "feral" fandom might actually have contributed as much as it created problems. So often, especially when reading metafandom, we only see the "downside" of the peculiarities of HP fandom, but there have been some fantastic things about the weird way that HP came online and grew, so it was refreshing to see that.

Sunday.
11:00-12:00: Dr. Jenkins reading. It was adorable. I think that's all I got. Maddy was mentioned, and that was awesome.
12:00-13:30: Plagiarism panel. It kicked ass. For reals. I can't even tell you how much it kicked ass. praetorianguard went through copyright law, then kitsune13 talked about academic plagiarism, then Suzanne talked about pastiche and then everyone talked about fanfiction and how really, we're just talking about internal community standards here, and possibly the application of academic plagiarism to fanfiction doesn't make a ton of sense. Also, perhaps everyone should calm the fuck down. And, whose responsibility is it to be generally culturally literate?
15:00-17:00: Snape Friend or Foe panel. At which both Suzanne and sistermagpie once again kicked some serious ass. You can see this panel at borders.com, if not now then soon. Most interesting aspect: all the Friend debaters said Snape was toast, while the pro-Foes all thought this ultimate survivor would live through this too.