Caitlin Duffy. “‘There is no real me’: Meaningless Consumption and the Fragmented Neoliberal Subject in Harron’s American Psycho”
Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000) concludes with serial killer Patrick Bateman informing the audience through a voice-over that, despite confessing to his crimes, “there is no catharsis, my punishment continues to elude me, and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself… This confession has meant nothing.” Bateman’s assertion that both creating and consuming this film/confession are meaningless acts parallels his own shallow and excessive consumption. This presentation argues that it is though the film’s interest in futile and surface-level consumption that Harron materializes the violent subjectivity of the monstrous consumer under American neoliberalism.
In particular, this presentation will close read many of the instances of consumption which Bateman performs throughout the film, including those relating to his obsession with fine dining, his love of pop culture, and, of course, his penchant for murder and cannibalism. Many of his consumer habits result from a desperate desire to fit in; however, his work to conform repeatedly serves instead to fragment his identity. For example, after watching Tobe Hooper’s film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Bateman attempts to consume Texas Chain Saw’s narrative by embodying it, authoring his own life by restaging this piece of popular cinema. In so doing, Bateman not only murders a prostitute whom he calls “Christie,” but also ruptures his own sense of self and momentarily relinquishes control of the camera’s subjectivity to Christie.
This presentation will examine the altered state of the American neoliberal subject through Harron’s American Psycho. The American subject, according to Harron, has been so deeply transformed by the incessant call to consume that the lines between reality and fantasy have not only blurred, but have become insignificant.
Jon Heggestad. “Werewolves, Bitelines, and Queer Family Making”
Fan communities have employed a number of popular—although at times controversial—fan tropes in order to reimagine cultural works though a lens of queer family making. After a brief overview of these tropes, which include slash, A/B/O and mpreg, my presentation will home in on the fandom surrounding the MTV series Teen Wolf (loosely based on the 1985 comedy by the same name) to highlight how these practices extend who pregnancy, reproduction, and family are able to represent. In focusing on the Teen Wolf (TV) fandom, I identify a unique focus on werewolf lore within wider fan practices. Drawing from a longer literary history, this aspect offers fans expansive modes for how to gauge, create, and understand family making, bridging more traditional (and often assimilative) forms of the “nuclear family” with chosen families and other familial frameworks that speak more explicitly to queer communities.
This study will first identify the ways that fan practices have remedied gaps in the content available to us. In unpacking these aspects through an analysis of popular Teen Wolf fan fic texts, however, I will also illustrate how tropes surrounding werewolf bodies, specifically, have created factions of fans who aim to stress their own stakes in the representative claims afforded by the practices they engage in and the narratives they create. In doing so, I draw attention to the inequalities that certain modes of imagined family making continue to uncover.
Jessica Hautsch. “Rolling Up Characters: Conceptual Blending Theory, Casting, and Character Construction in Dungeons and Dragons”
When we play a tabletop role-playing game, like D&D, we enter an altered state where we live in both the real world of the table and the fiction of the story world. We play characters, but when we talk about D&D characters, what are we talking about? Where do these characters exist? What happens when, during the game, I shift from my real world identity to the character I play? How do I know what my fictional alter ego would do, when he does not exist and I have no evidence of how he would or wouldn’t behave? I conceptualize him as if he is reliable and stable, but I’m making him up as I go along.
There has been considerable debate about where D&D characters are located, scholars suggesting that they exist in the character sheet or the performance of the players. In this presentation, I draw on work in the cognitive sciences–particularly conceptual blending theory and embodied cognition– and my phenomenological experience of play to theorize the ways in which we conceptualize and perform characters. I argue that the creation and development of D&D characters takes advantage of what cognitive scientists Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner call conceptual blending or conceptual integration networks. Rather than looking at characters as existing in a single place, I posit that they are the product of conceptual blending, that they are constituted through the interplay of game mechanics, the material world, and embodied performance. Characters are not just located on the character sheet or in their performance, but, rather, they emerge in and through a blend of all of these things. CBT helps us to make sense of the role that formal rule structures, material objects, our bodies, and our performances have in how we create, understand, and play our characters, how we shift from player to character and back again.
