Do you need a programming topic? Want to encourage someone else to take on an idea? It’s time to brainstorm!
Here are a handful of ideas that might spark a presentation. We’d love to hear what ideas you have for others to present as well; please feel free to post them here. This is also a great time to start seeking co-presenters, and we’re happy to have you post here on the blog, on any post on our LiveJournal, on the Sirens Facebook, or on our message boards.
Let us know if you’d like to take on any of these ideas and we’ll cross it out (with no guarantee that someone else won’t propose it—just as a note that someone is working on it). A few of these are old suggestions, but always mentioned as topics people would love to hear more about.
- The Past Comes Back: Exploration of Past in the Works of X, Y, and Z
- The Age Line?: Differences Middle Grade, Young Adult, New Adult, and Adult Fantasy
- Ghosts as Metaphor in…[Title]
- Better Worldbuilding…
- Programming on characters identified with nonbinary genders and orientations.
- The Lady Knight
- Cycles and patterns of particular tropes—what does it mean when our views on werewolves and vampires and fairies and witches change directions? What does it reflect?
- Panel or roundtable: Fantasy Future (Where fantasy is going, where it can go/boundaries it can push, where it isn’t going yet…but it could and we’d like it to.)
- Best/most useful social media, websites, and organizations for readers
- Fantasy to read next—great reads from small presses, from outside the U.S., being self-published, out of print or hard to find, etc.
- Ten Years of Women: Portrayals in Fantasy Film (Maybe animated? Or looking at when and where women are included?)
- Power and Personality in [Book? Series?]
- Women—creators and characters—in fantasy-related comics and graphic novels
You might also check out some brainstorming and topic giveaway posts from the first five years of Sirens: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Again, please feel free to look for collaborators, to add more ideas, to take ideas, and to discuss ideas in the comments.
Questions? Feel free to write to the programming team at (programming at sirensconference.org).
We have two chats scheduled for talking about programming ideas, books, travel, Sirens, and meeting potential travel buddies and roommates: Wednesday, April 2, from 9 to 11 p.m. Eastern and Saturday, April 5, from 2 to 4 p.m. Eastern. We hope you’ll join us!
So, I read this pretty icky little story about a guy saying that the movie Frozen has all these themes in it!
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/audio-disney-frozen-pastor-kevin-swanson-homosexuality-bestiality-687939
I confess that I’ve only seen a few clips, but I suspect there’s a lot to take apart as a response to those claims.
I’d also think that the article could prompt some analysis of whether there are some themes in particular that are breaking away from the traditional models in animated films (particularly Disney, but others as well). For example, Merida doesn’t want to get married, and Elsa doesn’t. Tiana wants to run a business. And so on. What’s interestingly pushing back against the mold? What breaks down or is taken back from those characters to push them back toward the mold? This might make an interesting set of pre-empaneled papers: a group of three or four could take a movie each and read short essays–or, perhaps, all focus on the same movie, and argue for or against certain features of the story being empowering or oppressive.
Shouting into the Void?
What can we do right now to raise the visibility of women in fantasy? How can we change the numbers on what gets reviewed? What are some of the mundane roadblocks that are out there, like placement in store displays? Etc. (Maybe we could come up with ten action steps as a group attending such a presentation?)
Another one: Let’s take a close look at some of the fantasy-themed television shows out there are review who does and does not get to act, how those people get to act, what stories are showcased (and not), how fans may or may not affect what is showcased, and so on. Once Upon a Time, Sleepy Hollow, Grimm, etc. together make a handful of examples.
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There is plenty in this article that doesn’t dig very deep and that leaves things under-examined, but I think it’s worthy of more discussion:
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/03/must-every-ya-action-heroine-be-petite/284568/
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