AFS Presentation Preparation

Thursday, October 6, 2022 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM EDT
Merten Hall, 3300

Join us this Thursday, October 6 in Merten Hall 3300 from 730PM – 830PM to learn more about the AFS annual meeting, hear brief practice presentations from graduate students Betty Aquino and Allie Stanich, and chat with folklore students and professors!

Betty Aquino will present Dark Drama: American Haunted Houses, Power, Performance, and Positionality in the Face of a Shifting Economic Landscape

This paper examines American Halloween traditions at farms and how they’ve adapted and influenced culture. Through participant observation and auto-ethnography at haunted house attractions in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, I argue that farms commodify nostalgia, folk horror, contemporary legend, and fear. Halloween on the farm is big business but commodified culture “is multifaceted, complex, and as likely to be a site for social meaning as any other,” (Goldstein, 2007). I argue through the scholarship on performance, the farm turned haunted house is a place where communities reckon with power, positionality, and performance in a way to maintain cultural relevancy.

And Allie Stanich will present Queering Cosplay and Conventions: Intersections of Folklore, the Cosplay Community, and Gender Identity

Within the field of folklore, little attention has been given to the study of cosplay, a form of fan interaction in which one dresses as a particular character from a fixed medium such as a TV show. Cosplay is both an example of fan translation of popular culture into folklore and a method through which cosplayers can explore their identity (e.g. LGBTQIA+) and experiment with gender through the liminal, ritualesque space of the cosplay convention. This presentation draws upon ethnographic fieldwork to examine the act or performance of cosplay, cosplay conventions, and the broader cosplay community from a folkloric lens.