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August 2023, Week 3

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Subject:
From:
"Briand (Brinni) Gentry" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Thu, 17 Aug 2023 14:11:27 -0500
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Hello! 

The panel “Enfleshment in the Fleischer Studios: Rendering Race and Animating the Other” seeks another panelist for SCMS 2024 in Boston. Please see further details in the CfP below.   

If you are interested in being a part of this panel but have any questions for clarification please reach out ASAP to [log in to unmask] If you immediately know that your research interests are in line with this proposed panel and you'd like to be part of our proposal to SCMS for next year's conference in Boston, please get in touch with me at [log in to unmask] with a paper proposal (see CFP) by no later than Tuesday, August 22. We'd very much welcome hearing from you! 

With gratitude and best wishes,
Briand (Brinni) Gentry
she/her
Doctoral Candidate 
Universtiy of Michigan – Film, Television, & Media 
[log in to unmask]

Panel CfP:

“Enfleshment in the Fleischer Studios: Rendering Race and Animating the Other,” aims to curate a broad range of media historians, theorists, and animation specialists to consider the role that race and otherness play in making Fleischer Studios animations “work.” 

In 1934, Fleischer Studios released a short film, Betty Boop’s Rise to Fame, combining live-action footage of Max Fleischer and a reporter with animations of Betty Boop moving around their office to perform a revue of her song and dance numbers from her greatest hits: Stopping the Show (1932), Betty Boop’s Bamboo Isle (1932), and The Old Man of the Mountain (1933). In this nearly 9 minute short Boop herself imitates Fanny Brice, performs her “I’m an Indian” in a sensualized buckskin and papoose costume, crossdresses as she vocally mimics Maurice Chevailler, rubs herself with ink from an inkwell to enter brownface as she performs a Rotoscoped hula lifted from the performance of The Royal Samoan’s lead dancer, Lotamuru, and finally proceeds to rid herself of the ink-staining of her dermis so she can play the white damsel foil to the lecherous Old Man of the Mountain (who is, significantly, voiced by Cab Calloway). This short serves to condense a much larger pattern within the Fleischer Studios where in ethnic and racialized talent were incorporated into Boop’s sounds, somatics, and stylizations with full acknowledgement of the original source material. In part to demonstrate the prowess of the Fleischer developed Rotoscope, many Fleischer animations (especially those of Betty Boop) open with live-action clip featuring the labor that was Rotoscoped into Boop’s own vocalizations and movements. Betty Boop herself was conceived as a quintessential caricature of a Jazz Age flapper and, like many of the flapper icons before her, racial appropriation and a certain play with fluidity (both gendered and racialized) are the keys to her success as a continual novelty. Like many flapper icons before her, Boop’s identity was constantly in question – was she Black, Jewish, White? Was her countenance lifted from Helen Kane, Baby Esther, or Josephine Baker? Why is boop’s fluidly fashioned flesh such a factor in her appeal? As Anne Anlin Cheng has stated, with regard to the Modernist fascination with Josephine Baker’s constantly visible skin, “Baker’s performances…challeng[ed] us to confront the ongoing dilemma of how to see raced bodies at the intersection of historic materiality and early century semiotics” (Second Skin, 175). 

This panel seeks to examine the ways in which racial and ethnic distinction, ambivalence, and fluidity are utilized in the full revue of Fleischer Studios characters and shorts from Betty Boop, Popeye, and Koko the Clown to the Color Classics Series, Talkartoons, and Out of the Inkwell shorts. This panel will serve as a collected rumination on the variety of ways a single animation studio makes use of animation’s affordances in ways that illuminate how the coding of voice, movement, and epidermal tinting operate to reveal the role that fantasies of racial fluidity and masquerade serve in trying to pin down race as something finite, durable, and legibly Other. By focusing on a studio like Fleischer (1929-1942) which operated from the gradual decline of silent cinema, through pre-code entertainments, and essentially shuttered its doors during its consolidation with the studio system and Paramount, this panel will offer a start at a thorough investigation of how animation practices, labor, and the particular invention of the Rotoscope all functioned to leverage racial fluidity as a hallmark of the studio that once competed with Disney. As Nicholas Sammond has meaningfully undercored, the history of animation (particularly US animation) is intimately entwined with minstrelsy. What do we make of a studio that acknowledges it’s appropriations as much as it intensifies and deflects them? What can we come to understand about the role fantasies of racial fluidity and fixity played and continue to play in the US mediascape by examining how an animation studio like Fleischer relied on the labor, creativity, and aestheticizations of groups considered Other to secure it’s spot in the mainstream? Why is animation fixated on epidermal inscription? How is race rendered by animation’s technologies? How is objecthood defied or reified in animation? 

Approaches to this topic and research angles might include, but need not be limited too: 
-	Animation/Industry technologies
-	Animation/Industry history 
-	Examinations of the various ways in which raced labor was featured and Rotoscoped in Fleischer animations
-	Gender/sexuality 
-	Music/Musicology/Music History 
-	Racialized/Ethnicized Performance Theory
-	Racialized/Ethniczed Performance History (ie theories and histories surrounding US minstrelsy, yellowface performance, and various other modes of racial masquerade) 
-	Jewish performance history 
-	Objecthood 
-	Kitsch theory 
-	Aesthetics of epidermalization 

Please send a brief topic proposal, title, and 3-5 bibliographic sources to [log in to unmask] If your paper is selected you should know within 24 hours of sending your email to me. Should your paper be selected, I request that you get a 2500 character abstract to me along with a brief author bio by no later than August 28. 

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