Abstracts of Papers and Posters Presented at the 2004 APCG Meeting, San Luis Obispo, California

Stuart C. Aitken, San Diego State University, saitken@mail.sdsu.edu. Encountering the Stoic Heart of Men Through Cinematic Spaces of Violence. With this essay, I focus on men's emotional involvement with violence through a discussion of leading men as victims of cinematic violence and the ways that this notion challenges the conventional wisdom from feminist film theory and elsewhere that male-scopic pleasure must center on control. My intent is not to resolve and subvert patriarchal ways of knowing, but to try to spin this two-sided Janus-coin so as to blur the edges and features that define it. I focus on leading men and cinematic contrivances between emotions and violence with intent, ultimately, on saying something about how masculinities are differentiated spatially. I begin with a brief and general discussion of the emotive experience of movie going. I then elaborate some conventional wisdom from feminist psychoanalytic studies that situates masculinity in terms that point to sadistic control and castration fear. This is followed with a fuller discussion of men and violence in cinema with intent to elaborate the multi-faceted complexity of representations that are, following Deleuze, best articulated from non-representational standpoints that focus on affect. The final part of the essay looks at movies that cast leading men in violent roles and yet treat violence in different ways as a foil against which larger theoretical issues find form. As I hope to show, affection-images not only invite visceral reactions from viewers, they also say something important about space and differentiated masculinities.

James P. Allen, james.allen@csun.edu; and Eugene Turner, California State University, Northridge, eugene.turner@csun.edu. Migrants Who Left California Between 1995 and 2000. We use Census 2000 files to study the destinations and characteristics of people who lived in California in 1995 but were living in other states in 2000. The county-to-county migration file identifies the number of migrants between each two counties in the United States, making possible detailed maps of flows between selected regions in California and individual counties. These maps demonstrate that Californians were most likely to move to those Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona counties closest to California, where they comprised between 6 and 18 percent of the total population in 2000. Migrants from various regions within California were also most likely to settle in nearby counties, both in California and in adjacent states. The PUMS file permits analysis of characteristics of White, Black, Asian, and Hispanic out-migrants from five regions of California to leading destination states in comparison to the characteristics of Californians in the same groups who lived in those regions in both 1995 and 2000. We compare migrants with stayers in terms of age, state of birth, educational attainment, and occupation.

Jenny Arkle, California State University, Fullerton, jennyarkle@hotmail.com. The San Joaquin Freshwater Reserve: GIS Vegetation Map and Analysis. The San Joaquin Freshwater Reserve is located in Orange County within the heart of urban sprawl. The reserve acts as a mitigation area to surrounding businesses that is easily accessible for researchers, educators, and students attending field classes. The development of a detailed vegetation map, using Arc View GIS, will aid researchers in analysis of the elaborate ecosystem. Using a visual representation enables spatial relationships and the location of specific plant species to be easily referenced. In cases where planning defines that an explicit amount of acreage be dedicated to indigenous species, GIS applications can quickly perform calculations to find such variables as net occupied area, standard deviations, average area, and individual polygon area. The flexibility of a GIS to display desired elements on the map allows educators to easily demonstrate complex natural occurrences. Long-term goals embrace the integration of annual documentation and mapping to produce an extensive database and visual representations of the successional phenomena that the reserve undergoes. Poster.

Daniel Arreola, Arizona State University, daniel.arreola@asu.edu. Forget the Alamo: Place as Cinematic Space in John Sayles' Lone Star. A title search summary statement to a videorecording or DVD of Lone Star might read as follows: "An unsolved...