Avatar: The Last Airbender (Nickelodeon Animation Studios, 2005-2008)
Megan E. Jackson is a social media strategist for 360training.com and will be attending NYU in the fall to start coursework for an MPA. She also runs the YouTube channel College Uncomplicated. As an undergraduate she wrote her senior thesis on gender representation in the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender, which was published in issue 4.2 of Film Matters in 2013. In the following interview, Megan discusses the beginnings of her article, gender representation, and works she has done outside the publication.
Rachel Wassil: How did you hear about Film Matters magazine? Why did you want to publish your work in it?
Megan E. Jackson: I had heard about Film Matters during my sophomore year of undergrad at the University of Texas at Austin. My instructor and mentor Anne Helen Petersen, who now does long-form articles for BuzzFeed, was teaching film history with a star studies twist. For one of our main papers, we had to do a case study of a celebrity who was in her/his prime before the 1980s. Naturally, I wrote my paper on the amazing Robert Redford, and after grading it, Annie suggested I submit it to Film Matters. That was the first time I had submitted a paper for possible publication, and I was excited to make it to the last round of reviews, but unfortunately it didn’t make the final cut. So when I started developing my senior thesis, which then became “(Gender)Bending in the Animated Series Avatar: The Last Airbender,” I knew I wanted to try to submit to the magazine again while I still had the chance!
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