Abstract submission for SAS conference

I just submitted an abstract for the Southern Anthropological Society's Annual Meeting in Richmond. Literally five minutes later, I got the following e-mail back from the conference organizer:
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Hi Marginalia84,
It looks like a perfect paper given the themes of the conference. looking forward to seeing you there.
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Eee! I'm getting pretty good at this conference presentation thingy! Nice to get a positive response so quickly, as opposed to my surprising last-minute accidentally-found-my-name-in-the-program acceptance to the AAA last fall.

Here's the abstract I submitted. It's basically one of the chapters from my M.A. thesis on Disneyland.
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Title: It’s a Small World After All? Questioning (Re)presentations in the Happiest Place on Earth.

Abstract: “The Happiest Place on Earth” is a label persistently applied by Disneyland to itself and is widely recognized as referring to Disneyland in American popular culture. The phrase is evocative of Walt Disney’s opening remark that he made on the park’s opening day on July 17, 1955: “To all who come to this happy place, welcome.” But if Disneyland is a happy place, why must it necessarily be “The Happiest Place on Earth,” rather than “The Happiest Place in America,” for instance? Disneyland cannot be the Happiest Place in America because Disneyland is America, or at least a simulacrum of it. Specifically, Baudrillard calls it a third-order simulacrum, one which masks the absence of a profound reality. In this paper, I explore the simulacrum by considering Disneyland’s presentation of itself as America, particularly with regard to Main Street USA and Frontierland, where the fantasy of Disneyland-as-America is sustained by the creation of a faux-nostalgic past and the erasure of troubling differences. I also question Disneyland’s contrasting presentations of the rest of the world, which range from the kitschy vision of universal sameness presented the “It’s a Small World” ride to the comic presentation of difference-as-dangerous in the Jungle Cruise ride. I incorporate Victor Turner’s ritual analysis, a keyword-focused discourse analysis, and Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems theory into my reading of the park.

Keywords: representation, simulacrum, ritual, performance, discourse, Disneyland

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Wish me luck! Richmond here I come!