Auswahl der wissenschaftlichen Literatur zum Thema „Catchpole, Chloe – Mental health“

Do you have something to share, reflect on or provoke thinking around? Write to the editor: elly.roberts@markallengroup.com Early years practitioner, Chloe Webster, shares her thoughts on the importance of staff understanding the relationship between the mental health needs of their colleagues and those of the children in their care, for Mental Health Awareness Month in May.

This monograph analyzes online coverage and social media posts from five professional athletes—Simone Biles, Serena Williama, Naomi Osaka, Chloe Kim, and Gracie Gold—to sheds light on the journalistic and individual narratives around athletes, performance, goals as these intersect with mental health. Online news and entertainment media’s general representation of athletes frequently emphasizes victory with a focus on outcomes, often overshadowing the athletes’ well-being. Using social identity and framing theories, the study identifies narratives in social and online media, emphasizing the storytelling components related to mental health, as well as what athletes express as potential causes of the mental health issues they are experiencing, especially intense competition, physical condition, media pressure, and a general lack of mental health awareness in sports. The study’s examination of how athletes use their social media platforms to help journalists craft their stories offers a deeper understanding of their mental health stories beyond the basic win-or-lose narrative. We advocate for a paradigm shift, urging recognition of athletes as individuals with vulnerabilities who deserve supportive environments.

Abstract We use regression models to examine baseline differences in physical and mental health PROs [Physical and Mental Component Summary T-scores (PCS/MCS: are linear transformations of the 0-100 possible range scoring for 8 SF-36/VR-12 sub-scales, with mean of 50 and standard deviation (SD) of 10, normed to the US population)] among non-Hispanic black (NHB), non-Hispanic white (NHW), and Hispanic elderly female patients, with newly diagnosed breast cancer (BC) between 2010-2015 in the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results-Medicare Health Outcomes Survey (SEER-MHOS) database (a cancer registry that provides value health-related quality of life information on patients enrolled in Medicare Advantage). The study analytic sample consisted of 11,765 NHW, 1,988 NHB and 1,361 Hispanic women with overall mean age and BMI of 50.1 years (SD: 10.5) and 27.5 kg/m^2 (SD: 6.6), respectively. Compared with NHW both NHB and Hispanic women had significantly elevated BMI [NHB risk difference (RD) 3.43, 95% CI: 3.09, 3.77; Hispanic RD 0.84, 95% CI: 0.44, 1.24]; but significantly lower age at diagnosis [NHB RD -2.86, 95% CI: -3.36, -2.37; Hispanic RD -1.67, 95% CI: -2.26, -1.09]. Compared with NHW, both crude PCS and MCS scores were significantly worse for NHB and Hispanic women [PCS: NHB RD -4.26, 95% CI: -4.87, -3.65; Hispanic RD -3.29, 95% CI: -4.01, -2.56; MCS: NHB RD -3.79, 95% CI: -4.37, -3.22; Hispanic RD -4.09, 95% CI: -4.76, -3.43]. These differences also persisted after adjustment for BMI and age [compared with NHW, PCS: NHB RD -2.09, 95% CI: -2.76, -1.43; Hispanic RD -3.26, 95% CI: -4.06, -2.45; MCS: NHB RD -3.2, 95% CI: -3.86, -2.54; Hispanic RD -4.21, 95% CI: -4.99, -3.43]. There were however no significant differences in PCS or MCS scores between NHB and Hispanic women after adjustment for age and BMI. Our results show that elderly NHB and Hispanic women with BC in the SEER-MHOS database are significantly more likely to have poorer physical and mental outcomes compared with NHW. However, this PRO disparity was not evident between NHB and Hispanic women and requires further exploration. Citation Format: Kendra R. Krebsbach, Chloe L. Stallion, Keith A. Dookeran. Examination of race/ethnicity differences in patient reported outcomes (PROs) among elderly female breast cancer patients in the SEER-MHOS database [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2022; 2022 Apr 8-13. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2022;82(12_Suppl):Abstract nr 5867.

ObjectiveTo assess evidence for public health impact of syndromic surveillance.IntroductionSystematic syndromic surveillance is undergoing a transition. Building on traditional roots in bioterrorism and situational awareness, proponents are demonstrating the timeliness and informative power of syndromic surveillance data to supplement other surveillance data.MethodsWe used PubMed and Google Scholar to identify articles published since 2007 using key words of interest (e.g., syndromic surveillance in combinations with emergency, evaluation, quality assurance, alerting). The following guiding questions were used to abstract impact measures of syndromic surveillance: 1) what was the public health impact; what decisions or actions occurred because of use of syndromic surveillance data?, 2) were there specific interventions or performance measures for this impact?, and 3) how, and by whom, was this information used?ResultsThirty-five papers were included. Almost all articles (n=33) remarked on the ability of syndromic surveillance to improve public health because of timeliness and/or accuracy of data. Thirty-four articles mentioned that syndromic surveillance data was used or could be useful. However, evidence of health impact directly attributable to syndromic surveillance efforts were lacking. Two articles described how syndromic data were used for decision-making. One article measured the effect of data utilization.ConclusionsWithin the syndromic surveillance literature instances of a conceptual shift from detection to practical response are plentiful. As the field of syndromic surveillance continues to evolve and is used by public health institutions, further evaluation of data utility and impact is needed.ReferencesAyala, A., Berisha, V., Goodin, K., Pogreba-Brown, K., Levy, C., McKinney, B., Koski, L., & Imholte, S. (2016). 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Introduction: Bubbles and Sport The ephemeral materiality of bubbles – beautiful, spectacular, and distracting but ultimately fragile – when applied to protect or conserve in the interests of sport-media profit, creates conditions that exacerbate existing inequalities in sport and society. Bubbles are usually something to watch, admire, and chase after in their brief yet shiny lives. There is supposed to be, technically, nothing inside them other than one or more gasses, and yet we constantly refer to people and objects being inside bubbles. The metaphor of the bubble has been used to describe the life of celebrities, politicians in purpose-built capital cities like Canberra, and even leftist, environmentally activist urban dwellers. The metaphorical and material qualities of bubbles are aligned—they cannot be easily captured and are liable to change at any time. In this article we address the metaphorical sporting bubble, which is often evoked in describing life in professional sport. This is a vernacular term used to capture and condemn the conditions of life of elite sportspeople (usually men), most commonly after there has been a sport-related scandal, especially of a sexual nature (Rowe). It is frequently paired with connotatively loaded adjectives like pampered and indulged. The sporting bubble is rarely interrogated in academic literature, the concept largely being left to the media and moral entrepreneurs. It is represented as involving a highly privileged but also pressurised life for those who live inside it. A sporting bubble is a world constructed for its most prized inhabitants that enables them to be protected from insurgents and to set the terms of their encounters with others, especially sport fans and disciplinary agents of the state. The Covid-19 pandemic both reinforced and reconfigured the operational concept of the bubble, re-arranging tensions between safety (protecting athletes) and fragility (short careers, risks of injury, etc.) for those within, while safeguarding those without from bubble contagion. Privilege and Precarity Bubble-induced social isolation, critics argue, encourages a loss of perspective among those under its protection, an entitled disconnection from the usual rules and responsibilities of everyday life. For this reason, the denizens of the sporting bubble are seen as being at risk to themselves and, more troublingly, to those allowed temporarily to penetrate it, especially young women who are first exploited by and then ejected from it (Benedict). There are many well-documented cases of professional male athletes “behaving badly” and trying to rely on institutional status and various versions of the sporting bubble for shelter (Flood and Dyson; Reel and Crouch; Wade). In the age of mobile and social media, it is increasingly difficult to keep misbehaviour in-house, resulting in a slew of media stories about, for example, drunkenness and sexual misconduct, such as when then-Sydney Roosters co-captain Mitchell Pearce was suspended and fined in 2016 after being filmed trying to force an unwanted kiss on a woman and then simulating a lewd act with her dog while drunk. There is contestation between those who condemn such behaviour as aberrant and those who regard it as the conventional expression of youthful masculinity as part of the familiar “boys will be boys” dictum. The latter naturalise an inequitable gender order, frequently treating sportsmen as victims of predatory women, and ignoring asymmetries of power between men and women, especially in homosocial environments (Toffoletti). For those in the sporting bubble (predominantly elite sportsmen and highly paid executives, also mostly men, with an array of service staff of both sexes moving in and out of it), life is reflected for those being protected via an array of screens (small screens in homes and indoor places of entertainment, and even smaller screens on theirs and others’ phones, as well as huge screens at sport events). These male sport stars are paid handsomely to use their skill and strength to perform for the sporting codes, their every facial expression and bodily action watched by the media and relayed to audiences. This is often a precarious existence, the usually brief career of an athlete worker being dependent on health, luck, age, successful competition with rivals, networks, and club and coach preferences. There is a large, aspirational reserve army of athletes vying to play at the elite level, despite risks of injury and invasive, life-changing medical interventions. Responsibility for avoiding performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs) also weighs heavily on their shoulders (Connor). Professional sportspeople, in their more reflective moments, know that their time in the limelight will soon be up, meaning that getting a ticket to the sporting bubble, even for a short time, can make all the difference to their post-sport lives and those of their families. The most vulnerable of the small minority of participants in sport who make a good, short-term living from it are those for whom, in the absence of quality education and prior social status, it is their sole likely means of upward social mobility (Spaaij). Elite sport performers are surrounded by minders, doctors, fitness instructors, therapists, coaches, advisors and other service personnel, all supporting athletes to stay focussed on and maximise performance quality to satisfy co-present crowds, broadcasters, sponsors, sports bodies and mass media audiences. The shield offered by the sporting bubble supports the teleological win-at-all-costs mentality of professional sport. The stakes are high, with athlete and executive salaries, sponsorships and broadcasting deals entangled in a complex web of investments in keeping the “talent” pivotal to the “attention economy” (Davenport and Beck)—the players that provide the content for sale—in top form. Yet, the bubble cannot be entirely secured and poor behaviour or performance can have devastating effects, including permanent injury or disability, mental illness and loss of reputation (Rowe, “Scandals and Sport”). Given this fragile materiality of the sporting bubble, it is striking that, in response to the sudden shutdown following the economic and health crisis caused by the 2020 global pandemic, the leaders of professional sport decided to create more of them and seek to seal the metaphorical and material space with unprecedented efficiency. The outcome was a multi-sided tale of mobility, confinement, capital, labour, and the gendering of sport and society. The Covid-19 Gilded Cage Sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman and John Urry have analysed the socio-politics of mobilities, whereby some people in the world, such as tourists, can traverse the globe at their leisure, while others remain fixed in geographical space because they lack the means to be mobile or, in contrast, are involuntarily displaced by war, so-called “ethnic cleansing”, famine, poverty or environmental degradation. The Covid-19 global pandemic re-framed these matters of mobilities (Rowe, “Subjecting Pandemic Sport”), with conventional moving around—between houses, businesses, cities, regions and countries—suddenly subjected to the imperative to be static and, in perniciously unreflective technocratic discourse, “socially distanced” (when what was actually meant was to be “physically distanced”). The late-twentieth century analysis of the “risk society” by Ulrich Beck, in which the mysterious consequences of humans’ predation on their environment are visited upon them with terrifying force, was dramatically realised with the coming of Covid-19. In another iteration of the metaphor, it burst the bubble of twenty-first century global sport. What we today call sport was formed through the process of sportisation (Maguire), whereby hyper-local, folk physical play was reconfigured as multi-spatial industrialised sport in modernity, becoming increasingly reliant on individual athletes and teams travelling across the landscape and well over the horizon. Co-present crowds were, in turn, overshadowed in the sport economy when sport events were taken to much larger, dispersed audiences via the media, especially in broadcast mode (Nicholson, Kerr, and Sherwood). This lucrative mediation of professional sport, though, came with an unforgiving obligation to generate an uninterrupted supply of spectacular live sport content. The pandemic closed down most sports events and those that did take place lacked the crucial participation of the co-present crowd to provide the requisite event atmosphere demanded by those viewers accustomed to a sense of occasion. Instead, they received a strange spectacle of sport performers operating in empty “cathedrals”, often with a “faked” crowd presence. The mediated sport spectacle under the pandemic involved cardboard cut-out and sex doll spectators, Zoom images of fans on large screens, and sampled sounds of the crowd recycled from sport video games. Confected co-presence produced simulacra of the “real” as Baudrillardian visions came to life. The sporting bubble had become even more remote. For elite sportspeople routinely isolated from the “common people”, the live sport encounter offered some sensory experience of the social – the sounds, sights and even smells of the crowd. Now the sporting bubble closed in on an already insulated and insular existence. It exposed the irony of the bubble as a sign of both privileged mobility and incarcerated athlete work, both refuge and prison. Its logic of contagion also turned a structure intended to protect those inside from those outside into, as already observed, a mechanism to manage the threat of insiders to outsiders. In Australia, as in many other countries, the populace was enjoined by governments and health authorities to help prevent the spread of Covid-19 through isolation and immobility. There were various exceptions, principally those classified as essential workers, a heterogeneous cohort ranging from supermarket shelf stackers to pharmacists. People in the cultural, leisure and sports industries, including musicians, actors, and athletes, were not counted among this crucial labour force. Indeed, the performing arts (including dance, theatre and music) were put on ice with quite devastating effects on the livelihoods and wellbeing of those involved. So, with all major sports shut down (the exception being horse racing, which received the benefit both of government subsidies and expanding online gambling revenue), sport organisations began to represent themselves as essential services that could help sustain collective mental and even spiritual wellbeing. This case was made most aggressively by Australian Rugby League Commission Chairman, Peter V’landys, in contending that “an Australia without rugby league is not Australia”. In similar vein, prominent sport and media figure Phil Gould insisted, when describing rugby league fans in Western Sydney’s Penrith, “they’re lost, because the football’s not on … . It holds their families together. People don’t understand that … . Their life begins in the second week of March, and it ends in October”. Despite misgivings about public safety and equality before the pandemic regime, sporting bubbles were allowed to form, re-form and circulate. The indefinite shutdown of the National Rugby League (NRL) on 23 March 2020 was followed after negotiation between multiple entities by its reopening on 28 May 2020. The competition included a team from another nation-state (the Warriors from Aotearoa/New Zealand) in creating an international sporting bubble on the Central Coast of New South Wales, separating them from their families and friends across the Tasman Sea. Appeals to the mental health of fans and the importance of the NRL to myths of “Australianness” notwithstanding, the league had not prudently maintained a financial reserve and so could not afford to shut down for long. Significant gambling revenue for leagues like the NRL and Australian Football League (AFL) also influenced the push to return to sport business as usual. Sport contests were needed in order to exploit the gambling opportunities – especially online and mobile – stimulated by home “confinement”. During the coronavirus lockdowns, Australians’ weekly spending on gambling went up by 142 per cent, and the NRL earned significantly more than usual from gambling revenue—potentially $10 million above forecasts for 2020. Despite the clear financial imperative at play, including heavy reliance on gambling, sporting bubble-making involved special licence. The state of Queensland, which had pursued a hard-line approach by closing its borders for most of those wishing to cross them for biographical landmark events like family funerals and even for medical treatment in border communities, became “the nation's sporting hub”. Queensland became the home of most teams of the men’s AFL (notably the women’s AFLW season having been cancelled) following a large Covid-19 second wave in Melbourne. The women’s National Netball League was based exclusively in Queensland. This state, which for the first time hosted the AFL Grand Final, deployed sport as a tool in both national sports tourism marketing and internal pre-election politics, sponsoring a documentary, The Sporting Bubble 2020, via its Tourism and Events arm. While Queensland became the larger bubble incorporating many other sporting bubbles, both the AFL and the NRL had versions of the “fly in, fly out” labour rhythms conventionally associated with the mining industry in remote and regional areas. In this instance, though, the bubble experience did not involve long stays in miners’ camps or even the one-night hotel stopovers familiar to the popular music and sport industries. Here, the bubble moved, usually by plane, to fulfil the requirements of a live sport “gig”, whereupon it was immediately returned to its more solid bubble hub or to domestic self-isolation. In the space created between disciplined expectation and deplored non-compliance, the sporting bubble inevitably became the scrutinised object and subject of scandal. Sporting Bubble Scandals While people with a very low risk of spreading Covid-19 (coming from areas with no active cases) were denied entry to Queensland for even the most serious of reasons (for example, the death of a child), images of AFL players and their families socialising and enjoying swimming at the Royal Pines Resort sporting bubble crossed our screens. Yet, despite their (players’, officials’ and families’) relative privilege and freedom of movement under the AFL Covid-Safe Plan, some players and others inside the bubble were involved in “scandals”. Most notable was the case of a drunken brawl outside a Gold Coast strip club which led to two Richmond players being “banished”, suspended for 10 matches, and the club fined $100,000. But it was not only players who breached Covid-19 bubble protocols: Collingwood coaches Nathan Buckley and Brenton Sanderson paid the $50,000 fine imposed on the club for playing tennis in Perth outside their bubble, while Richmond was fined $45,000 after Brooke Cotchin, wife of team captain Trent, posted an image to Instagram of a Gold Coast day spa that she had visited outside the “hub” (the institutionally preferred term for bubble). She was subsequently distressed after being trolled. Also of concern was the lack of physical distancing, and the range of people allowed into the sporting bubble, including babysitters, grandparents, and swimming coaches (for children). There were other cases of players being caught leaving the bubble to attend parties and sharing videos of their “antics” on social media. Biosecurity breaches of bubbles by players occurred relatively frequently, with stern words from both the AFL and NRL leaders (and their clubs) and fines accumulating in the thousands of dollars. Some people were also caught sneaking into bubbles, with Lekahni Pearce, the girlfriend of Swans player Elijah Taylor, stating that it was easy in Perth, “no security, I didn’t see a security guard” (in Barron, Stevens, and Zaczek) (a month later, outside the bubble, they had broken up and he pled guilty to unlawfully assaulting her; Ramsey). Flouting the rules, despite stern threats from government, did not lead to any bubble being popped. The sport-media machine powering sporting bubbles continued to run, the attendant emotional or health risks accepted in the name of national cultural therapy, while sponsorship, advertising and gambling revenue continued to accumulate mostly for the benefit of men. Gendering Sporting Bubbles Designed as biosecurity structures to maintain the supply of media-sport content, keep players and other vital cogs of the machine running smoothly, and to exclude Covid-19, sporting bubbles were, in their most advanced form, exclusive luxury camps that illuminated the elevated socio-cultural status of sportsmen. The ongoing inequalities between men’s and women’s sport in Australia and around the world were clearly in evidence, as well as the politics of gender whereby women are obliged to “care” and men are enabled to be “careless” – or at least to manage carefully their “duty of care”. In Australia, the only sport for women that continued during the height of the Covid-19 lockdown was netball, which operated in a bubble that was one of sacrifice rather than privilege. With minimum salaries of only $30,000 – significantly less than the lowest-paid “rookies” in the AFL – and some being mothers of small children and/or with professional jobs juggled alongside their netball careers, these elite sportswomen wanted to continue to play despite the personal inconvenience or cost (Pavlidis). Not one breach of the netballers out of the bubble was reported, indicating that they took their responsibilities with appropriate seriousness and, perhaps, were subjected to less scrutiny than the sportsmen accustomed to attracting front-page headlines. National Netball League (also known after its Queensland-based naming rights sponsor as Suncorp Super Netball) players could be regarded as fortunate to have the opportunity to be in a bubble and to participate in their competition. The NRL Women’s (NRLW) Premiership season was also completed, but only involved four teams subject to fly in, fly out and bubble arrangements, and being played in so-called curtain-raiser games for the NRL. As noted earlier, the AFLW season was truncated, despite all the prior training and sacrifice required of its players. Similarly, because of their resource advantages, the UK men’s and boy’s top six tiers of association football were allowed to continue during lockdown, compared to only two for women and girls. In the United States, inequalities between men’s and women’s sports were clearly demonstrated by the conditions afforded to those elite sportswomen inside the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) sport bubble in the IMG Academy in Florida. Players shared photos of rodent traps in their rooms, insect traps under their mattresses, inedible food and blocked plumbing in their bubble accommodation. These conditions were a far cry from the luxury usually afforded elite sportsmen, including in Florida’s Walt Disney World for the men’s NBA, and is just one of the many instances of how gendered inequality was both reproduced and exacerbated by Covid-19. Bursting the Bubble As we have seen, governments and corporate leaders in sport were able to create material and metaphorical bubbles during the Covid-19 lockdown in order to transmit stadium sport contests into home spaces. The rationale was the importance of sport to national identity, belonging and the routines and rhythms of life. But for whom? Many women, who still carry the major responsibilities of “care”, found that Covid-19 intensified the affective relations and gendered inequities of “home” as a leisure site (Fullagar and Pavlidis). Rates of domestic violence surged, and many women experienced significant anxiety and depression related to the stress of home confinement and home schooling. During the pandemic, women were also more likely to experience the stress and trauma of being first responders, witnessing virus-related sickness and death as the majority of nurses and care workers. They also bore the brunt of much of the economic and employment loss during this time. Also, as noted above, livelihoods in the arts and cultural sector did not receive the benefits of the “bubble”, despite having a comparable claim to sport in contributing significantly to societal wellbeing. This sector’s workforce is substantially female, although men dominate its senior roles. Despite these inequalities, after the late March to May hiatus, many elite male sportsmen – and some sportswomen - operated in a bubble. Moving in and out of them was not easy. Life inside could be mentally stressful (especially in long stays of up to 150 days in sports like cricket), and tabloid and social media troll punishment awaited those who were caught going “over the fence”. But, life in the sporting bubble was generally preferable to the daily realities of those afflicted by the trauma arising from forced home confinement, and for whom watching moving sports images was scant compensation for compulsory immobility. The ethical foundation of the sparkly, ephemeral fantasy of the sporting bubble is questionable when it is placed in the service of a voracious “media sports cultural complex” (Rowe, Global Media Sport) that consumes sport labour power and rolls back progress in gender relations as a default response to a global pandemic. Covid-19 dramatically highlighted social inequalities in many areas of life, including medical care, work, and sport. For the small minority of people involved in sport who are elite professionals, the only thing worse than being in a sporting bubble during the pandemic was not being in one, as being outside precluded their participation. Being inside the bubble was a privilege, albeit a dubious one. But, as in wider society, not all sporting bubbles are created equal. Some are more opulent than others, and the experiences of the supporting and the supported can be very different. The surface of the sporting bubble may be impermanent, but when its interior is opened up to scrutiny, it reveals some very durable structures of inequality. Bubbles are made to burst. They are, by nature, temporary, translucent structures created as spectacles. As a form of luminosity, bubbles “allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer” (Deleuze, 52). In echoing Deleuze, Angela McRobbie (54) argues that luminosity “softens and disguises the regulative dynamics of neoliberal society”. The sporting bubble was designed to discharge that function for those millions rendered immobile by home confinement legislation in Australia and around the world, who were having to deal with the associated trauma, risk and disadvantage. 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In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, where income has become precarious and Internet use has soared, the influencer industry has to strategise over new ways to sustain viewer attention, maintain income flows, and innovate around formats and messaging, to avoid being excluded from continued commercial possibilities. In this article, we review the press coverage of the influencer markets in Australia, Japan, and Korea, and consider how the industry has been attempting to navigate their way through the pandemic through deviations and detours. We consider the narratives and groups of influencers who have been included and excluded in shaping the discourse about influencer strategies in the time of COVID-19. The distinction between inclusion and exclusion has been a crucial mechanism to maintain the social normativity, constructed with gender, sexuality, wealth, able-ness, education, age, and so on (Stäheli and Stichweh, par. 3; Hall and Du Gay 5; Bourdieu 162). The influencer industry is the epitome of where the inclusion-exclusion binary is noticeable. It has been criticised for serving as a locus where social norms, such as femininity and middle-class identities, are crystallised and endorsed in the form of visibility and attention (Duffy 234; Abidin 122). Many are concerned about the global expansion of the influencer industry, in which young generations are led to clickbait and sensational content and normative ways of living, in order to be “included” by their peer groups and communities and to avoid being “excluded” (Cavanagh). However, COVID-19 has changed our understanding of the “normal”: people staying home, eschewing social communications, and turning more to the online where they can feel “virtually” connected (Lu et al. 15). The influencer industry also has been affected by COVID-19, since the images of normativity cannot be curated and presented as they used to be. In this situation, it is questionable how the influencer industry that pivots on the inclusion-exclusion binary is adjusting to the “new normal” brought by COVID-19, and how the binary is challenged or maintained, especially by exploring the continuities and discontinuities in industry. Methodology This cross-cultural study draws from a corpus of articles from Australia, Japan, and Korea published between January and May 2020, to investigate how local news outlets portrayed the contingencies undergone by the influencer industry, and what narratives or groups of influencers were excluded in the process. An extended discussion of our methodology has been published in an earlier article (Abidin et al. 5-7). Using the top ranked search engine of each country (Google for Australia and Japan, Naver for Korea), we compiled search results of news articles from the first ten pages (ten results per page) of each search, prioritising reputable news sites over infotainment sites, and by using targeted keyword searches: for Australia: ‘influencer’ and ‘Australia’ and ‘COVID-19’, ‘coronavirus’, ‘pandemic’; for Japan: ‘インフルエンサー’ (influensā) and ‘コロナ’ (korona), ‘新型コロ ナ’ (shin-gata korona), ‘コロナ禍’ (korona-ka); for Korea: ‘인플루언서’ (Influencer) and ‘코로나’ (corona) and ‘팬데믹’ (pandemic). 111 articles were collected (42 for Australia, 31 for Japan, 38 for Korea). In this article, we focus on a subset of 60 articles and adopt a grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss 5) to manually conduct open, axial, and close coding of their headline and body text. Each headline was translated by the authors and coded for a primary and secondary ‘open code’ across seven categories: Income loss, Backlash, COVID-19 campaign, Misinformation, Influencer strategy, Industry shifts, and Brand leverage. The body text was coded in a similar manner to indicate all the relevant open codes covered in the article. In this article, we focus on the last two open codes that illustrate how brands have been working with influencers to tide through COVID-19, and what the overall industry shifts were on the three Asia-Pacific country markets. Table 1 (see Appendix) indicates a full list of our coding schema. Inclusion of the Normal in Shifting Brand Preferences In this section, we consider two main shifts in brand preferences: an increased demand for influencers, and a reliance on influencers to boost viewer/consumer traffic. We found that by expanding digital marketing through Influencers, companies attempted to secure a so-called “new normal” during the pandemic. However, their marketing strategies tended to reiterate the existing inclusion-exclusion binary and exacerbated the lack of diversity and inequality in the industry. Increased Demand for Influencers Across the three country markets, brokers and clients in the influencer industry increased their demand for influencers’ services and expertise to sustain businesses via advertising in the “aftermath of COVID-19”, as they were deemed to be more cost-efficient “viral marketing on social media” (Yoo). By outsourcing content production to influencers who could still produce content independently from their homes (Cheik-Hussein) and who engage with audiences with their “interactive communication ability” (S. Kim and Cho), many companies attempted to continue their business and maintain their relationships with prospective consumers (Forlani). As the newly enforced social distancing measures have also interrupted face-to-face contact opportunities, the mass pivot towards influencers for digital marketing is perceived to further professionalise the industry via competition and quality control in all three countries (Wilkinson; S. Kim and Cho; Yadorigi). By integrating these online personae of influencers into their marketing, the business side of each country is moving towards the new normal in different manners. In Australia, businesses launched campaigns showcasing athlete influencers engaging in meaningful activities at home (e.g. yoga, cooking), and brands and companies reorganised their marketing strategies to highlight social responsibilities (Moore). On the other hand, for some companies in the Japanese market, the disruption from the pandemic was a rare opportunity to build connections and work with “famous” and “prominent” influencers (Yadorigi), otherwise unavailable and unwilling to work for smaller campaigns during regular periods of an intensely competitive market. In Korea, by emphasising their creative ability, influencers progressed from being “mere PR tools” to becoming “active economic subjects of production” who now can play a key role in product planning for clients, mediating companies and consumers (S. Kim and Cho). The underpinning premise here is that influencers are tech-savvy and therefore competent in creating media content, forging relationships with people, and communicating with them “virtually” through social media. Reliance on Influencers to Boost Viewer/Consumer Traffic Across several industry verticals, brands relied on influencers to boost viewership and consumer traffic on their digital estates and portals, on the premise that influencers work in line with the attention economy (Duffy 234). The fashion industry’s expansion of influencer marketing was noticeable in this manner. For instance, Korean department store chains (e.g. Lotte) invited influencers to “no-audience live fashion shows” to attract viewership and advertise fashion goods through the influencers’ social media (Y. Kim), and Australian swimwear brand Vitamin A partnered with influencers to launch online contests to invite engagement and purchases on their online stores (Moore). Like most industries where aspirational middle-class lifestyles are emphasised, the travel industry also extended partnerships with their current repertoire of influencers or international influencers in order to plan for the post-COVID-19 market recovery and post-border reopening tourism boom (Moore; Yamatogokoro; J. Lee). By extension, brands without any prior relationships with influencers, whcih did not have such histories to draw on, were likely to have struggled to produce new influencer content. Such brands could thus only rely on hiring influencers specifically to leverage their follower base. The increasing demand for influencers in industries like fashion, food, and travel is especially notable. In the attention economy where (media) visibility can be obtained and maintained (Duffy 121), media users practice “visibility labor” to curate their media personas and portray branding themselves as arbiters of good taste (Abidin 122). As such, influencers in genres where personal taste can be visibly presented—e.g. fashion, travel, F&B—seem to have emerged from the economic slump with a head start, especially given their dominance on the highly visual platform of Instagram. Our analysis shows that media coverage during COVID-19 repeated the discursive correlation between influencers and such hyper-visible or visually-oriented industries. However, this dominant discourse about hyper-visible influencers and the gendered genres of their work has ultimately reinforced norms of self-presentation in the industry—e.g. being feminine, young, beautiful, luxurious—while those who deviate from such norms seem to be marginalised and excluded in media coverage and economic opportunities during the pandemic cycle. Including Newness by Shifting Format Preferences We observed the inclusion of newness in the influencer scenes in all three countries. By shifting to new formats, the previously excluded and lesser seen aspects of our lives—such as home-based content—began to be integrated into the “new normal”. There were four main shifts in format preferences, wherein influencers pivoted to home-made content, where livestreaming is the new dominant format of content, and where followers preferred more casual influencer content. Influencers Have Pivoted to Home-Made Content In all three country markets, influencers have pivoted to generating content based on life at home and ideas of domesticity. These public displays of homely life corresponded with the sudden occurrence of being wired to the Internet all day—also known as “LAN cable life” (랜선라이프, lan-seon life) in the Korean media—which influencers were chiefly responsible for pioneering (B. Kim). While some genres like gaming and esports were less impacted upon by the pivot, given that the nature and production of the content has always been confined to a desktop at home (Cheik-Hussein), pivots occurred for the likes of outdoor brands (Moore), the culinary industry (Dean), and fitness and workout brands (Perelli and Whateley). In Korea, new trends such as “home cafes” (B. Kim) and DIY coffees—like the infamous “Dalgona-Coffee” that was first introduced by a Korean YouTuber 뚤기 (ddulgi)—went viral on social media across the globe (Makalintal). In Japan, the spike in influencers showcasing at-home activities (Hayama) also encouraged mainstream TV celebrities to open social media accounts explicitly to do the same (Kamada). In light of these trends, the largest Multi-Channel Network (MCN) in Japan, UUUM, partnered with one of the country’s largest entertainment industries, Yoshimoto Kogyo, to assist the latter’s comedian talents to establish a digital video presence—a trend that was also observed in Korea (Koo), further underscoring the ubiquity of influencer practices in the time of COVID-19. Along with those creators who were already producing content in a domestic environment before COVID-19, it was the influencers with the time and resources to quickly pivot to home-made content who profited the most from the spike in Internet traffic during the pandemic (Noshita). The benefits of this boost in traffic were far from equal. For instance, many others who had to turn to makeshift work for income, and those who did not have conducive living situations to produce content at home, were likely to be disadvantaged. Livestreaming Is the New Dominant Format Amidst the many new content formats to be popularised during COVID-19, livestreaming was unanimously the most prolific. In Korea, influencers were credited for the mainstreaming and demotising (Y. Kim) of livestreaming for “live commerce” through real-time advertorials and online purchases. Livestreaming influencers were solicited specifically to keep international markets continuously interested in Korean products and cultures (Oh), and livestreaming was underscored as a main economic driver for shaping a “post-COVID-19” society (Y. Kim). In Australia, livestreaming was noted among art (Dean) and fitness influencers (Dean), and in Japan it began to be adopted among major fashion brands like Prada and Chloe (Saito). While the Australian coverage included livestreaming on platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, and Douyin (Cheik-Hussein; Perelli and Whateley; Webb), the Japanese coverage highlighted the potential for Instagram Live to target young audiences, increase feelings of “trustworthiness”, and increase sales via word-of-mouth advertising (Saito). In light of reduced client campaigns, influencers in Australia had also used livestreaming to provide online consulting, teaching, and coaching (Perelli and Whateley), and to partner with brands to provide masterclasses and webinars (Sanders). In this era, influencers in genres and verticals that had already adopted streaming as a normative practice—e.g. gaming and lifestyle performances—were likely to have had an edge over others, while other genres were excluded from this economic silver lining. Followers Prefer More Casual Influencer Content In general, all country markets report followers preferring more casual influencer content. In Japan, this was offered via the potential of livestreaming to deliver more “raw” feelings (Saito), while in Australia this was conveyed through specific content genres like “mental or physical health battles” (Moore); specific aesthetic choices like appearing “messier”, less “curated”, and “more unfiltered” (Wilkinson); and the growing use of specific emergent platforms like TikTok (Dean, Forlani, Perelli, and Whateley). In Korea, influencers in the photography, travel, and book genres were celebrated for their new provision of pseudo-experiences during COVID-19-imposed social distancing (Kang). Influencers on Instagram also spearheaded new social media trends, like the “#wheredoyouwannago_challenge” where Instagram users photoshopped themselves into images of famous tourist spots around the world (Kang). Conclusion In our study of news articles on the impact of COVID-19 on the Australian, Japanese, and Korean influencer industries during the first wave of the pandemic, influencer marketing was primed to be the dominant and default mode of advertising and communication in the post-COVID-19 era (Tate). In general, specific industry verticals that relied more on visual portrayals of lifestyles and consumption—e.g. fashion, F&B, travel—to continue partaking in economic recovery efforts. However, given the gendered genre norms in the industry, this meant that influencers who were predominantly feminine, young, beautiful, and luxurious experienced more opportunity over others. Further, influencers who did not have the resources or skills to pivot to the “new normals” of creating content from home, engaging in livestreaming, and performing their personae more casually were excluded from these new economic opportunities. Across the countries, there were minor differences in the overall perception of influencers. There was an increasingly positive perception of influencers in Japan and Korea, due to new norms and pandemic-related opportunities in the media ecology: in Korea, influencers were considered to be the “vanguard of growing media commerce in the post-pandemonium era” (S. Kim and Cho), and in Japan, influencers were identified as critical vehicles during a more general consumer shift from traditional media to social media, as TV watching time is reduced and home-based e-commerce purchases are increasingly popular (Yadogiri). However, in Australia, in light of the sudden influx of influencer marketing strategies during COVID-19, the market seemed to be saturated more quickly: brands were beginning to question the efficiency of influencers, cautioned that their impact has not been completely proven for all industry verticals (Stephens), and have also begun to reduce commissions for influencer affiliate programmes as a cost-cutting measure (Perelli and Whateley). While news reports on these three markets indicate that there is some level of growth and expansion for various influencers and brands, such opportunities were not experienced equally, with some genres and demographics of influencers and businesses being excluded from pandemic-related pivots and silver linings. Further, in light of the increasing commercial opportunities, pressure for more regulations also emerged; for example, the Korean government announced new investigations into tax avoidance (Han). Not backed up by talent agencies or MCNs, independent influencers are likely to be more exposed to the disciplinary power of shifting regulatory practices, a condition which might have hindered their attempt at diversifying their income streams during the pandemic. Thus, while it is tempting to focus on the privileged and novel influencers who have managed to cling on to some measure of success during the pandemic, scholarly attention should also remember those who are being excluded and left behind, lest generations, cohorts, genres, or subcultures of the once-vibrant influencer industry fade into oblivion. References Abidin, Crystal. “#In$tagLam: Instagram as a repository of taste, a burgeoning marketplace, a war of eyeballs.” Mobile Media Making in an Age of Smartphones. Eds. Marsha Berry and Max Schleser. New York: Palgrave Pivot, 2014. 119-128. <https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137469816_11>. 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Introduction Many examinations of magic and witchcraft in film and television focus on the gender dynamics depicted and what these can reveal about attitudes to women and power in the eras in which they were made. For example, Campbell, in Cheerfully Empowered: The Witch-Wife in Twentieth Century Literature, Television and Film draws from scholarship such as Greene's Bell, Book and Camera, Gibson's Witchcraft Myths in American Culture, and Murphy's The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture to suggest connections between witch-wife narratives and societal responses to feminism. Campbell explores both the allure and fear of powerful women, who are often tamed (or partially tamed) by marriage in these stories. These perspectives provide important insights into cultural imaginings of witches, and this paper aims to use anthropological perspectives to further analyse rituals, spells, and cosmologies of screen stories of magic and witchcraft, asking how these narratives have engaged with witchcraft trials, symbols of women as witches, and rituals and myths invoking goddesses. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a television series that ran for seven seasons (1997-2003), focusses on a young woman, The Slayer, who vanquishes vampires. As Abbott (1) explains, the vampires in seasons one and two are ruled by a particularly old and powerful vampire, The Master, and use prophetic language and ancient rituals. When Buffy kills The Master, the vampiric threat evolves with the character of Spike, a much younger vampire who kills The Master's successor, The Anointed One, calling for “a little less ritual and a little more fun” ('School Hard'). This scene is important to Abbott's thesis that what makes Buffy the Vampire Slayer such an effective television program is that the evil that she battles is not a product of an ancient world but the product of the real world itself. Buffy has used the past four years to painstakingly dismantle and rebuild the conventions of the vampire genre and work toward gradually disembedding the vampire/slayer dichotomy from religious ritual and superstition … what we describe as ‘evil’ is a natural product of the modern world. (Abbott 5) While distinguishing the series from earlier books and films is important, I suggest that, nonetheless, ritual and magic remain central to numerous plots in the series. Moreover, Child argues that Buffy the Vampire Slayer disrupts the male gaze of classical Hollywood films as theorised by Mulvey, not only by making the central action hero a young woman, but by offering rich, complex, and developmental narrative arcs for other characters such as Willow: a quiet fellow student at Buffy's school who initially uses her research skills with books, computers, and science to help the group. Willow’s access to knowledge about magic through Buffy's Watcher, Giles, and his library, together with her growing experience fighting with demons, leads her to teach herself witchcraft, and she and her growing magical powers, including the ability to conjure Greek goddesses such as Hecate and Diana, become central to multiple storylines in the series (Krzywinska). Corcoran, who explores teen witches in American popular culture in some depth, reflects on Willow's changes and developments in the context of problematic 'post-feminist' films of 1990s. Corcoran suggests these films offer viewers tropes of empowerment in the form of the 'makeover' of witch characters, who transform, but often in individualised ways that elude more fundamental questions of societal structures of race, class, and gender. Offering one of the most fluid and hybrid examples, Willow not only embraces magic as a conduit for power and self-expression but, as the seasons progress, she occupies a host of identificatory categories. Moving from shy high school 'geek' to trainee witch, from empowered sorceress to dark avenger, Willow regularly makes herself over in accordance with her fluctuating selfhood (Corcoran). Corcoran also notes how Willow's character brings together skills in both science and witchcraft in ways that echo world views of early modern Europe. This connects her apparently distinct selves and, I suggest, also demonstrates how the show engages with magic as real within its internal cosmology. Fairy Tale Witches This liberating, fluid, and transformative depiction of witches is not, however, the only one. Early in season one, the show reflects tropes of witchcraft found in fairy tale and fantasy films such as Snow White and The Wizard of Oz. Both films are deeply ambivalent in their portraits of fascinating powerful witches, who are, however, also defined by being old, ugly, and/or deeply jealous of and threatening towards younger women (Zipes). The episode “Witch” reproduces these patriarchal rivalries, as the witch of the episode title is the mother of a classmate of Buffy, called Amy, who has used magic to swap bodies with her daughter in an attempt to recapture her lost glory as a famous cheerleader. There are debates around the symbolism of witches and crones, especially those in fairytales, and whether they can be re-purposed. For example, Rountree in 'The New Witch of the West' and Embracing the Witch and the Goddess has conducted interviews and participant observation with feminist witches in New Zealand who use both goddess and witch symbols in their ritual practice and feminist understandings of themselves and society. By embracing both the witch and the goddess, feminist witches disrupt what they regard as false divisions and dichotomies between these symbols and the pressures of the divided self that they argue have been imposed upon women by patriarchy. In these conceptions, the crone is not only a negative symbol, but can be re-evaluated as one of three aspects of the goddess (maiden, mother, and crone), depicting the cycles of all life and also enabling women to embrace the darker aspects of their own natures and emotions (Greenwood; Rountree 'New Witch'; Walker). Witch Trials That said, Germaine, examining witches in folk horror films such as The Witch and The Wicker Man, advises caution about witch images. Drawing from Hutton's The Witch, she explores grotesque images of the witch from the early modern witch trials, arguing that horror cinema can subvert older ideas about witches, but it also reveals their continued power. Indeed, horror cinema has forged the witch into a deeply ambiguous figure that proves problematic for feminism and its project to subvert or otherwise destabilize misogynist symbols. (Germaine 22) Purkiss's examination of early modern witchcraft trials in The Witch in History also questions many assumptions about the period. Contrary to Rountree's 'The New Witch of the West' (222), Purkiss argues that there is no evidence to suggest that healing and midwifery were central concerns of witch hunters, nor were those accused of witchcraft in this period regarded as particularly sexually liberated or lesbian. Moreover, the famous Malleus Maleficarum, a text that is “still the main source for the view that witch-hunting was woman-hunting” was, in fact, disdained by many early modern authorities (Purkiss 7-8). Rather, rivalries and social tensions in communities combined with broader societal politics to generate accusations: a picture that is more in line with Stewart and Strathern's cross-cultural study, Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors and Gossip, of the relationship between witchcraft and gossip. In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Gingerbread”, Amy has matured and has begun to engage with magic herself, as has Willow. The witch trial of the episode is not, however, triggered by this, but is rather initiated by Buffy and her mother finding the bodies of two dead children. Buffy's mother Joyce quickly escalates from understandable concern to a full-on assault on magical practice and knowledge as she founds MOO (Mothers Opposed to the Occult), who raid school lockers, confiscate books from the school library, and eventually try to burn them and Buffy, Willow, and Amy. The episode evokes fairy tales because the 'big bad' is a monster who disguises itself as Hansel and Gretel. As Giles explains, fairy tales can sometimes be real, and in this case, the monster feeds a community its worst fears and thrives off the hatred and chaos that ensues. However, his references to European Wicca covens are somewhat misleading. Hutton, in The Triumph of the Moon, explains that Wicca was founded in the 1950s in England by Gerald Gardner, and claims it to be a continuation of older pagan witch traditions that have largely been discredited. The episode therefore tries to combine a comment on the irrationality and dangers of witch hunts while also suggesting that (within the cosmology of the show) magic is real. Buffy's confrontation with her mother illustrates this. Furious about the confiscation of the library's occult collection, Buffy argues that without the knowledge they contain, young people are not more protected, but rather rendered defenceless, arguing that “maybe next time the world gets sucked into hell, I won't be able to stop it because the anti-hell-sucking book isn't on the approved reading list!” Thus, she simultaneously makes a general point about knowledge as a defence against the evils of the world, while also emphasising how magic is not merely symbolic for her and her friends, but a real, practical, problem and a combatant tool. Spells Spells take considerable skill and practice to master as they are linked to strong emotions but also need mental focus and clarity. Willow's learning curve as a witch is an important illustrator of this principle, as her spells do not always do what she had intended, or rather, she is not always wise to her own intentions. These ideas are also found in anthropological examples (Greenwood). Malinowski, an anthropologist of the Trobriand Islands, theorised that spells and magical objects have their origins in gestures and words that express the emotional states and intentions of the spellcaster. Over time, these became refined and codified in a society, becoming traditional spells that can amplify, focus, and direct the magician's will (Malinowski). In the episode “Witch”, Giles demonstrates the relationship between spells and intention as, casting a spell to reverse Amy's mother's switching of their bodies, he shouts in a commanding voice 'Release!' Willow also hones skills of concentration and directing her will through the practice of pencil floating, a seemingly small magical technique that nonetheless saves her life when she is captured by enemies and narrowly escapes being bitten by a vampire by floating a pencil and staking him with it in the episode “Choices”. The pencil is also used in another episode to illustrate the importance of focus and emotional balance. Willow explains to Buffy that she is honing these skills as she gently spins a pencil in the air, but as the conversation turns to Faith (a rogue Slayer who has hurt Willow's friends), she is distracted and the pencil spins wildly out of control before flying into a tree (“Dopplegangland”). In another example, Willow tries to conjure lights that will guide her out of difficulty in a haunted house, but, unable to make up her mind about where the lights should take her, she is plagued by them multiplying and spinning in multiple directions like a swarm of insects, thereby acting as an illustrator of her refracted metal state (“Fear Itself”). The series also explores the often comical consequences when love spells are cast with unclear motives. In the episode “Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered”, Buffy's friend Xander persuades Amy to cast a love spell on Cordelia who has just broken up with him. Amy warns him that for love spells, the intention should be pure, and is worried that Xander only wants revenge on Cordelia. Predictably, the spell goes wrong, as Cordelia is immune to Xander but every other woman that comes into proximity with him is overcome with obsession for him. Fleeing hordes of women, Xander and Cordelia have the space to talk, and impressed with his efforts to try to win her back, Cordelia rekindles the relationship, defying her traditional friendship circle. In this way, the spell both does not and does work, perhaps because, although Xander thinks he wants Cordelia to be enchanted, in fact what he really wants is her genuine affection and respect. Another example of spells going amiss is in the episode “Something Blue”, when Willow responds to a break-up by reverting to magic. Despondent over her boyfriend Oz leaving town, she wants to accelerate her grieving process and heal more quickly, and casts a spell to have her will be done in order to try to make that happen. The spell, however, does not work as expected but manifests her words about other things when she speaks with passion, rendering Giles blind when she says he does not see (meaning he does not understand her plight), and in another instance of the literal interpretation of Willow’s word choices causes Buffy and the vampire Spike to stop fighting, fall in love, and become an engaged couple. The episode therefore suggests the power of words to manifest unconscious intentions. Words may also, in the Buffyverse, have power in themselves. Overbey and Preston-Matto explore the power of words in the series, using the episode “Superstar” in which Xander speaks some Latin words in front of an open book that responds by spontaneously bursting into flames. They argue that the materiality of language in Buffy the Vampire Slayer [means that] words and utterances have palpable power and their rules must be respected if they are to be wielded as weapons in the fight against evil. (Overbey and Preston Matto 73) However, in drawing upon Searle's Speech Acts they emphasise the relationship between speech acts and meaning, but there are also examples that the sounds in themselves are efficacious, even if the speaker does not understand them – for example, when Willow tries to do the ritual to restore Angel’s soul to him and explains to Oz that it does not matter if he understands the related chant as long as he says it (“Becoming part 2”). The idea that words in themselves have power is also present in the work of Stoller, an ethnographer and magical apprentice to Songhay sorcerers living in the Republic of Niger. He documents a complex and very personal engagement with magic that he found fascinating but dangerous, giving him new powers but also subjecting him to magical attacks (Stoller and Olkes). This experience helped to cultivate his interest in the often under-reported sensuous aspects of anthropology, including the power of sound in spells, which he argues has an energy that goes beyond what the word represents. Moreover, skilled magicians can 'hear' things happening to the subtle essence of a person during rituals (Stoller). Seeing Other Realities Sight is also key to numerous magical practices. Greenwood, for example, has done participant observation with UK witches, including training in the arts of visualisation. Linked to general health benefits of meditation and imaginative play, such practices are also thought to connect adepts to 'other worlds' and their associated powers (Greenwood). Later seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer also depict skills in meditation and concentration, such as in the episode “No Place Like Home”, in which Buffy, worried about her sick mother, uses a spell supposedly created by a French sixteenth-century sorcerer called 'pull the curtain back' to try to see if her mother’s illness is caused by a spell. She uses incense and a ritual circle of sand to put herself into a trance and in that altered state of consciousness sees that her sister, Dawn, was not born to her mother, but has been placed into her family by magic. In another example, in the episode “Who are You?”, Willow has begun a relationship with fellow witch Tara and wants to introduce her to Buffy. However, the rogue Slayer, Faith, has escaped and switched bodies with Buffy, and Tara realises that something is wrong. She suggests doing a spell with Willow to investigate by seeing beyond the physical world and travelling to the nether realm using astral projection. This rather beautiful scene has been interpreted as a symbolic depiction of their sexual relationship (Gibson), but it is also suggesting that, within the context of the series, alternate dimensions, and spells to transport practitioners there, are not purely symbolic. Conclusion The idea that magic, monsters, and demons in the series Buffy the Vampire Slayer act to some extent as metaphors for the challenges that young people face growing up in America is well known (Little). While this is certainly true, at least some of the multiple examples of magic in the series have clear resemblances to witchcraft in numerous social worlds. This depth is potentially exciting for viewers, but it also makes the show's more negative and ambiguous tropes more troubling. Willow and Tara's relationship can be interpreted as showing their independence and rejection of patriarchy, but Willow identifying as lesbian later in the series obscures her earlier relationships with men and her potential identification as bi-sexual, suggesting a need on the part of the show's writers to “contain her metamorphic selfhood” (Corcoran 158-159). Moreover, the identity of lesbians as witches in a vampire narrative is fraught with potentially homophobic associations and stereotypes (Wilts), and one of the few positive depictions of a lesbian relationship on television was ruined by the brutal murder of the Tara character and Willow's subsequent out-of-control magical rampage, bringing the storyline back in line with murderous clichés (Wilts; Gibson). Furthermore, storylines where Willow cannot control her powers, or they are seen as an addiction to evil, make an uncomfortable comment on women and power more generally: a point which Corcoran highlights in relation to Nancy's story in The Craft. Ultimately, representations of magic and witchcraft are representations of power, and this makes them highly significant for societal understandings of power relations, particularly given the complex relationships between witch-hunting and misogyny. The symbols of woman-as-witch have been re-appropriated by fans of witch narratives and feminists, and perhaps most intriguingly, by people who regard magical power as not only symbolic power but as a way to tap into subtle forces and other worlds. Buffy the Vampire Slayer offers something to all of these groups, but all too often reverts to patriarchal tropes. Audiences (some of whom may be magicians) await what film and television witches come next. 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