Journal articles on the topic '21.49 photographic art: other'

Article analyses emergence of copyright law on photography in Russia and achievements of its prominent figures in early stages of formation and evolution of this art in the 19th — early 20th centuries. Copyright on photographic works in the Russian Empire was first regulated in 1857 by naming photography among other artistic property rights, and only in 1911 a separate chapter “Copyright for photographic works” was introduced in Copyright Law. Lack of legislation, as well as complex procedure for obtaining rights for photo production and registration of photographic works significantly impaired photographers rights. Originally photo studios could function only by obtaining privileges “for crafts, trade and inventions in crafts and arts” as well as permission “to engage in photographic craft”. De facto copyright on photographic works started developing right after new photo technology was introduced, even before it was enshrined in legislation. Authors emphasise significance of this historic period of Russia for legislative initiatives in copyright law in general and copyright on photographic works in particular which was also facilitated by the achievements of prominent representatives of photographic art, whose works and technologies serve to preserve cultural heritage.

Abstract Context Overestimation or underestimation of portion size leads to measurement error during dietary assessment. Objective To identify portion size estimation elements (PSEEs) and evaluate their relative efficacy in relation to dietary assessment, and assess the quality of studies validating PSEEs. Data Selection and Extraction Electronic databases, internet sites, and cross-references of published records were searched, generating 16 801 initial records, from which 334 records were reviewed and 542 PSEEs were identified, comprising 5% 1-dimensional tools (eg, food guides), 46% 2-dimensional tools (eg, photographic atlases), and 49% 3-dimensional tools (eg, household utensils). Out of 334 studies, 21 validated a PSEE (compared PSEE to actual food amounts) and 13 compared PSEEs with other PSEEs. Conclusion Quality assessment showed that only a few validation studies were of high quality. According to the findings of validation and comparison studies, food image–based PSEEs were more accurate than food models and household utensils. Key factors to consider when selecting a PSEE include efficiency of the PSEE and its applicability to targeted settings and populations.

Abstract 50 Objective: Despite antiretroviral treatment coverage exceeding 90% by government estimates, Kaposi sarcoma (KS) remains the most prevalent malignancy in Botswana. Incidence has decreased minimally over the last decade. We sought to explore reasons for persistent high incidence and describe KS outcomes. Methods: Since 2010, consenting patients presenting to one of three oncology centers for KS treatment were enrolled prospectively and followed quarterly. Baseline HIV testing performed and records abstracted through April 2015. Results: 207 KS patients enrolled, 60% (125) with clinical diagnosis, 34% (71) with pathologic diagnosis, and 11 (6%) with radiologic/other diagnosis. Median age at diagnosis was 37 years (IQR: 11.9) and 63% (133) male. At presentation, 65% (134) had cutaneous and 24% (49) had disseminated disease. Revised ACTG staging was 8% (17) stage I, 54% (112) stage II, 35% (73) stage III. Nearly all, 98% (199), were HIV-infected with median nadir CD4 190 cells/μL (IQR: 208). Among HIV-infected patients, 68% (109) were not on ART at time of KS diagnosis and 26% (42) were diagnosed within first six months of ART. Of those not yet on ART, 72% (47) of men and 28% (18) of women had CD4 <250 cells/μL, p=.0004. Few cases, 6 (10%), developed in patients on ART for >6 months. Patients not on ART were referred to start. 71% (146) received chemotherapy and 7% (15) required radiation. After median follow-up 19 months, 21% (43) patients had died. Estimated 3-year OS was 76% (95% CI: 69-82%). Gender, ART duration, disease extent, and stage did not significantly predict survival. Conclusions: With high population ART coverage, KS development among individuals with CD4<250 cells/μL accounts for majority of cases referred for oncologic treatment. ART delay, particularly among men, also contributed to persistent KS burden. Overall survival with KS in Botswana is similar to US and Europe. Initiation of ART at higher CD4 thresholds is needed to control the KS epidemic. AUTHORS' DISCLOSURES OF POTENTIAL CONFLICTS OF INTEREST: Shekinah N. Elmore No relationship to disclose Elizabeth S. Bigger No relationship to disclose Mukendi K.A. Kayembe No relationship to disclose Zola Musimar No relationship to disclose Gita Suneja No relationship to disclose Jason A. Efstathiou Honoraria: Medivation/Astellas, Bayer Healthcare Pharmaceuticals Consulting or Advisory Role: Medivation/Astellas, Bayer Healthcare Pharmaceuticals Scott Dryden-Peterson Patents, Royalties, Other Intellectual Property: UpToDate

When the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation included penal labour as a form of punishment, the legislative framework governing the appointment and execution of this criminal punishment was updated. This brought about an objective need to study the procedure of substituting other punishments, not related to the isolation of the convict from society, with penal labour. Based on legal acts and research, the author raises the question whether it is admissible to substitute compulsory and corrective labour with penal labour according to Part 3 of Art. 49 and Part 4 of Art. 50 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, respectively, if the malicious evasion from serving the previous sentence concerns the convict's violation of labour discipline. Some researchers believe that when substituting the unserved part of compulsory or corrective labour with a more severe criminal punishment, the court should not take into account the nature of malicious evasion. However, certain types of violations of the procedure and conditions for serving compulsory and corrective labour under Art. 30 and Art. 46 of the Penal Code of the Russian Federation testify to the inability of the convict to carry out labour activities, which is an integral attribute of penal labour. Therefore, the court needs to consider substituting the unserved part of compulsory or corrective labour with confinement, which will spare the necessity of returning to this issue when the convict is found to be maliciously evading compulsory labour. Currently, there is no uniform judicial practice on the problem under study. The failure to fulfill or improper fulfillment of the labour duties by the convict may be a reason for substituting compulsory or corrective labour with both penal labour and imprisonment, since the court is not required to justify the choice of punishment in the form of penal labour or confinement when a case under Part 3 of Art. 49 and Part 4 of Art. 50 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation is being considered. The author proposes to amend Decree No. 21 of the Plenum of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation of December 20, 2011, “On the application by courts of legislation on the execution of sentences”, according to which the systematic violation of labour discipline by the convict while serving compulsory or corrective labour becomes the basis for the substitution of the unserved part of the punishment with penal labour. The proposed changes not only comply with the norms of international law, but also make it possible to exclude the use of penal labour in relation to convicts avoid labour activity.

Indonesia is facing a serious health issue as the total fertility rate (TFR) has significantly increased in the period of 2000-2017. Contraceptive Prevalence Rate (CPR) is stagnant in the same period. This study aims to assess the use of contraception in reproductive age-married women in Indonesia focusing on Contraceptive Use Mix (CUM) and other related factors. This cross-sectional study used raw data from the Indonesian National Socio-Economic Survey (INSES). The sample was 15-49 years married women with contraceptive use in 34 provinces in Indonesia. Total sample were 19,991 women. The results show that modern contraceptive use was 97.2% as opposed to traditional methods (2.8%). The Short-Acting Reversible Contraceptive (SARC) preferred was injectable methods (55.2%) and pills (21.0%). Factors influenced the use of modern contraceptive use was the number of children with OR = 1.864 (50%CI: 1.534-2.266). This research argues that contraceptive use among married women of productive age is still low in Indonesia, especially rural areas. Therefore, government must increase contraceptive financing and the village midwife program.

Abstract Background Integrase strand transfer inhibitor (INSTI)-based antiretroviral therapy (ART) has been implicated in greater weight gain than other regimens among people with HIV, but there is little evidence about its role in serious clinical outcomes proximal to weight gain. We therefore examined the impact of initial ART regimen class/drug on incident diabetes mellitus (DM) in a large North American HIV cohort. Methods Treatment-naïve adults (≥18 years) initiating INSTI-, protease inhibitor (PI)-, or non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor (NNRTI)-based ART from January 2007 to December 2016 in the North American AIDS Cohort Collaboration on Research and Design (NA-ACCORD) were included. Individuals were followed until date of incident DM (HgA1c >6.5%, diabetes-specific medication, DM diagnosis along with diabetes-related medication, or random glucose measure ≥200 mg/dL), virologic failure, regimen core switch, cohort close (through December 2016), death date, or loss to follow-up (≥12 months with no contact before cohort close). Cox regression stratified by site and adjusting for age, sex, race, HIV transmission risk, year of ART initiation, and baseline weight, CD4+ cell count, and HIV-1 RNA yielded adjusted hazard ratios (HR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for incident DM by ART class and INSTI drug. Results Among 21,516 eligible ART initiators, 10,553 (49%) started NNRTIs, 6,677 (31%) PIs, and 4,286 (20%) INSTIs, with median follow-up of 3.0, 2.4, and 1.6 years, respectively. Among INSTI initiators, 21% started dolutegravir (DTG), 28% raltegravir (RAL), and 51% elvitegravir (EVG). Overall, 669 (3%) developed DM. Patients differed by all characteristics except baseline body mass index and HIV-1 RNA. Those starting INSTIs vs. NNRTIs had increased risk of incident DM (HR = 1.22; CI: 0.95–1.57) similar in magnitude as for PI vs. NNRTI initiators (HR = 1.25; CI: 1.05–1.49) (figure). Among INSTIs, starting RAL- vs. NNRTI-based ART was associated with a 50% increased risk of DM (HR = 1.50, CI: 1.11–2.03). Conclusion Initiating ART with INSTI- or PI- vs. NNRTI-based regimens may confer increased risk of incident DM, though risk is heterogeneous among INSTIs. Further research is needed to determine whether this elevated risk can be attributed to weight gain. Disclosures Kassem Bourgi, MD, Gilead Sciences (Grant/Research Support), Joseph J. Eron, MD, Gilead Sciences (Consultant, Grant/Research Support), Janssen (Grant/Research Support), Merck (Consultant), ViiV Healthcare (Consultant, Grant/Research Support), M. John Gill, MB, ChB, MSc, Gilead (Board Member), Merck (Board Member), Viiv (Board Member), Michael Silverberg, PhD, MPH, Gilead (Grant/Research Support). Other Authors: No reported disclosures.

This study aims to determine the prevalence of low birth weight in Sugh El-Chmis /Alkhoms -Libya and the associated factors with the low birth weight of the baby. A cross-sectional study was performed in Libya, in 2015 using a pre-tested self-administered questionnaire on a stratified sample of 408 pregnant women. Descriptive, bivariate and multivariate analyses were carried out for statistical analysis. Out of a total of 408 respondents, the prevalence of low birth-weight baby was 23.5%. The most of participants were aged between 19-26 years old (49%). Dietary supplements (folic acid, iron, omega and vitamin A, D, E, S, M), natural fruits (apple, grape, watermelon, plum, figs, strawberry and peaches), all milk and dairy products (milk, cheese and yogurt), meat, fish, egg, legumes were significantly associated with baby weight (P ˂0.05) using bivariate analysis. Furthermore, other factors such as culture and lifestyle and popular diets such as breakfast time, additional meal, soft drink, stimulants, barley wheat brown bread and dates also closely associated with the low-birth weight of new-borns (P ˂0.05). The intake of dietary supplements and nutrient-rich food for pregnant women influenced on the birth weight in Sugh El-Chmis /Alkhoms- Libya. Therefore, awareness regarding intake of dietary supplements and nutrient-rich food is highly recommended.

Background and aims: High-risk oncogenic genotype human papillomavirus (HPV) infection induces cervical cancer (CaCx), a common cancer in women globally. Women living with human immunodeficiency virus (WLHIV) have a greater risk of hr-HPV infection and perseverance, enhancing the risk of defects in the cells of the cervix and aggressive CaCx. However, its prevalence in WLHIV is not apparent. The main objective of this research was to explore the types and prevalence of HPV infection by genotyping HPV among a cohort of WLHIV attending an antiretroviral therapy (ART) clinic in Mukono, Uganda. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among women aged 25 to 49 years attending an ART clinic in a public health facility in Mukono, Uganda. Systematic random sampling was used to select 342 WLHIV from a target population of 3000. Only participants who had an Xpert HPV test between July 2021 and December 2022 were selected and interviewed, and their responses were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Results: Slightly more than half (56.7%) of the participants were under 35 years old, married (52.6%), and with a primary level of education (51.2%). The prevalence of hr-HPV was 39.8% (95% CI: 34.40-44.78). Of the total participants, 136 (39.8%) were high-risk HPV positive, with HPV 16, HPV18/45, and other hr-HPV types (31, 33, 35, 39, 45, 51, 52, 56, 58, 59, 66, and 68) being positive in 23 (6.7%), 21 (6.1%), and 110 (32.2%), respectively, while 17 (12.5%) had mixed hr-HPV infections. Conclusion: There is a high prevalence of HPV infection among WLHIV, underscoring the need to frequently screen and diagnose CaCx pre-cancerous lesions for its effective prevention.

BackgroundFor human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected adolescents facing lifelong antiretroviral therapy (ART), short-cycle therapy (SCT) with long-acting agents offers the potential for drug-free weekends, less toxicity, better adherence and cost savings.ObjectivesTo determine whether or not efavirenz (EFV)-based ART in short cycles of 5 days on and 2 days off is as efficacious (in maintaining virological suppression) as continuous EFV-based ART (continuous therapy; CT). Secondary objectives included the occurrence of new clinical HIV events or death, changes in immunological status, emergence of HIV drug resistance, drug toxicity and changes in therapy.DesignOpen, randomised, non-inferiority trial.SettingEurope, Thailand, Uganda, Argentina and the USA.ParticipantsYoung people (aged 8–24 years) on EFV plus two nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors and with a HIV-1 ribonucleic acid level [viral load (VL)] of < 50 copies/ml for > 12 months.InterventionsYoung people were randomised to continue daily ART (CT) or change to SCT (5 days on, 2 days off ART).Main outcome measuresFollow-up was for a minimum of 48 weeks (0, 4 and 12 weeks and then 12-weekly visits). The primary outcome was the difference between arms in the proportion with VL > 50 copies/ml (confirmed) by 48 weeks, estimated using the Kaplan–Meier method (12% non-inferiority margin) adjusted for region and age.ResultsIn total, 199 young people (11 countries) were randomised (n = 99 SCT group,n = 100 CT group) and followed for a median of 86 weeks. Overall, 53% were male; the median age was 14 years (21% ≥ 18 years); 13% were from the UK, 56% were black, 19% were Asian and 21% were Caucasian; and the median CD4% and CD4 count were 34% and 735 cells/mm3, respectively. By week 48, only one participant (CT) was lost to follow-up. The SCT arm had a 27% decreased drug exposure as measured by the adherence questionnaire and a MEMSCap™Medication Event Monitoring System (MEMSCap Inc., Durham, NC, USA) substudy (median cap openings per week: SCT group,n = 5; CT group,n = 7). By 48 weeks, six participants in the SCT group and seven in the CT group had a confirmed VL > 50 copies/ml [difference –1.2%, 90% confidence interval (CI) –7.3% to 4.9%] and two in the SCT group and four in the CT group had a confirmed VL > 400 copies/ml (difference –2.1%, 90% CI –6.2% to 1.9%). All six participants in the SCT group with a VL > 50 copies/ml resumed daily ART, of whom five were resuppressed, three were on the same regimen and two with a switch; two others on SCT resumed daily ART for other reasons. Overall, three participants in the SCT group and nine in the CT group (p = 0.1) changed ART regimen, five because of toxicity, four for simplification reasons, two because of compliance issues and one because of VL failure. Seven young people (SCT group,n = 2; CT group,n = 5) had major non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor mutations at VL failure, of whom two (n = 1 SCT group,n = 1 CT group) had the M184V mutation. Two young people had new Centers for Disease Control B events (SCT group,n = 1; CT group,n = 1). There were no significant differences between SCT and CT in grade 3/4 adverse events (13 vs. 14) or in serious adverse events (7 vs. 6); there were fewer ART-related adverse events in the SCT arm (2 vs. 14;p = 0.02). At week 48 there was no evidence that SCT led to increased inflammation using an extensive panel of markers. Young people expressed a strong preference for SCT in a qualitative substudy and in pre- and post-trial questionnaires. In total, 98% of the young people are taking part in a 2-year follow-up extension of the trial.ConclusionsNon-inferiority of VL suppression in young people on EFV-based first-line ART with a VL of < 50 copies/ml was demonstrated for SCT compared with CT, with similar resistance, safety and inflammatory marker profiles. The SCT group had fewer ART-related adverse events. Further evaluation of the immunological and virological impact of SCT is ongoing. A limitation of the trial is that the results cannot be generalised to settings where VL monitoring is either not available or infrequent, nor to use of low-dose EFV. Two-year extended follow-up of the trial is ongoing to confirm the durability of the SCT strategy. Further trials of SCT in settings with infrequent VL monitoring and with other antiretroviral drugs such as tenofovir alafenamide, which has a long intracellular half-life, and/or dolutegravir, which has a higher barrier to resistance, are planned.Trial registrationCurrent Controlled Trials ISRCTN97755073; EUDRACT 2009-012947-40; and CTA 27505/0005/001–0001.FundingThis project was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Health Technology Assessment programme (projects 08/53/25 and 11/136/108), the European Commission through EuroCoord (FP7/2007/2015), the Economic and Social Research Council, the PENTA Foundation, the Medical Research Council and INSERM SC10-US19, France, and will be published in full inHealth Technology Assessment; Vol. 20, No. 49. See the NIHR Journals Library website for further project information.

Abstract Background: Hepatitis C virus (HCV) chronic infection has been associated with increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) in people living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) as well as with a trend of inferior overall survival (OS) in HIV-associated NHL in the modern antiretroviral therapy (ART) era (Besson 2020). The recent introduction of interferon (IFN)-free direct-acting antivirals (DAAs) led to the achievement of sustained virologic response (SVR) in nearly all treated patients (pts) with negligible toxicity in all settings, including HIV/HCV coinfected pts, in which, however, careful attention to interactions with ART is required. We recently showed that DAAs' administration after immuno-chemotherapy (I-CT) may improve long-term outcome in HIV-negative HCV-associated diffuse large B-cell lymphomas (DLBCL) pts (Merli 2019), however, only scant data have been reported so far about the use of DAAs in HIV/HCV coinfected NHL pts. METHODS: We retrospectively collected clinical and virological features, treatments and outcome data of all consecutive pts with NHL and HIV/HCV co-infection, diagnosed and treated at 13 Italian centers between 2005 and 2021, with a special focus on pts affected by DLBCL and treated with DAAs. Only pts who received ART were included. The primary endpoints were SVR rate after DAAs and 2-year OS in HIV/HCV-positive NHL pts. RESULTS: Overall, we collected data of 74 HIV/HCV coinfected pts with NHL (69 males, 93%), including 52 DLBCL, 13 Burkitt lymphoma (BL), 5 plasmablastic lymphoma (PL), 1 anaplastic large-cell ALK negative, 1 T lymphoblastic, 1 gastric MALT and 1 lymphoplasmacytic lymphoma (Table 1). Median age was 51 years (22-57). Previous AIDS defining event was recorded in 16 cases (22%). The main HIV transmission group was represented by intravenous drug users (69%). Stage was III-IV in 63 pts (85%) and aaIPI was ≥2 in 57 pts (77%). At NHL diagnosis 38% of pts had CD4+ &lt;200/mmc and 31% ≥400 HIV-RNA copies/ml. ARL-IPI score was intermediate or high in 49 pts (64%). HCV genotype was 1 in 26 pts (58%), 3 in 12 (27%) and 4 in 7 (15%). Cirrhosis was present in 39% of pts (Child-Pugh B or C in 25%). Overall, 70 pts underwent curative first line therapy alongside ART, including (R-)CHOP-like in 50 (71%), (R-)EPOCH in 9 (13%), (R-)CODOX-M/IVAC in 8 (11%). Rituximab was used in 53% of cases (60% in DLBCL). 46 pts (66%) achieved a complete response (CR), 7 (10%) a partial response (PR), while 17 (24%) did not respond or progressed. At a median follow-up of 1.8 years (95%CI 0.1-12.3), 33 pts (45%) progressed, with a 2-year PFS of 53.5% (95%CI 40.7-64.8), and 38 (51%) died (30 due to NHL, 7 to infections and 1 to hepatocellular carcinoma), with a 2-year OS of 58.2% (95%CI 45.7-78.9). Two-year OS for DLBCL was 61.4% (95%CI 46.3-73.4), significantly higher than BL (39%, 95%CI 14.1-62.8; p=.0.47, Fig. 1). Considering anti-HCV therapy, 13 pts received IFN-based regimens, 5 of whom achieved SVR (38%). After 2016, 21 pts (14 DLBCL, 3 BL, 2 indolent and 2 T-cell lymphoma), including 4 who previously failed IFN, received various DAAs regimens after I-CT (sofosbuvir-based in 20). Toxicity of DAAs was minimal, with only 2 grade (G) ≥2 adverse events (1 G2 peripheral neuropathy and 1 G2 insomnia). SVR was achieved in 20/21 pts (95%): notably, the only non-responder had discontinued DAAs autonomously. DAAs use was associated with improved OS in all pts (p=0.01) and in DLBCL (p=0.04) and with better PFS (p=0.01) in all pts. Similarly, the achievement of SVR after either DAAs or IFN predicted a better OS (Fig.2) and PFS in all pts (p=0.005 and p=0.008, respectively) and in DLBCL (p=0.018 and p=0.047, respectively). The impact of DAAs and SVR on OS remained significant also if considering only pts who achieved CR or PR after I-CT (p&lt;0.05). At univariate analysis, age &gt;60 years (p=0.02), ARL-IPI (p=0.013), PS ECOG ≥2 (p=0.018) were associated with inferior OS. By applying multivariate Cox regression analysis, age &gt;60 years (HR 67.9, 95% CI 7.2- 643.3, p&lt;0.001), ARL-IPI (HR 2.87, 95%CI 1.03-8.06, p=0.044) and SVR after IFN or DAAs (HR 0.30, 95%CI 0.12-0.75, p=0.01) retained independent prognostic influence on OS. CONCLUSIONS: In this very high risk series of HIV/HCV coinfected pts with NHL, mainly represented by DLBCL, the administration of DAAs after I-CT resulted feasible and effective (SVR 95%), and displayed an independent favourable influence on OS. These results strongly support DAAs' use in this hard to treat population. Figure 1 Figure 1. Disclosures Tisi: Incyte: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; BWS: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Novartis: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Gilead: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees. Zilioli: Roche, Italfarmaco: Consultancy, Honoraria; MSD, Janssen: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Other: Travel, Accommodations; Takeda: Other: travel expenses, accommodation; Gentili, Takeda, Gilead, Servier: Consultancy, Speakers Bureau. Passamonti: AbbVie: Speakers Bureau; Celgene: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; BMS: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Janssen: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; Novartis: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau. Arcaini: Celgene, Roche, Janssen-Cilag, Gilead: Other: Travel expenses; Bayer, Celgene, Gilead Sciences, Roche, Sandoz, Janssen-Cilag, VERASTEM: Consultancy; Gilead Sciences: Research Funding; Celgene: Speakers Bureau.

Background: The sickling deformity of red blood cells in sickle cell disease (SCD) results in multisystem sequelae, including severe, acute pain from vaso-occlusive crises (VOCs) and chronic pain from central sensitization. Pain is the main cause of poor quality of life and hospital admissions among patients with SCD. While opioid therapy is an important component of treatment for acute SCD pain, it can be complicated by side effects and toxicities. In contrast, chronic SCD pain is best managed with non-pharmacologic therapies. A multimodal, multidisciplinary approach to pain management that promotes non-pharmacologic therapies can improve the quality of care for patients with SCD by addressing biopsychosocial components of the pain experience and is recommended by the American Society of Hematology (ASH). This study examines current usage of pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic therapies among Adolescents and Young Adults (AYAs) with SCD receiving care at our institution. Methods: The electronic medical record and Sickle Cell Knowledgebase, a customized data visualization platform unique to our institution, were utilized to conduct a retrospective chart review of AYAs, ages 13-21 years of age, with SCD from 2016-2021. Data collected included demographic information, diagnosis of chronic pain, emergency department (ED) visits and inpatient admissions for VOCs, as well as pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic therapies utilized in the ED, inpatient setting, and, for patients with chronic pain, in the outpatient setting. Results: The cohort included 90 AYAs with SCD (73% were 13-17 years old). The most common SCD genotypes were HbSS (n=47, 52%) and HbSC (n=32, 36%). The majority were female (n=53, 49%), Black (n=85, 94%), and non-Hispanic (n=86, 96%). There were 95 ED visits for VOC, where the patient was subsequently discharged home, and 246 admissions for VOC during the study period. There was a high frequency of opioid interventions for VOCs during the 95 extracted ED visits (81.8% in 2016, 91.7% in 2021). During VOC admissions, there was consistent use of opioids in 100% of admissions from 2016-2021 with increasing utilization of patient-controlled analgesia (7.7% in 2016, 45.1% in 2021) and subanesthetic ketamine (0% in 2016, 18.3% in 2021) each year during the study period. Compared to pharmacologic measures, non-pharmacologic therapies (i.e., healing touch, massage, art therapy, child life, music therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, psychology) were less utilized during VOC admissions. While healing touch and child life therapy were ordered during approximately 85% of VOC admissions, they occurred &lt;50% of the time. All other integrative therapies were ordered between 5-55% of admissions each year and occurred &lt;50% of the time. There was no correlation between length of hospital stay and use of integrative therapies. Seven patients with a diagnosis of chronic pain were identified. All 7 received non-pharmacologic therapies in the outpatient setting, including cognitive behavioral therapy, guided imagery, and psychology consultation. Six received either a gabapentinoid, serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor (SNRI), or tricyclic antidepressant (TCA). Conclusion: Per the ASH SCD guidelines, non-pharmacologic therapies are recommended for SCD-related pain. In our cohort, we found that non-pharmacologic therapies occurred in &lt;50% of VOC admissions and were underutilized for SCD-related pain in AYAs when compared to pharmacologic therapies at our institution. Though we speculate that healing touch and child life were frequently ordered as a default within our admission order set, utilization rates were still low. To better understand barriers to non-pharmacologic therapies in SCD, we are conducting qualitative interviews of patients, caregivers, and healthcare providers using the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR) as a theoretical model. Understanding barriers to the use of non-pharmacologic therapies will be essential to maximizing their implementation and hence maximizing pain control, improving quality of life, and increasing self-efficacy.

Abstract Background: Trisomy 4 is a recurrent but rare cytogenetic abnormality reported in patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML). The prognostic significance of this abnormality in AML patients is not clear. Prognosis of AML patients with trisomy 4 seems to be poor as compared to that of patients with intermediate-risk cytogenetics. Allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (allo-HCT) may improve survival if applied early in first complete remission (CR). However, neither prospective clinical nor larger retrospective cohort studies are available to support these results from small series. Aims: To characterize AML patients with trisomy 4 and compare outcomes according to different treatment strategies. Methods: We retrospectively studied 123 AML patients with trisomy 4 (median age at diagnosis, 58 years; range, 16-76 years) treated between 2000 and 2019 within 2 large study groups. Standard statistical methods were applied. Results: Median white blood cell count at diagnosis was 4.8/nl (range, 0.4-255/nl) and platelets 46/nl (range, 2-330/nl). Type of AML was de novo in 97 (79%), secondary after myelodysplastic syndrome/myeloproliferative neoplasm in 18 (15%), and therapy-related in 8 (6%) patients. Sixty-two (50%) patients were female. Cytogenetic analysis revealed trisomy 4 as the sole abnormality in 28 (23%), additional abnormalities in 95 (77%) patients, most frequently ≥3 (n=66) abnormalities, trisomy 8 (n=41), karyotypes characterized by trisomies only (n=21) and t(8;21) or inv(16) (CBF; n=10). A total of 98 patients (80%) had NPM1 and FLT3-ITD mutation testing. Of those, 21 (21%) and 15 (15%) harbored NPM1 and FLT3-ITD mutations. Only 2 (3%) of 72 patients were CEBPA double mutated. Data on response to intensive anthracycline-based induction therapy were available in 117 patients. Early death rate was 5% (n=6). CR was achieved in 68% (n=79) with 22 (19%) requiring an intensive salvage treatment cycle. Notably, patients with trisomy 4 as sole abnormality had a CR rate of 89% (n=25/28). There was no difference in the CR rate in FLT3-ITD positive (n=10/15) as compared to FLT3 wild type (n=56/83) patients (67% each, P=0.99). Univariable analysis revealed trisomy 4 as sole abnormality (OR, 5.76; P=0.007) and NPM1 (OR, 12.08; P=0.02) as favorable factors. An allo-HCT was performed in 40 (34%) patients, of whom 19 patients were transplanted in first CR after induction therapy. Nine patients achieved CR after salvage chemotherapy and went on to allo-HCT; another 12 patients received allo-HCT with active disease. Type of donor was matched-related in 8, matched-unrelated in 30, and unknown in 2 of the 40 patients, respectively. Median follow-up of the intensively treated cohort was 73 months (95%-CI, 36-91 months). Five-year overall survival (OS) and relapse-free survival (RFS) were 31% (95%-CI, 23-42%) and 27% (95%-CI, 18-42%). OS rates were significantly higher in patients with CBF leukemia or patients with trisomy 4 as compared to all other abnormalities (Figure 1; P&lt;0.001). Cox regression analysis on OS revealed CBF/CEBPA (HR, 0.75; P=0.02) and trisomy 4 as sole abnormality (HR, 0.63; P=0.04) as favorable factors; age with a difference of ten years was an in trend adverse factor (HR, 1.15; P=0.06; not significant: NPM1, FLT3-ITD, complex karyotype with ≥3 abnormalities). There was no difference on OS if patients proceeded to allo-HCT in CR1 or with active disease (P=0.8). Five-year RFS was 26% (95%-CI, 14-50%) in patients proceeding to allo-HCT after induction therapy (n=40), as compared to 28% (95%-CI, 17-46%; P=0.99) in those who received consolidation chemotherapy (n=49). Conclusions: Clinically, patients with trisomy 4 are very heterogeneous in particular with respect to cytogenetic and molecular abnormalities. In our cohort, patients with trisomy 4 as a sole abnormality had a high CR rate and favorable clinical outcome. In the total cohort, allo-HCT did not improve RFS. Figure 1 Figure 1. Disclosures Krause: Siemens: Research Funding; Takeda: Honoraria; Pfizer: Honoraria; art-tempi: Honoraria; Kosmas: Honoraria; Gilead: Other: travel support; Abbvie: Other: travel support. Schliemann: Philogen S.p.A.: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Abbvie: Consultancy, Other: travel grants; Astellas: Consultancy; AstraZeneca: Consultancy; Boehringer-Ingelheim: Research Funding; BMS: Consultancy, Other: travel grants; Jazz Pharmaceuticals: Consultancy, Research Funding; Novartis: Consultancy; Roche: Consultancy; Pfizer: Consultancy. Haenel: Takeda: Consultancy, Honoraria; Bayer Vital: Honoraria; Jazz: Consultancy, Honoraria; GSK: Consultancy; Roche: Consultancy, Honoraria; Novartis: Consultancy, Honoraria; Amgen: Consultancy; Celgene: Consultancy, Honoraria. Crysandt: Incyte: Honoraria; Pfizer: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees. Fransecky: Medac: Honoraria; Amgen: Honoraria; Abbvie: Honoraria, Research Funding; Novartis: Honoraria; Takeda: Honoraria. Martinez-Lopez: Pfizer: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; GSK: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Bristol Myers Squibb: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Amgen: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Roche: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Incyte: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Adaptive Biotechnologies: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Sanofi: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Janssen: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Celgene: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Novartis: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees. Einsele: Janssen, Celgene/BMS, Amgen, GSK, Sanofi: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding. Platzbecker: AbbVie: Honoraria; Celgene/BMS: Honoraria; Janssen: Honoraria; Novartis: Honoraria; Geron: Honoraria; Takeda: Honoraria. Baldus: Novartis: Honoraria; Amgen: Honoraria; Celgene/BMS: Honoraria; Jazz: Honoraria. Müller-Tidow: Pfizer: Research Funding; Janssen: Consultancy, Research Funding; Bioline: Research Funding. Levis: Astellas and FujiFilm: Research Funding; BMS: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Jazz: Consultancy, Honoraria; Amgen, Astellas Pharma, Daiichi-Sankyo, FujiFilm, and Menarini: Honoraria; AbbVie: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Pfizer: Consultancy, Honoraria; Takeda: Honoraria. Montesinos: Stemline/Menarini: Consultancy; Teva: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Sanofi: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; Pfizer: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Novartis: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Karyopharm: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Janssen: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Incyte: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau; Daiichi Sankyo: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Celgene: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Forma Therapeutics: Consultancy; Glycomimetics: Consultancy; Tolero Pharmaceutical: Consultancy; Agios: Consultancy; AbbVie: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Astellas Pharma, Inc.: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: Advisory board, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau. Röllig: Roche: Honoraria, Research Funding; Bristol-Meyer-Squibb: Honoraria, Research Funding; Janssen: Honoraria; Jazz: Honoraria; Novartis: Honoraria, Research Funding; Pfizer: Honoraria, Research Funding; Amgen: Honoraria; AbbVie: Honoraria, Research Funding. Schlenk: Novartis: Honoraria; Pfizer: Honoraria, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Hexal: Honoraria; Neovio Biotech: Honoraria; Daiichi Sankyo: Honoraria, Research Funding; Celgene: Honoraria; Astellas: Honoraria, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Abbvie: Honoraria; Agios: Honoraria; Roche: Honoraria, Research Funding; AstraZeneca: Research Funding; Boehringer Ingelheim: Research Funding.

Abstract Background. Literature on the treatment of rrPCNSL is limited to a few retrospective studies and phase II trials addressing new drugs or strategies. Evidence supporting therapeutic choice in patients (pts) with rrPCNSL after modern high-dose-methotrexate (HD-MTX)-based chemotherapy (chemo) followed by consolidative whole-brain irradiation (WBRT) or autologous stem cell transplantation (ASCT) is lacking. We reviewed management and outcome of pts with rrPCNSL in the randomized trials of the IELSG, which included 294 assessable pts, treated with modern approaches, and followed for several years. Herein, we analyse efficacy of salvage options to provide recommendations for routine practice. Methods. Pts enrolled in the IELSG20 or IELSG32 trials who experienced progressive disease (PD) at any time were considered. Pts who died due to toxicity and pts with extra-CNS relapse were excluded. Pts were grouped according to the time to progression after the first-line treatment: refractory (REF; relapse/PD ≤6 months from end of treatment), early relapse (ER; 6-35 months) and late relapse (LR; ≥36 months). Effect of salvage therapy on survival after relapse (SAR) was the primary objective. SAR was estimated from date of PD/relapse to date of death or last visit. Results. 164 pts (median age 58, range: 26-70; 94 males) were considered: 119 (73%) REF, 24 (15%) ER and 21 (13%) LR. First-line chemo included HD-MTX in all pts, alone in 31, +cytarabine in 68, +cytarabine/rituximab in 36, and +cytarabine/rituximab/thiotepa (MATRIX regimen) in 29. Consolidation was part of first-line treatment in 58 (35%) pts: WBRT in 39 and carmustine-thiotepa/conditioned ASCT in 19; 106 pts did not receive consolidation due to PD during first-line chemo (n=96), pt refusal (2), poor conditions (4) or per protocol (4). Treatment of relapsed/PD was WBRT in 47 pts and chemo in 58; 59 pts received only supportive care (BSC) due to rapid neurological impairment or pt refusal. Importantly, except for performance status (ECOG PS 0-1: 49% of BSC pts, 70% of treated pts; p=0.009), pts managed with BSC showed the same characteristics (age, gender, extension of disease, first-line treatment) than pts who received salvage therapy. Salvage chemo consisted of HD-ifosfamide-based chemo (R-IE, RICE, DeVIC) in 20 pts, rechallenging with HD-MTX-based chemo (same regimen or ± other drugs) in 25, direct myeloablative chemo and ASCT in 3, single drugs in 10; 17 pts responsive to salvage chemo received consolidative ASCT (n=12) or WBRT. Pts with LR had a better outcome than REF and ER cohorts, with a 2-year SAR of 64±11%, 11±3% and 13±7% (p= 0.001), respectively. These figures were similar when only treated pts were considered, with 2-year SAR of 80±11%, 17±4% and 23±12% (p= 0.0002), respectively. All untreated pts died of lymphoma within 4 months of progression. Salvage WBRT (n= 45) and chemo (n= 31) were associated with poor outcome in REF pts (2-year SAR 18±5% vs 16±6%; p= 0.76). Salvage treatment after ER or LR consisted of chemo in 27 pts and WBRT in two; HD-MTX retreatment showed a trend to a better outcome with respect to other chemo combinations, with a 2-year SAR of 73±12% and 27±13% (p=0.25), respectively. Importantly, 12 of the 15 pts with a SAR longer than one year were treated with HD-MTX-based chemo, followed by consolidation in 5 of them. A 2-year SAR of 90±9% was observed in the 11 LR pts retreated with HD-MTX-based chemo. At a median follow-up from relapse/PD of 40 (range 3-118) months, 16 (10%) pts are alive and disease-free. Deaths were due to lymphoma in 137 (93%) pts, infections in six (4%), and thromboembolic events in two (1%); cause unknown in two pts. Multivariable analysis showed that ECOG PS 0-1, LR and HD-MTX retreatment were independently associated with better SAR and that outcome was not affected by age, gender, first-line induction and consolidation, and considered trial. Conclusions. Mortality of rrPCNSL is regrettably high (≈90%), even among selected pts enrolled in prospective trials. One-third of pts are considered unsuitable candidates for salvage treatment. WBRT provides a marginal benefit over BSC in REF pts, suggesting that other strategies, including novel agents, should be considered in routine practice. Pts experiencing LR can achieve long-lasting second remission, especially when retreatment with HD-MTX-based chemo is feasible. Efficacy of salvage therapy appears to be independent of the first-line treatment. Disclosures Ferreri: Pfizer: Research Funding; Gilead: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; ADC Therapeutics: Research Funding; Genmab: Research Funding; Amgen: Research Funding; Hutchison Medipharma: Research Funding; Beigene: Research Funding; BMS: Research Funding; Novartis: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Roche: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; PletixaPharm: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; x Incyte: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Adienne: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Ospedale San Raffaele srl: Patents & Royalties. Cwynarski: Roche: Honoraria, Other: Travel / Conference Support, Speakers Bureau; Takeda: Honoraria, Other: Travel / Conference Support, Speakers Bureau; Celgene/BMS: Honoraria, Other: Travel / Conference Support; Atara: Honoraria; Gilead, KITE: Honoraria, Other: Travel / Conference Support, Speakers Bureau; Janssen: Honoraria, Other: Travel / Conference Support; Incyte: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau. Pulczynski: Roche: Research Funding. Fox: Abbvie: Honoraria, Research Funding; Astrazeneca: Honoraria; Atarabio: Honoraria; BMS/Celgene: Honoraria; Gilead: Honoraria, Research Funding; Janssen: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; Incyte: Honoraria; Roche: Honoraria, Research Funding, Speakers Bureau; Takeda: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; Beigene: Honoraria, Research Funding. La Rosée: AstraZeneca: Honoraria; Bristol Myers Squib: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; Novartis: Honoraria; Janssen-Cilag: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; Abbvie: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau. Schorb: Roche: Research Funding; AbbVie: Research Funding; Riemser Pharma GmbH: Honoraria, Research Funding. Tucci: janssen: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Gentili: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Takeda: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees. Roeth: Roche: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Kira: Consultancy, Honoraria; Bioverativ, a Sanofi company: Consultancy, Honoraria; Sanofi: Consultancy, Honoraria; Novartis: Consultancy, Honoraria; Apellis Pharmaceuticals: Consultancy, Honoraria; Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc.: Consultancy, Honoraria. Linton: BeiGene: Research Funding; Celgene: Research Funding; University of Manchester: Current Employment; Genmab: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Roche: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Hartley Taylor: Honoraria; Aptitude Health: Honoraria. Binder: Deutsche Krebsgellschaft, Medconcept GmbH, event Lab. GmbH: Honoraria, Other: Speaker Activity; Amgen GmbH, Janssen-Cilage GmbH, DGHO, Art tempi, Tumorzentrum Anhalt MD, Uniklinikum Hamburg, Sanofi Aventis: Honoraria, Other: Speaker Activity. Hemmaway: Abbvie: Honoraria. Pinto: Takeda: Consultancy; MSD: Honoraria; Bristol Myers Squibb-CELGENE: Honoraria; Incyte: Honoraria; Roche: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau. Zucca: Celltrion Healthcare: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Roche: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Miltenyi Biomedicine: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Merck: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Janssen: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Incyte: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Celgene/BMS: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; BeiGene: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; AstraZeneca: Research Funding; Gilead, Kite: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Abbvie: Other: Travel Support.

Language skills are significant predictors of early academic and social-emotional outcomes of children and are important predictors of school readiness. This study aims to improve children's language skills through the application of mind mapping learning methods. This classroom action research used Kemmis and Taggart's cycle model. The research subjects were 12 children in group B consisting of eight boys and four girls. The data was collected through observation, interviews, and documentation with the validity of the data using source triangulation and method triangulation. This research uses data analysis techniques in the form of data condensation, data presentation, and drawing conclusions. The results showed that the children's language skills through the application of the mind mapping method in the first cycle were 75%, and in the second cycle had increased to 92%. Based on the results of teacher observations in the implementation of cycle I, the children's language skills obtained a percentage value of 61.5%, and in cycle II increased to 92.3%. While the results of observations of children's activities in the implementation of the first cycle obtained a percentage of 54%, and in the second cycle, it increased to 85%. This study found that the teacher's assessment of this mind mapping method was an easy method to understand so that it was easy to apply in classroom learning. The implication of this research is that it is necessary to carry out further research on the application of the mind mapping method for other aspects of development. Keywords: Early Childhood, language Skills, Mind Mapping Learning Methods References: Abi-El-Mona, I., & Adb-El-Khalick, F. (2008). The influence of mind mapping on eighth graders’ science achievement. 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Fofeiture of property is the most severe of all penalties affecting property that have ever been imposed in hisiory. It consists in the convicted offender’s property being taken over – wholly or in part – by the treasury. The paper deals with the history of this particular penalty in the criminal policy of Polish People’s Republic in the years 1944–1990. The penalty of forfeiture of property was not provided for in the 1932 penal code (which remained in force till December 31, 1969). It appeared in the legislation shortly before World War II, in the act of June 23, 1939 on special criminal responsibility for desertion to the enemy or abroad. Before the passing of the 1932 penal code, the codes of the partitioning powers had been in force in the Polish territories (as until the regaining of independence in 1918, Poland was partitioned by Russia, Austria and Germany). Also those codes did not provide for forfeiture of property. It was only the legislator of People’s Poland who introduced forfeiture of property as an additionar penalty and provided for its broad adjudication. The history of forfeiture of property in postwar Poland is analyzed divided into four stages which differ from one another due to significant changes in the legislation. The changes reflected re-orientation of criminal policy in connection with a succession of political crises. The first such stage in the history of forfeiture of property were the years 1944–1958. The data discussed in the paper that concern this period are statistics of civilians convicted by military courts from the spring of l944 till April 30, 1955 (till which date in special cases provided for in statutes, civilians fell under the jurisdiction of military courts), and statistics of convictions by common courts till 1949. The second stage began with the passing of the act of June 18, 1959 on protection of social property. Stage three was initiated by the entering into force, on January 1, 1970, of the new penal code of April 19, 1969. The fourth and last stage began with the passing of the act of May 10, 1985 on special criminal responsability and ended with the act of February 23, 1990 which derogated the penalty of forfeiture of property. The introduction of forfeiture of property as an additional penalty is characteristic of the earliest legislative acts of the new authorities of People’s Poland, imposed from without. Its broad application and obligatory character demonstrate the importance attached by those authorities to forfeiture as an element of political game against society. The first legal acts of the Polish Committee for National Liberaltion provided for that penalty: the decree of August 31, 1944 on statutory penalties for the Nazi was criminals, the decree of September 23, 1944 – Penal Code of the Polish Army, and the decree of October 30, 1944 on protection of State. One year later, the decree of November 11,1945 was passed on offences of particular danger in the period of reconstruction of State (which quashed the former wartime decree on protection of State). It was in turn replaced with a new one under the same title, passed on June 13, 1946. The Council of Ministers justified the new decree with the need for aggravation of penalties for all activities that disturbed internal peace, order, and safety, and impaired Poland’s international position. The decree piovided for particularly severe penalties for perpetration of, incitement to, and approval of fratricide; for membership of illegal organizations and terrorist groups; for distribution of illegal literature; for illegal possession of firearms; for helping the members of terrorist groups; and in some cases of failure to inform on an offence. (The decree was generally known as the small penal code – s.p.c.). As provided for in the decree, the additional penalty of forfeiture of property was obfigatory in two cases: sentence to death or to life imprisonment, and conviction for attempt with violence or membership of an armed union. It was optional in the case of sentence to a prison term (Art. 49 para 1 and 2 of the decree). The provisions of s.p.c. extended the application of forfeiture: the court could at ail times adjudicate forfeiture of the property not only of the convicted person himself but also of his spouse or familly members (this did not concern, though, the property such persons attained themselves, inherited, or acquired gift not donated by the convicted persons). Thus forfeiture could affect a very large group of actually innocent persons. Here the decree introduced group responsability for crime. In 1953, four decrees were passed; according to the people’s legislator, they aimed at protecting social property and the interests of buyers in commercial trade. Two of them, the decree of March 4, 1953 on protection of buyers in commercial trade and another one passed on that same date on increased protection of social property, provided for the possibility of forfeiture of the offender’s property wholly or in part. In that case, forfeiture was optional. Statistical data concerning the adjudication of forfeiture were gathered since 1949. Beginning from August 15, 1944, though, forfeiture of property was also adjudicated in cases of civilians convicted by military courts which had civilians in their jurisdiction by force of the decree of October 30, 1944 on protection of State. Military courts were competent to decide in cases of persons accused of offences specified in Art. Art. 85–88 and 101 – 103 of penal code of the Polish Army, in the decree on protection of State, and – the latter quashed – in s.p.c. The jurisdiction of military courts in cases of civilians was abolished in the act of April 5, 1955 on transfer to common courts of the former competence of military courts in cases of civilians, functionaries of public security agencies, the Civic Militaria and Prison Staff. Military courts retained their competence in cases of the specified categories of civilians accused of espionage (Art. 7 s.p.c.). The passing of that act was the first manifestation of a gradual abolition of the legal and judiciary terror. Convictions of civilians tried by military courts were two or three times more frequent than convictions of military service men. Starting from as early as the latter half of 1944, civilians were convicted for membership of illegal or delegalized organizations (mainly the former Home Army) and for illegal possession of firearms (70 per cent of all convictions). Aftcr 1952, the number of persons convicted for the latter went down; instead, more persons were convicted for banditry and failure to inform on an offence. Forfeiture of property was adjudicated in about 40 to 50 per cent of cases of civilians; it accompanied sentences to long prison terms or to death, as well as another additional penalty: deprivation of public rights. It was imposed first of all on those who opposed the newly introduced political system, but also on chance perpetrators of what was called anti-State propagande. Common courts adjudicated forfeiture of property mainly for offences specified in two decrees: the one of August 31, 1944 on statutory penalties for Nazi war criminals, and the decree of June 28,1946 on criminal responsability for repudiation of Polish nationality during the 1939-1945 war. Over 90 per cent of all forfeiture were adjudicated in such cases. During the 1959–1969 decade, the additional penalty of forfeiture of property was imposed basing on special statutes. Two statutes were passed as a novelty which provided for forfeiture while aiming at special protection of the social property. They were: the act of January 21, 1958 on increased protection of social property, and the act of June 18, 1959 on criminal responsability for offences against social property. Nearly all forfeitures in that period were adjudicated for offences specified in the act of June 18, 1959, and the actual offence concerned was appropriation of social property in practically all cases. Convictions for the offences specified in the discussed statut constituted one-fifth of all convictions; most cases, however, concerned petty or not too serious offences where forfeiture was optional only. This is why that penalty was imposed rather seldom; there were realatively few acts for which it was obligatory. Forfeiture was also most seldom adjudicated by force of ther statutes. It amounted to 1,5–2,2 per cent of all additional penalties imposed. The new penal code passed on April 19, 1969 introduced forfeiture of property to its catalogue of additional penalties. Forfeiture of the whole or part of property was obligatory on the case of conviction for the following crimes: 1) against the basic political or economic interests of Polish People’s Republic: betrayal of the fatherland, conspiracy against Polish People’s Republic, espionage, terrorism, sabotage, abuse of confidence in foreign relations, misinformation, participation in organized crime against the economy or foreign currency regulations; and 2) appropriation of social property of considerable value. Besides, the court could adjudicate forfeiture of property wholly or in part in the case of conviction of another crime committed for material profit. The code’s regulation of application of forfeiture was clearly copied from the earlier legislation: the s.p.c. and the acts that increased the protection of social property. During the fifteen years 1970–1984, forfeiture of property was among the least frequently imposed penalties and constituted from 1,2 to 3,3 per cent of all additional penalties. It accompagnied nearly exlusively the convictions for two types of offences: appropriation of social property of considerable value, and that same offence committed by a person who availed himself of the activity of a unit of socialized economy, and acted in conspiracy with others to the detriment of that unit, its customers or contractors. Convictions for these offences constituted about 1 per cent of all convictions for offences against property. The fourth and last period discussed are the years 1985–1990 when forfeiture was again adjudicated very often, as in the 1940’s – 1950’s, to be abolished completely in the end. The entire five-year period was characterized by changes in penal law, one completely opposing another: from extension of penalization and increase of repressiveness introduced by the acts of 1985 to liberalization in 1990. Two acts were passed bearing the same date – may 10, 1985: on changing some provisions of penal law and the law on transgressions, and on special criminal responsability (the so-called provisional act in force till June 30, 1988). They introduced significant changes in the range of application of forfeiture of property, making its adjudication possible, and for some time even obligatory, for common offences. In the discussed period, that penalty was imposed mainly for offences against property. Nearly a half of them were burglaries, and the victims were usually – in two-thirds of cases – natural persons. In the period of particular intensity of convictions – 1986–1987 – forfeiture accompanied 11–12 per cent of ail convictions, the proportion going down to a mere 0,1 per cent in 1989. The imposition of that penalty was extremely broad: consequently, forfeiture was adjudicated in cases of quite petty offences where it was inappropriate and out of all proportion to the seriousness of the act and the guilt of the offender. This made the execution of forfeiture actually ineffective as it usually proved objectless in the case of petty common offenders. Forfeiture of property evolved in a way from was practically non-existence to emergence in special statutes and then in the penal code, to its special use in the criminal policy of the eighties when grounds well known from the past were given for its broader imposition: the need for severe penal repression towards offenders against property, to a complete abolition of that penalty in 1990. Forfeiture was extensively applied in the years 1949–1958 (when common courts adjudicated 1044, and military courts – 1538 forfeitures a year on the average). The next two periods were similar as to the number of forfeitures (503 and 513 respectively). The use of forfeiture was the broadest under the provisional statute (10,345 cases a year on the average). Forfeiture is no doubt one of the most severe penalties affecting property, or penalties in general, which is why it should have been adjudicated in exceptional cases only. Its use under the provisional statute in cases of ,,ordinary” offenders violated the principle of just punishment. On the other hand, forfeiture can hardly be called a just penalty anyway as it always affects not only the offender himself but also his family. The political changes in Poland made it possible to liberalize penal law and to remove the most unjust solutions it contained, the penalty of forfeiture of property included.

Background: Although sleep has been identified as an important modifiable risk factor for sports injury, the effect of decreased sleep on sports injuries in adolescents is poorly studied. Purpose: To systematically review published literature to examine if a lack of sleep is associated with sports injuries in adolescents and to delineate the effects of chronic versus acute lack of sleep. Methods: PubMed and EMBASE databases were systematically searched for studies reporting statistics regarding the relationship between sleep and sports injury in adolescents aged <19 years published between 1/1/1997 and 12/21/2017. From included studies, the following information was extracted: bibliographic and demographic information, reported outcomes related to injury and sleep, and definitions of injury and decreased sleep. Additionally, a NOS (Newcastle-Ottawa Scale) assessment and an evaluation of the OCEM (Oxford Center for Evidence-Based Medicine) level of evidence for each study was conducted to assess each study’s individual risk of bias, and the risk of bias across all studies. Results: Of 907 identified articles, 7 met inclusion criteria. Five studies reported that adolescents who chronically slept poorly were at a significantly increased likelihood of experiencing a sports or musculoskeletal injury. Two studies reported on acute sleep behaviors. One reported a significant positive correlation between acutely poor sleep and injury, while the other study reported no significant correlation. In our random effects model, adolescents who chronically slept poorly were more likely to be injured than those who slept well (OR 1.58, 95% CI 1.05 to 2.37, p = 0.03). OCEM criteria assessment showed that all but one study (a case-series) were of 2b level of evidence—which is the highest level of evidence possible for studies which were not randomized control trials or systematic reviews. NOS assessment was conducted for all six cohort studies to investigate each study’s individual risk of bias. Five out of six of these studies received between 4 to 6 stars, categorizing them as having a moderate risk of bias. One study received 7 stars, categorizing it as having a low risk of bias. NOS assessment revealed that the most consistent source of bias was in ascertainment of exposure: all studies relied on self-reported data regarding sleep hours rather than a medical or lab record of sleep hours. Conclusions: Chronic lack of sleep in adolescents is associated with greater risk of sports and musculoskeletal injuries. Current evidence cannot yet definitively determine the effect of acute lack of sleep on injury rates. Our results thus suggest that adolescents who either chronically sleep less than 8 hours per night, or have frequent night time awakenings, are more likely to experience sports or musculoskeletal injuries. [Figure: see text][Figure: see text][Table: see text][Table: see text][Table: see text] References used in tables and full manuscript Barber Foss KD, Myer GD, Hewett TE. Epidemiology of basketball, soccer, and volleyball injuries in middle-school female athletes. Phys Sportsmed. 2014;42(2):146-153. Adirim TA, Cheng TL. Overview of injuries in the young athlete. Sports Med. 2003;33(1):75-81. Valovich McLeod TC, Decoster LC, Loud KJ, et al. National Athletic Trainers’ Association position statement: prevention of pediatric overuse injuries. J Athl Train. 2011;46(2):206-220. Milewski MD, Skaggs DL, Bishop GA, et al. Chronic lack of sleep is associated with increased sports injuries in adolescent athletes. J Pediatr Orthop. 2014;34(2):129-133. Wheaton AG, Olsen EO, Miller GF, Croft JB. Sleep Duration and Injury-Related Risk Behaviors Among High School Students--United States, 2007-2013. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2016;65(13):337-341. Paruthi S, Brooks LJ, D’Ambrosio C, et al. Consensus Statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine on the Recommended Amount of Sleep for Healthy Children: Methodology and Discussion. Journal of clinical sleep medicine: JCSM: official publication of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. 2016;12(11):1549-1561. Watson NF, Badr MS, Belenky G, et al. Joint Consensus Statement of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and Sleep Research Society on the Recommended Amount of Sleep for a Healthy Adult: Methodology and Discussion. Sleep. 2015;38(8):1161-1183. Juliff LE, Halson SL, Hebert JJ, Forsyth PL, Peiffer JJ. Longer Sleep Durations Are Positively Associated With Finishing Place During a National Multiday Netball Competition. J Strength Cond Res. 2018;32(1):189-194. Beedie CJ, Terry PC, Lane AM. 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The quantity of municipal solid waste (MSW) generation is escalating at an alarming rate with every passing year alongside the modernization of our economy. Unfortunately, the majority of this waste remains uncollected or ends up in open dumping and followed by uncontrolled burning. Citing the deep-rooted consequences, open dumping should be absolutely abandoned and scientific interventions should be aggressively exercised to reclaim the municipal brownfields. The present research work undertook the judicial task of assessing the comparative feasibility of biomining and scientific capping as a technology selection for reclamation of about a decade old 120 million tons of waste chunk laying at Jawahar Nagar dump yard. Primary dump samples were collected from various locations, considering depth as a variable. While leachate and groundwater samples were collected from Malkaram lake and preinstalled borewells receptively. Additionally, the ambient air quality and noise level also been ascertained within the buffer zone. The blended representative solid sample was segregated using a 70 mm mesh size trommel into organic and inorganic fractions. The organic fraction was composted using a lab-scale aerobic static pile composting (ASPC) while the trommel reject was processed as refuse derived fuel (RDF). Evidently, the compost lagged quality and depicted nutrient deficiency. While the burning of RDF produced siloxane gas, significantly due to elevated silicon level in the primary waste. Furthermore, due to the prolonged leaching tenure and seasonal dilution, the concentration of legacy leachate was relatively weaker. Borewell samples collected from a depth of 20 feet also portrayed minor contamination up to 500 meters horizontal radius. The issue of leachability can solely be resolved with the capping of the existing dump and the end product quality derived from the biomining process is highly questionable. Thus, handling such large quantity capping is a befitting option over biomining for Jawahar Nagar dumpsite. INTRODUCTION Presently, in India due to rapid urbanization and industrialization, the generation of MSW has been increasing tremendously and also expected to continue a similar trend in the future (Scott, 1995; Bhat et al., 2017; Sethurajan et al., 2018; Sharma et al., 2018). Annually, the comprehensive urban MSW generation in India is more than 62 million tons. Metro cities are the mammoth contributor of the entire chunk and waste production had already reached an alarming figure of 50,000 tonnes/day. While the waste generation from the tier 2 cities is also rigorously escalating and presently contribute up to 20,000 tones/day (Sharma et al., 2018). A study conducted by the central pollution control board (CPCB) revealed MSW generation in India is increasing at a distressing rate of 5 % per annum with a sharp escalation in the quantities of domestic hazardous waste (Sharma et al., 2018). With major financial constraints, inefficacy of collection, treatment, and disposal incurs further reasons to worry. So far India has miserably failed to set up wholesome source segregation and collection method. Presently, the country spends more than 60% of its annual waste management budget only in collection. Besides, only 20% or less of the collected materials are scientifically handled and treated. Citing the statistics, it is evident that the majority of the MSW is simply gets dumped on the low laying grounds located somewhere on the outskirts of the cities. The precipitation, infiltration, surface water runoff, bird menace, rodent interference etc. triggers the vulnerability of waste and leads to mal odor, ground and surface water contamination, human and environmental health deterioration (Jayawardhana et al., 2016). Further, the perseverance of the inorganic and inert fractions leads to soil contamination, poses a fire threat, and also may incur carcinogenicity and acute toxicity among the animals (Mir et al., 2021). There are numerous techniques for the reclamation and remediation of the dumpsites, includes processes such as capping and closure, in-situ vitrification, sub-surface cut-off walls, and waste biomining (Chakrabarti and Dubey, 2015; Thakare and Nandi, 2016). Waste biomining is a stable way to get rid of the entire range of problems associated with open dumping and reclaim valuable land (Kaksonen et al., 2017). There are several instances including reclamation of Mumbai Gorai dump yard by IL & FS Environment, 70 – 80 years old 12,00,000 tons of dump clearance by Nagar Nigam Indore within a minute span of 3 years and many more. But the process of biomining is highly sensitive and case-specific. The success of the process solely depends on factors such as characteristics of the waste, efficacy of the effective microorganism culture, acceptability of the processed end product at the local market etc. (Jerez, 2017; Banerjee et al., 2017; Venkiteela, 2020). Contrarily, though the scientific capping is not an end-to-end solution but still advisable in the cases where the quantity of waste is gigantic, land scarcity is prevalent, no nearby industries to consume the end products etc. Mehta et al. (2018) have also supported the above claim based on the assessment of locations specific MSW dump reclamation case studies. While in another Nagpur-based case study conducted by Ashootosh et al. (2020) reported the superiority of the biominingprocess over simple land capping due to the favorability of the local conditions. Capping eliminates the environmental interference and thereby reduces biosphere contamination and leachate generation. Further, it captivates rodent and vector breeding and thereby curtails the spreading of communicable diseases and improves aesthetics. But right consolidation through compaction and execution is utmost necessary in the above case. As non-compaction and faulty sloping will easily lead to heavy settlement and slope failure (Berkun et al., 2005; Al-Ghouti et al., 2021). The present study has been pursued with the primary objective to run a techno-commercial assessment between scientific capping and biomining. While the secondary objective was to ascertain the level of contamination and propose mitigative measures. MATERIALS AND METHODStudy Area Spanning over 350 acres of a precious piece of land at the outskirts of Hyderabad city, Jawahar Nagar dumping yard was brutally utilized by the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) for open dumping for a prolonged tenure of 10 years. It housed nearly 12 lakh metric tons of heterogeneous solid and domestic hazardous waste and continues polluting until 2015, until the Ramky group was offered to cap the legacy dumping and scientifically handle the site. The present study has been facilitated at Hyderabad Municipal Solid Waste Limited, formerly known as Jawahar Nagar dump yard to analyze and assess the feasibility of bio-mining as handling and management alternate to the existing practice of scientific capping. The epicenter of processing and disposal facility is lying approximately on the cross-section of 17°31'24.45"N and 78°35'23.37"E. As per the contract, the comprehensive legacy dumping to be capped in three phases over about 150 acres of area and Ramky has significantly entered the phase two of the operation only within a span of five years by successfully capping more than half of the legacy footprint. Sampling Methodology The waste pile was divided into three layers namely, base, middle, and top. A uniform amount of sample was collected from the successive layers of all five different corners which cover north, south, east, west, and central of the garbage pile. Sampling inspections were performed using a manual auger besides large samples were collected using a JCB excavator. The top six-inch layer of the pile was removed to avoid any contamination while collecting the samples and 5-10 kg of sample was collected from each of the locations. Further, intermediate and bottom layer samples were collected by digging a 500 mm diameter hole through the heap. A composite was prepared by a homogenized blending of all the fifteen grub samples. The blend was distributed into four equal quadrants and the top and bottom quadrants were eliminated diagonally while the left-over quadrants were mixed thoroughly. This process was repeated until a sample of the required bulk of 20 kg is obtained. Surface and subsurface water samples from borewell were collected in and around the facility. Piezometric monitoring borewells located near the landfills were utilized for the subsurface sample collection. While a rainwater pond turned leachate lake named Malkaram was determined as the primary source for leachate collection. Buffer samples were collected from Ambedkar Nagar, the nearby colony exiting at a distance of only 300 meters. Lab-scale Experimentation The representative sample was characterized for composition and further screened through a 70 mm mesh size trommel. The trommel permeate was considered as the organic fraction while the reject was mostly inorganics and inert. The organics were subjected to ASPC. The quantity of the air required is arrived using the method delineated below (Figure 1). MSW Pile size: 2m x 0.5m x 0.5m Volume of pile: 0.5 m3 Average Density of MSW: 620 Kg/m3 Weight of pile: 310 Kg Nitrogen required for matured compost: 9300 mg/kg dry : 9300 X 310 mg : 2.88 x 106 mg : 2.88 Kg Total air required: 2.88 x 100/76 [as Nitrogen in air is 76% by weight] : 3.79 Kg of dry air : 3.79/1.225 m3 [@ 15 deg C density of air 1.225 kg/m3] : 3.1 m3 This air is to be supplied for 100 min / day for 0.5 m pile Air flow rate required: 3.1 x 60/100 = 1.86 m3/h (for practical purpose a flowrate of 2 m3/h was maintained). The maturation period was considered as 28 days and post-maturation, the stabilized material was further cured for 24 hours and screened using 12 mm and 4 mm trommel respectively to obtain the desired product quality and particle size. Whereas, the trommel reject was evenly spreader on the copper trays and dried in an oven at 1050C for 2 hours. The dried material was micronized to the size of 50 mm or below using a scissor and inert such as glass, sand, stone etc. were segregated manually (Mohan and Joseph, 2020). Concurrently, a bench-scale capped landfill prototype was built using the below-mentioned procedure to evaluate the factors such as settlement and slope stability. A 30 mm thick low permeable soil was laid on the top of the waste, followed by a 60 mm layer of compacted clay liner (CCL). Each join between successive liner material was closely monitored. A 1.5 mm thick HDPE liner was placed on the top of the CCL. A 285 GSM geotextile membrane was placed as the successive above layer followed by a 15 mm thick drainage media layer. A further layer of geotextile membrane was placed on top of the drainage media for better stabilization, grip, and strength. The top vegetative soil layer of 45 mm thickness was laid off on top of the geotextile media and St. Augustine grass was rooted (Cortellazzo et al., 2020; Ashford et al., 2000). 2.4 Sample Analysis pH, Electrical Conductivity (EC) and Turbidity of the samples were analyzed using pH, EC-TDS, and Nephelometer of Mettler Toledo. The pH meter was calibrated with the buffer solution of 4.0, 7.0 & 9.12 at a controlled temperature. EC-TDS meter was calibrated with 0.1 M KCL having 12.8 mS/cm of conductivity. Nephelometer was calibrated with Formazine solution of 10 & 100 NTU. Total Dissolved Solids (TDS), (mg/L) was performed using the gravimetric method at 1800C in the oven. Titrimetric parameters such as Total Alkalinity as CaCO3 (mg/L), Total Hardness as CaCO3 (mg/L), Chloride as Cl- (mg/L), Calcium as Ca2+ (mg/L), Residual Free Chlorine (RFC), (mg/L) were analyzed using APHA (American Public Health Associations) method, 23rd Edition, 2017. Total Kjeldahl Nitrogen (mg/L) and Ammonical Nitrogen (mg/L) were performed through distillation followed by titration with H2SO4 as a titrant. Sulphide as S2- was done with the Iodometric method after distillation. Each titrimetric parameter was analyzed in triplicate after standardizing the titrant with required reagents and crossed checked by keeping a check standard. Sodium as Na (mg/L) and Potassium as K (mg/L) were performed using Flame Photometer. The photometer was calibrated with different standards from 10 to 100 (mg/L) standard solutions. The leachate sample was diluted enough to get the value within the standard range and cross-checked with check standards at the same time. Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD), (mg/L) was performed using the open reflux method for 2 hours at 1500C in COD Digestor. Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD), (mg/L) was performed using the alkali iodide azide method for 3 days. The samples were kept in a BOD incubator at 270C for 3 days. It was kept in duplicate to have a check on quality control. Sulphate was analyzed by the gravimetric method instead of turbidimetric or through UV-Visible spectrophotometer as its concentration was found more than 40 mg/L. Nitrate as NO3- was analyzed after filtration at 220-275 nm, while Hexavalent Chromium as Cr6+ was analyzed at 540 nm in the UV-Vis. Parameters like Cyanide as CN-, Fluoride as F-, and Phenolic Compounds were gone through a distillation process followed by UV-Vis. The distillation process ensures the removal of interferences presents either positive or negative. For the parameters like Total Iron or Ferric Iron, the samples were digested properly with the required reagents on the hot plate before analyzing in UV-Vis. For the metal analysis the water samples were digested at a temperature of 1000C using aqua regia as a media. The samples were digested to one-fourth of the volume on a hot plate. The recommended wavelengths as per APHA 3120 B were selected for each of the metals. The standard graph was plotted for each of the metals before analysis and crossed checked with the check standard at the same time. Parameters such as bulk density and particle size were performed through the certified beaker and sieve. The percentage of moisture content was estimated using the oven by keeping the compost sample for 2 hours at 1050C. C/N ratio was estimated through CHNS analyzer keeping sulfanilamide as a check standard. The analysis was performed by extracting the desired component in the desired solution prescribed in the method followed by converting the same from mg/L to mg/Kg. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION An exhaustive bench-study has been pursued and real-time samples were collected and analyzed for all possible parameters to determine the pros and cons attributed to both processes. The investigation begins by collecting the samples and concluded by impact assessment studies inclusive of the buffer zone. Both solid, liquid, and gaseous samples were precisely investigated to opt for the best solution. A detailed finding of the investigation is summarized below. Primarily, the representative solid sample was characterized through a manual separation process and the results are portrayed in Figure 1. Compost Characterization ASPC of the organic fraction has resulted in a recovery of 46.7% of the initial load. While 53.3% of the influent mass were inert and barely degradable fraction contributes to reject, the rest 4.1% is miscellaneous process loss. The processed compost was extensively analyzed including for metal contamination and the same is tabulated in Table 1. The value of C/N ratio, OC, TN, K2O, P2O5, and NPK evidently portrays the shortcoming in terms of nutrient availability. Though it is highly enriched in organic carbon and thus the same can be effectively utilized as a soil preconditioner. Ayilara et al. (2020) also reported a similar finding, where the city compost sourced from MSW lagged major plant nutrients. RDF Characterization Processed trommel rejects constitute cloth, rexine, leather, jute, paper, plastics, coir and other inert contributed to RDF. The fraction of inert was as high as 37.2% of the overall RDF mass and it mostly constituted glass and sand. The combined weight of sand and glass fragments contributed 73.5% of the total inert, while the rest was stone and small brickbats. The higher level of silicon associated with the presence of glass and sand yielded siloxane and triggered the possibility of kiln corrosion. A detailed RDF analysis report is enclosed in Table 2. The values explicitly portray the quality of RDF is moderately lower and higher salts concentration is extremely prevalent. With relatively lower NCV and such high salt concentration, the above specimen will certainly pose a corrosion threat to the kiln and shall be either neglected as kiln feed or can be utilized after dilution with Grade III RDF quality. Further, such high ash generation will also induct high transportation and landfill charges. Leachate Characterization The Malkaram leachate lake is the end result of prolonged, slow, and steady mixing of the legacy leachate through the existing fissure cracks in the sheath rock bottom profile. Apparently, the concentration of leachate is significantly lower due to the dilution. Samples were analyzed in triplicates and the mean value is tabulated here in Table 3. The metal concertation and rest of the parameter values are well within the secondary treatment influent range, except for TDS. Thus, a modular aerobic biological treatment unit such as moving bed biofilm bioreactor (MBBR) or membrane bioreactor (MBR) would be a well-suited pick. However, a reverse osmosis (RO) system needs to be installed to get rid of the high TDS content. The permeate of RO can be reused back into the system. Whereas, the reject can be converted into dried powder through forced evaporation mechanisms. The higher concentration of salts in RDF collaterally justifies the elevated TDS level in leachate. In a leachate impact assessment study performed by El-Salam and Abu-Zuid (2015) the reported BOD/COD ratio of 0.69 is greater than double the value of 0.301 reported in Table 3. Though the difference in both the values are quite high, it is relatable and justifiable by the huge age difference of the source waste. The primarily characterized data is of a fresh leachate generated from regular MSW, while the later one is from a decade old waste that barely has any unstabilized organic content. Groundwater Contamination The obvious reason for downward leachate infiltration and osmotic movement facilitates groundwater contamination. Both surface and subsurface water samples were collected within the dump yard and the buffer zone and analyzed using the standard methods. The results are portrayed in Table 4. The slightly alkaline pH of the borewell sample is an indication of the ongoing anaerobic process. The dissolved oxygen value of 3.5 mg/L further validates the correlation. Higher TDS and hardness values are self-indicative of elevated salt concentration in source waste. Eventually, the same interfered with the RDF quality. Positively in the case of all the parameters, a successive decrement in pollution concentration has been spotted from dump ground towards the buffer zone. In a similar study conducted by Singh et al. (2016) at Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh the reported concentration of the parameters is significantly higher than reported in Table 4. The basic reason behind variation is the dissimilarities of the local soil profile. The sandy and clay loam soil profile of Varanasi allows a greater rate of percolation and infiltration. While the bottom sheath rock profile at Jawahar Nagar permits the only a minute to little percolation rate. The difference in percolation rate is directly correlated to the concentration levels in this case. Contrarily, Kurakalva et al. (2016) have reported much-elevated pollutant concertation both in ground and surface water for a study conducted at the same site in 2016. The higher concentration is relatable to the fact of the non-closure of the open dump back then. Capping activity had at Jawahar Nagar gained its pace 2018 onwards and capping for the primary section of 70 acres got concluded only during mid of 2019. Due to the decrement in runoff and percolation, the quality of both surface and subsurface water has improved drastically. Impact Assessment The odor and groundwater contamination are two of the primary issues that triggered a massive public agitation initially. The root causes of both the issues are identified as rainwater percolation and anaerobic digestion respectively. Eventually, the completion of the capping process would resolve both the problems effectively. Other non-tangential impacts include nausea; headache; irritation of the eye, nasal cavity, and throat; diarrhoeal diseases; vector-borne disease, cattle toxicity etc. Scientific capping can easily cater as the wholesome solution for all (Cortellazzo et al., 2020). Yu et al. (2018) had performed an extensive study to comprehend the relativity of respiratory sickness and MSW borne air pollution. The study made a couple of dreadful revelations such as gases released due to the anaerobic digestion of MSW such as methane, hydrogen sulphide, and ammonia incur detrimental impact on Lysozyme and secretory immunoglobulin A (SIgA). While SO2 was reported as the lung capacity and functionality reducer. Further, a gender-specific study executed by the same research group revealed, air pollution impacts more severely on male children than the female and retards immune functions. Presently, the area of 351 acres has been developed as Asia’s one of the largest state of the art municipal solid waste processing and disposal facility by Ramky Enviro Engineers Limited. This ensured zero dumping and no further environmental interventions. As legal compliance, the facility monitors the quality of groundwater and ambient air quality in and around the facility on monthly basis to assure the biosafety. The variation in concentration of various monitoring parameters between 2012 to 2020 is summarized in Figure 2. The concentration of each of the parameters are showcased in ppm and a standard equipment error was settled at 3% for respirable dust sampler and multi-gas analyzer (Taheri et al., 2014). Despite all parameter values have gradually increased except for methane, the facility still managed to maintain them well under the regulatory limits. The decrement in methane concentration is directly correlated to the practice of aerobic composting and aeration-based secondary treatment that prevented the formation of the anaerobic atmosphere and henceforth methane generation. While for the rest of the parameters the increment in values is quite substantial and predictable due to the sudden escalation in MSW generation in the past decade in correlation with Gross domestic product (GDP) enhancement. The observed and interpreted impacts due to the elevated pollutant level are in-line with the georeferenced findings reported by Deshmukh and Aher (2016) based on a study conducted at Sangamner, Maharashtra. CONCLUSION The study critically analyzed and investigated every techno-environmental and socio-economic aspect correlated to open dumping. The bench-scale experimentation revealed the efficiency of the single liner scientific capping is fair enough to eliminate any further rainwater infiltration, however, it has no control over the generation of leachate due to the inherent moisture. Internal moisture related issue was anyhow compensated with pertinent compaction prior to dispose of the waste. 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Abstract STUDY QUESTION What are the European trends and developments in ART and IUI in 2015 as compared to previous years? SUMMARY ANSWER The 19th ESHRE report on ART shows a continuing expansion of treatment numbers in Europe, and this increase, the variability in treatment modalities and the rising contribution to the birth rates in most participating countries all point towards the increasing impact of ART on European society. WHAT IS KNOWN ALREADY Since 1997, the ART data generated by national registries have been collected, analysed and reported in 18 manuscripts published in Human Reproduction. STUDY DESIGN, SIZE, DURATION Collection of European data by the European IVF-Monitoring Consortium (EIM) for ESHRE. The data for treatments performed between 1 January and 31 December 2015 in 38 European countries were provided by national registries or on a voluntary basis by clinics or professional societies. PARTICIPANTS/MATERIALS, SETTINGS, METHODS From 1343 institutions in 38 countries offering ART services a total of 849 811 treatment cycles, involving 155 960 with IVF, 385676 with ICSI, 218098 with frozen embryo replacement (FER), 21 041 with preimplantation genetic testing (PGT), 64 477 with egg donation (ED), 265 with IVM and 4294 with FOR were recorded. European data on IUI using husband/partner’s semen (IUI-H) and donor semen (IUI-D) were reported from 1352 institutions offering IUI in 25 countries and 21 countries, respectively. A total of 139 050 treatments with IUI-H and 49 001 treatments with IUI-D were included. MAIN RESULTS AND THE ROLE OF CHANCE In 18 countries (14 in 2014) with a population of approximately 286 million inhabitants, in which all institutions contributed to their respective national registers, a total of 409 771 treatment cycles were performed, corresponding to 1432 cycles per million inhabitants (range: 727–3068 per million). After IVF the clinical pregnancy rates (PRs) per aspiration and per transfer were slightly lower in 2015 as compared to 2014, at 28.5 and 34.6% versus 29.9 and 35.8%, respectively. After ICSI, the corresponding PR achieved per aspiration and per transfer in 2015 were also slightly lower than those achieved in 2014 (26.2 and 33.2% versus 28.4 and 35.0%, respectively). On the other hand, after FER with own embryos the PR per thawing continued to rise from 27.6% in 2014 to 29.2% in 2015. After ED a slightly lower PR per embryo transfer was achieved: 49.6% per fresh transfer (50.3% in 2014) and 43.4% for FOR (48.7% in 2014). The delivery rates (DRs) after IUI remained stable at 7.8% after IUI-H (8.5% in 2014) and at 12.0% after IUI-D (11.6% in 2014). In IVF and ICSI together, 1, 2, 3 and ≥4 embryos were transferred in 37.7, 53.9, 7.9 and in 0.5% of all treatments, respectively (corresponding to 34.9, 54.5, 9.9 and in 0.7% in 2014). This evolution towards the transfer of fewer embryos in both IVF and ICSI resulted in a proportion of singleton, twin and triplet DR of 83.1, 16.5 and 0.4%, respectively (compared to 82.5, 17.0 and 0.5%, respectively, in 2014). Treatments with FER in 2015 resulted in twin and triplet DR of 12.3 and 0.3%, respectively (versus 12.4 and 0.3% in 2014). Twin and triplet delivery rates after IUI-H were 8.9 and 0.5%, respectively (in 2014: 9.5 and 0.3%), and 7.3 and 0.6% after IUI-D (in 2014: 7.7 and 0.3%). LIMITATIONS, REASONS FOR CAUTION The methods of data collection and reporting vary among European countries. The EIM receives aggregated data from various countries with variable levels of completeness. Registries from a number of countries have failed to provide adequate data about the number of initiated cycles and deliveries. As long as incomplete data are provided, the results should be interpreted with caution. WIDER IMPLICATIONS OF THE FINDINGS The 19th EIM report on ART shows a continuing expansion of treatment numbers in Europe. The number of treatments reported, the variability in treatment modalities and the rising contribution to the birth rates in most participating countries point towards the increasing impact of ART on reproduction in Europe. Being the largest data collection on ART worldwide, detailed information about ongoing developments in the field is provided. STUDY FUNDING/COMPETING INTEREST(S) The study has no external funding and all costs are covered by ESHRE. There are no competing interests.

Abstract Study question To assess with a large number of patients why they chose to switch ART provider[s] before they had exhausted all of their treatment options. Summary answer The patient-provider relationship was the most common reason cited for leaving an ART provider, and also the most common reason for staying. What is known already A large number of patients drop out of treatment early in the ART treatment process, for many reasons. In previous studies, this was attributed to a negative patient experience. Also, ‘information’, ‘attitude of and relationship with staff’ and ‘competence of clinic and staff’ were noted by patients as three major points. Previous evidence suggests a ‘lack of empathy’, negative interactions with staff, and poorly formulated explanations of healthcare plans[5] are substantially causing discontinuation of treatment. Most research published on the topic available so far, either uses a small sample of patients or only indirectly assesses potential reasons for drop out. Study design, size, duration A 12-question online questionnaire was sent to 40 patient advocates of diverse age, race, sexual orientation, and treatment experiences. They were asked to disseminate it to members of their communities who met the criteria of having undergone at least one fertility treatment. In total, 1,060 patients were surveyed (February-April 2019). 89.6% came from the US, the remainder from 21 countries (six continents). Median age of respondents was 33.7. Median months trying to conceive was 48. Participants/materials, setting, methods The confidential online survey consisted of four demographic questions, four closed-ended treatment-history questions, and three open-ended questions about experiences with ART providers. The open-ended questions allowed answers of unlimited length. Long form responses were modeled using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) combined with NMF (Non-negative Matrix Factorization) and grouped into topics, from which several “themes” emerged. Methodology, results and conclusions were reviewed and endorsed by a committee of fertility specialists. Main results and the role of chance The reasons given for leaving their clinic fell into six clear themes: a treatment/approach not tailored to the patient and their needs (23%); poor bedside manner (communication style, the patient not feeling “heard”) (18%); logistical challenges e.g., doctor, clinic or patient had moved (14%); cost/access issues (9%); lack of efficacy e.g., treatment unsuccessful (8%); provider was “all business” e.g., patient felt like a number (8%). Taken together, 49% left a clinic because of a relationship issue. The remaining responses were too general to classify into a clear theme. Four clear themes emerged in the reasons provided for staying with their clinic. Patients stayed because of good access/cost/insurance coverage (29%), they were already enrolled in next steps at the clinic (e.g., purchased IVF bundle, embryo storage, etc.) (26%), they had a connection with staff (25%), they were feeling optimistic (20%). Relationships were also a major theme when respondents were asked to provide further comments about their experiences and/or what they value in a fertility doctor: a good fit (24%); provider has an interest in learning about them and/or exploring tailored treatment options (13%); feels connected and is being treated like a human being (11%); provider communicates and shows compassion (10%). Limitations, reasons for caution Respondents were invited to participate by other respondents, rather than recruited centrally. Wider implications of the findings This study demonstrates that, unlike patient access to funds or treatment success (over which they have little control), ART clinics can improve their patient retention rates by improving the one aspect of the patient experience over which providers have the most control: the patient-provider relationship. Trial registration number NA

Despite numerous critics describing him as an auteur (i.e. a film-maker who ‘does’ everything and fulfils every production role [Bordwell and Thompson 37] and/or with a signature “world-view” detectable in his/her work [Caughie 10]), Rolf de Heer appears to have declined primary authorship of Dance Me to My Song (1997), his seventh in an oeuvre of twelve feature films. Indeed, the opening credits do not mention his name at all: it is only with the closing credits that the audience learns de Heer has directed the film. Rather, as the film commences, the viewer is informed by the titles that it is “A film by Heather Rose”, thus suggesting that the work is her singular creation. Direct and uncompromising, with its unflattering shots of the lead actor and writer (Heather Rose Slattery, a young woman born with cerebral palsy), the film may be read as a courageous self-portrait which finds the grace, humanity and humour trapped inside Rose’s twisted body. Alternatively, it may be read as yet another example of de Heer’s signature interest in foregrounding a world view which gives voice to marginalised characters such as the disabled or the disadvantaged. For example, the developmentally retarded eponyme of Bad Boy Bubby (1993) is eventually able to make art as a singer in a band and succeeds in creating a happy family with a wife and two kids. The ‘mute’ girl in The Quiet Room (1996) makes herself heard by her squabbling parents through her persistent activism. In Ten Canoes (2006) the Indigenous Australians cast themselves according to kinship ties, not according to the director’s choosing, and tell their story in their own uncolonised language. A cursory glance at the films of Rolf de Heer suggests he is overtly interested in conveying to the audience the often overlooked agency of his unlikely protagonists. In the ultra-competitive world of professional film-making it is rare to see primary authorship ceded by a director so generously. However, the allocation of authorship to a member of a marginalized population re-invigorates questions prompted by Andy Medhurst regarding a film’s “authorship test” (198) and its relationship to a subaltern community wherein he writes that “a biographical approach has more political justification if the project being undertaken is one concerned with the cultural history of a marginalized group” (202-3). Just as films by gay authors about gay characters may have greater credibility, as Medhurst posits, one might wonder would a film by a person with a disability about a character with the same disability be better received? Enabling authorship by an unknown, crippled woman such as Rose rather than a famous, able-bodied male such as de Heer may be cynically regarded as good (show) business in that it is politically correct. This essay therefore asks if the appellation “A film by Heather Rose” is appropriate for Dance Me to My Song. Whose agency in telling the story (or ‘doing’ the film-making), the able bodied Rolf de Heer or the disabled Heather Rose, is reflected in this cinematic production? In other words, whose voice is enabled when an audience receives this film? In attempting to answer these questions it is inevitable that Paul Darke’s concept of the “normality drama” (181) is referred to and questioned, as I argue that Dance Me to My Song makes groundbreaking departures from the conventions of the typical disability narrative. Heather Rose as Auteur Rose plays the film’s heroine, Julia, who like herself has cerebral palsy, a group of non-progressive, chronic disorders resulting from changes produced in the brain during the prenatal stages of life. Although severely affected physically, Rose suffered no intellectual impairment and had acted in Rolf de Heer’s cult hit Bad Boy Bubby five years before, a confidence-building experience that grew into an ongoing fascination with the filmmaking process. Subsequently, working with co-writer Frederick Stahl, she devised the scenario for this film, writing the lead role for herself and then proactively bringing it to de Heer’s attention. Rose wrote of de Heer’s deliberate lack of involvement in the script-writing process: “Rolf didn’t even want to read what we’d done so far, saying he didn’t want to interfere with our process” (de Heer, “Production Notes”). In 2002, aged 36, Rose died and Stahl reports in her obituary an excerpt from her diary: People see me as a person who has to be controlled. But let me tell you something, people. I am not! And I am going to make something real special of my life! I am going to go out there and grab life with both hands!!! I am going to make the most sexy and honest film about disability that has ever been made!! (Stahl, “Standing Room Only”) This proclamation of her ability and ambition in screen-writing is indicative of Rose’s desire to do. In a guest lecture Rose gave further insights into the active intent in writing Dance Me to My Song: I wanted to create a screenplay, but not just another soppy disability film, I wanted to make a hot sexy film, which showed the real world … The message I wanted to convey to an audience was “As people with disabilities, we have the same feelings and desires as others”. (Rose, “ISAAC 2000 Conference Presentation”) Rose went on to explain her strategy for winning over director de Heer: “Rolf was not sure about committing to the movie; I had to pester him really. I decided to invite him to my birthday party. It took a few drinks, but I got him to agree to be the director” (ibid) and with this revelation of her tactical approach her film-making agency is further evidenced. Rose’s proactive innovation is not just evident in her successfully approaching de Heer. Her screenplay serves as a radical exception to films featuring disabled persons, which, according to Paul Darke in 1998, typically involve the disabled protagonist struggling to triumph over the limitations imposed by their disability in their ‘admirable’ attempts to normalize. Such normality dramas are usually characterized by two generic themes: first, that the state of abnormality is nothing other than tragic because of its medical implications; and, second, that the struggle for normality, or some semblance of it in normalization – as represented in the film by the other characters – is unquestionably right owing to its axiomatic supremacy. (187) Darke argues that the so-called normality drama is “unambiguously a negation of ascribing any real social or individual value to the impaired or abnormal” (196), and that such dramas function to reinforce the able-bodied audience’s self image of normality and the notion of the disabled as the inferior Other. Able-bodied characters are typically portrayed positively in the normality drama: “A normality as represented in the decency and support of those characters who exist around, and for, the impaired central character. Thus many of the disabled characters in such narratives are bitter, frustrated and unfulfilled and either antisocial or asocial” (193). Darke then identifies The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980) and Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone, 1989) as archetypal films of this genre. Even in films in which seemingly positive images of the disabled are featured, the protagonist is still to be regarded as the abnormal Other, because in comparison to the other characters within that narrative the impaired character is still a comparatively second-class citizen in the world of the film. My Left Foot is, as always, a prime example: Christy Brown may well be a writer, relatively wealthy and happy, but he is not seen as sexual in any way (194). However, Dance Me to My Song defies such generic restrictions: Julia’s temperament is upbeat and cheerful and her disability, rather than appearing tragic, is made to look healthy, not “second class”, in comparison with her physically attractive, able-bodied but deeply unhappy carer, Madelaine (Joey Kennedy). Within the first few minutes of the film we see Madelaine dissatisfied as she stands, inspecting her healthy, toned and naked body in the bathroom mirror, contrasted with vision of Julia’s twisted form, prostrate, pale and naked on the bed. Yet, in due course, it is the able-bodied girl who is shown to be insecure and lacking in character. Madelaine steals Julia’s money and calls her “spastic”. Foul-mouthed and short-tempered, Madelaine perversely positions Julia in her wheelchair to force her to watch as she has perfunctory sex with her latest boyfriend. Madelaine even masquerades as Julia, commandeering her voice synthesizer to give a fraudulently positive account of her on-the-job performance to the employment agency she works for. Madelaine’s “axiomatic supremacy” is thoroughly undermined and in the most striking contrast to the typical normality drama, Julia is unashamedly sexual: she is no Christy Brown. The affective juxtaposition of these two different personalities stems from the internal nature of Madelaine’s problems compared to the external nature of Julia’s problems. Madelaine has an emotional disability rather than a physical disability and several scenes in the film show her reduced to helpless tears. Then one day when Madelaine has left her to her own devices, Julia defiantly wheels herself outside and bumps into - almost literally - handsome, able-bodied Eddie (John Brumpton). Cheerfully determined, Julia wins him over and a lasting friendship is formed. Having seen the joy that sex brings to Madelaine, Julia also wants carnal fulfilment so she telephones Eddie and arranges a date. When Eddie arrives, he reads the text on her voice machine’s screen containing the title line to the film ‘Dance me to my song’ and they share a tender moment. Eddie’s gentleness as he dances Julia to her song (“Kizugu” written by Bernard Huber and John Laidler, as performed by Okapi Guitars) is simultaneously contrasted with the near-date-rapes Madelaine endures in her casual relationships. The conflict between Madeline and Julia is such that it prompts Albert Moran and Errol Vieth to categorize the film as “women’s melodrama”: Dance Me to My Song clearly belongs to the genre of the romance. However, it is also important to recognize it under the mantle of the women’s melodrama … because it has to do with a woman’s feelings and suffering, not so much because of the flow of circumstance but rather because of the wickedness and malevolence of another woman who is her enemy and rival. (198-9) Melodrama is a genre that frequently resorts to depicting disability in which a person condemned by society as disabled struggles to succeed in love: some prime examples include An Affair to Remember (Leo McCarey, 1957) involving a paraplegic woman, and The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) in which a strong-spirited but mute woman achieves love. The more conventional Hollywood romances typically involve attractive, able-bodied characters. In Dance Me to My Song the melodramatic conflict between the two remarkably different women at first seems dominated by Madelaine, who states: “I know I’m good looking, good in bed ... better off than you, you poor thing” in a stream-of-consciousness delivery in which Julia is constructed as listener rather than converser. Julia is further reduced to the status of sub-human as Madelaine says: “I wish you could eat like a normal person instead of a bloody animal” and her erstwhile boyfriend Trevor says: “She looks like a fuckin’ insect.” Even the benevolent Eddie says: “I don’t like leaving you alone but I guess you’re used to it.” To this the defiant Julia replies; “Please don’t talk about me in front of me like I’m an animal or not there at all.” Eddie is suitably chastised and when he treats her to an over-priced ice-cream the shop assistant says “Poor little thing … She’ll enjoy this, won’t she?” Julia smiles, types the words “Fuck me!”, and promptly drops the ice-cream on the floor. Eddie laughs supportively. “I’ll just get her another one,” says the flustered shop assistant, “and then get her out of here, please!” With striking eloquence, Julia wheels herself out of the shop, her voice machine announcing “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me”, as she departs exultantly. With this bold statement of independence and defiance in the face of patronising condescension, the audience sees Rose’s burgeoning strength of character and agency reflected in the onscreen character she has created. Dance Me to My Song and the films mentioned above are, however, rare exceptions in the many that dare represent disability on the screen at all, compliant as the majority are with Darke’s expectations of the normality drama. Significantly, the usual medical-model nexus in many normality films is ignored in Rose’s screenplay: no medication, hospitals or white laboratory coats are to be seen in Julia’s world. Finally, as I have described elsewhere, Julia is shown joyfully dancing in her wheelchair with Eddie while Madelaine proves her physical inferiority with a ‘dance’ of frustration around her broken-down car (see Starrs, "Dance"). In Rose’s authorial vision, audience’s expectations of yet another film of the normality drama genre are subverted as the disabled protagonist proves superior to her ‘normal’ adversary in their melodramatic rivalry for the sexual favours of an able-bodied love-interest. Rolf de Heer as Auteur De Heer does not like to dwell on the topic of auteurism: in an interview in 2007 he somewhat impatiently states: I don’t go in much for that sort of analysis that in the end is terminology. … Look, I write the damn things, and direct them, and I don’t completely produce them anymore – there are other people. If that makes me an auteur in other people’s terminologies, then fine. (Starrs, "Sounds" 20) De Heer has been described as a “remarkably non-egotistical filmmaker” (Davis “Working together”) which is possibly why he handed ownership of this film to Rose. Of the writer/actor who plied him with drink so he would agree to back her script, de Heer states: It is impossible to overstate the courage of the performance that you see on the screen. … Heather somehow found the means to respond on cue, to maintain the concentration, to move in the desired direction, all the myriad of acting fundamentals that we take for granted as normal things to do in our normal lives. (“Production NHotes”) De Heer’s willingness to shift authorship from director to writer/actor is representative of this film’s groundbreaking promotion of the potential for agency within disability. Rather than being passive and suffering, Rose is able to ‘do.’ As the lead actor she is central to the narrative. As the principle writer she is central to the film’s production. And she does both. But in conflict with this auteurial intent is the temptation to describe Dance Me to My Song as an autobiographical documentary, since it is Rose herself, with her unique and obvious physical handicap, playing the film’s heroine, Julia. In interview, however, De Heer apparently disagrees with this interpretation: Rolf de Heer is quick to point out, though, that the film is not a biography.“Not at all; only in the sense that writers use material from their own lives.Madelaine is merely the collection of the worst qualities of the worst carers Heather’s ever had.” Dance Me to My Song could be seen as a dramatised documentary, since it is Rose herself playing Julia, and her physical or surface life is so intense and she is so obviously handicapped. While he understands that response, de Heer draws a comparison with the first films that used black actors instead of white actors in blackface. “I don’t know how it felt emotionally to an audience, I wasn’t there, but I think that is the equivalent”. (Urban) An example of an actor wearing “black-face” to portray a cerebral palsy victim might well be Gus Trikonis’s 1980 film Touched By Love. In this, the disabled girl is unconvincingly played by the pretty, able-bodied actress Diane Lane. The true nature of the character’s disability is hidden and cosmeticized to Hollywood expectations. Compared to that inauthentic film, Rose’s screenwriting and performance in Dance Me to My Song is a self-penned fiction couched in unmediated reality and certainly warrants authorial recognition. Despite his unselfish credit-giving, de Heer’s direction of this remarkable film is nevertheless detectable. His auteur signature is especially evident in his technological employment of sound as I have argued elsewhere (see Starrs, "Awoval"). The first distinctly de Heer influence is the use of a binaural recording device - similar to that used in Bad Boy Bubby (1993) - to convey to the audience the laboured nature of Julia’s breathing and to subjectively align the audience with her point of view. This apparatus provides a disturbing sound bed that is part wheezing, part grunting. There is no escaping Julia’s physically unusual life, from her reliance on others for food, toilet and showering, to the half-strangled sounds emanating from her ineffectual larynx. But de Heer insists that Julia does speak, like Stephen Hawkings, via her Epson RealVoice computerized voice synthesizer, and thus Julia manages to retain her dignity. De Heer has her play this machine like a musical instrument, its neatly modulated feminine tones immediately prompting empathy. Rose Capp notes de Heer’s preoccupation with finding a voice for those minority groups within the population who struggle to be heard, stating: de Heer has been equally consistent in exploring the communicative difficulties underpinning troubled relationships. From the mute young protagonist of The Quiet Room to the aphasic heroine of Dance Me to My Song, De Heer’s films are frequently preoccupied with the profound inadequacy or outright failure of language as a means of communication (21). Certainly, the importance to Julia of her only means of communication, her voice synthesizer, is stressed by de Heer throughout the film. Everybody around her has, to varying degrees, problems in hearing correctly or understanding both what and how Julia communicates with her alien mode of conversing, and she is frequently asked to repeat herself. Even the well-meaning Eddie says: “I don’t know what the machine is trying to say”. But it is ultimately via her voice synthesizer that Julia expresses her indomitable character. When first she meets Eddie, she types: “Please put my voice machine on my chair, STUPID.” She proudly declares ownership of a condom found in the bathroom with “It’s mine!” The callous Madelaine soon realizes Julia’s strength is in her voice machine and withholds access to the device as punishment for if she takes it away then Julia is less demanding for the self-centred carer. Indeed, the film which starts off portraying the physical superiority of Madelaine soon shows us that the carer’s life, for all her able-bodied, free-love ways, is far more miserable than Julia’s. As de Heer has done in many of his other films, a voice has been given to those who might otherwise not be heard through significant decision making in direction. In Rose’s case, this is achieved most obviously via her electric voice synthesizer. I have also suggested elsewhere (see Starrs, "Dance") that de Heer has helped find a second voice for Rose via the language of dance, and in doing so has expanded the audience’s understandings of quality of life for the disabled, as per Mike Oliver’s social model of disability, rather than the more usual medical model of disability. Empowered by her act of courage with Eddie, Julia sacks her uncaring ‘carer’ and the film ends optimistically with Julia and her new man dancing on the front porch. By picturing the couple in long shot and from above, Julia’s joyous dance of triumph is depicted as ordinary, normal and not deserving of close examination. This happy ending is intercut with a shot of Madeline and her broken down car, performing her own frustrated dance and this further emphasizes that she was unable to ‘dance’ (i.e. communicate and compete) with Julia. The disabled performer such as Rose, whether deliberately appropriating a role or passively accepting it, usually struggles to placate two contrasting realities: (s)he is at once invisible in the public world of interhuman relations and simultaneously hyper-visible due to physical Otherness and subsequent instantaneous typecasting. But by the end of Dance Me to My Song, Rose and de Heer have subverted this notion of the disabled performer grappling with the dual roles of invisible victim and hyper-visible victim by depicting Julia as socially and physically adept. She ‘wins the guy’ and dances her victory as de Heer’s inspirational camera looks down at her success like an omniscient and pleased god. Film academic Vivian Sobchack writes of the phenomenology of dance choreography for the disabled and her own experience of waltzing with the maker of her prosthetic leg, Steve, with the comment: “for the moment I did displace focus on my bodily immanence to the transcendent ensemble of our movement and I really began to waltz” (65). It is easy to imagine Rose’s own, similar feeling of bodily transcendence in the closing shot of Dance Me to My Song as she shows she can ‘dance’ better than her able-bodied rival, content as she is with her self-identity. Conclusion: Validation of the Auteurial OtherRolf de Heer was a well-known film-maker by the time he directed Dance Me to My Song. His films Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and The Quiet Room (1996) had both screened at the Cannes International Film Festival. He was rapidly developing a reputation for non-mainstream representations of marginalised, subaltern populations, a cinematic trajectory that was to be further consolidated by later films privileging the voice of Indigenous Peoples in The Tracker (2002) and Ten Canoes (2006), the latter winning the Special Jury prize at Cannes. His films often feature unlikely protagonists or as Liz Ferrier writes, are “characterised by vulnerable bodies … feminised … none of whom embody hegemonic masculinity” (65): they are the opposite of Hollywood’s hyper-masculine, hard-bodied, controlling heroes. With a nascent politically correct worldview proving popular, de Heer may have considered the assigning of authorship to Rose a marketable idea, her being representative of a marginalized group, which as Andy Medhurst might argue, may be more politically justifiable, as it apparently is with films of gay authorship. However, it must be emphasized that there is no evidence that de Heer’s reticence about claiming authorship of Dance Me to My Song is motivated by pecuniary interests, nor does he seem to have been trying to distance himself from the project through embarrassment or dissatisfaction with the film or its relatively unknown writer/actor. Rather, he seems to be giving credit for authorship where credit is due, for as a result of Rose’s tenacity and agency this film is, in two ways, her creative success. Firstly, it is a rare exception to the disability film genre defined by Paul Darke as the “normality drama” because in the film’s diegesis, Julia is shown triumphing not simply over the limitations of her disability, but over her able-bodied rival in love as well: she ‘dances’ better than the ‘normal’ Madelaine. Secondly, in her gaining possession of the primary credits, and the mantle of the film’s primary author, Rose is shown triumphing over other aspiring able-bodied film-makers in the notoriously competitive film-making industry. Despite being an unpublished and unknown author, the label “A film by Heather Rose” is, I believe, a deserved coup for the woman who set out to make “the most sexy and honest film about disability ever made”. As with de Heer’s other films in which marginalised peoples are given voice, he demonstrates a desire not to subjugate the Other, but to validate and empower him/her. He both acknowledges their authorial voices and credits them as essential beings, and in enabling such subaltern populations to be heard, willingly cedes his privileged position as a successful, white, male, able-bodied film-maker. In the credits of this film he seems to be saying ‘I may be an auteur, but Heather Rose is a no less able auteur’. References Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction, 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993. Capp, Rose. “Alexandra and the de Heer Project.” RealTime + Onscreen 56 (Aug.-Sep. 2003): 21. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue56/7153›. Caughie, John. “Introduction”. Theories of Authorship. Ed. John Caughie. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 9-16. Darke, Paul. “Cinematic Representations of Disability.” The Disability Reader. Ed. Tom Shakespeare. London and New York: Cassell, 1988. 181-198. Davis, Therese. “Working Together: Two Cultures, One Film, Many Canoes.” Senses of Cinema 2006. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/06/41/ten-canoes.html›. De Heer, Rolf. “Production Notes.” Vertigo Productions. Undated. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.vertigoproductions.com.au/information.php?film_id=10&display=notes›. Ferrier, Liz. “Vulnerable Bodies: Creative Disabilities in Contemporary Australian Film.” Australian Cinema in the 1990s. Ed. Ian Craven. London and Portland: Frank Cass and Co., 2001. 57-78. Medhurst, Andy. “That Special Thrill: Brief Encounter, Homosexuality and Authorship.” Screen 32.2 (1991): 197-208. Moran, Albert, and Errol Veith. Film in Australia: An Introduction. Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 2006. Oliver, Mike. Social Work with Disabled People. Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1983. Rose Slattery, Heather. “ISAAC 2000 Conference Presentation.” Words+ n.d. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.words-plus.com/website/stories/isaac2000.htm›. Sobchack, Vivian. “‘Choreography for One, Two, and Three Legs’ (A Phenomenological Meditation in Movements).” Topoi 24.1 (2005): 55-66. Stahl, Frederick. “Standing Room Only for a Thunderbolt in a Wheelchair,” Sydney Morning Herald 31 Oct. 2002. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/10/30/1035683471529.html›. Starrs, D. Bruno. “Sounds of Silence: An Interview with Rolf de Heer.” Metro 152 (2007): 18-21. ———. “An avowal of male lack: Sound in Rolf de Heer’s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2003).” Metro 156 (2008): 148-153. ———. “Dance Me to My Song (Rolf de Heer 1997): The Story of a Disabled Dancer.” Proceedings Scopic Bodies Dance Studies Research Seminar Series 2007. Ed. Mark Harvey. University of Auckland, 2008 (in press). Urban, Andrew L. “Dance Me to My Song, Rolf de Heer, Australia.” Film Festivals 1988. 6 June 2008. ‹http://www.filmfestivals.com/cannes98/selofus9.htm›.

Ancient Egyptian mummies represent an opportunity to learn more about the health, beliefs, and skills of humans in antiquity. A fully wrapped mummy, from a Late Ptolemaic cemetery (c.332-30 BC) in Edfu, Egypt, has been stored, unexamined, at the Cairo Egyptian Museum since 1916. We hypothesized that scanning and 3D-printing the mummy using Computed Tomography (CT) could help in documenting and promoting its public display. CT enabled non-invasive digital unwrapping and revealed a well-preserved mummy. Biological sex could be determined from the presence of male genitalia; epiphyseal fusion and tooth eruption indicated an approximate age at death of 14–15 years. The deceased had healthy teeth and bones without evidence of poor nutrition or disease. CT detected a high-quality mummification process that included brain removal through an iatrogenic defect of the cribriform plate and viscera removal via a left lower-abdominal incision. The heart remained in the chest as a spiritual symbol. Resin was poured into the emptied cranial and torso cavities, and linen packs were placed inside the torso. The Mummy’s external ornamentation includes a gilded head mask, a pectoral cartonnage, and a pair of sandals. CT identified 49 amulets inside the mummy and between the wrappings, arranged in three columns. The amulets have 21 different shapes, including Udjat, scarabs, Ajet, Djed-pillar, Tyt, Placenta, Double-Plume, and Right-angle. CT densities indicated that 30 (61%) amulets were metal (likely gold), and the other amulets were made of faience, stones, or fired clay. The embalmers placed amulets to protect and provide vitality for the body for the afterlife. A gold tongue amulet was placed inside the mouth to ensure the deceased could speak in the afterlife. A Two-finger amulet was placed beside the penis to protect the embalming incision. 3D-printing enabled the tactile and visual study of a heart scarab found inside the thoracic cavity. Findings from this study suggest that ancient Egyptians valued their children and provided them with ritual treatment. State-of-the-art techniques such as CT and 3D printing provided valuable insights and supported the museum display of the mummy, nicknamed “The Golden Boy.”

Abstract Background Real-world effectiveness of fixed dose dolutegravir/lamivudine (DTG/3TC) two-drug regimens (2DR) during the first 24 months of availability in the US was compared to common three-drug regimens (3DRs) among suppressed antiretroviral therapy (ART)-experienced people living with HIV (PLWH). Methods Suppressed (viral load [VL] &lt; 200 copies/mL) PLWH initiating DTG/3TC 2DR, bictegravir (BIC)-3DR, or DTG-3DR between 01MAY2019 and 31OCT2020 in the OPERA® Cohort were followed until 30APR2021 (potential for ≥6 months of follow-up). Univariate Poisson regression (incidence rates) and Cox proportional hazards marginal structural models were employed to assess confirmed virologic failure (2 viral loads [VLs] ≥200 copies/mL) or regimen discontinuation. Results Overall, 8037 PLWH were included in the analysis (Table). Virologic failure incidence rates were low, ranging from 0.66 (DTG/3TC) to 1.78 (DTG 3DR) per 100 person-years. Compared to DTG/3TC, only DTG 3DR was associated with an increase in the hazard of virologic failure. Discontinuation incidence rates ranged from 8.30 (BIC 3DR) to 24.9 (DTG 3DR) per 100 person-years. The discontinuation hazard was 69% greater with DTG 3DRs and 49% lower with BIC 3DRs compared to DTG/3TC. Regardless of regimen, most discontinuers were suppressed (VL&lt; 200 copies/mL) at the time of discontinuation (DTG/3TC 2DR: 96%, BIC 3DR: 94%, DTG 3DR: 93%; all p &gt;0.05). Discontinuations following an adverse diagnosis/side effect were uncommon with DTG/3TC 2DR (3%) and DTG 3DR (4%, p=0.5), and higher with BIC 3DR discontinuation (7%, p=0.02). The most common reason for DTG 3DR discontinuations was regimen simplification (21%); no reason was given for &gt;50% of the discontinuations in each group. Conclusion Among ART-experienced, virologically suppressed PLWH, virologic failure was rare after switching to DTG/3TC 2DR, BIC 3DR or DTG 3DR. Most discontinuations were not attributed to the treatment (i.e., loss of suppression, adverse diagnosis, side effects), suggesting other reasons for discontinuation despite high levels of suppression and tolerability. Disclosures Gerald Pierone, Jr., MD, Gilead: Grant/Research Support|GSK-VIIV: Grant/Research Support Jennifer S. Fusco, BS, AIDS Healthcare Foundation: Client of my employer|EMD Serono: Client of my employer|Gilead Sciences: Client of my employer|Janssen: Client of my employer|Merck & Co.: Client of my employer|TheraTechnologies: Client of my employer|ViiV Healthcare: Client of my employer Laurence Brunet, PhD, AIDS Healthcare Foundation: Client of my employer|EMD Serono: Client of my employer|Gilead Sciences: Client of my employer|Janssen: Client of my employer|Merck & Co: Client of my employer|TheraTechnologies: Client of my employer|ViiV Healthcare: Client of my employer Vani Vannappagari, MBBS, MPH, PhD, ViiV Healthcare: I am full time employee of ViiV Healthcare and receive GlaxoSmithKline stock as part of my compensation package|ViiV Healthcare: Stocks/Bonds Supriya Sarkar, PhD, MPH, ViiV Healthcare: Salary|ViiV Healthcare: Stocks/Bonds Cassidy Henegar, PhD, MSPH, GlaxoSmithKline: Stocks/Bonds|ViiV Healthcare: full-time employee Andrew Zolopa, MD, ViiV Healthcare: full time employee|ViiV Healthcare: Stocks/Bonds Gregory P. Fusco, MD, MPH, AIDS Healthcare Foundation: Client of employer|EMD: Grant/Research Support|Gilead Sciences: Client of employer|Janssen: Client of employer|Merck & Co.: Client of employer|Theratechnologies: Client of employer|ViiV Healthcare: Client of employer.

The whole problem of speaking about the end…is that you have to speak of what lies beyond the end and also, at the same time, of the impossibility of ending. Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End(110) Jean Baudrillard’s insights into finality demonstrate that “ends” always prompt cultures to speculate on what can or will happen after these terminations and to fear those traumatic ends, in which the impossible actually occurs, may only be the beginning of chaos. In the absence of “rational” explanations for catastrophic ends and in the whirlwind of emotional responses that are their after-effects, the search for beginnings and origins – the antitheses of Baudrillard’s finality – characterises human response to tragedy. Strangely, Baudrillard’s engagement with the end is linked to an articulation predicated on our ability “to speak” events into existence, to conjure and to bridle those events in terms of recognisable, linear, and logical arrangements of words. Calling this verbal ordering “the poetry of initial conditions” (Baudrillard 113) in which memory imposes a structure so that the chaotic/catastrophic may be studied and its elements may be compared, Baudrillard suggests that this poetry “fascinates” because “we no longer possess a vision of final conditions” (113). The images of contemporary catastrophes and their subsequent visualisation serve as the ultimate reminders that we, as viewers and survivors, were not there – that visualisation itself involves a necessary distance between the horrified viewer and the viewed horror. In the case of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Centre, the need to “be there,” to experience vicariously a trauma as similarly as possible to those who later became its victims, perhaps explains why images of the planes first slamming into each of the towers were played and repeated ad nauseam. As Baudrillard suggests, “it would be interesting to know whether…effects persist in the absence of causes … whether something can exist apart from any origin and reference” (111). The ongoing search for these causes – particularly in the case of the World Trade Centre’s obliteration – has manifested itself in a persistent cycle of image production and consumption, prompting those images to serve as the visible/visual join between our own survival and the lost lives of the attacks or as surrogates for those whose death we could not witness. These images frequently allowed the West to legitimise its mourning, served as the road map by which we could (re-)explore the halcyon days prior to September 11, and provided the evidence needed for collective retribution. Ultimately, images served as the fictive embodiments of unseen victims and provided the vehicle by which mourning could be transformed from an isolated act to a shared experience. Visitors on the Rooftop: Visualising Origins and the Moments before Destruction It goes without saying that most have seen the famous photograph of the bundled-up tourist standing on the observation deck of the World Trade Centre with one of the jets ready to strike the tower shortly thereafter (see Figure 1). Though the photograph was deemed a macabre photo-manipulation, it reached thousands of e-mail inboxes almost two weeks following the horrific attacks and led many to ponder excitedly whether this image truly was the “last” image of a pre-September 11 world. Many openly debated why someone would fabricate such an image, yet analysts believe that its creation was a means to heal and to return to the unruffled days prior to September 11, when terrorism was thought to be a phenomenon relegated to the “elsewhere” of the Middle East. A Website devoted to the analysis of cultural rumours, Urban Legends, somewhat melodramatically suggested that the photograph resurrects what recovery efforts could not re-construct – a better understanding of the moments before thousands of individuals perished: The online world is fraught with clever photo manipulations that often provoke gales of laughter in those who view them, so we speculate that whoever put together this particular bit of imaging did so purely as a lark. However, presumed lighthearted motives or not, the photo provokes sensations of horror in those who view it. It apparently captures the last fraction of a second of this man’s life ... and also of the final moment of normalcy before the universe changed for all of us. In the blink of an eye, a beautiful yet ordinary fall day was transformed into flames and falling bodies, buildings collapsing inwards on themselves, and wave upon wave of terror washing over a populace wholly unprepared for a war beginning in its midst…The photo ripped away the healing distance brought by the nearly two weeks between the attacks and the appearance of this digital manipulation, leaving the sheer horror of the moment once again raw and bared to the wind. Though the picture wasn’t real, the emotions it stirred up were. It is because of these emotions the photo has sped from inbox to inbox with the speed that it has. (“The Accidental Tourist”) While the photograph does help the viewer recall the times before our fears of terrorism, war, and death were realised, this image does not episodically capture “the last fraction of a second” in a man’s life, nor does it give credibility to the “blink-of-an-eye” shifts between beautiful and battered worlds. The photographic analysis provided by Urban Legends serves as a retrospective means of condensing the space of time in which we must imagine the inevitable suffering of unseen individuals. Yet, the video of the towers, from the initial impacts to their collapse, measured approximately 102 minutes – a massive space of time in which victims surely contemplated escape, the inevitability of escape, the possibility of their death, and, ultimately, the impossibility of their survival (“Remains of a Day” 58). Post-traumatic visualising serves as the basis for constructing the extended horror as instantaneous, a projection that reflects how we hoped the situation might be for those who experienced it, rather than an accurate representation of the lengthy period of time between the beginning and end of the attacks. The photograph of the “accidental tourist” does not subscribe to the usual tenets of photography that suggest the image we see is, to quote W.J.T. Mitchell, “a purely objective transcript of reality” (Mitchell 281). Rather, this image invites a Burginian “inva[sion] by language in the very moment it is looked at: in memory, in association, [where] snatches of words and images continually intermingle and exchange one for the other” (Burgin 51). One sees the tourist in the photograph as a smiling innocent, posing at the wrong place and at the wrong time. Through that ascription, viewers may justify their anger and melancholy as this singular, visible body (about to be harmed) stands in for countless, unseen others awaiting the same fate. Its discrepancies with the actual opening hours of the WTC observation deck and the positioning of the aircraft largely ignored, the “accidental tourist” photo-manipulation was visualised by countless individuals and forwarded to a plethora of in-boxes because September 11 realities could not be shared intimately on that day, because the death of aircraft passengers, WTC workers, and rescue personnel was an inevitable outcome that could not be visualised as even remotely “actual” or explainable. Computer-based art and design have shown us that approximations to reality often result in its overall conflation. Accordingly, our desperate hope that we have seen glimpses of the moments before tragedy is ultimately dismantled by an acknowledgement of the illogical or impossible elements that go against the basic rules of visualisation. The “accidental tourist” is a phenomenon that not only epitomises Baudrillard’s search for origins in the wake of catastrophic effects, but underscores a collective need to visualise bodies as once-living rather than presently and inevitably dead. Faces in the Smoke: Visualising the Unseen Although such photo-manipulations were rampant in the days and weeks following the attack, many people constructed their own realities in the untouched images that the media streamed to them. The World Trade Centre disaster seemed to implore photography, in particular, to resurrect both the unseen, unremembered moments prior to the airliners’ slamming into the building and to perform two distinct roles as the towers burned: to reaffirm the public’s perception of the attack as an act of evil and to catalyse a sense of hope that those who perished were touched by God or ushered peacefully to their deaths. Within hours of the attacks, photographic stills captured what many thought to be the image of Satan – complete with horns, face, eyes, nose, and mouth – within the plumes of smoke billowing from one of the towers (see Figure 2 and its detail in Figure 3). The Associated Press, whose footage was most frequently used to reference this visual phenomenon, quickly dismissed the speculation; as Vin Alabiso, an executive photo editor for AP, observed: AP has a very strict policy which prohibits the alteration of the content of a photo in any way…The smoke in this photo combined with light and shadow has created an image which readers have seen in different ways. (“Angel or Devil?”) Although Alabiso’s comments defended the authenticity of the photographs, they also suggested the ways in which visual representation and perception could be affected by catastrophic circumstances. While many observers openly questioned whether the photographs had been “doctored,” others all too willingly invested these images with ethereal qualities by asking if the “face” they saw was that of Satan – a question mirroring their belief that such an act of terrorism was clear evidence of evil masterminding. If, as Mitchell has theorised, photographs function through a dialogical exchange of connotative and denotative messages, the photographs of the burning towers instead bombarded viewers with largely connotative messages – in other words, nothing that could precisely link specific bodies to the catastrophe. The visualising of Satan’s face happens not because Satan actually dwells within the plumes of smoke, but because the photograph resists Mitchell’s dialogue with the melancholic eye. The photograph refuses to “speak” for the individuals we know are suffering behind the layers of smoke, so our own eye constructs what the photograph will not reveal: the “face” of a reality we wish to be represented as deplorably and unquestionably evil. Barthes has observed that such “variation in readings is not … anarchic, [but] depends on the different types of knowledge … invested in the image…” (Barthes 46). In traumatic situations, one might amend this analysis to state that these various readings occur because of gaps in this knowledge and because visualisation transforms into an act based on knowledge that we wish we had, that we wish we could share with victims and fellow mourners. These visualisations highlight a desperate need to bridge the viewer’s experience of survival and their concomitant knowledge of others’ deaths and to link the “safe” visualisation of the catastrophic with the utter submission to catastrophe likely felt by those who died. Explaining the faces in the smoke as “natural indentations” as Alabiso did may be the technical and emotionally neutral means of cataloguing these images; however, the spotting of faces in photographic stills is a mechanism of visualisation that humanises a tragedy in which physical bodies (their death, their mutilation) cannot be seen. Other people who saw photographic stills from other angles and degrees of proximity were quick to highlight the presence of angels in the smoke, as captured by WABC from a perspective entirely different from that in Figure 2 (instead, see Figure 3). In either scenario, photography allows the visual personification of redemptive or evil influences, as well as the ability to visualise the tragedy not just as the isolated destruction of an architectural marvel, but as a crime against humanity with cosmic importance. Sharing the Fall: Desperation and the Photographing of Falling Bodies Perhaps what became even more troubling than the imagistic conjuring of human forms within the smoke was the photographing of bodies falling from the upper floors of the North Tower (see Figure 5). Though newspapers (re-)published photographs of the debris and hysteria of the attacks and television networks (re-)broadcast video sequences of the planes’ crashing into the towers and their collapse, the pictures of people jumping from the building were rarely circulated by the media. Dennis Cauchon and Martha T. Moore characterised these consequences of the terrorist attacks as “the most sensitive aspect of the Sept. 11 tragedy … [that] shocked the nation” (Cauchon and Moore). A delicate balance certainly existed between the media’s desire to associate faces with the feelings of desperation we know those who died must have experienced and a now-numb general public who ascribed to the photographs an unequivocal “too-muchness.” To read about those who jumped to escape smoke and flames reveals a horrific and frightfully swift narrative of panic: For those who jumped, the fall lasted 10 seconds. They struck the ground at just less than 150 miles per hour – not fast enough to cause unconsciousness while falling, but fast enough to ensure instant death on impact. People jumped from all four sides of the north tower. They jumped alone, in pairs and in groups. (Cauchon and Moore) The text contextualises these leaps to death in terms that are understandable to survivors who read the story and later discover these descriptions can never approximate the trauma of “being there”: Why did they jump? How fast were they travelling? Did they feel anything when their bodies hit the ground? Were they conscious during their jump? Did they die alone? These questions and their answers put into motion the very moment that the photograph of the jumping man has frozen. Words act as extensions of the physical boundaries of the photograph and underscore the horror of that image, from the description of the conditions that prompted the jump to the pondering of the death that was its consequence. If, as Jonathan Crary’s analysis of photographic viewing might intimate, visualisation prompts both an “autonomy of vision” and a “standardisation and regulation of the observer” (Crary 150), the photograph of a man plummeting to his death fashions the viewer’s eye as autonomous and alive because the image he/she views is the undeniable representation of a now-deceased Other. Yet, as seen in the often-hysterical responses to the threats of terrorism in the days following September 11, this “Other” embodies the very possibility of our own demise. Suddenly, the man we see in mid-air becomes the visualised “Every(wo)man” whose photographic representation also represents our unacknowledged vulnerabilities. Thus, trauma is shared through a poignant visual negotiation of dying: the certainty of the photographed man’s death juxtaposed with the newly realised or conjured threat of the viewer’s own death. In terms of humanness, those who witnessed these falls firsthand recall the ways in which the falling people became objectified – their fall seemingly robbing them of any visible sense of humanity. Eric Thompson, an employee on the seventy-seventh floor of the South Tower, shared an instantaneous moment with one of the victims: Thompson looked the man in the face. He saw his tie flapping in the wind. He watched the man’s body strike the pavement below. “There was no human resemblance whatsoever,” Thompson says. (Cauchon and Moore) Obviously, the in-situ experience of viewing these individuals hopelessly jumping to their deaths served as the prompt to run away, to escape, but the photograph acts as the frozen-in-time re-visitation and sharing of – a turning back toward – this scenario. The act of viewing the photographs reinstates the humanness that the panic of the moment seemingly removed; yet, the disparity between the photograph’s foreground (the jumping man) and its background (the building’s façade) remains its greatest disconcerting element. Unlike those photographic portraits that script behaviours and capture us in our most presentable states of being, this photograph reveals the unwilling subject – he who has not consented to share his state of being with the camera. Though W.J.T. Mitchell suggests that “[p]hotographs…seem necessarily incomplete in their imposition of a frame that can never include everything that was there to be…‘taken’” (Mitchell 289), the eye in times of catastrophe shifts between its desire to maintain the frame (that does not visually engage the inferno from which the man jumped or the concrete upon which he died) and its inability to do so. This photograph, as Mitchell might assert, “speaks” because visualisation allows its total frame of reference to extend beyond its physical boundaries and, as evidenced by post-September 11 phobias and our responses to horrific images, to affect the very means by which catastrophe is imagined and visualised. Technically speaking, the negotiated balance between foreground and background in the photograph is lost: the desperation of the falling man juxtaposed with a seemingly impossible background that should not have been there. Lost, too, is the viewer’s ability to “connect” visually with – literally, to share – that experience, to see oneself within the contexts of that particular visual representation. This inability to see the viewing self in the photograph is an ironic moment of experiential possibility that lingers still in the Western world’s fears surrounding terrorism: when the supposedly impossible act is finally visualised, territorialised, and rendered as possible. Dead Art: The Destructions and Resurrections of Works by Rodin In many ways, the photographing of those experiences so divorced from our own contributed to intense discussions of perspective in visualisation: the viewer’s witnessing of trauma by means of a camera and photographer that captured the image from a “safe” distance. However, the recovery of artwork that actually suffered damage as a result of the World Trade Centre collapse prompted many art historians and theorists to ponder the possibilities of art’s death and to contemplate the fate of art that is physically victimised. In an anticipatory vein, J.M. Bernstein suggests that “art ends as it becomes progressively further distanced from truth and moral goodness, as it loses its capacity to speak the truth about our most fundamental categorical engagements…” (Bernstein 5). If Bernstein’s theory is applied to those works damaged at the World Trade Centre site, the sculptures of Rodin, so famously photographed in the weeks of excavation that followed September 11, could be categorised as “dead” – distanced from the “truth” of human form that Rodin cast, even further from the moral goodness and the striving toward global peace that the Cantor Fitzgerald collection aimed to embrace. While many art critics believed that the destroyed works should not be displayed again, many (including Fritz Koenig, who designed The Sphere, which was damaged in the terrorist attacks) believe that such “dead art” deserves, even requires, resuscitation (see Figure 6). Much like the American flags that survived the infernos at the World Trade Centre and Pentagon site, these lost and re-discovered artworks have served as rallying points to accomplish both the sharing of trauma and an artistically inspired foundation for the re-development of the lower Manhattan site. In the case of Rodin’s The Thinker, which was recovered at the site and later presumed stolen, the statue’s discovery alongside aircraft parts and twisted steel girders served as a unique and rare survival story, almost as the surrogate representative body for those human bodies that were never found, never seen. Dan Barry and William K. Rashbaum recall that in the days following the sculpture’s disappearance, “investigators have been at Fresh Kills [landfill] and at ground zero in recent weeks, flashing a photograph of ‘The Thinker’ and asking, in effect: Have you seen this symbol of humanity” (Barry and Rashbaum)? Given such symbolic weight, sculpture most certainly took on superhuman proportions. Yet, in the days that followed the discovery of artwork that survived the attacks, only passing references were made to those figurative paintings and drawings by Picasso, Hockney, Lichtenstein, and Miró that were lost – perhaps because their subject matter or manner of artistic representation did not (or could not) reflect a “true” infliction of damage and pain the way a three-dimensional, human-like sculpture could. Viewers visualised not only the possibility of their own cultural undoing by seeing damaged Rodins, but also the embodiment of unseen victims’ bodies that could not be recovered. In a rousing speech about September 11 as an attack upon the humanities and the production of culture, Bruce Cole stated that “the loss of artifacts and art, no matter how priceless and precious, is dwarfed by the loss of life” (Cole). Nevertheless, the visualisation of maimed, disfigured art was the lens through which many individuals understood the immensity of that loss of life and the finality of their loved ones’ disappearances. What the destruction and damaging of artwork on September 11 created was an atmosphere in which art, traditionally conjured as the studied and inanimate subject, transformed from a determined to a determining influence, a re-working of Paul Smith’s theory in which “the ‘subject’ … is determined – the object of determinant forces; whereas ‘the individual’ is assumed to be determining” (Smith xxxiv). Damaged sculptures gave representative form to the thousands of victims we, as a visualising public, knew were inside the towers, but their survival spoke to larger artistic issues: the impossibility of art’s end and the foiling of its death. Baudrillard’s notion of the “impossibility of ending” demonstrates that the destruction of art (in the capitalistic sense that is contingent on its undamaged condition and its prescribed worth and “value”) does not equate to the destruction of meaning as such, but that the new and re-negotiated meanings deployed by injured art frighteningly implicate us – viewers who once assigned meaning becoming the subjects who long to be assigned something, anything, be it solace, closure, or retribution. Importantly, the latest plans for the re-vitalised World Trade Centre site indicate that the damaged Rodin and Koenig sculptures will semiotically mediate the significations established when the original World Trade Centre was a vital nexus of activity in lower Manhattan, the shock and pain experienced when the towers collapsed and individuals were searching for meaning in art’s destruction and survival, and the hope many have invested in the new buildings and their role in the maintenance and recovery of memory. A Concluding Thought Digital manipulation, photography, and the re-contextualisation of artistic “masterpieces” from their hermetic placement in the gallery to their brutal dumping in a landfill have served as the humanistic prompts that actively determined the ways in which culture grappled with and shared unimaginable horror. Images have transformed in purpose from static re(-)presentations of reality to active, changing conduits by which pasts can be remembered, by which the intangibility of death can be given substance, by which unshared moments can be more intimately considered. Oddly, visualisation has performed simultaneously two disparate functions: separating the living from the dead through a panoply of re-affirming visual experiences and permitting the re-visitation of those times, events, and people that the human eye could not see itself. Ultimately, what the manipulations, misinterpretations, and destructions of art show us is that the conveyance of meaning between individuals, whether dead or alive, whether seen or unseen, is the image’s most pressing and difficult charge. Works Cited “Angel or Devil? Viewers See Images in Smoke.” Click on Detroit. 17 Sep. 2001. 10 February 2003 <http://www.clickondetroit.com/sh/news/stories/nat-news-96283920010917-120936.php>. Barry, Dan, and William K. Rashbaum. “Rodin Work from Trade Center Survived, and Vanished.” New York Times. 20 May 2002: B1. Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Baudrillard, Jean. The Illusion of the End. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. Bernstein, J.M. The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. Burgin, Victor. The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Post-Modernity. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1986. Cauchon, Dennis and Martha T. Moore. “Desperation Drove Sept. 11 Victims Out World Trade Center Windows.” Salt Lake Tribune Online. 4 September 2002. 19 Jan. 2003 <http://www.sltrib.com/2002/sep/09042002/nation_w/768120.htm>. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990. Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1994. “Remains of a Day.” Time 160.11 (9 Sep. 2002): 58. Smith, Paul. Discerning the Subject. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988. “The Accidental Tourist.” Urban Legends. 20 Nov. 2001. 21 Feb. 2003 <http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/crash.htm>. Links http://www.clickondetroit.com/sh/news/stories/nat-news-96283920010917-120936.html http://www.sltrib.com/2002/sep/09042002/nation_w/768120.htm http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/crash.htm Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Smith, Royce W.. "The Image Is Dying" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/09-imageisdying.php>. APA Style Smith, R. W. (2003, Apr 23). The Image Is Dying. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/09-imageisdying.php>

In the 1960s, especially in the West, art that was revelatory and art that was revealing operated at opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum. On the side of the revelatory we can think of encounters synonymous with modernism, in which an expressionist painting was revelatory of the Freudian unconscious, or a Barnett Newman the revelatory intensity of the sublime. By contrast, the impulse to reveal in 1960s art was rooted in post-Duchampian practice, implicating artists as different as Lynda Benglis and Richard Hamilton, who mined the potential of an art that was without essence. If revelatory art underscored modernism’s transcendental conviction, critically revealing work tested its discursive rules and institutional conventions. Of course, nothing in history happens as neatly as this suggests, but what is clear is how polarized the language of artistic revelation was throughout the 1960s. With the international spread of minimalism, pop art, and fluxus, provisional reveals eventually dominated art-historical discourse. Aesthetic conviction, with its spiritual undertones, was haunted by its demystification. In the words of Donald Judd: “a work needs only to be interesting” (184).That art galleries could be sites of timely socio-political issues, rather than timeless intuitions undersigned by medium specificity, is one of the more familiar origin stories of postmodernism. Few artists symbolize this shift more than Hans Haacke, whose 2019 exhibition All Connected, at the New Museum, New York, examined the legacy of his outward-looking work. Born in Germany in 1936, and a New Yorker since 1965, Haacke has been linked to the term “institutional critique” since the mid 1980s, after Mel Ramsden’s coining in 1975, and the increased recognition of kindred spirits such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Michael Asher, Martha Rosler, Robert Smithson, Daniel Buren, and Marcel Broodthaers. These artists have featured in books and essays by the likes of Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, and Yve-Alain Bois, but they are also known for their own contributions to art discourse, producing hybrid conceptions of the intellectual postmodern artist as historian, critic and curator.Haacke was initially fascinated by kinetic sculpture in the early 1960s, taking inspiration from op art, systems art, and machine-oriented research collectives such as Zero (Germany), Gruppo N (Italy) and GRAV (France, an acronym of Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel). Towards the end of the decade he started to produce more overtly socio-political work, creating what would become a classic piece from this period, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1 (1969). Here, in a solo exhibition at New York’s Howard Wise Gallery, the artist invited viewers to mark their birthplaces and places of residence on a map. Questioning the statistical demography of the Gallery’s avant-garde attendees, the exhibition anticipated the meticulous sociological character of much of his practice to come, grounding New York art – the centre of the art world – in local, social, and economic fabrics.In the forward to the catalogue of All Connected, New Museum Director Lisa Philips claims that Haacke’s survey exhibition provided a chance to reflect on the artist’s prescience, especially given the flourishing of art activism over the last five or so years. Philips pressed the issue of why no other American art institution had mounted a retrospective of his work in three decades, since his previous survey, Unfinished Business, at the New Museum in 1986, at its former, and much smaller, Soho digs (8). It suggests that other institutions have deemed Haacke’s work too risky, generating too much political heat for them to handle. It’s a reputation the artist has cultivated since the Guggenheim Museum famously cancelled his 1971 exhibition after learning his intended work, Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System as of May 1, 1971 (1971) involved research into dubious New York real estate dealings. Guggenheim director Thomas Messer defended the censorship at the time, going so far as to describe it as an “alien substance that had entered the art museum organism” (Haacke, Framing 138). Exposé was this substance Messer dare not name: art that was too revealing, too journalistic, too partisan, and too politically viscid. (Three years later, Haacke got his own back with Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Board of Trustees, 1974, exposing then Guggenheim board members’ connections to the copper industry in Chile, where socialist president Salvador Allende had just been overthrown with US backing.) All Connected foregrounded these institutional reveals from time past, at a moment in 2019 when the moral accountability of the art institution was on the art world’s collective mind. The exhibition followed high-profile protests at New York’s Whitney Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Louvre, and the British Museum. These and other arts organisations have increasingly faced pressures, fostered by social media, to end ties with unethical donors, sponsors, and board members, with activist groups protesting institutional affiliations ranging from immigration detention centre management to opioid and teargas manufacturing. An awareness of the limits of individual agency and autonomy undoubtedly defines this era, with social media platforms intensifying the encumbrances of individual, group, and organisational identities. Hans Haacke, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 1, 1969 Hans Haacke, Gallery-Goers’ Birthplace and Residence Profile, Part 2, 1969-71Unfinished BusinessUnderscoring Haacke’s activist credentials, Philips describes him as “a model of how to live ethically and empathetically in the world today”, and as a beacon of light amidst the “extreme political and economic uncertainty” of the present, Trump-presidency-calamity moment (7). This was markedly different to how Haacke’s previous New York retrospective, Unfinished Business, was received, which bore the weight of being the artist’s first museum exhibition in New York following the Guggenheim controversy. In the catalogue to Haacke’s 1986 exhibition, then New Museum director Marcia Tucker introduced his work as a challenge, cautiously claiming that he poses “trenchant questions” and that the institution accepts “the difficulties and contradictions” inherent to any museum staging of his work (6).Philips’s and Tucker’s distinct perspectives on Haacke’s practice – one as heroically ethical, the other as a sobering critical challenge – exemplify broader shifts in the perception of institutional critique (the art of the socio-political reveal) over this thirty-year period. In the words of Pamela M. Lee, between 1986 and 2019 the art world has undergone a “seismic transformation”, becoming “a sphere of influence at once more rapacious, acquisitive, and overweening but arguably more democratizing and ecumenical with respect to new audiences and artists involved” (87). Haacke’s reputation over this period has taken a similar shift, from him being a controversial opponent of art’s autonomy (an erudite postmodern conceptualist) to a figurehead for moral integrity and cohesive artistic experimentation.As Rosalyn Deutsche pointed out in the catalogue to Haacke’s 1986 exhibition, a potential trap of such a retrospective is that, through biographical positioning, Haacke might be seen as an “exemplary political artist” (210). With this, the specific political issues motivating his work would be overshadowed by the perception of the “great artist” – someone who brings single-issue politics into the narrative of postmodern art, but at the expense of the issues themselves. This is exactly what Douglas Crimp discovered in Unfinished Business. In a 1987 reflection on the show, Crimp argued that, when compared with an AIDS-themed display, Homo Video, staged at the New Museum at the same time, reviewers of Haacke’s exhibition tended to analyse his politics “within the context of the individual artist’s body of work … . Political issues became secondary to the aesthetic strategies of the producer” (34). Crimp, whose activism would be at the forefront of his career in subsequent years, was surprised at how Homo Video and Unfinished Business spawned different readings. Whereas works in the former exhibition tended to be addressed in terms of the artists personal and partisan politics, Haacke’s prompted reflection on the aesthetics-politics juxtaposition itself. For Crimp, the fact that “there was no mediation between these two shows”, spoke volumes about the divisions between political and activist art at the time.New York Times critic Michael Brenson, reiterating a comment made by Fredric Jameson in the catalogue for Unfinished Business, describes the timeless appearance of Haacke’s work in 1986, which is “surprising for an artist whose work is in some way about ideology and history” (Brenson). The implication is that the artist gives a surprisingly long aesthetic afterlife to the politically specific – to ordinarily short shelf-life issues. In this mode of critical postmodernism in which we are unable to distinguish clearly between intervening in and merely reproducing the logic of the system, Haacke is seen as an astute director of an albeit ambiguous push and pull between political specificity and aesthetic irreducibility, political externality and the internalist mode of art about art. Jameson, while granting that Haacke’s work highlights the need to reinvent the role of the “ruling class” in the complex, globalised socio-economic situation of postmodernism, claims that it does so as representative of the “new intellectual problematic” of postmodernism. Haacke, according Jameson, stages postmodernism’s “crisis of ‘mapping’” whereby capitalism’s totalizing, systemic forms are “handled” (note that he avoids “critiqued” or “challenged”) by focusing on their manifestation through particular (“micro-public”) institutional means (49, 50).We can think of the above examples as constituting the postmodern version of Haacke, who frames very specific political issues on the one hand, and the limitless incorporative power of appropriative practice on the other. To say this another way, Haacke, circa 1986, points to specific sites of power struggle at the same time as revealing their generic absorption by an art-world system grown accustomed to its “duplicate anything” parameters. For all of his political intent, the artistic realm, totalised in accordance with the postmodern image, is ultimately where many thought his gestures remained. The philosopher turned art critic Arthur Danto, in a negative review of Haacke’s exhibition, portrayed institutional critique as part of an age-old business of purifying art, maintaining that Haacke’s “crude” and “heavy-handed” practice is blind to how art institutions have always relied on some form of critique in order for them to continue being respected “brokers of spirit”. This perception – of Haacke’s “external” critiques merely serving to “internally” strengthen existing art structures – was reiterated by Leo Steinberg. Supportively misconstruing the artist in the exhibition catalogue, Steinberg writes that Haacke’s “political message, by dint of dissonance, becomes grating and shrill – but shrill within the art context. And while its political effectiveness is probably minimal, its effect on Minimal art may well be profound” (15). Hans Haacke, MOMA Poll, 1970 All ConnectedSo, what do we make of the transformed reception of Haacke’s work since the late 1980s: from a postmodern ouroboros of “politicizing aesthetics and aestheticizing politics” to a revelatory exemplar of art’s moral power? At a period in the late 1980s when the culture wars were in full swing and yet activist groups remained on the margins of what would become a “mainstream” art world, Unfinished Business was, perhaps, blindingly relevant to its times. Unusually for a retrospective, it provided little historical distance for its subject, with Haacke becoming a victim of the era’s propensity to “compartmentalize the interpretive registers of inside and outside and the terms corresponding to such spatial­izing coordinates” (Lee 83).If commentary surrounding this 2019 retrospective is anything to go by, politics no longer performs such a parasitic, oppositional or even dialectical relation to art; no longer is the political regarded as a real-world intrusion into the formal, discerning, longue-durée field of aesthetics. The fact that protests inside the museum have become more visible and vociferous in recent years testifies to this shift. For Jason Farrago, in his review of All Connected for the New York Times, “the fact that no person and no artwork stands alone, that all of us are enmeshed in systems of economic and social power, is for anyone under 40 a statement of the obvious”. For Alyssa Battistoni, in Frieze magazine, “if institutional critique is a practice, it is hard to see where it is better embodied than in organizing a union, strike or boycott”.Some responders to All Connected, such as Ben Lewis, acknowledge how difficult it is to extract a single critical or political strategy from Haacke’s body of work; however, we can say that, in general, earlier postmodern questions concerning the aestheticisation of the socio-political reveal no longer dominates the reception of his practice. Today, rather than treating art and politics are two separate but related entities, like form is to content, better ideas circulate, such as those espoused by Bruno Latour and Jacques Rancière, for whom what counts as political is not determined by a specific program, medium or forum, but by the capacity of any actor-network to disrupt and change a normative social fabric. Compare Jameson’s claim that Haacke’s corporate and museological tropes are “dead forms” – through which “no subject-position speaks, not even in protest” (38) – with Battistoni’s, who, seeing Haacke’s activism as implicit, asks the reader: “how can we take the relationship between art and politics as seriously as Haacke has insisted we must?”Crimp’s concern that Unfinished Business perpetuated an image of the artist as distant from the “political stakes” of his work did not carry through to All Connected, whose respondents were less vexed about the relation between art and politics, with many noting its timeliness. The New Museum was, ironically, undergoing its own equity crisis in the months leading up to the exhibition, with newly unionised staff fighting with the Museum over workers’ salaries and healthcare even as it organised to build a new $89-million Rem Koolhaas-designed extension. Battistoni addressed these disputes at-length, claiming the protests “crystallize perfectly the changes that have shaped the world over the half-century of Haacke’s career, and especially over the 33 years since his last New Museum exhibition”. Of note is how little attention Battistoni pays to Haacke’s artistic methods when recounting his assumed solidarity with these disputes, suggesting that works such as Creating Consent (1981), Helmosboro Country (1990), and Standortkultur (Corporate Culture) (1997) – which pivot on art’s public image versus its corporate umbilical cord – do not convey some special aesthetico-political insight into a totalizing capitalist system. Instead, “he has simply been an astute and honest observer long enough to remind us that our current state of affairs has been in formation for decades”.Hans Haacke, News, 1969/2008 Hans Haacke, Wide White Flow, 1967/2008 Showing Systems Early on in the 1960s, Haacke was influenced by the American critic, artist, and curator Jack Burnham, who in a 1968 essay, “Systems Esthetics” for Artforum, inaugurated the loose conceptualist paradigm that would become known as “systems art”. Here, against Greenbergian formalism and what he saw as the “craft fetishism” of modernism, Burnham argues that “change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done” (30). Burnham thought that emergent contemporary artists were intuitively aware of the importance of the systems approach: the significant artist in 1968 “strives to reduce the technical and psychical distance between his artistic output and the productive means of society”, and pays particular attention to relationships between organic and non-organic systems (31).As Michael Fried observed of minimalism in his now legendary 1967 essay Art and Objecthood, this shift in sixties art – signalled by the widespread interest in the systematic – entailed a turn towards the spatial, institutional, and societal contexts of receivership. For Burnham, art is not about “material entities” that beautify or modify the environment; rather, art exists “in relations between people and between people and the components of their environment” (31). At the forefront of his mind was land art, computer art, and research-driven conceptualist practice, which, against Fried, has “no contrived confines such as the theatre proscenium or picture frame” (32). In a 1969 lecture at the Guggenheim, Burnham confessed that his research concerned not just art as a distinct entity, but aesthetics in its broadest possible sense, declaring “as far as art is concerned, I’m not particularly interested in it. I believe that aesthetics exists in revelation” (Ragain).Working under the aegis of Burnham’s systems art, Haacke was shaken by the tumultuous and televised politics of late-1960s America – a time when, according to Joan Didion, a “demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community” (41). Haacke cites Martin Luther King’s assassination as an “incident that made me understand that, in addition to what I had called physical and biological systems, there are also social systems and that art is an integral part of the universe of social systems” (Haacke, Conversation 222). Haacke created News (1969) in response to this awareness, comprising a (pre-Twitter) telex machine that endlessly spits out live news updates from wire services, piling up rolls and rolls of paper on the floor of the exhibition space over the course of its display. Echoing Burnham’s idea of the artist as a programmer whose job is to “prepare new codes and analyze data”, News nonetheless presents the museum as anything but immune from politics, and technological systems as anything but impersonal (32).This intensification of social responsibility in Haacke’s work sets him apart from other, arguably more reductive techno-scientific systems artists such as Sonia Sheridan and Les Levine. The gradual transformation of his ecological and quasi-scientific sculptural experiments from 1968 onwards could almost be seen as making a mockery of the anthropocentrism described in Fried’s 1967 critique. Here, Fried claims not only that the literalness of minimalist work amounts to an emphasis on shape and spatial presence over pictorial composition, but also, in this “theatricality of objecthood” literalness paradoxically mirrors (153). At times in Fried’s essay the minimalist art object reads as a mute form of sociality, the spatial presence filled by the conscious experience of looking – the theatrical relationship itself put on view. Fried thought that viewers of minimalism were presented with themselves in relation to the entire world as object, to which they were asked not to respond in an engaged formalist sense but (generically) to react. Pre-empting the rise of conceptual art and the sociological experiments of post-conceptualist practice, Fried, unapprovingly, argues that minimalist artists unleash an anthropomorphism that “must somehow confront the beholder” (154).Haacke, who admits he has “always been sympathetic to so-called Minimal art” (Haacke, A Conversation 26) embraced the human subject around the same time that Fried’s essay was published. While Fried would have viewed this move as further illustrating the minimalist tendency towards anthropomorphic confrontation, it would be more accurate to describe Haacke’s subsequent works as social-environmental barometers. Haacke began staging interactions which, however dry or administrative, framed the interplays of culture and nature, inside and outside, private and public spheres, expanding art’s definition by looking to the social circulation and economy that supported it.Haacke’s approach – which seems largely driven to show, to reveal – anticipates the viewer in a way that Fried would disapprove, for whom absorbed viewers, and the irreduction of gestalt to shape, are the by-products of assessments of aesthetic quality. For Donald Judd, the promotion of interest over conviction signalled scepticism about Clement Greenberg’s quality standards; it was a way of acknowledging the limitations of qualitative judgement, and, perhaps, of knowledge more generally. In this way, minimalism’s aesthetic relations are not framed so much as allowed to “go on and on” – the artists’ doubt about aesthetic value producing this ongoing temporal quality, which conviction supposedly lacks.In contrast to Unfinished Business, the placing of Haacke’s early sixties works adjacent to his later, more political works in All Connected revealed something other than the tensions between postmodern socio-political reveal and modernist-formalist revelation. The question of whether to intervene in an operating system – whether to let such a system go on and on – was raised throughout the exhibition, literally and metaphorically. To be faced with the interactions of physical, biological, and social systems (in Condensation Cube, 1963-67, and Wide White Flow, 1967/2008, but also in later works like MetroMobiltan, 1985) is to be faced with the question of change and one’s place in it. Framing systems in full swing, at their best, Haacke’s kinetic and environmental works suggest two things: 1. That the systems on display will be ongoing if their component parts aren’t altered; and 2. Any alteration will alter the system as a whole, in minor or significant ways. Applied to his practice more generally, what Haacke’s work hinges on is whether or not one perceives oneself as part of its systemic relations. To see oneself implicated is to see beyond the work’s literal forms and representations. Here, systemic imbrication equates to moral realisation: one’s capacity to alter the system as the question of what to do. Unlike the phenomenology-oriented minimalists, the viewer’s participation is not always assumed in Haacke’s work, who follows a more hermeneutic model. In fact, Haacke’s systems are often circular, highlighting participation as a conscious disruption of flow rather than an obligation that emanates from a particular work (148).This is a theatrical scenario as Fried describes it, but it is far from an abandonment of the issue of profound value. In fact, if we accept that Haacke’s work foregrounds intervention as a moral choice, it is closer to Fried’s own rallying cry for conviction in aesthetic judgement. As Rex Butler has argued, Fried’s advocacy of conviction over sceptical interest can be understood as dialectical in the Hegelian sense: conviction is the overcoming of scepticism, in a similar way that Geist, or spirit, for Hegel, is “the very split between subject and object, in which each makes the other possible” (Butler). What is advanced for Fried is the idea of “a scepticism that can be remarked only from the position of conviction and a conviction that can speak of itself only as this scepticism” (for instance, in his attempt to overcome his scepticism of literalist art on the basis of its scepticism). Strong and unequivocal feelings in Fried’s writing are informed by weak and indeterminate feeling, just as moral conviction in Haacke – the feeling that I, the viewer, should do something – emerges from an awareness that the system will continue to function fine without me. In other words, before being read as “a barometer of the changing and charged atmosphere of the public sphere” (Sutton 16), the impact of Haacke’s work depends upon an initial revelation. It is the realisation not just that one is embroiled in a series of “invisible but fundamental” relations greater than oneself, but that, in responding to seemingly sovereign social systems, the question of our involvement is a moral one, a claim for determination founded through an overcoming of the systemic (Fry 31).Haacke’s at once open and closed works suit the logic of our algorithmic age, where viewers have to shift constantly from a position of being targeted to one of finding for oneself. Peculiarly, when Haacke’s online digital polls in All Connected were hacked by activists (who randomized statistical responses in order to compel the Museum “to redress their continuing complacency in capitalism”) the culprits claimed they did it in sympathy with his work, not in spite of it: “we see our work as extending and conversing with Haacke’s, an artist and thinker who has been a source of inspiration to us both” (Hakim). This response – undermining done with veneration – is indicative of the complicated legacy of his work today. Haacke’s influence on artists such as Tania Bruguera, Sam Durant, Forensic Architecture, Laura Poitras, Carsten Höller, and Andrea Fraser has less to do with a particular political ideal than with his unique promotion of journalistic suspicion and moral revelation in forms of systems mapping. It suggests a coda be added to the sentiment of All Connected: all might not be revealed, but how we respond matters. Hans Haacke, Large Condensation Cube, 1963–67ReferencesBattistoni, Alyssa. “After a Contract Fight with Its Workers, the New Museum Opens Hans Haacke’s ‘All Connected’.” Frieze 208 (2019).Bishara, Hakim. “Hans Haacke Gets Hacked by Activists at the New Museum.” Hyperallergic 21 Jan. 2010. <https://hyperallergic.com/538413/hans-haacke-gets-hacked-by-activists-at-the-new-museum/>.Brenson, Michael. “Art: In Political Tone, Works by Hans Haacke.” New York Times 19 Dec. 1988. <https://www.nytimes.com/1986/12/19/arts/artin-political-tone-worksby-hans-haacke.html>.Buchloh, Benjamin. “Hans Haacke: Memory and Instrumental Reason.” Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000.Burnham, Jack. “Systems Esthetics.” Artforum 7.1 (1968).Butler, Rex. “Art and Objecthood: Fried against Fried.” Nonsite 22 (2017). <https://nonsite.org/feature/art-and-objecthood>.Carrion-Murayari, Gary, and Massimiliano Gioni (eds.). Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon and New Museum, 2019.Crimp, Douglas. “Strategies of Public Address: Which Media, Which Publics?” In Hal Foster (ed.), Discussions in Contemporary Culture, no. 1. Washington: Bay P, 1987.Danto, Arthur C. “Hans Haacke and the Industry of Art.” In Gregg Horowitz and Tom Huhn (eds.), The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste. London: Routledge, 1987/1998.Didion, Joan. The White Album. London: 4th Estate, 2019.Farago, Jason. “Hans Haacke, at the New Museum, Takes No Prisoners.” New York Times 31 Oct. 2019. <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/arts/design/hans-haacke-review-new-museum.html>.Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Artforum 5 (June 1967).Fry, Edward. “Introduction to the Work of Hans Haacke.” In Hans Haacke 1967. Cambridge: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2011.Glueck, Grace. “The Guggenheim Cancels Haacke’s Show.” New York Times 7 Apr. 1971.Gudel, Paul. “Michael Fried, Theatricality and the Threat of Skepticism.” Michael Fried and Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2018.Haacke, Hans. Hans Haacke: Framing and Being Framed: 7 Works 1970-5. Halifax: P of the Nova Scotia College of Design and New York: New York UP, 1976.———. “Hans Haacke in Conversation with Gary Carrion-Murayari and Massimiliano Gioni.” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon and New Museum, 2019.Haacke, Hans, et al. “A Conversation with Hans Haacke.” October 30 (1984).Haacke, Hans, and Brian Wallis (eds.). Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 1986.“Haacke’s ‘All Connected.’” Frieze 25 Oct. 2019. <https://frieze.com/article/after-contract-fight-its-workers-new-museum-opens-hans-haackes-all-connected>.Judd, Donald. “Specific Objects.” Complete Writings 1959–1975. Halifax: P of the Nova Scotia College of Design and New York: New York UP, 1965/1975.Lee, Pamela M. “Unfinished ‘Unfinished Business.’” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon P Limited and New Museum, 2019.Ragain, Melissa. “Jack Burnham (1931–2019).” Artforum 19 Mar. 2019. <https://www.artforum.com/passages/melissa-ragain-on-jack-burnham-78935>.Sutton, Gloria. “Hans Haacke: Works of Art, 1963–72.” Hans Haacke: All Connected. New York: Phaidon P Limited and New Museum, 2019.Tucker, Marcia. “Director’s Forward.” Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass: MIT P, 1986.

Abstract Study question Assess the effectiveness of treatments at a Male Endocrine Fertility Clinic, over a five-year period, through spermatogenesis rates and fertility outcomes via a patient-centred questionnaire Summary answer Rate of successful spermatogenesis was 68% and live birth (LB) 36%. Trend towards lower odds ratio for LB was noted, if partners reported subfertility. What is known already Approximately half of infertility cases are due to male factor, with up to 70% being idiopathic. The remaining 30% of male factor infertility is attributed to primary testicular or central endocrine disorders. Identifying the aetiology of male hypogonadism is important to determine treatment strategies, such as gonadotrophin therapy and surgical testicular sperm extraction (TESE). Although treatment pathways for hypogonadal men with infertility have been established over the last thirty years, the effectiveness of such pathways is diverse and data from large studies are scanty. Study design, size, duration A questionnaire, covering basic demographic data about both partners, as well as health conditions affecting fertility, was prospectively sent out to 168 men who had received gonadotrophins for induction of spermatogenesis between 2017 and 2021. Men presented with azoospemia or severe oligospermia (&lt;5million/ml). Eighty-four questionnaires (50%) were completed. Medical records were reviewed, to validate participant responses, identify baseline endocrine biochemistry from the start of spermatogenesis and seminal parameters at the end of the process. Participants/materials, setting, methods Mean age of participants was 38 years (range 21-63). Twenty-two men had primary (26%) and the remaining 74% central hypogonadism. The questionnaire was sent via email and responses were anonymised with each participant given a unique study identification number. All statistical analysis was performed using Graph Pad Prism. All hypothesis testing was two-tailed; p &lt; 0.05 was considered statistically significant. Main results and the role of chance 58% of men (49/84) had sperm seen in their ejaculate and 10% of men (8/84) after microTESE. Men with persistent azoospermia were more likely to have a diagnosis of primary hypogonadism (PH) and small testicular size. 28% (13/47) had partners, who conceived spontaneously and delivered healthy babies. 9% (4/47) had a live birth after ART. Only 1 of 2 men with PH seeking fertility, had a partner with a positive pregnancy test, which resulted in a miscarriage. Age, body mass index, alcohol intake, baseline LH, FSH and testosterone were not significantly different between men with or without a live birth. Men without a live birth trended towards having partners with subfertility (pelvic inflammatory disease, endometriosis or polycystic ovarian syndrome), though this did not reach statistically significance (Odds ratio 6.9, 95%CI: 0.8 – 59.9, p = 0.07). Also, LBR was lower for female partners above 35 years, compared to LBR for younger female partners; 35% (6/17) for couples with partners above 35 years, versus 65% (11/17) for couples with partners below 35 years. Seminal parameters were not statistically different between men with or without live births, which supports the possibility that factors other than male reproductive status affected fertility outcomes. Limitations, reasons for caution The 50% response rate to our questionnaire-based study means outcomes may not be representative of all patients attending our clinic and can introduce bias with differences between responders and non-responders. Furthermore, the questionnaire used was not externally validated and its data may not be representative of outcomes in other centers. Wider implications of the findings Our study highlighted successful spermatogenesis and comparable live birth rates to other male fertility services worldwide. It is the first to compare the clinical, biochemical and seminal characteristics between men with live births versus those without a live birth. Ensuring couples are well informed is essential to further successful outcomes. Trial registration number not applicable

Photo by Christian Bowen on Unsplash ABSTRACT Assisted Reproductive Technology can be a beneficial tool for couples unable to reproduce independently; however, it has historically discriminated against the LGBTQ+ community members. Given the evolution and acceptance of LGBTQ rights in recent years, discrimination and barriers to access reproductive technology and health care should be readdressed as they still exist within this community. INTRODUCTION In recent years, the LGBTQ+ community has made great strides toward attaining equal rights. This fight dates back to 1970 when Michael Baker and McConnell applied for a marriage license in Minnesota.[1] After the county courthouse denied the couple's request, they appealed to the Minnesota Supreme Court. Baker and McConnell’s dispute reached the US Supreme Court. Baker v. Nelson[2] was the first time a same-sex couple attempted to pursue marriage through higher courts in the US.[3] Because the couple lost the case, Baker changed his name to a gender-neutral one, and McConnell adopted Baker, allowing Baker and McConnell to have legal protections like the ability to receive certain inheritances. Baker and McConnell received a marriage license from an unsuspecting clerk from Blue Earth County, where they wed on September 3, 1971.[4] BACKGROUND The Supreme Court’s decision left individual state legislatures the option to accommodate same-sex couples’ rights constitutionally. As a result, some states banned same-sex marriage, while others offered alternative options such as domestic partnerships. With many obstacles, such as the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and President Bush’s efforts to limit marriage to heterosexual people, Massachusetts became the first state to legalize gay marriage in 2003.[5] Other states slowly followed. Finally, in 2015 the US Supreme Court made same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states in Obergefell v. Hodges,[6] marking an important milestone for the LGBTQ+ community’s fight toward marriage equality. The Obergefell v. Hodges decision emphasized that members of the homosexual community are “not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization's oldest institutions,” thus granting them the right to “equal dignity in the eyes of the law.”[7] This paper argues that in the aftermath of the wide acceptance of LGBTQ rights, discrimination and barriers to access reproductive technology and health care persist nationally. Procreation also faces discrimination. Research supports that children’s overall psychological and physical welfare with same-sex parents does not differ compared to children with heterosexual parents.[8] Some others worry about the children’s developmental health and argue that same-sex male couples’ inability to breastfeed their children may be harmful; however, such parents can obtain breast milk via surrogate donation.[9] Further concerns regarding confusion in gender identity in children raised by same-sex parents are not supported by research in the field indicating that there are “no negative developmental or psychological outcomes for a child, nor does it result in differing gender identity, gender role behavior or sexual partner preference compared to opposite-sex parents.”[10] ANALYSIS l. Desire to Procreate The American perception toward same-sex unions has evolved “from pathology to deviant lifestyle to identity.”[11] In 2001, only 35 percent of Americans favored same‐sex marriage, while 62 percent favored it in 2017.[12] The “Gay marriage generation”[13] has a positive attitude toward same-sex unions, arising from the “interaction among activists, celebrities, political and religious leaders, and ordinary people, who together reconfigured Americans’ social imagination of homosexuality in a way that made gay marriage seem normal, logical, and good.”[14] Same-sex couples’ right to build a biological family and ability to do so using modern reproductive technology is unclear. The data generated by the LGBTQ Family Building Survey revealed “dramatic differences in expectations around family building between LGBTQ millennials (aged 18-35) and older generations of LGBTQ people,”[15] which may be in part attributable to recent federal rulings in favor of same-sex couples. Three important results from this survey are that 63 percent of LGBTQ millennials are considering expanding their families throughout parenthood, 48 percent of LGBTQ millennials are actively planning to grow their families, compared to 55 percent of non-LGBTQ millennials; and 63 percent of those LGBTQ people interested in building a family expect to use assisted reproductive technology (ART), foster care, or adoption to become parents.[16] There are 15.9 million Americans who identify as LGBTQ+ (6.1 million of whom are 18 to 35 years old); thus, an estimated “3.8 million LGBTQ+ millennials are considering expanding their families in the coming years, and 2.9 million are actively planning to do so.”[17] Yet access and affordability to ART, especially in vitro fertilization (IVF) and surrogacy for same-sex couples, has not been consistent at a national level. The two primary problems accessing ART for the LGBTQ community are the lack of federal law and cost. A federal law that guaranteed coverage would address both problems. ll. ART for Same-Sex Couples All same-sex male (SSM) couples and same-sex female (SSF) couples must involve third parties, including surrogates or egg or sperm donors.[18] ART involves the legal status of “up to two women (surrogate and egg donor),” the intended parents, and the child for SSM couples.[19] While sometimes necessary for heterosexual couples using ART, an egg or sperm from someone other than the intended parents or a surrogate will always be necessary for the LGBTQ people seeking ART. ART, in particular IVF, is essential for infertile couples unable to conceive on their own. Unlike other industrialized countries (such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany, and Australia), the US does not heavily oversee this multibillion-dollar industry.[20] The American Society for Reproductive Medicine does provide lengthy guidelines to fertility clinics and sperm banks; however, state lawmakers have been less active as they seem to avoid the controversy surrounding controversial topics like embryo creation and abortion.[21] As a result, states “do not regulate how many children may be conceived from one donor, what types of medical information or updates must be supplied by donors, what genetic tests may be performed on embryos, how many fertilized eggs may be placed in a woman or how old a donor can be.”[22] lll. A Flawed Definition of Infertility The WHO defines the medical definition of infertility as “a disease of the reproductive system defined by the failure to achieve a clinical pregnancy after twelve months or more of regular unprotected sexual intercourse.”[23] This antiquated definition must be updated to include social infertility to integrate same-sex couples’ rights.[24] In the US, single individuals and LGBTQ couples interested in building a family by biological means are considered “socially infertile.”[25] If insurance coverage is allotted only to those with physical infertility, then it is exclusive to the heterosexual community. Although some states, such as New York, discussed below, have directly addressed this inequality by extending the definition of infertility and coverage of infertility treatments to include all residents regardless of sexual orientation, this is not yet the norm everywhere else. The outdated definition of infertility is one of the main issues affecting same-sex couples’ access to ART, as medical insurance companies hold on to the formal definition of infertility to deny coverage. lV. Insurance Coverage for IVF Insurance coverage varies per state and relies on the flawed definition of infertility. As of August 2020, 19 states have passed laws requiring insurance coverage for infertility, 13 of which include IVF coverage, as seen in Figure 1. Also, most states do not offer IVF coverage to low-income people through Medicaid.[26] In states that mandate IVF insurance coverage, the utilization rate was “277% of the rate when there was no coverage,”[27] which supports the likelihood that in other states, the cost is a primary barrier to access. When insurance does not cover ART, ART is reserved for wealthy individuals. One cycle of ART could cost, on average, “between $10,000 and $15,000.”[28] In addition, multiple cycles are often required as one IVF cycle only has “about a 25% to 30%” live birth success rate.[29] Altogether, the total cost of successful childbirth was estimated from $44,000 to $211,940 in 1992.[30] On February 11, 2021, New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo “directed the Department of Financial Services to ensure that insurers begin covering fertility services immediately for same-sex couples who wish to start a family.”[31] New York had recently passed an IVF insurance law that required “large group insurance policies and contracts that provide medical, major medical, or similar comprehensive-type coverage and are delivered or issued for delivery in New York to cover three cycles of IVF used in the treatment of infertility.”[32] But the law fell short for same-sex couples, which were still required to “pay 6 or 12 months of out-of-pocket expenses for fertility treatments such as testing and therapeutic donor insemination procedures before qualifying for coverage.”[33] Cuomo’s subsequent order made up for gaps in the law, which defined infertility as “the inability to conceive after a certain period of unprotected intercourse or donor insemination.”[34] Cuomo’s order and the law combine to make New York an example other states can follow to broaden access to ART. V. Surrogacy Access to surrogacy also presents its own set of problems, although not exclusive to the LGBTQ community. Among states, there are differences in how and when parental rights are established. States in dark green in Figure 2 allow pre-birth orders, while the states in light green allow post-birth parentage orders. Pre-birth orders “are obtained prior to the child’s birth, and they order that the intended parent(s) will be recognized as the child’s only legal parent(s) and will be placed on the child’s birth certificate,” while post-birth parentage orders have the same intent but are obtained after the child’s birth. [35] For instance, states can require genetic testing post-birth, possibly causing a delay in establishing parentage.[36] Although preventable through the execution of a health care power of attorney, a surrogate mother could be the legal, medical decision-maker for the baby before the intended parents are legally recognized. On February 15, 2021, gestational surrogacy – the most popular type of surrogacy in which the surrogate has no biological link to the baby – was legalized in New York,[37] but it remains illegal in some states such as Nebraska, Louisiana, and Michigan.[38] In addition, the costs of surrogacy are rising, and it can cost $100,000 in the US.[39] Medicaid does not cover surrogacy costs,[40] and some health insurance policies provide supplemental surrogacy insurance with premiums of approximately $10,000 and deductibles starting at $15,000.[41] Thus, “surrogacy is really only available to those gay and lesbian couples who are upper class,”[42] leaving non-affluent couples out of options to start a family through biological means. Vl. A Right to Equality and Procreation Some argue that same-sex couples should have the right to procreate (or reproductive rights). Based on arguments stemming from equal rights and non-discrimination, same-sex couples who need to use ART to procreate should have access to it. The need to merge social infertility into the currently incomplete definition of fertility could help same-sex couples achieve access through insurance coverage. The human right of equality and non-discrimination guarantees “equal and effective protection against discrimination on any ground.”[43] The United Nations later clarified that “sexual orientation is a concept which is undoubtedly covered” [44] by this protection. The right to procreate is not overtly mentioned in the US Constitution; however, the Equal Protection Clause states that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States… without due process of law.”[45] In fact, some states have abridged the reproductive privileges of some US citizens by upholding prohibitive and intricate mechanisms that deter same-sex couples from enjoying the privileges other citizens have. The Supreme Court acknowledged procreation as a “fundamental”[46] personal right, in Skinner v. Oklahoma, mandating that the reproductive rights of individuals be upheld as the right to procreate is “one of the basic civil rights of man”[47] because “procreation [is] fundamental to the very existence and survival of the race.”[48] In Eisenstadt v. Baird, the courts also supported that “the decision whether to bear or beget a child” fundamentally affects a person.[49] I argue that this protection extends to same-sex couples seeking to procreate. Finally, Obergefell v. Hodges held that the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses ensure same-sex couples the right to marriage, as marriage “safeguards children and families, draw[ing] meaning from related rights of childrearing, procreation, and education.”[50] By implicit or explicit means, these cases align with the freedom to procreate that should not be unequally applied to different social or economic groups. Yet, the cases do not apply to accessing expensive tools to procreate. As heterosexuals and the LGBTQ community face trouble accessing expensive ART for vastly different reasons, especially IVF and surrogacy, the equal rights or discrimination argument is not as helpful. For now, it is relevant to adoption cases where religious groups can discriminate.[51] The insurance coverage level may be the best approach. While the social norms adapt and become more inclusive, the elimination of the infertility requirement or changing the definition of infertility could work. Several arguments could address the insurance coverage deficit. Under one argument, a biological or physical inability to conceive exists in the homosexual couple trying to achieve a pregnancy. Depending on the wording or a social definition, a caselaw could be developed arguing the medical definition of infertility applies to the LGBTQ community as those trying to procreate are physically unable to conceive as a couple planning to become parents. One counterargument to that approach is that it can be offensive to label people infertile (or disabled) only because of their status as part of a homosexual couple.[52] CONCLUSION In the last 50 years, there has been a notable shift in the social acceptance of homosexuality.[53] Marriage equality has opened the door for further social and legal equality, as evidenced by the increased number of same-sex couples seeking parenthood “via co-parenting, fostering, adoption or surrogacy” – colloquially referred to as the ‘Gayby Boom’.[54] However, some prejudice and disdain toward LGBTQ+ parenting remain. Equitable access to ART for all people may be attainable as new technology drives costs down, legislators face societal pressure to require broader insurance coverage, and social norms become more inclusive. [1] Eckholm, E. (2015, May 17). The same-sex couple who got a marriage license in 1971. Retrieved April 08, 2021, from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/us/the-same-sex-couple-who-got-a-marriage-license-in-1971.html [2] Eckholm, E. [3] A brief history of civil rights in the United States: A timeline of the legalization of same-sex marriage in the U.S. (2021, January 27). Retrieved April 08, 2021, from https://guides.ll.georgetown.edu/c.php?g=592919&p=4182201 [4] Eckholm, E. [5] A brief history of civil rights in the United States: A timeline of the legalization of same-sex marriage in the U.S. (2021, January 27). Retrieved April 08, 2021, from https://guides.ll.georgetown.edu/c.php?g=592919&p=4182201 [6] A brief history of civil rights in the United States [7] A brief history of civil rights in the United States [8] Lee, J., & Bolzendahl, C. (2019). Acceptance and Rejection: Patterns of opinion on homosexuality in the United States and the world. Sociological Forum, 34(4), 1026-1031. doi:10.1111/socf.12562 [9] Lee, J., et al. [10] Lee, J., et al. [11] Lee, J., et al. [12] Lee, et al. [13] Lee, et al. [14] Lee, et al. [15] LGBTQ family building survey. (2020, July 02). Retrieved April 08, 2021, from https://www.familyequality.org/resources/lgbtq-family-building-survey/ [16] LGBTQ family building survey. (2020, July 02). Retrieved April 08, 2021, from https://www.familyequality.org/resources/lgbtq-family-building-survey/ [17] LGBTQ family building survey. (2020, July 02). Retrieved April 08, 2021, from https://www.familyequality.org/resources/lgbtq-family-building-survey/ [18] Mackenzie, S. C., Wickins-Drazilova, D., & Wickins, J. (2020). The ethics of fertility treatment for same-sex male couples: Considerations for a modern fertility clinic. European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Reproductive Biology, 244, 71-75. doi:10.1016/j.ejogrb.2019.11.011 [19] Mackenzie, et al. [20] Ollove, M. (2015, March 18). States not eager to regulate fertility industry. Retrieved April 08, 2021, from https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2015/3/18/states-not-eager-to-regulate-fertility-industry [21] Ollove, M. [22] Ollove, M. [23] World Health Organization. (2020, September 14). Infertility. World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/infertility [24] Leondires, M. P. (2020, March 19). Fertility insurance Mandates & same-sex couples. Retrieved April 08, 2021, from https://www.gayparentstobe.com/gay-parenting-blog/fertility-insurance-mandates-same-sex-couples/ [25] Lo, W., & Campo-Engelstein, L. (2018). Expanding the Clinical Definition of Infertility to Include Socially Infertile Individuals and Couples. Reproductive Ethics II, 71–83. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89429-4_6 [26] Mohapatra, S. (2015). Assisted Reproduction Inequality and Marriage Equality. Chicago-Kent Law Review, 92(1). Retrieved April 08, 2021, from https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4146&context=cklawreview [27] Mohapatra, S. [28] Mohapatra, S. [29] Mohapatra, S. [30] Mohapatra, S. [31] Governor Cuomo announces new actions to expand access to FERTILITY coverage for same sex couples as part of 2021 Women's Agenda. (n.d.). [32] Health Insurers FAQs: IVF and Fertility Preservation Law Q&A Guidance. (n.d.). Retrieved April 08, 2021, from https://www.dfs.ny.gov/apps_and_licensing/health_insurers/ivf_fertility_preservation_law_qa_guidance [33] Governor Cuomo announces new actions to expand access to FERTILITY coverage for same sex couples as part of 2021 Women's Agenda. (n.d.). Retrieved April 08, 2021, from https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-announces-new-actions-expand-access-fertility-coverage-same-sex-couples-part#:~:text=February%2011%2C%202021-,Governor%20Cuomo%20Announces%20New%20Actions%20to%20Expand%20Access%20to%20Fertility,Part%20of%202021%20Women's%20Agenda&text=Cuomo%20today%20directed%20the%20Department,wish%20to%20start%20a%20family. [34] Leondires, M. P. [35] Assisted reproduction parentage proceedings information: Academy of Adoption and Assistive Reproduction Attorneys (AAAA). (2019, March 14). Retrieved April 08, 2021, from https://adoptionart.org/assisted-reproduction/parentage-proceedings/ [36] Assisted reproduction parentage proceedings information. [37] Governor Cuomo reminds surrogates and parents of their new Insurance rights and protections During Gestational Surrogacy. (n.d.). Retrieved April 08, 2021, from https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-reminds-surrogates-and-parents-their-new-insurance-rights-and-protections-during [38] U.S. Surrogacy Map: Surrogacy laws by state. (2020, December 23). Retrieved April 08, 2021, from https://www.creativefamilyconnections.com/us-surrogacy-law-map/ [39] Mohapatra, S. [40] Beitsch, R. (2017, June 29). As surrogacy surges, new parents seek legal protections. Retrieved April 08, 2021, from https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2017/06/29/as-surrogacy-surges-new-parents-seek-legal-protections#:~:text=Medicaid%20does%20not%20cover%20surrogacy,and%20intended%20parents%20at%20risk. [41] Where to find surrogacy insurance? (2017, November 02). Retrieved April 08, 2021, from https://surrogate.com/intended-parents/surrogacy-laws-and-legal-information/where-can-i-find-surrogacy-insurance/ [42] Mohapatra, S. [43] International covenant on civil and political rights. (n.d.). Retrieved April 08, 2021, from https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ccpr.aspx [44] United Nations. (2003). Human rights in the administration of justice: a manual on human rights for judges, prosecutors and lawyers. [45] U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 1. [46] Skinner v. Oklahoma, Https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/316/535.html (June 1, 1942). [47] Skinner v. Oklahoma [48] Skinner v. Oklahoma [49] Eisenstadt v. Baird, Https://www.lexisnexis.com/community/casebrief/p/casebrief-eisenstadt-v-baird (March 22, 1972). [50] Obergefell v. Hodges [51] Higgins, T. (2021, June 17). Supreme Court sides with Catholic adoption agency that refuses to work with LGBT couples. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/17/supreme-court-sides-with-catholic-adoption-agency-that-refuses-to-work-with-lgbt-couples.html. [52] Bowerman, M., May, A., & Rossman, S. (2017, April 24). Should the definition of infertility be more inclusive? USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/04/22/same-sex-couples-covered-infertility-insurance/100644092/. [53] Mackenzie, et al. [54] Mackenzie, et al.

One of the greatest joys in watching Foxtel is to see all the crazy people who run talk shows. Judgement, ridicule and generalisations slip from their tongues like overcooked lamb off a bone. From Oprah to Rikki, from Jerry to Mother Love, the posterior of pop culture claims a world-wide audience. Recently, a new talk diva was added to the pay television stable. Dr Laura Schlessinger, the Mother of Morals, prowls the soundstage. attacking 'selfish acts' such as divorce, de facto relationships and voting Democrat. On April 11, 2001, a show aired in Australia that added a new demon to the decadence of the age. Dr Laura had been told that a disgusting video clip, called 'Rock DJ', had been televised at 2:30pm on MTV. Children could have been watching. The footage that so troubled our doyenne of daytime featured the British performer Robbie Williams not only stripping in front of disinterested women, but then removing skin, muscle and tissue in a desperate attempt to claim their gaze. This was too much for Dr Laura. She was horrified: her strident tone became piercing. She screeched, "this is si-ee-ck." . My paper is drawn to this sick masculinity, not to judge - but to laugh and theorise. Robbie Williams, the deity of levity, holds a pivotal role in theorising the contemporary 'crisis' of manhood. To paraphrase Austin Powers, Williams returned the ger to singer. But Williams also triumphed in a captivatingly original way. He is one of the few members of a boy band who created a successful solo career without regurgitating the middle of the road mantras of boys, girls, love, loss and whining about it. Williams' journey through post-war popular music, encompassing influences from both Sinatra and Sonique, forms a functional collage, rather than patchwork, of masculinity. He has been prepared to not only age in public, but to discuss the crevices and cracks in the facade. He strips, smokes, plays football, wears interesting underwear and drinks too much. My short paper trails behind this combustible masculinity, focussing on his sorties with both masculine modalities and the rock discourse. My words attack the gap between text and readership, beat and ear, music and men. The aim is to reveal how this 'sick masculinity' problematises the conservative rendering of men's crisis. Come follow me I'm an honorary Sean Connery, born '74 There's only one of me … Press be asking do I care for sodomy I don't know, yeah, probably I've been looking for serial monogamy Not some bird that looks like Billy Connolly But for now I'm down for ornithology Grab your binoculars, come follow me. 'Kids,' Robbie Williams Robbie Williams is a man for our age. Between dating supermodels and Geri 'Lost Spice' Halliwell [1], he has time to "love … his mum and a pint," (Ansen 85) but also subvert the Oasis cock(rock)tail by frocking up for a television appearance. Williams is important to theories of masculine representation. As a masculinity to think with, he creates popular culture with a history. In an era where Madonna practices yoga and wears cowboy boots, it is no surprise that by June 2000, Robbie Williams was voted the world's sexist man [2]. A few months later, in the October edition of Vogue, he posed in a British flag bikini. It is reassuring in an era where a 12 year old boy states that "You aren't a man until you shoot at something," (Issac in Mendel 19) that positive male role models exist who are prepared to both wear a frock and strip on national television. Reading Robbie Williams is like dipping into the most convincing but draining of intellectual texts. He is masculinity in motion, conveying foreignness, transgression and corruption, bartering in the polymorphous economies of sex, colonialism, race, gender and nation. His career has spanned the boy bands, try-hard rock, video star and hybrid pop performer. There are obvious resonances between the changes to Williams and alterations in masculinity. In 1988, Suzanne Moore described (the artist still known as) Prince as "the pimp of postmodernism." (165-166) Over a decade later, the simulacra has a new tour guide. Williams revels in the potency of representation. He rarely sings about love or romance, as was his sonic fodder in Take That. Instead, his performance is fixated on becoming a better man, glancing an analytical eye over other modes of masculinity. Notions of masculine crisis and sickness have punctuated this era. Men's studies is a boom area of cultural studies, dislodging the assumed structures of popular culture [3]. William Pollack's Real Boys has created a culture of changing expectations for men. The greater question arising from his concerns is why these problems, traumas and difficulties are emerging in our present. Pollack's argument is that boys and young men invest energy and time "disguising their deepest and most vulnerable feelings." (15) This masking is difficult to discern within dance and popular music. Through lyrics and dancing, videos and choreography, masculinity is revealed as convoluted, complex and fragmented. While rock music is legitimised by dominant ideologies, marginalised groups frequently use disempowered genres - like country, dance and rap genres - to present oppositional messages. These competing representations expose seamless interpretations of competent masculinity. Particular skills are necessary to rip the metaphoric pacifier out of the masculine mouth of popular culture. Patriarchal pop revels in the paradoxes of everyday life. Frequently these are nostalgic visions, which Kimmel described as a "retreat to a bygone era." (87) It is the recognition of a shared, simpler past that provides reinforcement to heteronormativity. Williams, as a gaffer tape masculinity, pulls apart the gaps and crevices in representation. Theorists must open the interpretative space encircling popular culture, disrupting normalising criteria. Multiple nodes of assessment allow a ranking of competent masculinity. From sport to business, drinking to sex, masculinity is transformed into a wired site of ranking, judgement and determination. Popular music swims in the spectacle of maleness. From David Lee Roth's skied splits to Eminem's beanie, young men are interpellated as subjects in patriarchy. Robbie Williams is a history lesson in post war masculinity. This nostalgia is conservative in nature. The ironic pastiche within his music videos features motor racing, heavy metal and Bond films. 'Rock DJ', the 'sick text' that vexed Doctor Laura, is Williams' most elaborate video. Set in a rollerdrome with female skaters encircling a central podium, the object of fascination and fetish is a male stripper. This strip is different though, as it disrupts the power held by men in phallocentralism. After being confronted by Williams' naked body, the observing women are both bored and disappointed at the lack-lustre deployment of masculine genitalia. After this display, Williams appears embarrassed, confused and humiliated. As Buchbinder realised, "No actual penis could every really measure up to the imagined sexual potency and social or magical power of the phallus." (49) To render this banal experience of male nudity ridiculous, Williams then proceeds to remove skin and muscle. He finally becomes an object of attraction for the female DJ only in skeletal form. By 'going all the way,' the strip confirms the predictability of masculinity and the ordinariness of the male body. For literate listeners though, a higher level of connotation is revealed. The song itself is based on Barry White's melody for 'It's ecstasy (when you lay down next to me).' Such intertextuality accesses the meta-racist excesses of a licentious black male sexuality. A white boy dancer must deliver an impotent, but ironic, rendering of White's (love unlimited) orchestration of potent sexuality. Williams' iconography and soundtrack is refreshing, emerging from an era of "men who cling … tightly to their illusions." (Faludi 14) When the ideological drapery is cut away, the male body is a major disappointment. Masculinity is an anxious performance. Fascinatingly, this deconstructive video has been demeaned through its labelling as pornography [4]. Oddly, a man who is prepared to - literally - shave the skin of masculinity is rendered offensive. Men's studies, like feminism, has been defrocking masculinity for some time. Robinson for example, expressed little sympathy for "whiny men jumping on the victimisation bandwagon or playing cowboys and Indians at warrior weekends and beating drums in sweat lodges." (6) By grating men's identity back to the body, the link between surface and depth - or identity and self - is forged. 'Rock DJ' attacks the new subjectivities of the male body by not only generating self-surveillance, but humour through the removal of clothes, skin and muscle. He continues this play with the symbols of masculine performance throughout the album Sing when you're winning. Featuring soccer photographs of players, coaches and fans, closer inspection of the images reveal that Robbie Williams is actually every character, in every role. His live show also enfolds diverse performances. Singing a version of 'My Way,' with cigarette in tow, he remixes Frank Sinatra into a replaying and recutting of masculine fabric. He follows one dominating masculinity with another: the Bond-inspired 'Millennium.' Some say that we are players Some say that we are pawns But we've been making money Since the day we were born Robbie Williams is comfortably located in a long history of post-Sinatra popular music. He mocks the rock ethos by combining guitars and drums with a gleaming brass section, hailing the lounge act of Dean Martin, while also using rap and dance samples. Although carrying fifty year's of crooner baggage, the spicy scent of homosexuality has also danced around Robbie Williams' career. Much of this ideology can be traced back to the Take That years. As Gary Barlow and Jason Orange commented at the time, Jason: So the rumour is we're all gay now are we? Gary: Am I gay? I am? Why? Oh good. Just as long as we know. Howard: Does anyone think I'm gay? Jason: No, you're the only one people think is straight. Howard: Why aren't I gay? What's wrong with me? Jason: It's because you're such a fine figure of macho manhood.(Kadis 17) For those not literate in the Take That discourse, it should come as no surprise that Howard was the TT equivalent of The Beatle's Ringo Starr or Duran Duran's Andy Taylor. Every boy band requires the ugly, shy member to make the others appear taller and more attractive. The inference of this dialogue is that the other members of the group are simply too handsome to be heterosexual. This ambiguous sexuality has followed Williams into his solo career, becoming fodder for those lads too unappealing to be homosexual: Oasis. Born to be mild I seem to spend my life Just waiting for the chorus 'Cause the verse is never nearly Good enough Robbie Williams "Singing for the lonely." Robbie Williams accesses a bigger, brighter and bolder future than Britpop. While the Gallagher brothers emulate and worship the icons of 1960s British music - from the Beatles' haircuts to the Stones' psychedelia - Williams' songs, videos and persona are chattering in a broader cultural field. From Noel Cowardesque allusions to the ordinariness of pub culture, Williams is much more than a pretty-boy singer. He has become an icon of English masculinity, enclosing all the complexity that these two terms convey. Williams' solo success from 1999-2001 occurred at the time of much parochial concern that British acts were not performing well in the American charts. It is bemusing to read Billboard over this period. The obvious quality of Britney Spears is seen to dwarf the mediocrity of British performers. The calibre of Fatboy Slim, carrying a smiley backpack stuffed with reflexive dance culture, is neither admitted nor discussed. It is becoming increasing strange to monitor the excessive fame of Williams in Britain, Europe, Asia and the Pacific when compared to his patchy career in the United States. Even some American magazines are trying to grasp the disparity. The swaggering king of Britpop sold a relatively measly 600,000 copies of his U.S. debut album, The ego has landed … Maybe Americans didn't appreciate his songs about being famous. (Ask Dr. Hip 72) In the first few years of the 2000s, it has been difficult to discuss a unified Anglo-American musical formation. Divergent discursive frameworks have emerged through this British evasion. There is no longer an agreed centre to the musical model. Throughout 1990s Britain, blackness jutted out of dance floor mixes, from reggae to dub, jazz and jungle. Plied with the coldness of techno was an almost too hot hip hop. Yet both were alternate trajectories to Cool Britannia. London once more became swinging, or as Vanity Fair declared, "the nerve centre of pop's most cohesive scene since the Pacific Northwest grunge explosion of 1991." (Kamp 102) Through Britpop, the clock turned back to the 1960s, a simpler time before race became 'a problem' for the nation. An affiliation was made between a New Labour, formed by the 1997 British election, and the rebirth of a Swinging London [5]. This style-driven empire supposedly - again - made London the centre of the world. Britpop was itself a misnaming. It was a strong sense of Englishness that permeated the lyrics, iconography and accent. Englishness requires a Britishness to invoke a sense of bigness and greatness. The contradictions and excesses of Blur, Oasis and Pulp resonate in the gap between centre and periphery, imperial core and colonised other. Slicing through the arrogance and anger of the Gallaghers is a yearning for colonial simplicity, when the pink portions of the map were the stable subjects of geography lessons, rather than the volatile embodiment of postcolonial theory. Simon Gikandi argues that "the central moments of English cultural identity were driven by doubts and disputes about the perimeters of the values that defined Englishness." (x) The reason that Britpop could not 'make it big' in the United States is because it was recycling an exhausted colonial dreaming. Two old Englands were duelling for ascendancy: the Oasis-inflected Manchester working class fought Blur-inspired London art school chic. This insular understanding of difference had serious social and cultural consequences. The only possible representation of white, British youth was a tabloidisation of Oasis's behaviour through swearing, drug excess and violence. Simon Reynolds realised that by returning to the three minute pop tune that the milkman can whistle, reinvoking parochial England with no black people, Britpop has turned its back defiantly on the future. (members.aol.com/blissout/Britpop.html) Fortunately, another future had already happened. The beats per minute were pulsating with an urgent affirmation of change, hybridity and difference. Hip hop and techno mapped a careful cartography of race. While rock was colonialisation by other means, hip hop enacted a decolonial imperative. Electronic dance music provided a unique rendering of identity throughout the 1990s. It was a mode of musical communication that moved across national and linguistic boundaries, far beyond Britpop or Stateside rock music. While the Anglo American military alliance was matched and shadowed by postwar popular culture, Brit-pop signalled the end of this hegemonic formation. From this point, English pop and American rock would not sail as smoothly over the Atlantic. While 1995 was the year of Wonderwall, by 1996 the Britpop bubble corroded the faces of the Gallagher brothers. Oasis was unable to complete the American tour. Yet other cultural forces were already active. 1996 was also the year of Trainspotting, with "Born Slippy" being the soundtrack for a blissful journey under the radar. This was a cultural force that no longer required America as a reference point [6]. Robbie Williams was able to integrate the histories of Britpop and dance culture, instigating a complex dialogue between the two. Still, concern peppered music and entertainment journals that British performers were not accessing 'America.' As Sharon Swart stated Britpop acts, on the other hand, are finding it less easy to crack the U.S. market. The Spice Girls may have made some early headway, but fellow purveyors of pop, such as Robbie Williams, can't seem to get satisfaction from American fans. (35 British performers had numerous cultural forces working against them. Flat global sales, the strength of the sterling and the slow response to the new technological opportunities of DVD, all caused problems. While Britpop "cleaned house," (Boehm 89) it was uncertain which cultural formation would replace this colonising force. Because of the complex dialogues between the rock discourse and dance culture, time and space were unable to align into a unified market. American critics simply could not grasp Robbie Williams' history, motives or iconography. It's Robbie's world, we just buy tickets for it. Unless, of course you're American and you don't know jack about soccer. That's the first mistake Williams makes - if indeed one of his goals is to break big in the U.S. (and I can't believe someone so ambitious would settle for less.) … Americans, it seems, are most fascinated by British pop when it presents a mirror image of American pop. (Woods 98 There is little sense that an entirely different musical economy now circulates, where making it big in the United States is not the singular marker of credibility. Williams' demonstrates commitment to the international market, focussing on MTV Asia, MTV online, New Zealand and Australian audiences [7]. The Gallagher brothers spent much of the 1990s trying to be John Lennon. While Noel, at times, knocked at the door of rock legends through "Wonderwall," he snubbed Williams' penchant for pop glory, describing him as a "fat dancer." (Gallagher in Orecklin 101) Dancing should not be decried so summarily. It conveys subtle nodes of bodily knowledge about men, women, sex and desire. While men are validated for bodily movement through sport, women's dancing remains a performance of voyeuristic attention. Such a divide is highly repressive of men who dance, with gayness infiltrating the metaphoric masculine dancefloor [8]. Too often the binary of male and female is enmeshed into the divide of rock and dance. Actually, these categories slide elegantly over each other. The male pop singers are located in a significant semiotic space. Robbie Williams carries these contradictions and controversy. NO! Robbie didn't go on NME's cover in a 'desperate' attempt to seduce nine-year old knickerwetters … YES! He used to be teenybopper fodder. SO WHAT?! So did the Beatles the Stones, the Who, the Kinks, etc blah blah pseudohistoricalrockbollocks. NO! Making music that gurlz like is NOT a crime! (Wells 62) There remains an uncertainty in his performance of masculinity and at times, a deliberate ambivalence. He grafts subversiveness into a specific lineage of English pop music. The aim for critics of popular music is to find a way to create a rhythm of resistance, rather than melody of credible meanings. In summoning an archaeology of the archive, we begin to write a popular music history. Suzanne Moore asked why men should "be interested in a sexual politics based on the frightfully old-fashioned ideas of truth, identity and history?" (175) The reason is now obvious. Femininity is no longer alone on the simulacra. It is impossible to separate real men from the representations of masculinity that dress the corporeal form. Popular music is pivotal, not for collapsing the representation into the real, but for making the space between these states livable, and pleasurable. Like all semiotic sicknesses, the damaged, beaten and bandaged masculinity of contemporary music swaddles a healing pedagogic formation. Robbie Williams enables the writing of a critical history of post Anglo-American music [9]. Popular music captures such stories of place and identity. Significantly though, it also opens out spaces of knowing. There is an investment in rhythm that transgresses national histories of music. While Williams has produced albums, singles, video and endless newspaper copy, his most important revelations are volatile and ephemeral in their impact. He increases the popular cultural vocabulary of masculinity. [1] The fame of both Williams and Halliwell was at such a level that it was reported in the generally conservative, pages of Marketing. The piece was titled "Will Geri's fling lose its fizz?" Marketing, August 2000: 17. [2] For poll results, please refer to "Winners and Losers," Time International, Vol. 155, Issue 23, June 12, 2000, 9 [3] For a discussion of this growth in academic discourse on masculinity, please refer to Paul Smith's "Introduction," in P. Smith (ed.), Boys: Masculinity in contemporary culture. Colorado: Westview Press, 1996. [4] Steve Futterman described Rock DJ as the "least alluring porn video on MTV," in "The best and worst: honour roll," Entertainment Weekly 574-575 (December 22-December 29 2000): 146. [5] Michael Bracewell stated that "pop provides an unofficial cartography of its host culture, charting the national mood, marking the crossroads between the major social trends and the tunnels of the zeitgeist," in "Britpop's coming home, it's coming home." New Statesman .(February 21 1997): 36. [6] It is important to make my point clear. The 'America' that I am summoning here is a popular cultural formation, which possesses little connection with the territory, institution or defence initiatives of the United States. Simon Frith made this distinction clear, when he stated that "the question becomes whether 'America' can continue to be the mythical locale of popular culture as it has been through most of this century. As I've suggested, there are reasons now to suppose that 'America' itself, as a pop cultural myth, no longer bears much resemblance to the USA as a real place even in the myth." This statement was made in "Anglo-America and its discontents," Cultural Studies 5 1991: 268. [7] To observe the scale of attention paid to the Asian and Pacific markets, please refer to http://robbiewilliams.com/july13scroll.html, http://robbiewilliams.com/july19scroll.html and http://robbiewilliams.com/july24scroll.html, accessed on March 3, 2001 [8] At its most naïve, J. Michael Bailey and Michael Oberschneider asked, "Why are gay men so motivated to dance? One hypothesis is that gay men dance in order to be feminine. In other words, gay men dance because women do. An alternative hypothesis is that gay men and women share a common factor in their emotional make-up that makes dancing especially enjoyable," from "Sexual orientation in professional dance," Archives of Sexual Behaviour. 26.4 (August 1997). Such an interpretation is particularly ludicrous when considering the pre-rock and roll masculine dancing rituals in the jive, Charleston and jitterbug. Once more, the history of rock music is obscuring the history of dance both before the mid 1950s and after acid house. [9] Women, gay men and black communities through much of the twentieth century have used these popular spaces. For example, Lynne Segal, in Slow Motion. London: Virago, 1990, stated that "through dancing, athletic and erotic performance, but most powerfully through music, Black men could express something about the body and its physicality, about emotions and their cosmic reach, rarely found in white culture - least of all in white male culture,": 191 References Ansen, D., Giles, J., Kroll, J., Gates, D. and Schoemer, K. "What's a handsome lad to do?" Newsweek 133.19 (May 10, 1999): 85. "Ask Dr. Hip." U.S. News and World Report 129.16 (October 23, 2000): 72. Bailey, J. Michael., and Oberschneider, Michael. "Sexual orientation in professional dance." Archives of Sexual Behaviour. 26.4 (August 1997):expanded academic database [fulltext]. Boehm, E. "Pop will beat itself up." Variety 373.5 (December 14, 1998): 89. Bracewell, Michael. "Britpop's coming home, it's coming home." New Statesman.(February 21 1997): 36. Buchbinder, David. Performance Anxieties .Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1998. Faludi, Susan. Stiffed. London: Chatto and Windus, 1999. Frith, Simon. "Anglo-America and its discontents." Cultural Studies. 5 1991. Futterman, Steve. "The best and worst: honour roll." Entertainment Weekly, 574-575 (December 22-December 29 2000): 146. Gikandi, Simon. Maps of Englishness. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Kadis, Alex. Take That: In private. London: Virgin Books, 1994. Kamp, D. "London Swings! Again!" Vanity Fair ( March 1997): 102. Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America. New York: The Free Press, 1996. Mendell, Adrienne. How men think. New York: Fawcett, 1996. Moore, Susan. "Getting a bit of the other - the pimps of postmodernism." In Rowena Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford (ed.) Male Order .London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988. 165-175. Orecklin, Michele. "People." Time. 155.10 (March 13, 2000): 101. Pollack, William. Real boys. Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 1999. Reynolds, Simon. members.aol.com/blissout/britpop.html. Accessed on April 15, 2001. Robinson, David. No less a man. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University, 1994. Segal, Lynne. Slow Motion. London: Virago, 1990. Smith, Paul. "Introduction" in P. Smith (ed.), Boys: Masculinity in contemporary culture. Colorado: Westview Press, 1996. Swart, S. "U.K. Showbiz" Variety.(December 11-17, 2000): 35. Sexton, Paul and Masson, Gordon. "Tips for Brits who want U.S. success" Billboard .(September 9 2000): 1. Wells, Steven. "Angst." NME.(November 21 1998): 62. "Will Geri's fling lose its fizz?" Marketing.(August 2000): 17. Woods, S. "Robbie Williams Sing when you're winning" The Village Voice. 45.52. (January 2, 2001): 98.

This article will look at the use of personal photographs that attempt to convey a sense of social activism as a reaction against global terrorism. Moreover, I argue that the photographs uploaded to the site “We’re Not Afraid”, which began after the London bombings in 2005, presents a forum to promote the pleasures of western cultural values as a defence against the anxiety of terror. What is compelling are the ways in which the Website promotes, seemingly, everyday modalities through what may be deemed as the domestic snapshot. Nevertheless, the aura from the context of these images operates to arouse the collective memory of terrorism and violence. It promotes photography’s spectacular power. To begin it is worthwhile considering the ways in which the spectacle of terrorism is mediated. For example, the bombs activated on the London Underground and at Tavistock Square on the 7th of July 2005 marked the day that London became a victim of ‘global’ terrorism, re-instilling the fear projected by the media to be alarmed and to be suspicious. In the shadow of the terrorist events of September 11, as well as the Madrid Bombings in 2004, the incidents once again drew attention to the point that in the Western world ‘we’ again can be under attack. Furthermore, the news media plays a vital role in mediating the reality and the spectacle of terrorist attacks in the display of visual ‘proof’. After the London bombings of 7 July 2005, the BBC Website encouraged photo submissions of the incidents, under the heading “London Explosions: Your Photos”, thus promoting citizen journalism. Within six hours the BBC site received more that 1000 photographs. According to Richard Sambrook, director of the BBC’s World Service and Global News division, “people were participating in our coverage in way we had never seen before” (13). Other news Websites, such as Reuters and MSNBC also set up a similar call and display of the incidents. The images taken by everyday people and survivors‚ suggest a visceral response to the trauma of terrorism in which they became active participants in the reportage. Leading British newspapers further evoked the sensational terror of the incidents through the captioning of horrific images of destruction. It contextualised them within the realm of fascination and fear with headlines such as “London’s Day of Terror” from the Guardian, “Terror Comes to London” from the Independent and “Al-Qa’eda Brings Terror to the Heart of London” from the Daily Telegraph (“What the Papers Say”). Roland Barthes notes that “even from the perspective of a purely immanent analysis, the structure of the photograph is not an isolated structure; it is in communication with at least one other structure, namely the text – title, caption or article – accompanying every press photograph” (16). He suggested that, with the rise to prominence of ‘the press photograph’ as a mode of visual communication, the traditional relationship between image and text was inverted: “it is not the image which comes to elucidate or ‘realize’ the text, but the latter which comes to sublimate, patheticize or rationalize the image” (25). Frederic Jameson raises a very important point in regards to the role the media plays in terror. He suggests that the Western media is not only affected by a permanent condition of amnesia, but that this has become its primary ‘informational function’ (20). Hence, terror images are constantly repeated for their affect. “When combined with the media, terrorism’s reality-making power is astounding: its capacity to blend the media’s sensational stories, old mythical stereotypes, and a burning sense of moral wrath” (Zulaika and Douglass ix). Susan Sontag, in her 2003 book Regarding the Pain of Others, also discusses the assault of images (116). She argues that “the iconography of suffering has a long pedigree. The sufferings most often deemed worthy of representation are those understood to be the product of wrath, divine or human” (40). Furthermore, globalisation has profoundly changed the rhetoric of terrorism in which the uses of photographs for political means are ubiquitous. Sontag argues that “it seems as if there is a greater quantity of such news than before” (116). Nevertheless, she stresses, “it seems normal to turn away from images that simply make us feel bad” (116). Rather, than the focus on images of despair, the “We’re Not Afraid” Website provides a reaction against visual assaults. The images suggest a turning away from the iconography of terror and suffering to a focus on everyday western middle-class modalities. The images on the site consist of domestic ritual photographic practices, such as family snapshots. The images were disseminated following what has been referred to as the ‘incidents’ by the British press of the attacks on 7 July on the London transport system. Significantly, rather than being described as an event, such as the September 11 terrorist assaults were, the term ‘incidents’ suggests that everyday modalities, the everyday ways of being, may not be affected despite the terror of the attacks. It is, perhaps, a very British approach to the idea of ‘moving on’ despite adversity, which the Website advocates. The Website invites the general public to upload personal photographs captioned with the phrase “We’re not afraid” to “show that terrorists would not change the way people lived their lives” (Clarke).The Website began on 7 July 2005 and during the first week the site received, at times, up to 15 images a minute from across the world (Nikkah). Notably, within days of the Website’s launch it received over 3500 images and 11 million hits (Clarke).The images taken by everyday people and survivors‚ suggest a visceral response to the incidents. These images seem to support Susan Sontag’s argument from On Photography, in which she argues that photography is mainly a social rite, a defence against anxiety, and a tool of power (8). The images present a social activism for the predominantly white middle-class online participants and, as such, is subversive in its move away from the contextualised sensational images of violence that abound in the mainstream press. According to the site’s creator, London Web designer, Alfie Dennen “the idea for this site came from a picture of one of the bombed trains sent from a mobile phone to Dennen’s own weblog. Someone else added the words ‘We’re Not Afraid’ alongside the image” (“‘Not Afraid’ Website Overwhelmed”). Hence, in Dennen’s Weblog the terror and trauma of the train images of the London underground, that were circulated in the main stream press, have been recontextualised by the caption to present defiance and survival. The images uploaded onto the Website range from personal snapshots to manipulated photographs which all bear the declaration: ‘We are not afraid’. Currently, there are 770 galleries with 24 images per gallery amounting to around 18500 images that have been sent to the site. The photographs provide a crack in the projected reality of terrorism and the iconography of suffering as espoused by the mainstream media. The Website claims: We’re not afraid is an outlet for the global community to speak out against the acts of terror that have struck London, Madrid, New York, Baghdad, Basra, Tikrit, Gaza, Tel-Aviv, Afghanistan, Bali, and against the atrocities occurring in cities around the world each and every day. It is a worldwide action for people not willing to be cowed by terrorism and fear mongering. It suggests that: The historical response to these types of attacks has been a show of deadly force; we believe that there is a better way. We refuse to respond to aggression and hatred in kind. Instead, we who are not afraid will continue to live our lives the best way we know how. We will work, we will play, we will laugh, we will live. We will not waste one moment, nor sacrifice one bit of our freedom, because of fear. We are not afraid. (“we’re not afraid.com: Citizens for a secure world, united against terror.”) The images evoke the social memory of our era of global terrorism. Arguably, the events since September 11 have placed the individual in a protection mode. The photographs represent, as Sontag espouses, a tool against the anxiety of our time. This is a turn away from the visual iconography of despair. As such, rather than images of suffering they are images of survival, or life carrying on as usual. Or, more precisely, the images represent depictions of everyday western middle-class existence. The images range from family snaps, touristic photographs, pictures of the London underground and some manipulated images all containing the words ‘We’re Not Afraid’. Dennen “said the site had become a symbol for people to show solidarity with London and say they will not be cowed by the bombings” (“‘Not Afraid’ Website Overwhelmed”). The photographs also serve as a form of protection of western middle-class values and lifestyle that may be threatened by terrorist acts. Of consideration is that “personal photographs not only bind us to our own pasts – they bind us to the pasts of the social groups to which we belong” (Gye 280). The images on the site may be described as a “revocation of social power through visibility” and as such photography is considered a “performance of power” (Frosh 46). Barthes asserts that “formerly, the image illustrated the text (made it clearer); today, the text loads the image, burdening it with a culture, a moral, an imagination” (25). The images loaded onto the Website “We’re Not Afraid’ assumes notions of resilience and defiance which can be closely linked to Anglo-American cultural memory and imagination. Significantly, efforts to influence ‘heart and minds’ through support of touring exhibitions were common in the earlier days of the Cold War. Sontag argues that “photographic collections can be used to substitute a world” (162). The images exalted a universal humanism, similarly to the images on the “We’re Not Afraid” site. Many exhibits were supported throughout the 1950s, often under the auspices of the USIA (United States Information Agency). A famous example is the photography exhibit ‘The Family of Man’ which travelled to 28 countries between 1955-59 and was seen by 9 million people (Kennedy 316). It contained 503 images, 273 photographers from 68 nations “it posited humanity as a universal ideal and human empathy as a compensatory response to the threat of nuclear annihilation” (Kennedy 322). Significantly, Liam Kennedy asserts that, the Cold War rhetoric surrounding the exhibition blurred the boundaries between art, information and propaganda. The exhibition has been critiqued ideologically as an imperialist project, most notably by Allan Sekula in which he states “the worldliness of photography is the outcome, not of any immanent universality of meaning, but of a project of global domination” (96). In more recent times an exhibition, backed by the US State Department titled ‘After September 11: Images from Ground Zero’, by photojournalist/art photographer Joel Meyorowitz travelled to more than 60 countries and assisted in shaping and maintaining a public memory of the attacks of the World Trade Centre and its aftermath (Kennedy 315). Similar, to ‘The Family of Man’, it adds an epic quality to the images. As Kennedy points out that: To be sure this latter exhibit has been more overtly designed as propaganda, yet it also carries the cachet of ‘culture’ (most obviously, via the signature of a renowned photographer) and is intended to transmit a universal message that transcends the politics of difference. (Kennedy 323) The Website “We’re Not Afraid’ maintains the public memory of terrorism, without the horror of suffering. With a ‘universal message’ similar to the aforementioned exhibitions, it attempts to transcends the politics of difference by addressing the ‘we’ as the ‘everyday’ citizen. It serves as a gallery space and similarly evokes western romantic universal ideals conveyed in the exhibition ‘The Family of Man’, whilst its aesthetic forms avoid the stylististically captured scenes of ‘After September 11’. As stated earlier, the site had over 11 million hits in the first few weeks; as such the sheer number of viewers exceeds that of any formal photographic exhibition. Moreover, unlike these highly constructed art exhibitions from leading professional photographers, the Website significantly presents a democratic form of participation in which the ‘personal is political’. It is the citizen journalist. It is the ‘everyday’ person, as evidenced in the predominant snapshot aesthetics and the ordinariness in the images that are employed. Kris Cohen, in his analysis of photoblogging suggests that this aesthetic emphasises the importance in “photoblogging of not thinking too much, of the role that instinct plays in the making of photographs and the photoblog” (890). As discussed, previously, the overwhelming response and contributions to the Website within days of its launch seems to suggest this. The submission of photographs suggests a visceral response to the incidents from the ‘people’ in the celebration of the ‘everyday’ and the mundane. It also should be noted that “there are now well over a million documented blogs and photoblogs in the world”, with most appearing since 2003 (Cohen 886). As Cohen suggests “their newfound popularity has provoked a gentle storm of press, along with a significant number of utopic scenarios in which blogs feature as the next emancipatory mass media product”(886). The world-wide press coverage for the “We’re Not Afraid’ site is one key example that promotes this “utopian vision of transfigured citizens and in Benedict Anderson’s well used term an ‘imagined community” (Goggin xx). Nevertheless, the defiant captioning of the images also returns us historically to the social memory of the London Blitz 1940-41 in which the theme of a transfigured community was employed and in which the London underground and shelters became a signifier for the momentum of “We’re Not Afraid’. Barthes explained in Mythologies about the “the sight of the ‘naturalness’ with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history” (11). What I want to argue is that the mythology surrounding the London bombings articulated in the Website “We’re Not Afraid’ is determined by 20th Century history of the media and the cultural imaginary surrounding predominantly British values*.** *The British Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, asserted that “qualities of creativity built on tolerance, openness and adaptability, work and self improvement, strong communities and families and fair play, rights and responsibilities and an outward looking approach to the world that all flow from our unique island geography and history.” (“Blair Defines British Values”). These values are suggested in the types of photographs uploaded onto the activist Website, as such notions of the British Empire are evoked. Moreover, in his address following the incident, “Blair harkened back to the ‘Blitz spirit’ that saw Londoners through the dark days of Nazi bombing during World War II — and, by association, to Winston Churchill, the wartime leader whose determined, moving speeches helped steel the national resolve” (“Blair Delivers”). In his Churchillian cadence he paid “tribute to the stoicism and resilience of the people of London who have responded in a way typical of them”. He said Britain would show “by our spirit and dignity” that “our values will long outlast” the terrorists. He further declared that “the purpose of terrorism is just that. It is to terrorize people and we will not be terrorized” (“Blair Delivers”). The mythology of the Blitz and “the interpretive context at the time (and for some years thereafter) can be summarized by the phrase ‘the People’s War’—a populist patriotism that combined criticism of the past with expectations of social change and inclusive messages of shared heritage and values” (Field 31). The image conveyed is of a renewed sense of community. The language of triumph against adversity and the endurance of ordinary citizens are also evoked in the popular press of the London incidents. The Times announced: Revulsion and resolve: Despite the shock, horror and outrage, the calm shown in London was exemplary. Ordinary life may be inconvenienced by the spectre of terror, yet terrorism will not force free societies to abandon their fundamental features. An attack was inevitable. The casualties were dreadful. The terrorists have only strengthened the resolve of Britain and its people. (“What the Papers Say”) Similarly the Daily Express headline was “We Britons Will Never Be Defeated” (“What the Papers Say”). The declaration of “We’re not afraid” alongside images on the Website follows on from this trajectory. The BBC reported that the Website “‘We’re not afraid’ gives Londoners a voice” (“Not Afraid Website Overwhelmed”). The BBC has also made a documentary concerning the mission and the somewhat utopian principles presented. Similarly discussion of the site has been evoked in other Weblogs that overwhelmingly praise it and very rarely question its role. One example is from a discussion of “We’re Not Afraid” on another activist site titled “World Changing: Change Your Thinking”. The contributor states: Well, I live in the UK and I am afraid. I’m also scared that sites like We’re Not Afraid encourage an unhealthy solidarity of superiority, nationalism and xenophobia – perpetuating a “we’re good” and “they’re evil” mentality that avoids the big picture questions of how we got here. Posted by: John Norris at July 8, 2005 03:45 AM Notably, this statement also reiterates the previous argument on cultural diplomacy presented by theorists in regards to the exhibitions of ‘The Family of Man’ and ‘After September 11’ in which the images are viewed as propaganda, promoting western cultural values. This is also supported by the mood of commentary in the British press since the London bombings, in which it is argued that “Britain and the British way of life are under threat, the implication being that the threat is so serious that it may ultimately destroy the nation and its values” (King). The significance of the Website is that it represents a somewhat democratic medium in its call for engagement and self-expression. Furthermore, the emancipatory photography of self and space, presented in the “We’re Not Afraid” site, echoes Blair’s declaration of “we will not be terrorized”. However, it follows similar politically conservative themes that were evoked in the Blitz, such as community, family and social stability, with tacit reference to social fragmentation and multi-ethnicity (Field 41-42). In general, as befitted the theme of “a People’s War,” the Blitz imagery was positive and sympathetic in the way it promoted the endurance of the ordinary citizen. Geoffrey Field suggests “it offered an implicit rejoinder to the earlier furor—focusing especially on brave, caring mothers who made efforts to retain some semblance of family under the most difficult circumstances and fathers who turned up for work no matter how heavy the bombing had been the night before” (24). Images on the Website consist of snapshots of babies, families, pets, sporting groups, people on holiday and at celebrations. It represents a, somewhat, global perspective of middle-class values. The snapshot aesthetic presents, what Liz Kotz refers to as, the “aesthetics of intimacy”. It is a certain kind of photographic work which is quasi-documentary and consists of “colour images of individuals, families, or groupings, presented in an apparently intimate, unposed manner, shot in an off-kilter, snapshot style, often a bit grainy, unfocused, off-colour” (204). These are the types of images that provide the visual gratification of solidarity amongst its contributors and viewers, as it seemingly appears more ‘real’. Yet, Kotz asserts that these type of photographs also involve a structure of power relations “that cannot be easily evaded by the spontaneous performance before the lens” (210). For example, Sarah Boxer importantly points out that “We’re Not Afraid”, set up to show solidarity with London, seems to be turning into a place where the haves of the world can show that they’re not afraid of the have-nots” (1). She argues that “there’s a brutish flaunting of wealth and leisure” (1). The iconography in the images of “We’re not Afraid” certainly promotes a ‘memorialisation’ of the middle-class sphere. The site draws attention to the values of the global neoliberal order in which capital accumulation is paramount. It, nevertheless, also attempts to challenge “the true victory of terrorism”, which Jean Baudrillard circumspectly remarks is in “the regression of the value system, of all the ideology of freedom and free movement etc… that the Western world is so proud of, and that legitimates in its eyes its power over the rest of the world”. Self-confidence is conveyed in the images. Moreover, with the subjects welcoming gaze to the camera there may be a sense of narcissism in publicising what could be considered mundane. However, visibility is power. For example, one of the contributors, Maryland USA resident Darcy Nair, said “she felt a sense of helplessness in the days after 9/11. Posting on the We’re Not Afraid may be a small act, but it does give people like her a sense that they’re doing something” (cited in Weir). Nair states that: It seems that it is the only good answer from someone like me who’s not in the government or military…There are so many other people who are joining in. When bunches of individuals get together – it does make me feel hopeful – there are so many other people who feel the same way. (cited in Weir) Participation in the Website conveys a power which consists of defiantly celebrating western middle-class aesthetics in the form of personal photography. As such, the personal becomes political and the private becomes public. The site offers an opportunity for a shared experience and a sense of community that perhaps is needed in the era of global terrorism. It could be seen as a celebration of survival (Weir). The Website seems inspirational with its defiant message. Moreover, it also has postings from various parts of the world that convey a message of triumph in the ‘everyday’. The site also presents the ubiquitous use of photography in a western cultural tradition in which idealised constructions are manifested in ‘Kodak’ moments and in which the domestic space and leisure times are immortalised and become, significantly, the arena of activism. As previously discussed Sontag argues that photography is mainly a social rite, a defence against anxiety, and a tool of power (8). The Website offers the sense of a global connection. It promotes itself as “citizens for a secure world, united against terror”. It attempts to provide a universal solidarity, which appears uplifting. It is a defence against anxiety in which, in the act of using personal photographs, it becomes part of the collective memory and assists in easing the frustration of not being able to do anything. As Sontag argues “often something looks, or is felt to look ‘better’ in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things” (81). Rather than focus on the tragic victim of traditional photojournalism, in which the camera is directed towards the other, the site promotes the sharing and triumph of personal moments. In the spotlight are ‘everyday’ modalities from ‘everyday people’ attempting to confront the rhetoric of terrorism. In their welcoming gaze to the camera the photographic subjects challenge the notion of the sensational image, the spectacle that is on show is that of middle-class modalities and a performance of collective power. Note Themes from this article have been presented at the 2005 Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Conference in Sydney, Australia and at the 2006 Association for Cultural Studies Crossroads Conference in Istanbul, Turkey. References Barthes, Roland. “The Photographic Message.” Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Noonday Press, 1977 [1961]. 15-31. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Vintage, 1993 [1972]. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Spirit of Terrorism.” Trans. Rachel Bloul. La Monde 2 (2001). < http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-the-spirit-of-terrorism.html >. “Blair Defines British Values.” BBC News 28 Mar. 2000. < http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/693591.stm >. “Blair Delivers a Classically British Rallying Cry.” Associated Press 7 July 2005. < http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8502984/ >. Boxter, Sarah. “On the Web, Fearlessness Meets Frivolousness.” The York Times 12 July 2005. < http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/arts/design/12boxe.html?ex= 1278820800&en=e3b207245991aea8&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss >. Clarke, R. “Web Site Shows Defiance to Bombers: Thousands Send Images to Say ‘We Are Not Afraid.’” CNN International 12 July 2005. < http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/07/11/london.website/ >. “CJ Bombings in London.” MSNBC TV Citizen Journalist. < http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8499792/ >. Cohen, Kris R. “What Does the Photoblog Want?” Media, Culture & Society 27.6 (2005): 883-901. Dennen, Alfie. “We’renotafraid.com: Citizens for a Secure World, United Against Terror.” < http://www.werenotafraid.com/ >. Field, Geoffrey. “Nights Underground in Darkest London: The Blitz, 1940–1941.” International Labor and Working-Class History 62 (2002): 11-49. Frosh, Paul. “The Public Eye and the Citizen-Voyeur: Photography as a Performance of Power.” Social Semiotics 11.1 (2001): 43-59. Gye, Lisa. “Picture This: The Impact of Mobile Camera Phones on Personal Photographic Practices.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 22.2 (2007): 279-288. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern. New York: Verso, 1998. 1-20. Kennedy, Liam. “Remembering September 11: Photography as Cultural Diplomacy.” International Affairs 79.2 (2003): 315-326. King, Anthony. “What Does It Mean to Be British?” Telegraph 27 May 2005. < http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/07/27/ nbrit27.xml >. Kotz, Liz. “The Aesthetics of Intimacy.” In D. Bright (ed.), The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire. London: Routledge, 1998. 204-215. “London Explosions: Your Photos.” BBC News 8 July 2005 < http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/4660563.stm >. Nikkhah, Roya. “We’restillnotafraid.com.” Telegraph co.uk 23 July 2005. < http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/07/24/ nseven224.xml >. “‘Not Afraid’ Website Overwhelmed.” BBC News 12 July 2005. < http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/england/london/4674425.stm >. Norris, John. “We’re Not Afraid”. World Changing: Change Your Thinking. < http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003069.html >. “Reuters: You Witness News.” < http://www.reuters.com/youwitness >. Sambrook, Richard. “Citizen Journalism and the BBC.” Nieman Reports (Winter 2005): 13-16. Sekula, Allan. “The Traffic in Photographs.” In Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photoworks 1973-1983. Halifax Nova Scotia: Nova Scotia College Press, 1984. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. Sontag. Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1977. Weir, William. “The Global Community Support and Sends a Defiant Message to Terrorists.” Hartford Courant 14 July 2005. < http://www.uchc.edu/ocomm/newsarchive/news05/jul05/notafraid.html >. We’renot afraid.com: Citizens for a Secure World, United against Terror. < http://www.werenotafraid.com >. “What the Papers Say.” Media Guardian 8 July 2005. < http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/jul/08/pressandpublishing.terrorism1 >. Zulaika, Joseba, and William A. Douglass. Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables, and Faces of Terrorism. New York: Routledge, 1996.

This article will look at the use of personal photographs that attempt to convey a sense of social activism as a reaction against global terrorism. Moreover, I argue that the photographs uploaded to the site “We’re Not Afraid”, which began after the London bombings in 2005, presents a forum to promote the pleasures of western cultural values as a defence against the anxiety of terror. What is compelling are the ways in which the Website promotes, seemingly, everyday modalities through what may be deemed as the domestic snapshot. Nevertheless, the aura from the context of these images operates to arouse the collective memory of terrorism and violence. It promotes photography’s spectacular power. To begin it is worthwhile considering the ways in which the spectacle of terrorism is mediated. For example, the bombs activated on the London Underground and at Tavistock Square on the 7th of July 2005 marked the day that London became a victim of ‘global’ terrorism, re-instilling the fear projected by the media to be alarmed and to be suspicious. In the shadow of the terrorist events of September 11, as well as the Madrid Bombings in 2004, the incidents once again drew attention to the point that in the Western world ‘we’ again can be under attack. Furthermore, the news media plays a vital role in mediating the reality and the spectacle of terrorist attacks in the display of visual ‘proof’. After the London bombings of 7 July 2005, the BBC Website encouraged photo submissions of the incidents, under the heading “London Explosions: Your Photos”, thus promoting citizen journalism. Within six hours the BBC site received more that 1000 photographs. According to Richard Sambrook, director of the BBC’s World Service and Global News division, “people were participating in our coverage in way we had never seen before” (13). Other news Websites, such as Reuters and MSNBC also set up a similar call and display of the incidents. The images taken by everyday people and survivors‚ suggest a visceral response to the trauma of terrorism in which they became active participants in the reportage. Leading British newspapers further evoked the sensational terror of the incidents through the captioning of horrific images of destruction. It contextualised them within the realm of fascination and fear with headlines such as “London’s Day of Terror” from the Guardian, “Terror Comes to London” from the Independent and “Al-Qa’eda Brings Terror to the Heart of London” from the Daily Telegraph (“What the Papers Say”). Roland Barthes notes that “even from the perspective of a purely immanent analysis, the structure of the photograph is not an isolated structure; it is in communication with at least one other structure, namely the text – title, caption or article – accompanying every press photograph” (16). He suggested that, with the rise to prominence of ‘the press photograph’ as a mode of visual communication, the traditional relationship between image and text was inverted: “it is not the image which comes to elucidate or ‘realize’ the text, but the latter which comes to sublimate, patheticize or rationalize the image” (25). Frederic Jameson raises a very important point in regards to the role the media plays in terror. He suggests that the Western media is not only affected by a permanent condition of amnesia, but that this has become its primary ‘informational function’ (20). Hence, terror images are constantly repeated for their affect. “When combined with the media, terrorism’s reality-making power is astounding: its capacity to blend the media’s sensational stories, old mythical stereotypes, and a burning sense of moral wrath” (Zulaika and Douglass ix). Susan Sontag, in her 2003 book Regarding the Pain of Others, also discusses the assault of images (116). She argues that “the iconography of suffering has a long pedigree. The sufferings most often deemed worthy of representation are those understood to be the product of wrath, divine or human” (40). Furthermore, globalisation has profoundly changed the rhetoric of terrorism in which the uses of photographs for political means are ubiquitous. Sontag argues that “it seems as if there is a greater quantity of such news than before” (116). Nevertheless, she stresses, “it seems normal to turn away from images that simply make us feel bad” (116). Rather, than the focus on images of despair, the “We’re Not Afraid” Website provides a reaction against visual assaults. The images suggest a turning away from the iconography of terror and suffering to a focus on everyday western middle-class modalities. The images on the site consist of domestic ritual photographic practices, such as family snapshots. The images were disseminated following what has been referred to as the ‘incidents’ by the British press of the attacks on 7 July on the London transport system. Significantly, rather than being described as an event, such as the September 11 terrorist assaults were, the term ‘incidents’ suggests that everyday modalities, the everyday ways of being, may not be affected despite the terror of the attacks. It is, perhaps, a very British approach to the idea of ‘moving on’ despite adversity, which the Website advocates. The Website invites the general public to upload personal photographs captioned with the phrase “We’re not afraid” to “show that terrorists would not change the way people lived their lives” (Clarke).The Website began on 7 July 2005 and during the first week the site received, at times, up to 15 images a minute from across the world (Nikkah). Notably, within days of the Website’s launch it received over 3500 images and 11 million hits (Clarke).The images taken by everyday people and survivors‚ suggest a visceral response to the incidents. These images seem to support Susan Sontag’s argument from On Photography, in which she argues that photography is mainly a social rite, a defence against anxiety, and a tool of power (8). The images present a social activism for the predominantly white middle-class online participants and, as such, is subversive in its move away from the contextualised sensational images of violence that abound in the mainstream press. According to the site’s creator, London Web designer, Alfie Dennen “the idea for this site came from a picture of one of the bombed trains sent from a mobile phone to Dennen’s own weblog. Someone else added the words ‘We’re Not Afraid’ alongside the image” (“‘Not Afraid’ Website Overwhelmed”). Hence, in Dennen’s Weblog the terror and trauma of the train images of the London underground, that were circulated in the main stream press, have been recontextualised by the caption to present defiance and survival. The images uploaded onto the Website range from personal snapshots to manipulated photographs which all bear the declaration: ‘We are not afraid’. Currently, there are 770 galleries with 24 images per gallery amounting to around 18500 images that have been sent to the site. The photographs provide a crack in the projected reality of terrorism and the iconography of suffering as espoused by the mainstream media. The Website claims: We’re not afraid is an outlet for the global community to speak out against the acts of terror that have struck London, Madrid, New York, Baghdad, Basra, Tikrit, Gaza, Tel-Aviv, Afghanistan, Bali, and against the atrocities occurring in cities around the world each and every day. It is a worldwide action for people not willing to be cowed by terrorism and fear mongering. It suggests that: The historical response to these types of attacks has been a show of deadly force; we believe that there is a better way. We refuse to respond to aggression and hatred in kind. Instead, we who are not afraid will continue to live our lives the best way we know how. We will work, we will play, we will laugh, we will live. We will not waste one moment, nor sacrifice one bit of our freedom, because of fear. We are not afraid. (“we’re not afraid.com: Citizens for a secure world, united against terror.”) The images evoke the social memory of our era of global terrorism. Arguably, the events since September 11 have placed the individual in a protection mode. The photographs represent, as Sontag espouses, a tool against the anxiety of our time. This is a turn away from the visual iconography of despair. As such, rather than images of suffering they are images of survival, or life carrying on as usual. Or, more precisely, the images represent depictions of everyday western middle-class existence. The images range from family snaps, touristic photographs, pictures of the London underground and some manipulated images all containing the words ‘We’re Not Afraid’. Dennen “said the site had become a symbol for people to show solidarity with London and say they will not be cowed by the bombings” (“‘Not Afraid’ Website Overwhelmed”). The photographs also serve as a form of protection of western middle-class values and lifestyle that may be threatened by terrorist acts. Of consideration is that “personal photographs not only bind us to our own pasts – they bind us to the pasts of the social groups to which we belong” (Gye 280). The images on the site may be described as a “revocation of social power through visibility” and as such photography is considered a “performance of power” (Frosh 46). Barthes asserts that “formerly, the image illustrated the text (made it clearer); today, the text loads the image, burdening it with a culture, a moral, an imagination” (25). The images loaded onto the Website “We’re Not Afraid’ assumes notions of resilience and defiance which can be closely linked to Anglo-American cultural memory and imagination. Significantly, efforts to influence ‘heart and minds’ through support of touring exhibitions were common in the earlier days of the Cold War. Sontag argues that “photographic collections can be used to substitute a world” (162). The images exalted a universal humanism, similarly to the images on the “We’re Not Afraid” site. Many exhibits were supported throughout the 1950s, often under the auspices of the USIA (United States Information Agency). A famous example is the photography exhibit ‘The Family of Man’ which travelled to 28 countries between 1955-59 and was seen by 9 million people (Kennedy 316). It contained 503 images, 273 photographers from 68 nations “it posited humanity as a universal ideal and human empathy as a compensatory response to the threat of nuclear annihilation” (Kennedy 322). Significantly, Liam Kennedy asserts that, the Cold War rhetoric surrounding the exhibition blurred the boundaries between art, information and propaganda. The exhibition has been critiqued ideologically as an imperialist project, most notably by Allan Sekula in which he states “the worldliness of photography is the outcome, not of any immanent universality of meaning, but of a project of global domination” (96). In more recent times an exhibition, backed by the US State Department titled ‘After September 11: Images from Ground Zero’, by photojournalist/art photographer Joel Meyorowitz travelled to more than 60 countries and assisted in shaping and maintaining a public memory of the attacks of the World Trade Centre and its aftermath (Kennedy 315). Similar, to ‘The Family of Man’, it adds an epic quality to the images. As Kennedy points out that: To be sure this latter exhibit has been more overtly designed as propaganda, yet it also carries the cachet of ‘culture’ (most obviously, via the signature of a renowned photographer) and is intended to transmit a universal message that transcends the politics of difference. (Kennedy 323) The Website “We’re Not Afraid’ maintains the public memory of terrorism, without the horror of suffering. With a ‘universal message’ similar to the aforementioned exhibitions, it attempts to transcends the politics of difference by addressing the ‘we’ as the ‘everyday’ citizen. It serves as a gallery space and similarly evokes western romantic universal ideals conveyed in the exhibition ‘The Family of Man’, whilst its aesthetic forms avoid the stylististically captured scenes of ‘After September 11’. As stated earlier, the site had over 11 million hits in the first few weeks; as such the sheer number of viewers exceeds that of any formal photographic exhibition. Moreover, unlike these highly constructed art exhibitions from leading professional photographers, the Website significantly presents a democratic form of participation in which the ‘personal is political’. It is the citizen journalist. It is the ‘everyday’ person, as evidenced in the predominant snapshot aesthetics and the ordinariness in the images that are employed. Kris Cohen, in his analysis of photoblogging suggests that this aesthetic emphasises the importance in “photoblogging of not thinking too much, of the role that instinct plays in the making of photographs and the photoblog” (890). As discussed, previously, the overwhelming response and contributions to the Website within days of its launch seems to suggest this. The submission of photographs suggests a visceral response to the incidents from the ‘people’ in the celebration of the ‘everyday’ and the mundane. It also should be noted that “there are now well over a million documented blogs and photoblogs in the world”, with most appearing since 2003 (Cohen 886). As Cohen suggests “their newfound popularity has provoked a gentle storm of press, along with a significant number of utopic scenarios in which blogs feature as the next emancipatory mass media product”(886). The world-wide press coverage for the “We’re Not Afraid’ site is one key example that promotes this “utopian vision of transfigured citizens and in Benedict Anderson’s well used term an ‘imagined community” (Goggin xx). Nevertheless, the defiant captioning of the images also returns us historically to the social memory of the London Blitz 1940-41 in which the theme of a transfigured community was employed and in which the London underground and shelters became a signifier for the momentum of “We’re Not Afraid’. Barthes explained in Mythologies about the “the sight of the ‘naturalness’ with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history” (11). What I want to argue is that the mythology surrounding the London bombings articulated in the Website “We’re Not Afraid’ is determined by 20th Century history of the media and the cultural imaginary surrounding predominantly British values*.** *The British Prime Minister at the time, Tony Blair, asserted that “qualities of creativity built on tolerance, openness and adaptability, work and self improvement, strong communities and families and fair play, rights and responsibilities and an outward looking approach to the world that all flow from our unique island geography and history.” (“Blair Defines British Values”). These values are suggested in the types of photographs uploaded onto the activist Website, as such notions of the British Empire are evoked. Moreover, in his address following the incident, “Blair harkened back to the ‘Blitz spirit’ that saw Londoners through the dark days of Nazi bombing during World War II — and, by association, to Winston Churchill, the wartime leader whose determined, moving speeches helped steel the national resolve” (“Blair Delivers”). In his Churchillian cadence he paid “tribute to the stoicism and resilience of the people of London who have responded in a way typical of them”. He said Britain would show “by our spirit and dignity” that “our values will long outlast” the terrorists. He further declared that “the purpose of terrorism is just that. It is to terrorize people and we will not be terrorized” (“Blair Delivers”). The mythology of the Blitz and “the interpretive context at the time (and for some years thereafter) can be summarized by the phrase ‘the People’s War’—a populist patriotism that combined criticism of the past with expectations of social change and inclusive messages of shared heritage and values” (Field 31). The image conveyed is of a renewed sense of community. The language of triumph against adversity and the endurance of ordinary citizens are also evoked in the popular press of the London incidents. The Times announced: Revulsion and resolve: Despite the shock, horror and outrage, the calm shown in London was exemplary. Ordinary life may be inconvenienced by the spectre of terror, yet terrorism will not force free societies to abandon their fundamental features. An attack was inevitable. The casualties were dreadful. The terrorists have only strengthened the resolve of Britain and its people. (“What the Papers Say”) Similarly the Daily Express headline was “We Britons Will Never Be Defeated” (“What the Papers Say”). The declaration of “We’re not afraid” alongside images on the Website follows on from this trajectory. The BBC reported that the Website “‘We’re not afraid’ gives Londoners a voice” (“Not Afraid Website Overwhelmed”). The BBC has also made a documentary concerning the mission and the somewhat utopian principles presented. Similarly discussion of the site has been evoked in other Weblogs that overwhelmingly praise it and very rarely question its role. One example is from a discussion of “We’re Not Afraid” on another activist site titled “World Changing: Change Your Thinking”. The contributor states: Well, I live in the UK and I am afraid. I’m also scared that sites like We’re Not Afraid encourage an unhealthy solidarity of superiority, nationalism and xenophobia – perpetuating a “we’re good” and “they’re evil” mentality that avoids the big picture questions of how we got here. Posted by: John Norris at July 8, 2005 03:45 AM Notably, this statement also reiterates the previous argument on cultural diplomacy presented by theorists in regards to the exhibitions of ‘The Family of Man’ and ‘After September 11’ in which the images are viewed as propaganda, promoting western cultural values. This is also supported by the mood of commentary in the British press since the London bombings, in which it is argued that “Britain and the British way of life are under threat, the implication being that the threat is so serious that it may ultimately destroy the nation and its values” (King). The significance of the Website is that it represents a somewhat democratic medium in its call for engagement and self-expression. Furthermore, the emancipatory photography of self and space, presented in the “We’re Not Afraid” site, echoes Blair’s declaration of “we will not be terrorized”. However, it follows similar politically conservative themes that were evoked in the Blitz, such as community, family and social stability, with tacit reference to social fragmentation and multi-ethnicity (Field 41-42). In general, as befitted the theme of “a People’s War,” the Blitz imagery was positive and sympathetic in the way it promoted the endurance of the ordinary citizen. Geoffrey Field suggests “it offered an implicit rejoinder to the earlier furor—focusing especially on brave, caring mothers who made efforts to retain some semblance of family under the most difficult circumstances and fathers who turned up for work no matter how heavy the bombing had been the night before” (24). Images on the Website consist of snapshots of babies, families, pets, sporting groups, people on holiday and at celebrations. It represents a, somewhat, global perspective of middle-class values. The snapshot aesthetic presents, what Liz Kotz refers to as, the “aesthetics of intimacy”. It is a certain kind of photographic work which is quasi-documentary and consists of “colour images of individuals, families, or groupings, presented in an apparently intimate, unposed manner, shot in an off-kilter, snapshot style, often a bit grainy, unfocused, off-colour” (204). These are the types of images that provide the visual gratification of solidarity amongst its contributors and viewers, as it seemingly appears more ‘real’. Yet, Kotz asserts that these type of photographs also involve a structure of power relations “that cannot be easily evaded by the spontaneous performance before the lens” (210). For example, Sarah Boxer importantly points out that “We’re Not Afraid”, set up to show solidarity with London, seems to be turning into a place where the haves of the world can show that they’re not afraid of the have-nots” (1). She argues that “there’s a brutish flaunting of wealth and leisure” (1). The iconography in the images of “We’re not Afraid” certainly promotes a ‘memorialisation’ of the middle-class sphere. The site draws attention to the values of the global neoliberal order in which capital accumulation is paramount. It, nevertheless, also attempts to challenge “the true victory of terrorism”, which Jean Baudrillard circumspectly remarks is in “the regression of the value system, of all the ideology of freedom and free movement etc… that the Western world is so proud of, and that legitimates in its eyes its power over the rest of the world”. Self-confidence is conveyed in the images. Moreover, with the subjects welcoming gaze to the camera there may be a sense of narcissism in publicising what could be considered mundane. However, visibility is power. For example, one of the contributors, Maryland USA resident Darcy Nair, said “she felt a sense of helplessness in the days after 9/11. Posting on the We’re Not Afraid may be a small act, but it does give people like her a sense that they’re doing something” (cited in Weir). Nair states that: It seems that it is the only good answer from someone like me who’s not in the government or military…There are so many other people who are joining in. When bunches of individuals get together – it does make me feel hopeful – there are so many other people who feel the same way. (cited in Weir) Participation in the Website conveys a power which consists of defiantly celebrating western middle-class aesthetics in the form of personal photography. As such, the personal becomes political and the private becomes public. The site offers an opportunity for a shared experience and a sense of community that perhaps is needed in the era of global terrorism. It could be seen as a celebration of survival (Weir). The Website seems inspirational with its defiant message. Moreover, it also has postings from various parts of the world that convey a message of triumph in the ‘everyday’. The site also presents the ubiquitous use of photography in a western cultural tradition in which idealised constructions are manifested in ‘Kodak’ moments and in which the domestic space and leisure times are immortalised and become, significantly, the arena of activism. As previously discussed Sontag argues that photography is mainly a social rite, a defence against anxiety, and a tool of power (8). The Website offers the sense of a global connection. It promotes itself as “citizens for a secure world, united against terror”. It attempts to provide a universal solidarity, which appears uplifting. It is a defence against anxiety in which, in the act of using personal photographs, it becomes part of the collective memory and assists in easing the frustration of not being able to do anything. As Sontag argues “often something looks, or is felt to look ‘better’ in a photograph. Indeed, it is one of the functions of photography to improve the normal appearance of things” (81). Rather than focus on the tragic victim of traditional photojournalism, in which the camera is directed towards the other, the site promotes the sharing and triumph of personal moments. In the spotlight are ‘everyday’ modalities from ‘everyday people’ attempting to confront the rhetoric of terrorism. In their welcoming gaze to the camera the photographic subjects challenge the notion of the sensational image, the spectacle that is on show is that of middle-class modalities and a performance of collective power. Note Themes from this article have been presented at the 2005 Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Conference in Sydney, Australia and at the 2006 Association for Cultural Studies Crossroads Conference in Istanbul, Turkey. References Barthes, Roland. “The Photographic Message.” Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Noonday Press, 1977 [1961]. 15-31. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Vintage, 1993 [1972]. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Spirit of Terrorism.” Trans. Rachel Bloul. La Monde 2 (2001). http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-the-spirit-of-terrorism.html>. “Blair Defines British Values.” BBC News 28 Mar. 2000. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/693591.stm>. “Blair Delivers a Classically British Rallying Cry.” Associated Press 7 July 2005. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8502984/>. Boxter, Sarah. “On the Web, Fearlessness Meets Frivolousness.” The York Times 12 July 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/12/arts/design/12boxe.html?ex= 1278820800&en=e3b207245991aea8&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss>. Clarke, R. “Web Site Shows Defiance to Bombers: Thousands Send Images to Say ‘We Are Not Afraid.’” CNN International 12 July 2005. http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/07/11/london.website/>. “CJ Bombings in London.” MSNBC TV Citizen Journalist. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8499792/>. Cohen, Kris R. “What Does the Photoblog Want?” Media, Culture & Society 27.6 (2005): 883-901. Dennen, Alfie. “We’renotafraid.com: Citizens for a Secure World, United Against Terror.” http://www.werenotafraid.com/>. Field, Geoffrey. “Nights Underground in Darkest London: The Blitz, 1940–1941.” International Labor and Working-Class History 62 (2002): 11-49. Frosh, Paul. “The Public Eye and the Citizen-Voyeur: Photography as a Performance of Power.” Social Semiotics 11.1 (2001): 43-59. Gye, Lisa. “Picture This: The Impact of Mobile Camera Phones on Personal Photographic Practices.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 22.2 (2007): 279-288. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern. New York: Verso, 1998. 1-20. Kennedy, Liam. “Remembering September 11: Photography as Cultural Diplomacy.” International Affairs 79.2 (2003): 315-326. King, Anthony. “What Does It Mean to Be British?” Telegraph 27 May 2005. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/07/27/ nbrit27.xml>. Kotz, Liz. “The Aesthetics of Intimacy.” In D. Bright (ed.), The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire. London: Routledge, 1998. 204-215. “London Explosions: Your Photos.” BBC News 8 July 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_pictures/4660563.stm>. Nikkhah, Roya. “We’restillnotafraid.com.” Telegraph co.uk 23 July 2005. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/07/24/ nseven224.xml>. “‘Not Afraid’ Website Overwhelmed.” BBC News 12 July 2005. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/england/london/4674425.stm>. Norris, John. “We’re Not Afraid”. World Changing: Change Your Thinking. http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/003069.html>. “Reuters: You Witness News.” http://www.reuters.com/youwitness>. Sambrook, Richard. “Citizen Journalism and the BBC.” Nieman Reports (Winter 2005): 13-16. Sekula, Allan. “The Traffic in Photographs.” In Photography against the Grain: Essays and Photoworks 1973-1983. Halifax Nova Scotia: Nova Scotia College Press, 1984. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003. Sontag. Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1977. Weir, William. “The Global Community Support and Sends a Defiant Message to Terrorists.” Hartford Courant 14 July 2005. http://www.uchc.edu/ocomm/newsarchive/news05/jul05/notafraid.html>. We’renot afraid.com: Citizens for a Secure World, United against Terror. http://www.werenotafraid.com>. “What the Papers Say.” Media Guardian 8 July 2005. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2005/jul/08/pressandpublishing.terrorism1>. Zulaika, Joseba, and William A. Douglass. Terror and Taboo: The Follies, Fables, and Faces of Terrorism. New York: Routledge, 1996. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Allmark, Panizza. "Photography after the Incidents: We’re Not Afraid!." M/C Journal 10.6/11.1 (2008). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/06-allmark.php>. APA Style Allmark, P. (Apr. 2008) "Photography after the Incidents: We’re Not Afraid!," M/C Journal, 10(6)/11(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0804/06-allmark.php>.

To Rodica, who died first / To Mircea, who continues me [I]In his book Picturing Health and Illness: Images of Identity and Difference, Sander L. Gilman argues that during the nineteenth century the healthy norm perceived as ugly not only those who were deformed, but also those who were ill, ageing, and/or experienced different bodily “loss of function” (53). In the nineteenth century, how much was medicine responsible for defining ugly as ill, deformed, and getting old, versus beautiful as healthy, and then, for the sake of the community’s health, firmly promoting these ideas? Furthermore, with the rise of photographic art, medicine was able to manipulate and control these ideas even more efficiently. According to Deborah Lupton, “The new technology of photography that developed from the mid-nineteenth century became a valuable strategy in the documentation of patterns of disease and illness, and the construction of the sites of dirtiness and contagion” (30). This essay focuses on the skin’s narrative as it presents its story when photographed. William Yang takes photos of his good friend, Allan, who is dying of AIDS. Of interests here is to discuss/approach the photographic art not from its scopophilic angle, that is, not from its perverse and pleasurable voyeuristic angle, but to analyze it side-by-side with Drew Leder’s notion of the “the remaining body.” He believes that in states of severe pain, one’s body “dys-appears,” “from the Greek prefix signifying ‘bad,’ ‘hard,’ or ‘ill,’” and he gives as example the English word “dysfunctional” (84). Yang’s photos offer variations of the “body that remains,” and, as we shall see, of the body that gradually did not remain. Through his work, Yang approaches visually the theme of the ars moriendi of the entropic body in pain as reminder of its mortal, gradually disabling fabric. [II] In the section of his work dedicated to AIDS, Gilman discusses only a collection of posters that have circulated in mass-media, which he researched at the National Library of Medicine at Bethesda, Maryland. Gilman thinks these posters function as the “still images of illness” (174). In other words, he believes these posters may have had an impact on the lay community, although not the intensified, urgent one, as he would have hoped. Because Gilman did not include a single photo of a patient dying of AIDS — although he understood this lack — I juxtapose one of the posters from his book with Yang’s photos taken of his dying friend, Allan, from his project entitled Sadness: A Monologue with Slides. Here I discuss the impact of Allan’s increasingly emaciated body versus the static, almost ineffective quality of the poster in order to consider the idea according to which “AIDS victims are living sculptures. … Both subject and object of art … they combine with their disease to overcome the narcissism of human consciousness. … It is an art of continuous transformation of subject into object and object into subject” (Siebers 220-21). Yang is an Australian artist with Chinese parentage. The images presented in this section originally appeared in print in Thomas W. Sokolowski’s and Rosalind Solomon’s collection of essays entitled Portraits in the Time of AIDS. According to the editors, Yang presented them as “monologues with slide projection in the theatre” (34) because the main actor of this one-man show is dying of AIDS. Yang’s work consists of seventeen slides with short texts written underneath them. In an attempt to respect the body that is dying, the texts are not recited, but the readers/spectators read them subvocally. The brilliance of this piece resides in its hushed tone, which parallels the act of dying when the patient’s body and mind become more and more tacit and lifeless. From one photo to another, and from one text to another, we discover Allan, although we never quite get to know him. The minitexts relate Allan’s story: how he was hospitalized at St. Vincent’s, known as “the AIDS ward” (35); how he decided to return home, into a studio shared with a dealer; how AIDS first attacked his lungs, and so he had to keep next to him “a large cylinder of oxygen as he was often out of breath” (37); how AIDS then affected his sight, and he developed a condition known as “CytoMegalo Virus — C.M.V. Retinctus” that gradually “destroyed the retina” of his eyes (39); how he decided “to go off medication” (46); and, how, finally “he went into a coma. I saw a nurse give him a glass of water but the water just ran out of his mouth” (50). To look at these photos time and time again is to be reminded of Albert Einstein’s vision of the passenger trapped in the train running with the speed of light. That passenger could not sense all that was happening in the train, and especially outside of it, because time moves in its cosmic, non-human, slippery dimension, and thus sensation could not profusely permeate his body. Juxtaposing Einstein’s vision with Allan’s decaying body, I read the latter’s body as if it were coiled up inside his mind just like a snail covers a part of its body under its hard shell. The photos are presented rapidly with no entr-acte in between; in a matter of minutes, time and space seem to collapse. There is no time for a prolonged reminiscence of Allan’s spent life. Allan is dying now, and he does not have time to remember his life. He barely has time to feel his body, a touch, or a kiss on his face, which seems to Yang “to have caved in” (47). Through this work, not only does Yang capture the disturbing moments of a friend dying, but he also touches on the “epidermis” of despair. This “epidermis” is both endotopic and exotopic, meaning that it starts within the patient and then it radiates/extends to his relatives and friends. Yang’s images of Allan dying give the impression that his body levitates, jutting out into space — but unfortunately without much meaning. On the other hand, the posters advertised for AIDS are simple, if not quite embarrassing and disrespectful given the gravity of this illness. They rarely touch on any aspects related to the illness itself, as they allude more to the immorality of homosexual acts. Gilman explains part of the rationale involved in the process of not presenting people dying of AIDS as follows: The image of the ‘positive’ body or the body with AIDS is strictly controlled in the world of the public health poster. Nowhere is an image of the ‘ugly’ or diseased body evoked directly, for any such evocation would refer back to the initial sense as a ‘gay’ disease. … Mens non sana in corpore insano cannot be the motto. For representing the ill body as a dying body is not possible. Such a body would point to ‘deviance from the norm’ in the form of illness. And this association with homosexuality and addiction labeled as illness must be suppressed. … All these images are images not of educating, but of control. (162) The poster chosen for illustration reads “LOVE AIDS PEOPLE,” with AIDS used as a verb and not as a noun; nonetheless, the construction’s subtlety is rather counterproductive. To a certain extent, this poster can be related to Michelangelo Merisi Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1601-02). There, the Apostle touches the actual wound because he needs tactile proof to accept its existence. The act of touching, as well as the skin open by the wound, reveal the fact that “Skin lacks the depth, the interiority we want it to give us. … The flesh we crave as confirmation of our forms cannot do anything but turn us forever out even as we burrow into the holes we find there” (Phelan 42). But the poster presented below brings into focus verbally (therefore propagandistically) how one’s body might be destroyed because of AIDS. Furthermore, the symbol of the arrow is a recurrent motif in the art representing AIDS, especially in light of its religious association with the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (see for example David Wojnarowicz art works which offer a personal interpretation of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian). But if LOVE AIDS PEOPLE, and if gay men identify themselves with a martyr, then they might easily fall target to this twisted logic and think of themselves as victims. As Larry Kramer notes, gay men are tragic people partly because they feel responsible for an illness that has been affecting both the homosexual and heterosexual communities: “The continuing existence of HIV is essential for the functioning of the totalitarianism under which gay people now live. It works like this: HIV allows ‘them’ to sell us as sick. And that kills off our usefulness, both in our minds — their thinking we are sick — and in the eyes of the world — everyone thinking we are sick” (65).Gay men have always been a target since, allegedly, they are a menace to the institution of marriage, procreation, and to morality in general. Endocrinology studies have been conducted on gay men, but their results have not been able to say with certainty why some people prefer to engage in homosexual rather than heterosexual acts. According to Jennifer Terry, earlier studies from the 1930s aimed at determining distinct somatic features of homosexuals for the most part failed to produce any such evidence. Most of them focused on the overall physical structure of bodies, measuring skeletal features, pelvic angles and things like muscle density and hair distribution. (144) (Another useful resource is Holt N. Parker’s 2001 article “The Myth of the Heterosexual: Anthropology and Sexuality for Classicists.”) How and by whom are our sexual identities created? Does the presence of one specific anatomical organ delimit one person’s sexual identity? We have been trained into believing that there are only two genders, male and female, partly because of our binary way of thinking. Needless to say, just as in one color there are degrees of its intensity and saturation, so there are in us verbal, behavioral, and sexual tendencies that could make us look and act more or less masculine or feminine. Even more productive is to note the importance of power (control) and the erotic in our lives considering that the photos (and the minitexts) presenting Allan seem insufficient to initiate a dialogue by themselves. Because the eroticized body is what dies, that is, what is put at risk or could become powerless because of AIDS. The body that cannot touch and be touched anymore; the body that cannot control its needs and desires; and, ultimately, the body that is deprived of its pleasures and thus loses its erotic self. Therefore, AIDS is not only a way to redefine our erotic life, but also becomes a reason to question our hygiene practices. Elizabeth Grosz points out that “erotic pleasures are evanescent, they are forgotten almost as they occur” (195). But when erotic pleasures are controlled, as seems to be the case because of AIDS, have we intervened in such a manner as to program our intercourse? Admittedly, AIDS is predominantly linked with one’s sexuality and, hence, it could make one feel too self-aware about one’s needs, as well as rigid and self-conscious in an (intimate) act which, in essence, is all about losing oneself, being uninhibited. In the end, Allan’s sense of identity seems to be imprinted only in the camera’s objective lens. After he died, as Yang remembers, “I read his diaries […]. AIDS was a tragedy that was for sure, but as well he had an addictive personality and his day to day life was full of desperation. I hadn’t realize the extent of this and it came as a shock. Yet there were moments of clarity when his fresh test for life shone” (51). Yang does not say more about Allan’s intimate writings and, as he suggests, it was quite surprising for him to discover a richer, more intimate dimension of his friend. Still, until Allan’s diaries will be released to the public to offer us a more palpable view on his life, we rely exclusively on the selections of photos and minitexts accomplished by Yang, thus being aware that, no matter how exquisite they are, they could only say a few things about this enigmatic patient.[III] After exposing Allan’s gradually collapsing body, we may want to analyze to which extent is dying/death something that reveals our self-centricity. It is by now a truism to say that death is the final moment of our embodiment to which we are denied access. Nonetheless, we cannot stop thinking about (our) death, and the last passage of this essay proposes its own reflection on this subject. Norbert Elias argues that each one of us is a homo clausus (Latin for “closed, self-sufficient being”). He believes that this condition is a consequence of our living an advanced phase in our individualized life. Surprisingly, he relates this self-sufficiency to the ritual of dying. He believes that in highly industrialized societies, a patient may benefit from the most recent technical and medical equipment, but that that person usually dies alone, meaning without his family/relatives around him. On the other hand, as he goes on to argue, “families in less developed states … often go hand in hand with far greater inequalities of power between men and women. [The dying] take leave of the world publicly, within a circle of people most of whom have strong emotive value for them, and for whom they themselves have a such a value. They die unhygienically, but not alone” (87). Elias does not explore this idea in depth, so we are left to wonder what he meant by dying unhygienically, or if he thought that method was better in coping with death. Also, he never mentioned the exact countries/regions he had in mind when he made that remark; therefore, we are left unsatisfied by his comment. Nonetheless, as Elias reminds us, it is important to remember that the traditional death rituals were and are intimate moments (and they should remain like this). The homo clausus idea may be linked with a body that is reaching its final embodiment, and hence becoming a closing-in-itself body. However, how does a body transact and/or negotiate the moments of its final embodiment? The process of sinking in one’s body, to which I refer, is not a visually, aurally, or especially olfactorily pleasant experience. Our deceitful memory misdirects our emotional brains by indicating which subsystem is still functional and open and which has become useless, that is, closed. In this light, we should redefine Elias’s idea by saying that what appears to be a monolithic structure — a body: closed, sealed, and/or self-contained — is in fact a very fluid body; that death does not reveal our self-centricity because that reasoning may generate an absurd idea, namely, we die alone because we have spent a life alone. Consequently, the dying body becomes the margin par excellence, which, because it is completely out of control, does not stop from leaking and/or emitting smells. This theory is confirmed by a study conducted on dying patients, Dying Process: Patients' Experiences of Palliative Care (2000), where Julia Lawton notes that “on a number of occasions, staff kept aromatherapy oil burners running throughout the day and night in an attempt to veil the odour of excretia, vomit and rotting flesh. … I observed that smell created a boundary around a patient, repelling others away” (135). One has to close one’s eyes to vaguely imagine what it must feel like for the medical personnel to keep the vigil of the dying bodies. Nonetheless, the lay community is exposed to photographs of the dying only on rare occasions. According to Gilman, these images are not made public because “The classical model of ‘healthy/beauty’ and ‘illness/ugliness’ is part of a cultural baggage that accompanies any representation of the ill or healthy body” (118-19). While the skin is endowed with the capacity of regenerating itself after it has been wounded, thus effacing time, a photograph of a dying body seems to efface one’s memory of one’s accumulated experiences. Such a photograph makes its contents (that is, the time, location, personal context of the shooting) disappear since its details will eventually fade away. As a corollary, the absent body effaces its photographed version, leaving it few chances to be remembered. The theme of the ars moriendi, as presented in this essay, has demonstrated that what dies is not only one’s body, but also the echoed memory of its erotic self. ReferencesElias, Norbert. The Loneliness of Dying. New York: Blackwell, 1985. Gilman, Sander. Picturing Health and Illness: Images of Identity and Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies.New York: Routledge, 1995. Kramer, Larry. The Tragedy of Today’s Gay. New York: Penguin Group, 2005. Lawton, Julia. Dying Process: Patients' Experiences of Palliative Care. New York: Routledge, 2000. Leder, Drew. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Lupton, Deborah. The Imperative of Health: Public Health and the Regulated Body. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 1995. Peggy Phelan. Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. New York: Routledge, 1997. Siebers, Tobin. The Body Aesthetic: From Fine Art to Body Modification. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Jennifer Terry. “The Seductive Power of Science in the Making of Deviant Subjectivity.” Posthuman Bodies. Eds. Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1995: 135-162. Yang, William. “Allan from Sadness: A Monologue with Slides.” Portraits in the Time of AIDS. Eds. Thomas W. Sokolowski and Rosalind Solomon. New York: Grey Art Gallery & Study Center, 1988: 34-51.

To Remember‘The central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenisation and cultural heterogenisation.’ (Appadurai 49)While this statement has been made more than twenty years, it remains more relevant than ever. The current age is one of widespread global migrations and dis-placement. The phenomenon of globalisation is the first and major factor for this newly created shift of ground, of transmigration as defined by its etymological meaning. However, a growing number of migrations also result from social or political oppression and war as we witness the current flow of refugees from Africa or Syria to Europe and with growing momentum, from climate change, the people of Tokelau or Nauru migrating as a result of the rise of sea levels in their South Pacific homeland. Such global migrations lead to an intense co-habitation of various cultures, ethnicities and religions in host societies. In late twentieth century Giddens explains this complexity and discusses how globalisation requires a re-organisation of time and space in social and cultural life of both the host and the migrant (Giddens 14). In the host country, Appadurai terms the physical consequences of this phenomenon as the new ‘ethnoscape’ (Appadurai 51). This fact is particularly relevant to New Zealand, a country that is currently seeing an unprecedented level of immigration from various and numerous ethnic groups which is evidently influencing the makeup of its entire population.For the migrant, according to Xavier & Rosaldo, social life following migration re-establishes itself on two fronts: the first is the pre-modern manner of being present through participation in localised activities at specific locales; the second is about fostering relationships with absent others through media and across the world. These “settings for distanced relations – for relations at a distance, [are] stretched out across time and space” (Xavier & Rosaldo 8). Throughout the world, people in dis-placement reorganise their societies in both of these fronts.Dis-placement is ‘a potentially traumatic event that is collectively experienced" (Norris 128). Disaster and trauma related dis-placement as stressors happen to entire communities, not just individuals, families and neighbourhoods. Members are exposed together and it has been argued, must, therefore, recover together, (Norris 145). On one hand, in the situation of collective trauma some attachment to a new space ‘increases the likelihood that a community as a whole has the will to rebuild’ (Norris 145). On the other, it is suggested that for the individual, place attachment makes the necessary relocation much harder. It is in re-location however that the will to recreate or reproduce will emerge. Indeed part of the recovery in the case of relocation can be the reconstruction of place. The places of past experiences and rituals for meaning are commonly recreated or reproduced as new places of attachment abroad. The will and ability to reimagine and re-materialise (Gupta & Ferguson 70) the lost heritage is motivational and defines resilience.This is something a great deal of communities such as the displaced Coptic community in New Zealand look to achieve, re-constructing a familiar space, where rituals and meaning can reaffirm their ideal existence, the only form of existence they have ever known before relocation. In this instance it is the reconstruction and reinterpretation of a traditional Coptic Orthodox church. Resilience can be examined as a ‘sense of community’, a concept that binds people with shared values. Concern for community and respect for others can transcend the physical and can bind disparate individuals in ways that otherwise might require more formal organisations. It has been noted that trauma due to displacement and relocation can enhance a sense of closeness and stronger belonging (Norris 139). Indeed citizen participation is fundamental to community resilience (Norris 139) and it entails the engagement of community members in formal organisations, including religious congregations (Perkins et al. 2002; Norris 139) and collective gatherings around cultural rituals. However, the displacement also strengthens the emotional ties at the individual level to the homeland, to kinfolk and to the more abstract cultural mores and ideas.Commitment and AttachmentRecalling places of collective events and rituals such as assembly halls and spaces of worship is crucially important for dis-placed communities. The attachment to place exposes the challenges and opportunities for recollecting the spirit of space in the situation of a people abroad. This in turn, raises the question of memory and its representation in re-creating the architectural qualities of the cultural space from its original context. This article offers the employ of visual representation (drawings) as a strategy of recall. To explore these ideas further, the situation of the Egyptian community of Coptic Orthodox faith, relocated, displaced and living ‘abroad’ in New Zealand is being considered. This small community that emigrated to New Zealand firstly in the 1950s then in the 1970s represents in many ways the various ethnicities and religious beliefs found in New Zealand.Rituals and congregations are held in collective spaces and while the attachment to the collective is essential, the question to be addressed here relates to the role of the physical community space in forming or maintaining the attachment to community (Pretty, Chipuer, and Bramston 78). Groups or societies use systems of shared meanings to interpret and make sense of the world. However, shared meanings have traditionally been tied to the idea of a fixed territory (Manzo & Devine-Wright 335, Xavier & Rosaldo 10). Manzo and Perkins further suggest that place attachments provide stability and are integral to self-definitions (335-350). Image by Vioula Said.Stability and self-definition and ultimately identity are in turn, placed in jeopardy with the process of displacement and de-territorilisation. Shared meanings are shifted and potentially lost when the resultant instability occurs. Norris finds that in the strongest cases, individuals, neighbourhoods and communities lose their sense of identity and self-definition when displaced due to the destruction of natural and built environments (Norris 139). This comment is particularly relevant to people who are emigrating to New Zealand as refugees from climate change such as Pasifika or from wars and oppression such as the Coptic community. This loss strengthens the requirement for something greater than just a common space of congregation, something that transcends the physical. The sense of belonging and identity in the complexity of potential cultural heterogenisation is at issue. The role of architecture in dis-placement is thereby brought into question seeking answers to how it should facilitate a space of attachment for resilience, for identity and for belonging.A unity of place and people has long been assumed in the anthropological concept of culture (Gupta & Ferguson: 75). According to Xavier & Rosaldo the historical tendency has been to connect the realm of constructing meaning to the particularities of place (Xavier & Rosaldo 10). Thereby, cultural meanings are intrinsically linked to place. Therefore, place attachment to the reproduced or re-interpreted place is crucially important for dis-placed societies in re-establishing social and cultural content. Architectural spaces are the obvious holders of cultural, social and spiritual content for such enterprises. Hillier suggests that all "architecture is, in essence, the application of speculative and abstract thought to the non-discursive aspects of building, and because it is so, it is also its application to the social and cultural contents of buildings” (Hillier 3).To Re-ImagineAn attempt to reflect the history, stories and the cultural mores of the Coptic community in exile by privileging material and design authenticity, merits attention. An important aspect of the Coptic faith lies within its adherence to symbolism and rituals and strict adherence to the traditional forms and configurations of space may reflect some authenticity of the customary qualities of the space (Said 109). However, the original space is itself in flux, changing with time and environmental conditions; as are the memories of those travelling abroad as they come from different moments in time. Experience has shown that a communities’ will to re-establish social and cultural content through their traditional architecture on new sites has not always resurrected their history and reignited their original spirit. The impact of the new context’s reality on the reproduction or re interpretation of place may not fully enable its entire community’s attachment to it. There are significant implications from the displacement of site that lead to a disassociation from the former architectural language. Consequently there is a cultural imperative for an approach that entails the engagement of community in the re-making of a cultural space before responding to the demands of site. Cultures come into conflict when the new ways of knowing and acting are at odds with the old. Recreating a place without acknowledging these tensions may lead to non-attachment. Facing cultural paradox and searching for authenticity explains in part, the value of intangible heritage and the need to privilege it over its tangible counterpart.Intangible HeritageThe intangible qualities of place and the memory of them are anchors for a dis-placed community to reimagine and re-materialise its lost heritage and to recreate a new place for attachment. This brings about the notion of the authenticity of cultural heritage, it exposes the uncertain value of reconstruction and it exhibits the struggles associated with de-territorilisation in such a process.In dealing with cultural heritage and contemporary conservation practice with today’s wider understanding of the interdisciplinary field of heritage studies, several authors discuss the relevance and applicability of the 1964 Venice Charter on architectural heritage. Glendinning argues that today’s heritage practices exploit the physical remains of the past for useful modern and aesthetic purposes as they are less concerned with the history they once served (Glendinning 3). For example, the act of modernising and restoring a historic museum is counterbalanced by its ancient exhibits thereby highlighting modern progress. Others support this position by arguing that relationships, associations and meanings that contribute to the value of a site should not be dismissed in favour of physical remains (Hill 21). Smith notes that the less tangible approaches struggle to gain leverage within conventional practice, and therefore lack authenticity. This can be evidenced in so many of our reconstructed heritage sites. This leads to the importance of the intangible when dealing with architectural heritage. Image by Vioula Said.In practice, a number of different methods and approaches are employed to safeguard intangible cultural heritage. In order to provide a common platform for considering intangible heritage, UNESCO developed the 2003 ‘Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage’. Rather than simply addressing physical heritage, this convention helped to define the intangible and served to promote its recognition. Intangible cultural heritage is defined as expressions, representations, practices, skills and knowledge that an individual a community or group recognise as their cultural heritage.Safeguarding intangible heritage requires a form of translation, for example, from the oral form into a material form, e.g. archives, inventories, museums and audio or film records. This ‘freezing’ of intangible heritage requires thoughtfulness and care in the choosing of the appropriate methods and materials. At the same time, the ephemeral aspects of intangible heritage make it vulnerable to being absorbed by the typecast cultural models predominant at any particular time. This less tangible characteristic of history and the pivotal role it plays in conveying a dialogue between the past and the present demands alternative methods. At a time when the identity of dis-placed people is in danger of being diminished by dominant host societies, the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage is critically important in re-establishing social and cultural content.Recent news has shown the destruction of many Coptic churches in Egypt, through fire at increasing rates since 2011 or by bombings such as the ones witnessed in April 2017. For this particular problem of the Coptic Community, the authors propose that visual representation of spiritual spaces may aid in recollecting and re-establishing such heritage. The illustrations in this article present the personal journey of an artist of Egyptian Copt descent drawing from her memories of a place and time within the sphere of religious rituals. As Treib suggests, “Our recollections are situational and spatialised memories; they are memories attached to places and events” (Treib 22). The intertwining of real and imagined memory navigates to define the spirit of place of a lost time and community.The act of remembering is a societal ritual and in and of itself is part of the globalised world we live in today. The memories lodged in physical places range from incidents of personal biography to the highly refined and extensively interpreted segments of cultural lore (Treib 63). The act of remembering allows for our sense of identity and reflective cultural distinctiveness as well as shaping our present lives from that of our past. To remember is to celebrate or to commemorate the past (Treib 25).Memory has the aptitude to generate resilient links between self and environment, self and culture, as well as self and collective. “Our access to the past is no longer mediated by the account of a witness or a narrator, or by the eye of a photographer. We will not respond to a re-presentation of the historical event, but to a presentation or performance of it” (van Alphen 11). This statement aligns with Smith’s critical analysis of heritage and identity, not as a set of guidelines but as a performance experienced through the imagination, “experienced within a layering of performative qualities that embody remembrance and commemoration and aim to construct a sense of place and understanding within the present”(van Alphen 11). Heritage is hereby investigated as a re-constructed experience; attempting to identify a palette of memory-informed qualities that can be applied to the re-establishing of the heritage lost. Here memory will be defined as Aristotle’s Anamnesis, to identify the capacity to stimulate a range of physical and sensory experiences in the retrieval of heritage that may otherwise be forgotten (Cubitt 75; Huyssen 80). In architectural terms, Anamnesis, refers to the process of retrieval associated with intangible heritage, as a performance aimed at the recovery of memory, experienced through the imagination (Said 143). Unfortunately, when constructing an experience aimed at the recovery of memory, the conditions of a particular moment do not, once passed, move into a state of retirement from which they can be retrieved at a later date. Likewise, the conditions and occurrences of one moment can never be precisely recaptured, Treib describes memory as an interventionist:it magnifies, diminishes, adjusts, darkens, or illuminates places that are no longer extant, transforming the past anew every time it is called to mind, shorn or undesirable reminiscence embellished by wishful thinking, coloured by present concerns. (Treib 188)To remember them, Cubitt argues, we must reconstruct them; “not in the sense of reassembling something that has been taken to pieces and carefully stored, but in the sense of imaginatively configuring something that can no longer have the character of actuality” (Cubitt 77). Image by Vioula Said.Traditionally, history and past events have been put in writing to preserve their memory within the present. However, as argued by Treib, this mode of representation is inherently linear and static; contributing to a flattening of history. Similarly, Nelson states; “I consider how a visual mode of representation – as opposed to textual or oral – helps to shape memory” (Nelson 37). The unflattening of past events can occur by actively engaging with culture and tradition through the mechanism of reconstruction and representation of the intangible heritage (Said 145). As memory becomes crucial in affirming collective identity, place also becomes crucial in anchoring such experience. Interactive exhibition facilitates this act using imagery, interpretation and physical engagement while architectural place gives distinctiveness to cultural products and practices. Architectural space is always intrinsically bound with cultural practice. Appadurai says that where a groups’ past increasingly becomes part of museums, exhibits and collection, its culture becomes less a realm of reproducible practices and more an arena of choices and cultural reproduction (59). When place is shifted (de-territorilisation in migration) the loss of territorial roots brings “an erosion of the cultural distinctiveness of places, a de-territorilisation of identity” (Gupta & Ferguson 68). According to Gupta & Ferguson, “remembered places have …. often served as symbolic anchors of community for dispersed people” (Gupta & Ferguson 69).To Re-MakeIn the context of de-territorialisation the intangible qualities of the original space offer an avenue for the creation and experience of a new space in the spirit of its source. Simply reproducing a traditional building layout in the new territory or recollecting artefacts does not suffice in recalling the essence of place, nor does descriptive writing no matter how compelling. Issues of authenticity and identity underpin both of these strategies. Accepting the historical tendency to reconnect the realm of constructing meaning to the particularities of place requires an investigation on those ‘particularities of place’. Intangible heritage can bridge the problems of being out of one’s country, overseas, or ‘abroad’. While architecture can be as Hillier suggests, “in essence, the application of speculative and abstract thought to the non-discursive aspects of building” (Hillier 3). Architecture should not be reproduced but rather re-constructed as a holder or facilitator of recollection and collective performance. It is within the performance of intangible heritage in the ‘new’ architecture that a sense of belonging, identity and reconnection with home can be experienced abroad. Its visual representation takes centre stage in the process. The situation of the Egyptian community of Coptic faith in New Zealand is here looked at as an illustration. The intangibility of architectural heritage is created through one of the author’s graphic work here presented. Image by Vioula Said.The concept of drawing as an anchor for memory and drawing as a method to inhabit space is exposed and this presents a situation where drawing has an experiential nature in itself.It has been argued that a drawing is simply an image that compresses an entire experience of temporality. Pallasmaa suggests that “every drawing is an excavation into the past and memory of its creator” (Pallasmaa 91). The drawing is considered as a process of both observation and expression, of receiving and giving. The imagined or the remembered space turns real and becomes part of the experiential reality of the viewer and of the image maker. The drawing as a visual representation of the remembered experience within the embrace of an interior space is drawn from the image maker’s personal experience. It is the expression of their own recollection and not necessarily the precise realityor qualities perceived or remembered by others. This does not suggest that such drawing has a limited value. This article promotes the idea that such visual representation has potentially a shared transformative role. The development of drawings in this realm of intangible heritage exposes the fact that the act of drawing memory may provide an intimate relationship between architecture, past events within the space, the beholder of the memory and eventually the viewer of the drawing. The drawings can be considered a reminder of moments past, and an alternative method to the physical reproduction or preservation of the built form. It is a way to recollect, express and give new value to the understanding of intangible heritage, and constructs meaning.From the development of a personal spatial and intuitive recall to produce visual expressions of a remembered space and time, the image author optimistically seeks others to deeply engage with these images of layered memories. They invite the viewer to re-create their own memory by engaging with the author’s own perception. Simply put, drawings of a personal memory are offered as a convincing representation of intangible heritage and as an authentic expression of the character or essence of place to its audience. This is offered as a method of reconstructing what is re-membered, as a manifestation of symbolic anchor and as a first step towards attachment to place. The relevance of which may be pertinent for people in exile in a foreign land.ReferencesAppadurai, A. “Sovereignty without Territoriality: Notes for a Postnational Geography.” The Geography of Identity. Ed. Patricia Yaeger. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1997. 40–58. Brown, R.H., and B. Brown. “The Making of Memory: The Politics of Archives, Libraries and Museum in the Construction of National Consciousness.” History of Human Sciences 11.4 (1993): 17–32.Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997.Cubitt, Geoffrey. History and Memory. London: Oxford UP, 2013.Giddens, A. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990.Gupta, A., and J. Ferguson. “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference.” Religion and Social Justice for Immigrants. Ed. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2006.Glendinning, Miles. The Conservation Movement: A History of Architectural Preservation: Antiquity to Modernity. London: Routledge, 2013.Hill, Jennifer. The Double Dimension: Heritage and Innovation. Canberra: The Royal Australian Institute of Architects, 2004.Hillier, Bill, Space Is the Machine. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge UP, 1996.Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts, Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.Lira, Sergio, and Rogerio Amoeda. Constructing Intangible Heritage. Barcelos, Portugal: Green Lines Institute for Sustainable Development, 2010.Manzo, Lynne C., and Douglas Perkins. “Finding Common Ground: The Importance of Place Attachment to Community Participation and Planning.” Journal of Planning Literature 20 (2006): 335–350. Manzo, Lynne C., and Patrick Devine-Wright. Place Attachment: Advances in Theory, Methods and Applications. London: Routledge. 2013.Nelson, Robert S., and Margaret Olin. Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2003.Norris, F.H., S.P. Stevens, B. Pfefferbaum, KF. Wyche, and R.L. Pfefferbaum. “Community Resilience as a Metaphor, Theory, Set of Capacities and Strategy for Disaster Readiness.” American Journal of Community Psychology 41 (2008): 127–150.Perkins, D.D., J. Hughey, and P.W. Speer. “Community Psychology Perspectives on Social Capital Theory and Community Development Practice.” Journal of the Community Development Society 33.1 (2002): 33–52.Pretty, Grace, Heather H. Chipuer, and Paul Bramston. “Sense of Place Amongst Adolescents and Adults in Two Rural Australian Towns: The Discriminating Features of Place Attachment, Sense of Community and Place Dependence in Relation to Place Identity.” Journal of Environmental Psychology 23.3 (2003): 273–87.Said, Vioula. Coptic Ruins Reincarnated. Thesis. Master of Interior Architecture. Victoria University of Wellington, 2014.Smith, Laura Jane. Uses of Heritage. New York: Routledge, 2006.Treib, Marc. Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape. New York: Routledge, 2013.UNESCO. “Text of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Human Heritage.” 2003. 15 Aug. 2017 <http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/convention>.Van Alphen, Ernst. Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature and Theory. Redwood City, CA: Stanford UP, 1997.Xavier, Jonathan, and Renato Rosaldo. “Thinking the Global.” The Anthropology of Globalisation. Eds. Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo. Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 2002.

I was born illegitimate. Born on an existential precipice. My unwed mother was 36 years old when she relinquished me. I was the fourth baby she was required to give away. After I emerged blood stained and blue tinged – abject, liminal – not only did the nurses refuse me my mother’s touch, I also lost the sound of her voice. Her smell. Her heart beat. Her taste. Her gaze. The silence was multi-sensory. When they told her I was dead, I also lost, within her memory and imagination, my life. I was adopted soon after but not told for over four decades. It was too shameful for even me to know. Imprinted at birth with a psychological ‘death’, I fell, as a Late Discovery Adoptee (LDA), into a socio-cultural and psychological abyss, frozen at birth at the bottom of a parturitive void from where, invisible within family, society, and self I was unable to form an undamaged sense of being.Throughout the 20th century (and for centuries before) this kind of ‘social abortion’ was the dominant script. An adoptee was regarded as a bastard, born of sin, the mother blamed, the father exonerated, and silence demanded (Lynch 28-74). My adoptive mother also sinned. She was infertile. But, in taking me on, she assumed the role of a womb worthy woman, good wife, and, in her case, reluctant mother (she secretly didn’t want children and was privately overwhelmed by the task). In this way, my mother, my adoptive mother, and myself are all the daughters of bereavement, all of us sacrificed on the altar of prejudice and fear that infertility, sex outside of marriage, and illegitimacy were unspeakable crimes for which a price must be paid and against which redemptive protection must be arranged. If, as Thomas Keneally (5) writes, “original sin is the mother fluid of history” then perhaps all three of us all lie in its abject waters. Grotevant, Dunbar, Kohler and Lash Esau (379) point out that adoption was used to ‘shield’ children from their illegitimacy, women from their ‘sexual indiscretions’, and adoptive parents from their infertility in the belief that “severing ties with birth family members would promote attachment between adopted children and parents”. For the adoptee in the closed record system, the socio/political/economic vortex that orchestrated their illegitimacy is born out of a deeply, self incriminating primal fear that reaches right back into the recesses of survival – the act of procreation is infested with easily transgressed life and death taboos within the ‘troop’ that require silence and the burial of many bodies (see Amanda Gardiner’s “Sex, Death and Desperation: Infanticide, Neonaticide, and Concealment of Birth in Colonial Western Australia” for a palpable, moving, and comprehensive exposition on the links between 'illegitimacy', the unmarried mother and child murder). As Nancy Verrier (24) states in Coming Home to Self, “what has to be understood is that separation trauma is an insidious experience, because, as a society, we fail to see this experience as a trauma”. Indeed, relinquishment/adoption for the baby and subsequent adult can be acutely and chronically painful. While I was never told the truth of my origins, of course, my body knew. It had been there. Sentient, aware, sane, sensually, organically articulate, it messaged me (and anyone who may have been interested) over the decades via the language of trauma, its lexicon and grammar cellular, hormonal, muscular (Howard & Crandall, 1-17; Pert, 72), the truth of my birth, of who I was an “unthought known” (Bollas 4). I have lived out my secret fatality in a miasmic nebula of what I know now to be the sequelae of adoption psychopathology: nausea, physical and psychological pain, agoraphobia, panic attacks, shame, internalised anger, depression, self-harm, genetic bewilderment, and generalised anxiety (Brodzinsky 25-47; Brodzinsky, Smith, & Brodzinsky 74; Kenny, Higgins, Soloff, & Sweid xiv; Levy-Shiff 97-98; Lifton 210-212; Verrier The Primal Wound 42-44; Wierzbicki 447-451) – including an all pervading sense of unreality experienced as dissociation (the experience of depersonalisation – where the self feels unreal – and derealisation – where the world feels unreal), disembodiment, and existential elision – all characteristics of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In these ways, my body intervened, acted out, groaned in answer to the social overlay, and from beyond “the dermal veil” tried to procure access, as Vicky Kirby (77) writes, to “the body’s opaque ocean depths” through its illnesses, its eloquent, and incessantly aching and silent verbosities deepened and made impossibly fraught because I was not told. The aim of this paper is to discuss one aspect of how my body tried to channel the trauma of my secret fatality and liminality: my pre-disclosure art work (the cellular memory of my trauma also expressed itself, pre-disclosure, through my writings – poetry, journal entries – and also through post-coital glossolalia, all discussed at length in my Honours research “Womb Tongues” and my Doctoral Dissertation “The Womb Artist – A Novel: Translating Pre-verbal Late Discovery Adoption Trauma into Narrative”). From the age of thirty onwards I spent twelve years in therapy where the cause of my childhood and adult psychopathology remained a mystery. During this time, my embodied grief and memories found their way into my art work, a series of 5’ x 3’ acrylic paintings, some of which I offer now for discussion (figures 1-4). These paintings map and express what my body knew but could not verbalise (without language to express my grief, my body found other ways to vent). They are symptom and sign of my pre-verbal adoption trauma, evidence that my body ‘knew’ and laboured ceaselessly and silently to find creative ways to express the incarcerated trauma. Post disclosure, I have used my paintings as artefacts to inform, underpin, and nourish the writing of a collection of poetry “Womb Tongues” and a literary novel/memoir “The Womb Artist” (TWA) in an ongoing autoethnographical, performative, and critical inquiry. My practice-led research as a now conscious and creative witness, fashions the recontextualisation of my ‘self’ into my ‘self’ and society, this time with cognisant and reparative knowledge and facilitates the translation of my body’s psychopathology and memory (explicit and implicit) into a healing testimony that explores the traumatised body as text and politicizes the issues surrounding LDAs (Riley 205). If I use these paintings as a memoirist, I use them second hand, after the fact, after they have served their initial purpose, as the tangible art works of a baby buried beneath a culture’s prejudice, shame, and judgement and the personal cries from the illegitimate body/self. I use them now to explore and explain my subclinical and subterranean life as a LDA.My pre-disclosure paintings (Figures 1-4) – filled with vaginal, fetal, uterine, and umbilical references – provide some kind of ‘evidence’ that my body knew what had happened to me as if, with the tenacity of a poltergeist, my ‘spectral self’ found ways to communicate. Not simply clues, but the body’s translation of the intra-psychic landscape, a pictorial and artistic séance into the world, as if my amygdala – as quasar and signal, homing device and history lesson (a measure, container, and memoir) – knew how to paint a snap shot or an x-ray of the psyche, of my cellular marrow memories (a term formulated from fellow LDA Sandy McCutcheon’s (76) memoir, The Magician’s Son when he says, “What I really wanted was the history of my marrow”). If, as Salveet Talwar suggests, “trauma is processed from the body up”, then for the LDA pre-discovery, non-verbal somatic signage is one’s ‘mother tongue’(25). Talwar writes, “non-verbal expressive therapies such as art, dance, music, poetry and drama all activate the sub-cortical regions of the brain and access pre-verbal memories” (26). In these paintings, eerily divinatory and pointed traumatic, memories are made visible and access, as Gussie Klorer (213) explains in regard to brain function and art therapy, the limbic (emotional) system and the prefrontal cortex in sensorimotor integration. In this way, as Marie Angel and Anna Gibbs (168) suggest, “the visual image may serve as a kind of transitional mode in thought”. Ruth Skilbeck in her paper First Things: Reflections on Single-lens Reflex Digital Photography with a Wide-angled Lens, also discusses (with reference to her photographic record and artistic expression of her mother’s death) what she calls the “dark matter” – what has been overlooked, “left out”, and/or is inexplicable (55) – and the idea of art work as the “transitional object” as “a means that some artists use, conceptually and yet also viscerally, in response to the extreme ‘separation anxiety’ of losing a loved one, to the void of the Unknown” (57). In my case, non-disclosure prevented my literacy and the evolution of the image into language, prevented me from fully understanding the coded messages left for me in my art work. However, each of my paintings is now, with the benefit of full disclosure, a powerful, penetrating, and comprehensible intra and extra sensory cry from the body in kinaesthetic translation (Lusebrink, 125; Klorer, 217). In Figure 1, ‘Embrace’, the reference to the umbilical is palpable, described in my novel “The Womb Artist” (184) this way; “two ropes tightly entwine as one, like a dark and dirty umbilical cord snaking its way across a nether world of smudged umbers”. There is an ‘abject’ void surrounding it. The cord sapped of its colour, its blood, nutrients – the baby starved of oxygen, breath; the LDA starved of words and conscious understanding. It has two parts entwined that may be seen in many ways (without wanting to reduce these to static binaries): mother/baby; conscious/unconscious; first person/third person; child/adult; semiotic/symbolic – numerous dualities could be spun from this embrace – but in terms of my novel and of the adoptive experience, it reeks of need, life and death, a text choking on the poetic while at the same time nourished by it; a text made ‘available’ to the reader while at the same narrowing, limiting, and obscuring the indefinable nature of pre-verbal trauma. Figure 1. Embrace. 1993. Acrylic on canvas.The painting ‘Womb Tongues’ (Figure 2) is perhaps the last (and, obviously, lasting) memory of the infinite inchoate universe within the womb, the umbilical this time wrapped around in a phallic/clitorial embrace as the baby-self emerges into the constrictions of a Foucauldian world, where the adoptive script smothers the ‘body’ encased beneath the ‘coils’ of Judeo-Christian prejudice and centuries old taboo. In this way, the reassigned adoptee is an acute example of power (authority) controlling and defining the self and what knowledge of the self may be allowed. The baby in this painting is now a suffocated clitoris, a bound subject, a phallic representation, a gagged ‘tongue’ in the shape of the personally absent (but socially imposing) omni-present and punitive patriarchy. Figure 2. Womb Tongues. 1997. Acrylic on canvas.‘Germination’ (Figure 3) depicts an umbilical again, but this time as emerging from a seething underworld and is present in TWA (174) this way, “a colony of night crawlers that writhe and slither on the canvas, moving as one, dozens of them as thin as a finger, as long as a dream”. The rhizomic nature of this painting (and Figure 4), becomes a heaving horde of psychosomatic and psychopathological influences and experiences, a multitude of closely packed, intense, and dendridic compulsions and symptoms, a mass of interconnected (and by nature of the silence and lie) subterranean knowledges that force the germination of a ‘ghost baby/child/adult’ indicated by the pale and ashen seedling that emerges above ground. The umbilical is ghosted, pale and devoid of life. It is in the air now, reaching up, as if in germination to a psychological photosynthesis. There is the knot and swarm within the unconscious; something has, in true alien fashion, been incubated and is now emerging. In some ways, these paintings are hardly cryptic.Figure 3. Germination.1993. Acrylic on canvas.In Figure 4 ‘The Birthing Tree’, the overt symbolism reaches ‘clairvoyant status’. This could be read as the family ‘tree’ with its four faces screaming out of the ‘branches’. Do these represent the four babies relinquished by our mother (the larger of these ‘beings’ as myself, giving birth to the illegitimate, silenced, and abject self)? Are we all depicted in anguish and as wraithlike, grotesquely simplified into pure affect? This illegitimate self is painted as gestating a ‘blue’ baby, near full-term in a meld of tree and ‘self’, a blue umbilical cord, again, devoid of blood, ghosted, lifeless and yet still living, once again suffocated by the representation of the umbilical in the ‘bowels’ of the self, the abject part of the body, where refuse is stored and eliminated: The duodenum of the damned. The Devil may be seen as Christopher Bollas’s “shadow of the object”, or the Jungian archetypal shadow, not simply a Judeo-Christian fear-based spectre and curmudgeon, but a site of unprocessed and, therefore, feared psychological material, material that must be brought to consciousness and integrated. Perhaps the Devil also is the antithesis to ‘God’ as mother. The hell of ‘not mother’, no mother, not the right mother, the reluctant adoptive mother – the Devil as icon for the rich underbelly of the psyche and apophatic to the adopted/artificial/socially scripted self.Figure 4. The Birthing Tree. 1995. Acrylic on canvas.These paintings ache with the trauma of my relinquishment and LDA experience. They ache with my body’s truth, where the cellular and psychological, flesh and blood and feeling, leak from my wounds in unspeakable confluence (the two genital lips as the site of relinquishment, my speaking lips that have been sealed through non-disclosure and shame, the psychological trauma as Verrier’s ‘primal wound’) just as I leaked from my mother (and society) at birth, as blood and muck, and ooze and pus and death (Grosz 195) only to be quickly and silently mopped up and cleansed through adoption and life-long secrecy. Where I, as translator, fluent in both silence and signs, disclose the baby’s trauma, asking for legitimacy. My experience as a LDA sets up an interesting experiment, one that allows an examination of the pre-verbal/pre-disclosure body as a fleshed and breathing Rosetta Stone, as an interface between the language of the body and of the verbalised, painted, and written text. As a constructed body, written upon and invented legally, socially, and psychologically, I am, in Hélène Cixous’s (“To Live the Orange” 83) words, “un-forgetting”, “un-silencing” and “unearthing” my ‘self’ – I am re-writing, re-inventing and, under public scrutiny, legitimising my ‘self’. I am a site of inquiry, discovery, extrapolation, and becoming (Metta 492; Poulus 475) and, as Grosz (vii) suggests, a body with “all the explanatory power” of the mind. I am, as I embroider myself and my LDA experience into literary and critical texts, authoring myself into existence, referencing with particular relevance Peter Carnochan’s (361) suggestion that “analysis...acts as midwife to the birth of being”. I am, as I swim forever amorphous, invisible, and unspoken in my mother’s womb, fashioning a shore, landscaping my mind against the constant wet, my chronic liminality (Rambo 629) providing social landfall for other LDAs and silenced minorities. As Catherine Lynch (3) writes regarding LDAs, “Through the creation of text and theory I can formulate an intimate space for a family of adoptive subjects I might never know via our participation in a new discourse in Australian academia.” I participate through my creative, self-reflexive, process fuelled (Durey 22), practice-led enquiry. I use the intimacy (and also universality and multiplicity) and illegitimacy of my body as an alterative text, as a site of academic and creative augmentation in the understanding of LDA issues. The relinquished and silenced baby and LDA adult needs a voice, a ‘body’, and a ‘tender’ place in the consciousness of society, as Helen Riley (“Confronting the Conspiracy of Silence” 11) suggests, “voice, validation, and vindication”. Judith Herman (3) argues that, “Survivors challenge us to reconnect fragments, to reconstruct history, to make meaning of their present symptoms in the light of past events”. I seek to use the example of my experience – as Judith Durey (31) suggests, in “support of evocative, creative modes of representation as valid forms of research in their own right” – to unfurl the whole, to give impetus and precedence for other researchers into adoption and advocate for future babies who may be bought, sold, arranged, and/or created by various means. The recent controversy over Gammy, the baby boy born with Down Syndrome in Thailand, highlights the urgent and moral need for legislation with regard to surrogacy (see Kajsa Ekis Ekman’s Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self for a comprehensive examination of surrogacy issues). Indeed, Catherine Lynch in her paper Doubting Adoption Legislation links the experiences of LDAs and the children of born of surrogacy, most effectively arguing that, “if the fate that closed record adoptees suffered was a misplaced solution to the question of what to do with children already conceived how can you justify the deliberate conception of a child with the intention even before its creation of cruelly removing that child from their mother?” (6). Cixous (xxii) confesses, “All I want is to illustrate, depict fragments, events of human life and death...each unique and yet at the same time exchangeable. Not the law, the exception”. I, too, am a fragment, an illustration (a painting), and, as every individual always is – paradoxically – a communal and, therefore, deeply recognisable and generally applicable minority and exception. In my illegitimacy, I am some kind of evidence. Evidence of cellular memory. Evidence of embodiment. Evidence that silenced illegitimacies will manifest in symptom and non-verbal narratives, that they will ooze out and await translation, verification, and witness. This paper is offered with reverence and with feminist intention, as a revenant mouthpiece for other LDAs, babies born of surrogacy, and donor assisted offspring (and, indeed, any) who are marginalised, silenced, and obscured. It is also intended to promote discussion in the psychological and psychoanalytic fields and, as Helen Riley (202-207) advocates regarding late discovery offspring, more research within the social sciences and the bio-medical field that may encourage legislators to better understand what the ‘best interests of the child’ are in terms of late discovery of origins and the complexity of adoption/conception practices available today. As I write now (and always) the umbilical from my paintings curve and writhe across my soul, twist and morph into the swollen and throbbing organ of tongues, my throat aching to utter, my hands ready to craft latent affect into language in translation of, and in obedience to, my body’s knowledges. It is the art of mute witness that reverses genesis, that keeps the umbilical fat and supple and full of blood, and allows my conscious conception and creation. Indeed, in the intersection of my theoretical, creative, psychological, and somatic praxis, the heat (read hot and messy, insightful and insistent signage) of my body’s knowledges perhaps intensifies – with a ripe bouquet – the inevitably ongoing odour/aroma of the reproductive world. ReferencesAngel, Maria, and Anna Gibbs. “On Moving and Being Moved: The Corporeality of Writing in Literary Fiction and New Media Art.” Literature and Sensation, eds. Anthony Uhlmann, Helen Groth, Paul Sheehan, and Stephan McLaren. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009: 162-172. Bollas, Christopher. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Brodzinsky, David. “Adjustment to Adoption: A Psychosocial Perspective.” Clinical Psychology Review 7 (1987): 25-47. doi: 10.1016/0272-7358(87)90003-1.Brodzinsky, David, Daniel Smith, and Anne Brodzinsky. Children’s Adjustment to Adoption: Developmental and Clinical Issues. 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Past Adoption Experiences: National Research Study on the Service Response to Past Adoption Practices. Research Report 21. Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2012.Kirby, Vicky. Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. Klorer, P. Gussie. “Expressive Therapy with Severely Maltreated Children: Neuroscience Contributions.” Journal of the American Art Therapy Association 22.4 (2005): 213-220. doi:10.1080/07421656.2005.10129523.Levy-Shiff, Rachel. “Psychological Adjustment of Adoptees in Adulthood: Family Environment and Adoption-Related Correlates. 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In August 2006 the LiveJournal (hereafter LJ) community sga_flashfic posted its bimonthly challenge: a “Mission Report” challenge. Challenge communities are fandom-specific sites where moderators pick a theme or prompt to which writers respond and then post their specific fan works. The terms of this challenge were to encourage participants to invent a new mission and create a piece of fan fiction in the form of a mission report from the point of view of the Stargate Atlantis team of explorers. As an alternative possibility, and this is where the trouble started, the challenge also allowed to “take another author’s story and write a report” of its mission. Moderator Cesperanza then explained, “if you choose to write a mission report of somebody else’s story, we’ll ask you to credit them, but we won’t require you to ask their permission” (sga_flashfic LJ, 21 Aug. 2006, emphasis added). Whereas most announcement posts would only gather a few comments, this reached more than a hundred responses within hours, mostly complaints. Even though the community administrators quickly backtracked and posted a revision of the challenge not 12 hours later, the fannish LiveJournal sphere debated the challenge for days, reaching far beyond the specific fandom of Stargate Atlantis to discuss the ethical questions surrounding fannish appropriation and remix. At the center of the debate were the last eight words: “we won’t require you to ask their permission.” By encouraging fans to effectively write fan fiction of fan fiction and by not requiring permission, the moderators had violated an unwritten norm within this fannish community. Like all fan communities, western media fans have developed internal rules covering everything from what to include in a story header to how long to include a spoiler warning following aired episodes (for a definition and overview of western media fandom, see Coppa). In this example, the mods violated the fannish prohibition against the borrowing of original characters, settings, plot points, or narrative structures from other fan writers without permission—even though as fan fiction, the source of the inspiration engages in such borrowing itself. These kinds of normative rules can be altered, of course, but any change requires long and involved discussions. In this essay, we look at various debates that showcase how this fan community—media fandom on LiveJournal—creates and enforces but also discusses and changes its normative behavior. Fan fiction authors’ desire to prevent their work from being remixed may seem hypocritical, but we argue that underlying these conversations are complex negotiations of online privacy and control, affective aesthetics, and the value of fan labor. This is not to say that all fan communities address issues of remixing in the same way media fandom at this point in time did nor to suggest that they should; rather, we want to highlight a specific community’s internal ethics, the fervor with which members defend their rules, and the complex arguments that evolve from all sides when rules are questioned. Moreover, we suggest that these conversations offer insight into the specific relation many fan writers have to their stories and how it may differ from a more universal authorial affect. In order to fully understand the underlying motivations and the community ethos that spawned the sga_flashfic debates, we first want to differentiate between forms of unauthorised (re)uses and the legal, moral, and artistic concerns they create. Only with a clear definition of copyright infringement and plagiarism, as well as a clear understanding of who is affected (and in what ways) in any of these cases, can we fully understand the social and moral intersection of fan remixing of fan fiction. Only when sidestepping the legal and economic concerns surrounding remix can we focus on the ethical intricacies between copyright holders and fan writers and, more importantly, within fan communities. Fan communities differ greatly over time, between fandoms, and even depending on their central social interfaces (such as con-based zines, email-based listservs, journal-based online communities, etc.), and as a result they also develop a diverse range of internal community rules (Busse and Hellekson, “Works”; Busker). Much strife is caused when different traditions and their associated mores intersect. We’d argue, however, that the issues in the case of the Stargate Atlantis Remix Challenge were less the confrontation of different communities and more the slowly changing attitudes within one. In fact, looking at media fandom today, we may already be seeing changed attitudes—even as the debates continue over remix permission and unauthorised use. Why Remixes Are Not Copyright Infringement In discussing the limits of unauthorised use, it is important to distinguish plagiarism and copyright violation from forms of remix. While we are more concerned with the ethical issues surrounding plagiarism, we want to briefly address copyright infringement, simply because it often gets mixed into the ethics of remixes. Copyright is strictly defined as a matter of law; in many of the online debates in media fandom, it is often further restricted to U.S. Law, because a large number of the source texts are owned by U.S. companies. According to the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 8), Congress has the power to secure an “exclusive Right” “for limited Times.” Given that intellectual property rights have to be granted and are limited, legal scholars read this statute as a delicate balance between offering authors exclusive rights and allowing the public to flourish by building on these works. Over the years, however, intellectual property rights have been expanded and increased at the expense of the public commons (Lessig, Boyle). The main exception to this exclusive right is the concept of “fair use,” defined as use “for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching..., scholarship, or research” (§107). Case law circumscribes the limits of fair use, distinguishing works that are merely “derivative” from those that are “transformative” and thus add value (Chander and Sunder, Fiesler, Katyal, McCardle, Tushnet). The legal status of fan fiction remains undefined without a specific case that would test the fair use doctrine in regards to fan fiction, yet fair use and fan fiction advocates argue that fan fiction should be understood as eminently transformative and thus protected under fair use. The nonprofit fan advocacy group, the Organization for Transformative Works, in fact makes clear its position by including the legal term in their name, reflecting a changing understanding of both fans and scholars. Why Remixes Are Not Plagiarism Whereas copyright infringement is a legal concept that punishes violations between fan writers and commercial copyright holders, plagiarism instead is defined by the norms of the audience for which a piece is written: definitions of plagiarism thus differ from academic to journalist to literary contexts. Within fandom one of the most blatant (and most easily detectable) forms of plagiarism is when a fan copies another work wholesale and publishes it under their own name, either within the same fandom or by simply searching and replacing names to make it fit another fandom. Other times, fan writers may take selections of published pro or fan fiction and insert them into their works. Within fandom accusations of plagiarism are taken seriously, and fandom as a whole polices itself with regards to plagiarism: the LiveJournal community stop_plagiarism, for example, was created in 2005 specifically to report and pursue accusations of plagiarism within fandom. The community keeps a list of known plagiarisers that include the names of over 100 fan writers. Fan fiction plagiarism can only be determined on a case-by-case basis—and fans remain hypervigilant simply because they are all too often falsely accused as merely plagiarising when instead they are interpreting, translating, and transforming. There is another form of fannish offense that does not actually constitute plagiarism but is closely connected to it, namely the wholesale reposting of stories with attributions intact. This practice is frowned upon for two main reasons. Writers like to maintain at least some control over their works, often deriving from anxieties over being able to delete one’s digital footprint if desired or necessary. Archiving stories without authorial permission strips authors of this ability. More importantly, media fandom is a gift economy, in which labor is not reimbursed economically but rather rewarded with feedback (such as comments and kudos) and the growth of a writer’s reputation (Hellekson, Scott). Hosting a story in a place where readers cannot easily give thanks and feedback to the author, the rewards for the writer’s fan labor are effectively taken from her. Reposting thus removes the story from the fannish gift exchange—or, worse, inserts the archivist in lieu of the author as the recipient of thanks and comments. Unauthorised reposting is not plagiarism, as the author’s name remains attached, but it tends to go against fannish mores nonetheless as it deprives the writer of her “payment” of feedback and recognition. When Copyright Holders Object to Fan Fiction A small group of professional authors vocally proclaim fan fiction as unethical, illegal, or both. In her “Fan Fiction Rant” Robin Hobbs declares that “Fan fiction is to writing what a cake mix is to gourmet cooking” and then calls it outright theft: “Fan fiction is like any other form of identity theft. It injures the name of the party whose identity is stolen.” Anne Rice shares her feelings about fan fiction on her web site with a permanent message: “I do not allow fan fiction. The characters are copyrighted. It upsets me terribly to even think about fan fiction with my characters. I advise my readers to write your own original stories with your own characters. It is absolutely essential that you respect my wishes.” Diana Gabaldon calls fan fiction immoral and describes, “it makes me want to barf whenever I’ve inadvertently encountered some of it involving my characters.” Moreover, in a move shared by other anti-fan fiction writers, she compares her characters to family members: “I wouldn’t like people writing sex fantasies for public consumption about me or members of my family—why would I be all right with them doing it to the intimate creations of my imagination and personality?” George R.R. Martin similarly evokes familial intimacy when he writes, “My characters are my children, I have been heard to say. I don’t want people making off with them.” What is interesting in these—and other authors’—articulations of why they disapprove of fan fiction of their works is that their strongest and ultimate argument is neither legal nor economic reasoning but an emotional plea: being a good fan means coloring within the lines laid out by the initial creator, putting one’s toys back exactly as one found them, and never ever getting creative or transformative with them. Many fan fiction writers respect these wishes and do not write in book fandoms where the authors have expressed their desires clearly. Sometimes entire archives respect an author’s desires: fanfiction.net, the largest repository of fic online, removed all stories based on Rice’s work and does not allow any new ones to be posted. However, fandom is a heterogeneous culture with no centralised authority, and it is not difficult to find fic based on Rice’s characters and settings if one knows where to look. Most of these debates are restricted to book fandoms, likely for two reasons: (1) film and TV fan fiction alters the medium, so that there is no possibility that the two works might be mistaken for one another; and (2) film and TV authorship tends to be collaborative and thus lowers the individual sense of ownership (Mann, Sellors). How Fannish Remixes Are like Fan Fiction Most fan fiction writers strongly dismiss accusations of plagiarism and theft, two accusations that all too easily are raised against fan fiction and yet, as we have shown, such accusations actually misdefine terms. Fans extensively debate the artistic values of fan fiction, often drawing from classical literary discussions and examples. Clearly echoing Wilde’s creed that “there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book,” Kalichan, for example, argues in one LJ conversation that “whenever I hear about writers asserting that other writing is immoral, I become violently ill. Aside from this, morality & legality are far from necessarily connected. Lots of things are immoral and legal, illegal and moral and so on, in every permutation imaginable, so let’s just not confuse the two, shall we” (Kalichan LJ, 3 May 2010). Aja Romano concludes an epic list of remixed works ranging from the Aeneid to The Wind Done Gone, from All’s Well That Ends Well to Wicked with a passionate appeal to authors objecting to fan fiction: the story is not defined by the barriers you place around it. The moment you gave it to us, those walls broke. You may hate the fact people are imagining more to your story than what you put there. But if I were you, I’d be grateful that I got the chance to create a story that has a culture around it, a story that people want to keep talking about, reworking, remixing, living in, fantasizing about, thinking about, writing about. (Bookshop LJ, 3 May 2010)Many fan writers view their own remixes as part of a larger cultural movement that appropriates found objects and culturally relevant materials to create new things, much like larger twentieth century movements that include Dada and Pop Art, as well as feminist and postcolonial challenges to the literary canon. Finally, fan fiction partakes in 21st century ideas of social anarchy to create a cultural creative commons of openly shared ideas. Fan Cupidsbow describes strong parallels and cross-connection between all sorts of different movements, from Warhol to opensource, DeviantArt to AMV, fanfiction to mashups, sampling to critique and review. All these things are about how people are interacting with technology every day, and not just digital technology, but pens and paper and clothes and food fusions and everything else. (Cupidsbow LJ, 20 May 2009) Legally, of course, these reuses of collectively shared materials are often treated quite differently, which is why fan fiction advocates often maintain that all remixes be treated equally—regardless of whether their source text is film, TV, literature, or fan fiction. The Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works, for example, does not distinguish in its Content and Abuse Policy section between commercial and fan works in regard to plagiarism and copyright. Returning to the initial case of the Stargate Atlantis Mission Report Challenge, we can thus see how the moderator clearly positions herself within a framework that considers all remixes equally remixable. Even after changing the guidelines to require permission for the remixing of existing fan stories, moderator Cesperanza notes that she “remain[s] philosophically committed to the idea that people have the right to make art based on other art provided that due credit is given the original artist” (sga_flashfic LJ, 21 Aug. 2006). Indeed, other fans agree with her position in the ensuing discussions, drawing attention to the hypocrisy of demanding different rules for what appears to be the exact same actions: “So explain to me how you can defend fanfiction as legitimate derivative work if it’s based on one type of source material (professional writing or TV shows), yet decry it as ‘stealing’ and plagiarism if it’s based on another type of source material (fanfiction)” (Marythefan LJ, 21 Aug. 2006). Many fans assert that all remixes should be tolerated by the creators of their respective source texts—be they pro or fan. Fans expect Rowling to be accepting of Harry Potter’s underage romance with a nice and insecure Severus Snape, and they expect Matthew Weiner to be accepting of stories that kill off Don Draper and have his (ex)wives join a commune together. So fans should equally accept fan fiction that presents the grand love of Rodney McKay and John Sheppard, the most popular non-canonical fan fiction pairing on Stargate Atlantis, to be transformed into an abusive and manipulative relationship or rewritten with one of them dying tragically. Lydiabell, for example, argues that “there’s [no]thing wrong with creating a piece of art that uses elements of another work to create something new, always assuming that proper credit is given to the original... even if your interpretation is at odds with everything the original artist wanted to convey” (Lydiabell LJ, 22 Aug. 2006). Transforming works can often move them into territory that is critical of the source text, mocks the source text, rearranges relationships, and alters characterisations. It is here that we reach the central issue of this article: many fans indeed do view intrafandom interactions as fundamentally different to their interactions with professional authors or commercial entertainment companies. While everyone agrees that there are no legal, economic, or even ultimately moral arguments to be made against remixing fan fiction (because any such argument would nullify the fan’s right to create their fan fiction in the first place), the discourses against open remixing tend to revolve around community norms, politeness, and respect. How Fannish Remixes Are Not like Fan Fiction At the heart of the debate lie issues of community norms: taking another fan’s stories as the basis for one’s own fiction is regarded as a violation of manners, at least the way certain sections of the community define them. This, in fact, is not unlike the way many fan academics engage with fandom research. While it may be perfectly legal to directly cite fans’ blog posts, and while it may even be in compliance with institutional ethical research requirements (such as Internal Review Boards at U.S. universities), the academic fan writing about her own community may indeed choose to take extra precautions to protect herself and that community. As Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson have argued, fan studies often exists at the intersection of language and social studies, and thus written text may simultaneously be treated as artistic works and as utterances by human subjects (“Identity”). In this essay (and elsewhere), we thus limit direct linking into fannish spaces, instead giving site, date, and author, and we have consent from all fans we cite in this essay. The community of fans who write fic in a particular fandom is relatively small, and most of them are familiar with each other, or can trace a connection via one or two degrees of separation only. While writing fan fiction about Harry Potter may influence the way you and your particular circle of friends interpret the novels, it is unlikely to affect the overall reception of the work. During the remix debate, fan no_pseud articulates the differing power dynamic: When someone bases fanfic on another piece of fanfic, the balance of power in the relationship between the two things is completely different to the relationship between a piece of fanfic and the canon source. The two stories have exactly equal authority, exactly equal validity, exactly equal ‘reality’ in fandom. (nopseud LJ, 21 Aug. 2006) Within fandom, there are few stories that have the kind of reach that professional fiction does, and it is just as likely that a fan will come across an unauthorised remix of a piece of fan fiction as the original piece itself. In that way, the reception of fan fiction is more fragile, and fans are justifiably anxious about it. In a recent conversation about proper etiquette within Glee fandom, fan writer flaming_muse articulates her reasons for expecting different behavior from fandom writers who borrow ideas from each other: But there’s a huge difference between fanfic of media and fanfic of other fanfic authors. Part of it is a question of the relationship of the author to the source material … but part of it is just about not hurting or diminishing the other creative people around you. We aren’t hurting Glee by writing fic in their ‘verse; we are hurting other people if we write fanfic of fanfic. We’re taking away what’s special about their particular stories and all of the work they put into them. (Stoney321 LJ, 12 Feb. 2012)Flaming_muse brings together several concepts but underlying all is a sense of community. Thus she equates remixing within the community without permission as a violation of fannish etiquette. The sense of community also plays a role in another reason given by fans who prefer permission, which is the actual ease of getting it. Many fandoms are fairly small communities, which makes it more possible to ask for permission before doing a translation, adaptation, or other kind of rewrite of another person’s fic. Often a fan may have already given feedback to the story or shared some form of conversation with the writer, so that requesting permission seems fairly innocuous. Moreover, fandom is a community based on the economy of gifting and sharing (Hellekson), so that etiquette becomes that much more important. Unlike pro authors who are financially reimbursed for their works, feedback is effectively a fan writer’s only payment. Getting comments, kudos, or recommendations for their stories are ways in which readers reward and thank the writers for their work. Many fans feel that a gift economy functions only through the goodwill of all its participants, which remixing without permission violates. How Fan Writing May Differ From Pro Writing Fans have a different emotional investment in their creations, only partially connected to writing solely for love (as opposed to professional writers who may write for love but also write for their livelihood in the best-case scenarios). One fan, who writes both pro and fan fiction, describes her more distanced emotional involvement with her professional writing as follows, When I’m writing for money, I limit my emotional investment in the material I produce. Ultimately what I am producing does not belong to me. Someone else is buying it and I am serving their needs, not my own. (St_Crispins LJ, 27 Aug. 2006)The sense of writing for oneself as part of a community also comes through in a comment by pro and fan writer Matociquala, who describes the specificity and often quite limited audience of fan fiction as follows: Fanfiction is written in the expectation of being enjoyed in an open membership but tight-knit community, and the writer has an expectation of being included in the enjoyment and discussion. It is the difference, in other words, between throwing a fair on the high road, and a party in a back yard. Sure, you might be able to see what’s going on from the street, but you’re expected not to stare. (Matociquala LJ, 18 May 2006)What we find important here is the way both writers seem to suggest that fan fiction allows for a greater intimacy and immediacy on the whole. So while not all writers write to fulfill (their own or other’s) emotional and narrative desires, this seems to be more acceptable in fan fiction. Intimacy, i.e., the emotional and, often sexual, openness and vulnerability readers and writers exhibit in the stories and surrounding interaction, can thus constitute a central aspect for readers and writers alike. Again, none of these aspects are particular to fan fiction alone, but, unlike in much other writing, they are such a central component that the stories divorced from their context—textual, social, and emotional—may not be fully comprehensible. In a discussion several years ago, Ellen Fremedon coined the term Id Vortex, by which she refers to that very tailored and customised writing that caters to the writers’ and/or readers’ kinks, that creates stories that not only move us emotionally because we already care about the characters but also because it uses tropes, characterisations, and scenes that appeal very viscerally: In fandom, we’ve all got this agreement to just suspend shame. I mean, a lot of what we write is masturbation material, and we all know it, and so we can’t really pretend that we’re only trying to write for our readers’ most rarefied sensibilities, you know? We all know right where the Id Vortex is, and we have this agreement to approach it with caution, but without any shame at all. (Ellen Fremedon LJ, 2 Dec. 2004)Writing stories for a particular sexual kink may be the most obvious way fans tailor stories to their own (or others’) desires, but in general, fan stories often seem to be more immediate, more intimate, more revealing than most published writing. This attachment is only strengthened by fans’ immense emotional attachment to the characters, as they may spend years if not decades rewatching their show, discussing all its details, and reading and writing stories upon stories. From Community to Commons These norms and mores continue to evolve as fannish activity becomes more and more visible to the mainstream, and new generations of fans enter fandom within a culture where media is increasingly spreadable across social networks and all fannish activity is collectively described and recognised as “fandom” (Jenkins, Ford, and Green). The default mode of the mainstream often treats “found” material as disseminable, and interfaces encourage such engagement by inviting users to “share” on their collection of social networks. As a result, many new fans see remixing as not only part of their fannish right, but engage in their activity on platforms that make sharing with or without attribution both increasingly easy and normative. Tumblr is the most recent and obvious example of a platform in which reblogging other users’ posts, with or without commentary, is the normative mode. Instead of (or in addition to) uploading one’s story to an archive, a fan writer might post it on Tumblr and consider reblogs as another form of feedback. In fact, our case study and its associated differentiation of legal, moral, and artistic justifications for and against remixing fan works, may indeed be an historical artifact in its own right: media fandom as a small and well-defined community of fans with a common interest and a shared history is the exception rather than the norm in today’s fan culture. When access to stories and other fans required personal initiation, it was easy to teach and enforce a community ethos. Now, however, fan fiction tops Google searches for strings that include both Harry and Draco or Spock and Uhura, and fan art is readily reblogged by sites for shows ranging from MTV’s Teen Wolf to NBC’s Hannibal. Our essay thus must be understood as a brief glimpse into the internal debates of media fans at a particular historical juncture: showcasing not only the clear separation media fan writers make between professional and fan works, but also the strong ethos that online communities can hold and defend—if only for a little while. References Boyle, James. The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. Ithaca: Yale University Press, 2008. Busker, Rebecca Lucy. “On Symposia: LiveJournal and the Shape of Fannish Discourse.” Transformative Works and Cultures 1 (2008). http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/49. Busse, Kristina, and Karen Hellekson. “Work in Progress.” In Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, eds., Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. 5–40. Busse, Kristina, and Karen Hellekson. “Identity, Ethics, and Fan Privacy.” In Katherine Larsen and Lynn Zubernis, eds., Fan Culture: Theory/Practice. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. 38-56. Chander, Anupam, and Madhavi Sunder. “Everyone’s a Superhero: A Cultural Theory of ‘Mary Sue’ Fan Fiction as Fair Use.” California Law Review 95 (2007): 597-626. Coppa, Francesca. “A Brief History of Media Fandom.” In Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, eds., Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. 41–59. Fiesler, Casey. “Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Fandom: How Existing Social Norms Can Help Shape the Next Generation of User-Generated Content.” Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law 10 (2008): 729-62. Gabaldon, Diana. “Fan Fiction and Moral Conundrums.” Voyages of the Artemis. Blog. 3 May 2010. 7 May 2010 http://voyagesoftheartemis.blogspot.com/2010/05/fan-fiction-and-moral-conundrums.html. Hellekson, Karen. “A Fannish Field of Value: Online Fan Gift Culture.” Cinema Journal 48.4 (2009): 113–18. Hobbs, Robin. “The Fan Fiction Rant.” Robin Hobb’s Home. 2005. 14 May 2006 http://www.robinhobb.com/rant.html. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Katyal, Sonia. “Performance, Property, and the Slashing of Gender in Fan Fiction.” Journal of Gender, Social Policy, and the Law 14 (2006): 463-518. Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in a Hybrid Economy. New York: Penguin, 2008. Mann, Denise. “It’s Not TV, It’s Brand Management.” In Vicki Mayer, Miranda Banks, and John Thornton Caldwell, eds., Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries. New York: Routledge, 2009. 99-114. Martin, George R.R. “Someone is Angry on the Internet.” LiveJournal. 7 May 2010. 15 May 2013. http://grrm.livejournal.com/151914.html. McCardle, Meredith. “Fandom, Fan Fiction and Fanfare: What’s All the Fuss?” Boston University Journal of Science and Technology Law 9 (2003): 443-68. Rice, Anne. “Important Message From Anne on ‘Fan Fiction’.” n.d. 15 May 2013. http://www.annerice.com/readerinteraction-messagestofans.html. Scott, Suzanne. “Repackaging Fan Culture: The Regifting Economy of Ancillary Content Models.” Transformative Works and Cultures 3 (2009). http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2009.0150. Sellors, C. Paul. Film Authorship: Auteurs and Other Myths. London: Wallflower, 2010. Tushnet, Rebecca. “Copyright Law, Fan Practices, and the Rights of the Author.” In Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, and C. Lee Harrington, eds., Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World. New York: New York University Press, 2007. 60-71.

augmentvb [ɔːgˈmɛnt]1. to make or become greater in number, amount, strength, etc.; increase2. Music: to increase (a major or perfect interval) by a semitone (Collins English Dictionary 107) Almost everything associated with Robert Johnson has been subject to some form of augmentation. His talent as a musician and songwriter has been embroidered by myth-making. Johnson’s few remaining artefacts—his photographic images, his grave site, other physical records of his existence—have attained the status of reliquary. Even the integrity of his forty-two surviving recordings is now challenged by audiophiles who posit they were musically and sonically augmented by speeding up—increasing the tempo and pitch. This article documents the promulgation of myth in the life and music of Robert Johnson. His disputed photographic images are cited as archetypal contested artefacts, augmented both by false claims and genuine new discoveries—some of which suggest Johnson’s cultural magnetism is so compelling that even items only tenuously connected to his work draw significant attention. Current challenges to the musical integrity of Johnson’s original recordings, that they were “augmented” in order to raise the tempo, are presented as exemplars of our on-going fascination with his life and work. Part literature review, part investigative history, it uses the phenomenon of augmentation as a prism to shed new light on this enigmatic figure. Johnson’s obscurity during his lifetime, and for twenty-three years after his demise in 1938, offered little indication of his future status as a musical legend: “As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note” (Wald, Escaping xv). Such anonymity allowed those who first wrote about his music to embrace and propagate the myths that grew around this troubled character and his apparently “supernatural” genius. Johnson’s first press notice, from a pseudonymous John Hammond writing in The New Masses in 1937, spoke of a mysterious character from “deepest Mississippi” who “makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur” (Prial 111). The following year Hammond eulogised the singer in profoundly romantic terms: “It still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way to phonograph records […] Johnson died last week at precisely the moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall” (19). The visceral awe experienced by subsequent generations of Johnson aficionados seems inspired by the remarkable capacity of his recordings to transcend space and time, reaching far beyond their immediate intended audience. “Johnson’s music changed the way the world looked to me,” wrote Greil Marcus, “I could listen to nothing else for months.” The music’s impact originates, at least in part, from the ambiguity of its origins: “I have the feeling, at times, that the reason Johnson has remained so elusive is that no one has been willing to take him at his word” (27-8). Three decades later Bob Dylan expressed similar sentiments over seven detailed pages of Chronicles: From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up … it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition …When he sings about icicles hanging on a tree it gives me the chills, or about milk turning blue … it made me nauseous and I wondered how he did that … It’s hard to imagine sharecroppers or plantation field hands at hop joints, relating to songs like these. You have to wonder if Johnson was playing for an audience that only he could see, one off in the future. (282-4) Such ready invocation of the supernatural bears witness to the profundity and resilience of the “lost bluesman” as a romantic trope. Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch have produced a painstaking genealogy of such a-historical misrepresentation. Early contributors include Rudi Blesch, Samuel B Charters, Frank Driggs’ liner notes for Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers collection, and critic Pete Welding’s prolific 1960s output. Even comparatively recent researchers who ostensibly sought to demystify the legend couldn’t help but embellish the narrative. “It is undeniable that Johnson was fascinated with and probably obsessed by supernatural imagery,” asserted Robert Palmer (127). For Peter Guralnick his best songs articulate “the debt that must be paid for art and the Faustian bargain that Johnson sees at its core” (43). Contemporary scholarship from Pearson and McCulloch, James Banninghof, Charles Ford, and Elijah Wald has scrutinised Johnson’s life and work on a more evidential basis. This process has been likened to assembling a complicated jigsaw where half the pieces are missing: The Mississippi Delta has been practically turned upside down in the search for records of Robert Johnson. So far only marriage application signatures, two photos, a death certificate, a disputed death note, a few scattered school documents and conflicting oral histories of the man exist. Nothing more. (Graves 47) Such material is scrappy and unreliable. Johnson’s marriage licenses and his school records suggest contradictory dates of birth (Freeland 49). His death certificate mistakes his age—we now know that Johnson inadvertently founded another rock myth, the “27 Club” which includes fellow guitarists Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain (Wolkewitz et al., Segalstad and Hunter)—and incorrectly states he was single when he was twice widowed. A second contemporary research strand focuses on the mythmaking process itself. For Eric Rothenbuhler the appeal of Johnson’s recordings lies in his unique “for-the-record” aesthetic, that foreshadowed playing and song writing standards not widely realised until the 1960s. For Patricia Schroeder Johnson’s legend reveals far more about the story-tellers than it does the source—which over time has become “an empty center around which multiple interpretations, assorted viewpoints, and a variety of discourses swirl” (3). Some accounts of Johnson’s life seem entirely coloured by their authors’ cultural preconceptions. The most enduring myth, Johnson’s “crossroads” encounter with the Devil, is commonly redrawn according to the predilections of those telling the tale. That this story really belongs to bluesman Tommy Johnson has been known for over four decades (Evans 22), yet it was mistakenly attributed to Robert as recently as 1999 in French blues magazine Soul Bag (Pearson and McCulloch 92-3). Such errors are, thankfully, becoming less common. While the movie Crossroads (1986) brazenly appropriated Tommy’s story, the young walking bluesman in Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) faithfully proclaims his authentic identity: “Thanks for the lift, sir. My name's Tommy. Tommy Johnson […] I had to be at that crossroads last midnight. Sell my soul to the devil.” Nevertheless the “supernatural” constituent of Johnson’s legend remains an irresistible framing device. It inspired evocative footage in Peter Meyer’s Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl? The Life and Music of Robert Johnson (1998). Even the liner notes to the definitive Sony Music Robert Johnson: The Centennial Edition celebrate and reclaim his myth: nothing about this musician is more famous than the word-of-mouth accounts of him selling his soul to the devil at a midnight crossroads in exchange for his singular mastery of blues guitar. It has become fashionable to downplay or dismiss this account nowadays, but the most likely source of the tale is Johnson himself, and the best efforts of scholars to present this artist in ordinary, human terms have done little to cut through the mystique and mystery that surround him. Repackaged versions of Johnson’s recordings became available via Amazon.co.uk and Spotify when they fell out of copyright in the United Kingdom. Predictable titles such as Contracted to the Devil, Hellbound, Me and the Devil Blues, and Up Jumped the Devil along with their distinctive “crossroads” artwork continue to demonstrate the durability of this myth [1]. Ironically, Johnson’s recordings were made during an era when one-off exhibited artworks (such as his individual performances of music) first became reproducible products. Walter Benjamin famously described the impact of this development: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art […] the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. (7) Marybeth Hamilton drew on Benjamin in her exploration of white folklorists’ efforts to document authentic pre-modern blues culture. Such individuals sought to preserve the intensity of the uncorrupted and untutored black voice before its authenticity and uniqueness could be tarnished by widespread mechanical reproduction. Two artefacts central to Johnson’s myth, his photographs and his recorded output, will now be considered in that context. In 1973 researcher Stephen LaVere located two pictures in the possession of his half–sister Carrie Thompson. The first, a cheap “dime store” self portrait taken in the equivalent of a modern photo booth, shows Johnson around a year into his life as a walking bluesman. The second, taken in the Hooks Bros. studio in Beale Street, Memphis, portrays a dapper and smiling musician on the eve of his short career as a Vocalion recording artist [2]. Neither was published for over a decade after their “discovery” due to fears of litigation from a competing researcher. A third photograph remains unpublished, still owned by Johnson’s family: The man has short nappy hair; he is slight, one foot is raised, and he is up on his toes as though stretching for height. There is a sharp crease in his pants, and a handkerchief protrudes from his breast pocket […] His eyes are deep-set, reserved, and his expression forms a half-smile, there seems to be a gentleness about him, his fingers are extraordinarily long and delicate, his head is tilted to one side. (Guralnick 67) Recently a fourth portrait appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in Vanity Fair. Vintage guitar seller Steven Schein discovered a sepia photograph labelled “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B. B. King???” [sic] while browsing Ebay and purchased it for $2,200. Johnson’s son positively identified the image, and a Houston Police Department forensic artist employed face recognition technology to confirm that “all the features are consistent if not identical” (DiGiacomo 2008). The provenance of this photograph remains disputed, however. Johnson’s guitar appears overly distressed for what would at the time be a new model, while his clothes reflect an inappropriate style for the period (Graves). Another contested “Johnson” image found on four seconds of silent film showed a walking bluesman playing outside a small town cinema in Ruleville, Mississippi. It inspired Bob Dylan to wax lyrical in Chronicles: “You can see that really is Robert Johnson, has to be – couldn’t be anyone else. He’s playing with huge, spiderlike hands and they magically move over the strings of his guitar” (287). However it had already been proved that this figure couldn’t be Johnson, because the background movie poster shows a film released three years after the musician’s death. The temptation to wish such items genuine is clearly a difficult one to overcome: “even things that might have been Robert Johnson now leave an afterglow” (Schroeder 154, my italics). Johnson’s recordings, so carefully preserved by Hammond and other researchers, might offer tangible and inviolate primary source material. Yet these also now face a serious challenge: they run too rapidly by a factor of up to 15 per cent (Gibbens; Wilde). Speeding up music allowed early producers to increase a song’s vibrancy and fit longer takes on to their restricted media. By slowing the recording tempo, master discs provided a “mother” print that would cause all subsequent pressings to play unnaturally quickly when reproduced. Robert Johnson worked for half a decade as a walking blues musician without restrictions on the length of his songs before recording with producer Don Law and engineer Vincent Liebler in San Antonio (1936) and Dallas (1937). Longer compositions were reworked for these sessions, re-arranging and edited out verses (Wald, Escaping). It is also conceivable that they were purposefully, or even accidentally, sped up. (The tempo consistency of machines used in early field recordings across the South has often been questioned, as many played too fast or slow (Morris).) Slowed-down versions of Johnson’s songs from contributors such as Angus Blackthorne and Ron Talley now proliferate on YouTube. The debate has fuelled detailed discussion in online blogs, where some contributors to specialist audio technology forums have attempted to decode a faintly detectable background hum using spectrum analysers. If the frequency of the alternating current that powered Law and Liebler’s machine could be established at 50 or 60 Hz it might provide evidence of possible tempo variation. A peak at 51.4 Hz, one contributor argues, suggests “the recordings are 2.8 per cent fast, about half a semitone” (Blischke). Such “augmentation” has yet to be fully explored in academic literature. Graves describes the discussion as “compelling and intriguing” in his endnotes, concluding “there are many pros and cons to the argument and, indeed, many recordings over the years have been speeded up to make them seem livelier” (124). Wald ("Robert Johnson") provides a compelling and detailed counter-thesis on his website, although he does acknowledge inconsistencies in pitch among alternate master takes of some recordings. No-one who actually saw Robert Johnson perform ever called attention to potential discrepancies between the pitch of his natural and recorded voice. David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Robert Lockwood Jr. and Johnny Shines were all interviewed repeatedly by documentarians and researchers, but none ever raised the issue. Conversely Johnson’s former girlfriend Willie Mae Powell was visibly affected by the familiarity in his voice on hearing his recording of the tune Johnson wrote for her, “Love in Vain”, in Chris Hunt’s The Search for Robert Johnson (1991). Clues might also lie in the natural tonality of Johnson’s instrument. Delta bluesmen who shared Johnson’s repertoire and played slide guitar in his style commonly used a tuning of open G (D-G-D-G-B-G). Colloquially known as “Spanish” (Gordon 2002, 38-42) it offers a natural home key of G major for slide guitar. We might therefore expect Johnson’s recordings to revolve around the tonic (G) or its dominant (D) -however almost all of his songs are a full tone higher, in the key of A or its dominant E. (The only exceptions are “They’re Red Hot” and “From Four Till Late” in C, and “Love in Vain” in G.) A pitch increase such as this might be consistent with an increase in the speed of these recordings. Although an alternative explanation might be that Johnson tuned his strings particularly tightly, which would benefit his slide playing but also make fingering notes and chords less comfortable. Yet another is that he used a capo to raise the key of his instrument and was capable of performing difficult lead parts in relatively high fret positions on the neck of an acoustic guitar. This is accepted by Scott Ainslie and Dave Whitehill in their authoritative volume of transcriptions At the Crossroads (11). The photo booth self portrait of Johnson also clearly shows a capo at the second fret—which would indeed raise open G to open A (in concert pitch). The most persuasive reasoning against speed tampering runs parallel to the argument laid out earlier in this piece, previous iterations of the Johnson myth have superimposed their own circumstances and ignored the context and reality of the protagonist’s lived experience. As Wald argues, our assumptions of what we think Johnson ought to sound like have little bearing on what he actually sounded like. It is a compelling point. When Son House, Skip James, Bukka White, and other surviving bluesmen were “rediscovered” during the 1960s urban folk revival of North America and Europe they were old men with deep and resonant voices. Johnson’s falsetto vocalisations do not, therefore, accord with the commonly accepted sound of an authentic blues artist. Yet Johnson was in his mid-twenties in 1936 and 1937; a young man heavily influenced by the success of other high pitched male blues singers of his era. people argue that what is better about the sound is that the slower, lower Johnson sounds more like Son House. Now, House was a major influence on Johnson, but by the time Johnson recorded he was not trying to sound like House—an older player who had been unsuccessful on records—but rather like Leroy Carr, Casey Bill Weldon, Kokomo Arnold, Lonnie Johnson, and Peetie Wheatstraw, who were the big blues recording stars in the mid–1930s, and whose vocal styles he imitated on most of his records. (For example, the ooh-well-well falsetto yodel he often used was imitated from Wheatstraw and Weldon.) These singers tended to have higher, smoother voices than House—exactly the sound that Johnson seems to have been going for, and that the House fans dislike. So their whole argument is based on the fact that they prefer the older Delta sound to the mainstream popular blues sound of the 1930s—or, to put it differently, that their tastes are different from Johnson’s own tastes at the moment he was recording. (Wald, "Robert Johnson") Few media can capture an audible moment entirely accurately, and the idea of engineering a faithful reproduction of an original performance is also only one element of the rationale for any recording. Commercial engineers often aim to represent the emotion of a musical moment, rather than its totality. John and Alan Lomax may have worked as documentarians, preserving sound as faithfully as possible for the benefit of future generations on behalf of the Library of Congress. Law and Liebler, however, were producing exciting and profitable commercial products for a financial gain. Paradoxically, then, whatever the “real” Robert Johnson sounded like (deeper voice, no mesmeric falsetto, not such an extraordinarily adept guitar player, never met the Devil … and so on) the mythical figure who “sold his soul at the crossroads” and shipped millions of albums after his death may, on that basis, be equally as authentic as the original. Schroeder draws on Mikhail Bakhtin to comment on such vacant yet hotly contested spaces around the Johnson myth. For Bakhtin, literary texts are ascribed new meanings by consecutive generations as they absorb and respond to them. Every age re–accentuates in its own way the works of its most immediate past. The historical life of classic works is in fact the uninterrupted process of their social and ideological re–accentuation [of] ever newer aspects of meaning; their semantic content literally continues to grow, to further create out of itself. (421) In this respect Johnson’s legend is a “classic work”, entirely removed from its historical life, a free floating form re-contextualised and reinterpreted by successive generations in order to make sense of their own cultural predilections (Schroeder 57). As Graves observes, “since Robert Johnson’s death there has seemed to be a mathematical equation of sorts at play: the less truth we have, the more myth we get” (113). The threads connecting his real and mythical identity seem so comprehensively intertwined that only the most assiduous scholars are capable of disentanglement. Johnson’s life and work seem destined to remain augmented and contested for as long as people want to play guitar, and others want to listen to them. Notes[1] Actually the dominant theme of Johnson’s songs is not “the supernatural” it is his inveterate womanising. Almost all Johnson’s lyrics employ creative metaphors to depict troubled relationships. Some even include vivid images of domestic abuse. In “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues” a woman threatens him with a gun. In “32–20 Blues” he discusses the most effective calibre of weapon to shoot his partner and “cut her half in two.” In “Me and the Devil Blues” Johnson promises “to beat my woman until I get satisfied”. However in The Lady and Mrs Johnson five-time W. C. Handy award winner Rory Block re-wrote these words to befit her own cultural agenda, inverting the original sentiment as: “I got to love my baby ‘til I get satisfied”.[2] The Gibson L-1 guitar featured in Johnson’s Hooks Bros. portrait briefly became another contested artefact when it appeared in the catalogue of a New York State memorabilia dealership in 2006 with an asking price of $6,000,000. The Australian owner had apparently purchased the instrument forty years earlier under the impression it was bona fide, although photographic comparison technology showed that it couldn’t be genuine and the item was withdrawn. “Had it been real, I would have been able to sell it several times over,” Gary Zimet from MIT Memorabilia told me in an interview for Guitarist Magazine at the time, “a unique item like that will only ever increase in value” (Stewart 2010). References Ainslie, Scott, and Dave Whitehall. Robert Johnson: At the Crossroads – The Authoritative Guitar Transcriptions. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Publishing, 1992. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Banks, Russell. “The Devil and Robert Johnson – Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings.” The New Republic 204.17 (1991): 27-30. Banninghof, James. “Some Ramblings on Robert Johnson’s Mind: Critical Analysis and Aesthetic in Delta Blues.” American Music 15/2 (1997): 137-158. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin, 2008. Blackthorne, Angus. “Robert Johnson Slowed Down.” YouTube.com 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/user/ANGUSBLACKTHORN?feature=watch›. Blesh, Rudi. Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1946. Blischke, Michael. “Slowing Down Robert Johnson.” The Straight Dope 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=461601›. Block, Rory. The Lady and Mrs Johnson. Rykodisc 10872, 2006. Charters, Samuel. The Country Blues. New York: De Capo Press, 1959. Collins UK. Collins English Dictionary. Glasgow: Harper Collins Publishers, 2010. DiGiacomo, Frank. “A Disputed Robert Johnson Photo Gets the C.S.I. Treatment.” Vanity Fair 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2008/10/a-disputed-robert-johnson-photo-gets-the-csi-treatment›. DiGiacomo, Frank. “Portrait of a Phantom: Searching for Robert Johnson.” Vanity Fair 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/11/johnson200811›. Dylan, Bob. Chronicles Vol 1. London: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Evans, David. Tommy Johnson. London: November Books, 1971. Ford, Charles. “Robert Johnson’s Rhythms.” Popular Music 17.1 (1998): 71-93. Freeland, Tom. “Robert Johnson: Some Witnesses to a Short Life.” Living Blues 150 (2000): 43-49. Gibbens, John. “Steady Rollin’ Man: A Revolutionary Critique of Robert Johnson.” Touched 2004. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.touched.co.uk/press/rjnote.html›. Gioia, Ted. Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionised American Music. London: W. W. Norton & Co, 2008. Gioia, Ted. "Robert Johnson: A Century, and Beyond." Robert Johnson: The Centennial Collection. Sony Music 88697859072, 2011. Gordon, Robert. Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters. London: Pimlico Books, 2002. Graves, Tom. Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson. Spokane: Demers Books, 2008. Guralnick, Peter. Searching for Robert Johnson: The Life and Legend of the "King of the Delta Blues Singers". London: Plume, 1998. Hamilton, Marybeth. In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007. Hammond, John. From Spirituals to Swing (Dedicated to Bessie Smith). New York: The New Masses, 1938. Johnson, Robert. “Hellbound.” Amazon.co.uk 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hellbound/dp/B0063S8Y4C/ref=sr_1_cc_2?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376605065&sr=1-2-catcorr&keywords=robert+johnson+hellbound›. ———. “Contracted to the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2002. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Contracted-The-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00006F1L4/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376830351&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=Contracted+to+The+Devil›. ———. King of the Delta Blues Singers. Columbia Records CL1654, 1961. ———. “Me and the Devil Blues.” Amazon.co.uk 2003. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Me-Devil-Blues-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00008SH7O/ref=sr_1_16?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604807&sr=1-16&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “The High Price of Soul.” Amazon.co.uk 2007. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/High-Price-Soul-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000LC582C/ref=sr_1_39?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604863&sr=1-39&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “Up Jumped the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2005. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Up-Jumped-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000B57SL8/ref=sr_1_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376829917&sr=1-2&keywords=Up+Jumped+The+Devil›. Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music. London: Plume, 1997. Morris, Christopher. “Phonograph Blues: Robert Johnson Mastered at Wrong Speed?” Variety 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.varietysoundcheck.com/2010/05/phonograph-blues-robert-johnson-mastered-at-wrong-speed.html›. Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? DVD. Universal Pictures, 2000. Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago’s South Side to the World. London: Penguin Books, 1981. Pearson, Barry Lee, and Bill McCulloch. Robert Johnson: Lost and Found. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Prial, Dunstan. The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “For–the–Record Aesthetics and Robert Johnson’s Blues Style as a Product of Recorded Culture.” Popular Music 26.1 (2007): 65-81. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “Myth and Collective Memory in the Case of Robert Johnson.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24.3 (2007): 189-205. Schroeder, Patricia. Robert Johnson, Mythmaking and Contemporary American Culture (Music in American Life). Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Segalstad, Eric, and Josh Hunter. The 27s: The Greatest Myth of Rock and Roll. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2009. Stewart, Jon. “Rock Climbing: Jon Stewart Concludes His Investigation of the Myths behind Robert Johnson.” Guitarist Magazine 327 (2010): 34. The Search for Robert Johnson. DVD. Sony Pictures, 1991. Talley, Ron. “Robert Johnson, 'Sweet Home Chicago', as It REALLY Sounded...” YouTube.com 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCHod3_yEWQ›. Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. London: HarperCollins, 2005. ———. The Robert Johnson Speed Recording Controversy. Elijah Wald — Writer, Musician 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.elijahwald.com/johnsonspeed.html›. Wilde, John . “Robert Johnson Revelation Tells Us to Put the Brakes on the Blues: We've Been Listening to the Immortal 'King of the Delta Blues' at the Wrong Speed, But Now We Can Hear Him as He Intended.” The Guardian 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/may/27/robert-johnson-blues›. Wolkewitz, M., A. Allignol, N. Graves, and A.G. Barnett. “Is 27 Really a Dangerous Age for Famous Musicians? Retrospective Cohort Study.” British Medical Journal 343 (2011): d7799. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d7799›.

Introduction Mentors play a role in real life, just as they do in fiction. They also feature in reality television, which sits somewhere between the two. In fiction, mentors contribute to the narrative arc by providing guidance and assistance (Vogler 12) to a mentee in his or her life or professional pursuits. These exchanges are usually characterized by reciprocity, the need for mutual recognition (Gadamer 353) and involve some kind of moral question. They dramatise the possibilities of mentoring in reality, to provide us with a greater understanding of the world, and our human interaction within it. Reality television offers a different perspective. Like drama it uses the plot device of a mentor character to heighten the story arc, but instead of focusing on knowledge-based portrayals (Gadamer 112) of the mentor and mentee, the emphasis is instead on the mentee’s quest for ascension. In attempting to transcend their unknownness (Boorstin) contestants aim to penetrate an exclusive creative class (Florida). Populated by celebrity chefs, businessmen, entertainers, fashionistas, models, socialites and talent judges (to name a few), this class seemingly adds authenticity to ‘competitions’ and other formats. While the mentor’s role, on the surface, is to provide divine knowledge and facilitate the journey, a different agenda is evident in the ways carefully scripted (Booth) dialogue heightens the drama through effusive praise (New York Daily News) and “tactless” (Woodward), humiliating (Hirschorn; Winant 69; Woodward) and cruel sentiments. From a screen narrative point of view, this takes reality television as ‘storytelling’ (Aggarwal; Day; Hirschorn; “Reality Writer”; Rupel; Stradal) into very different territory. The contrived and later edited (Crouch; Papacharissi and Mendelson 367) communication between mentor and mentee not only renders the relationship disingenuous, it compounds the primary ethical concerns of associated Schadenfreude (Balasubramanian, Forstie and van den Scott 434; Cartwright), and the severe financial inequality (Andrejevic) underpinning a multi-billion dollar industry (Hamilton). As upward mobility and instability continue to be ubiquitously portrayed in 21st century reality entertainment under neoliberalism (Sender 4; Winant 67), it is with increasing frequency that we are seeing the systematic reinvention of the once significant cultural and historical role of the mentor. Mentor as Fictional Archetype and Communicator of ThemesDepictions of mentors can be found across the Western art canon. From the mythological characters of Telemachus’ Athena and Achilles’ Chiron, to King Arthur’s Merlin, Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, Jim Hawkins’ Long John Silver, Frodo’s Gandalf, Batman’s Alfred and Marty McFly’s Doc Emmett Brown (among many more), the dramatic energy of the teacher, expert or supernatural aid (Vogler 39) has been timelessly powerful. Heroes, typically, engage with a mentor as part of their journey. Mentor types range extensively, from those who provide motivation, inspiration, training or gifts (Vogler), to those who may be dark or malevolent, or have fallen from grace (such as Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko in Wall Street 1987, or the ex-tribute Haymitch in The Hunger Games, 2012). A good drama usually complicates the relationship in some way, exploring initial reluctance from either party, or instances of tragedy (Vogler 11, 44) which may prevent the relationship achieving its potential. The intriguing twist of a fallen or malevolent mentor additionally invites the audience to morally analyze the ways the hero responds to what the mentor provides, and to question what our teachers or superiors tell us. In television particularly, long running series such as Mad Men have shown how a mentoring relationship can change over time, where “non-rational” characters (Buzzanell and D’Enbeau 707) do not necessarily maintain reciprocity or equality (703) but become subject to intimate, ambivalent and erotic aspects.As the mentor in fiction has deep cultural roots for audiences today, it is no wonder they are used, in a variety of archetypal capacities, in reality television. The dark Simon Cowell (of Pop Idol, American Idol, Britain’s Got Talent, America’s Got Talent and The X-Factor series) and the ‘villainous’ (Byrnes) Michelin-starred Marco Pierre White (Hell’s Kitchen, The Chopping Block, Marco Pierre White’s Kitchen Wars, MasterChef Australia, New Zealand, South Africa) provide reality writers with much needed antagonism (Rupel, Stradal). Those who have fallen from grace, or allowed their personal lives to play out in tabloid sagas such as Britney Spears (Marikar), or Caitlyn Jenner (Bissinger) provide different sources of conflict and intrigue. They are then counterbalanced with or repackaged as the good mentor. Examples of the nurturer who shows "compassion and empathy" include American Idol’s Paula Abdul (Marche), or the supportive Jennifer Hawkins in Next Top Model (Thompson). These distinctive characters help audiences to understand the ‘reality’ as a story (Crouch; Rupel; Stradal). But when we consider the great mentors of screen fiction, it becomes clear how reality television has changed the nature of story. The Karate Kid I (1984) and Good Will Hunting (1998) are two examples where mentoring is almost the exclusive focus, and where the experience of the characters differs greatly. In both films an initially reluctant mentor becomes deeply involved in the mentee’s project. They act as a special companion to the hero in the face of isolation, and, significantly, reveal a tragedy of their own, providing a nexus through which the mentee can access a deeper kind of truth. Not only are they flawed and ordinary people (they are not celebrities within the imagined worlds of the stories) who the mentee must challenge and learn to truly respect, they are “effecting and important” (Maslin) in reminding audiences of those hidden idiosyncrasies that open the barriers to friendship. Mentors in these stories, and many others, communicate themes of class, culture, talent, jealousy, love and loss which inform ideas about the ethical treatment of the ‘other’ (Gadamer). They ultimately prove pivotal to self worth, human confidence and growth. Very little of this thematic substance survives in reality television (see comparison of plots and contrasting modes of human engagement in the example of The Office and Dirty Jobs, Winant 70). Archetypally identifiable as they may be, mean judges and empathetic supermodels as characters are concerned mostly with the embodiment of perfection. They are flawless, untouchable and indeed most powerful when human welfare is at stake, and when the mentee before them faces isolation (see promise to a future ‘Rihanna’, X-Factor USA, Season 2, Episode 1 and Tyra Banks’ Next Top Model tirade at a contestant who had not lived up to her potential, West). If connecting with a mentor in fiction has long signified the importance of understanding of the past, of handing down tradition (Gadamer 354), and of our fascination with the elder, wiser other, then we can see a fundamental shift in narrative representation of mentors in reality television stories. In the past, as we have opened our hearts to such characters, as a facilitator to or companion of the hero, we have rehearsed a sacred respect for the knowledge and fulfillment mentors can provide. In reality television the ‘drama’ may evoke a fleeting rush of excitement at the hero’s success or failure, but the reality belies a pronounced distancing between mentor and mentee. The Creative Class: An Aspirational ParadigmThemes of ascension and potential fulfillment are also central to modern creativity discourse (Runco; Runco 672; United Nations). Seen as the driving force of the 21st century, creativity is now understood as much more than art, capable of bringing economic prosperity (United Nations) and social cohesion to its acme (United Nations xxiii). At the upper end of creative practice, is what Florida called “the creative class: a fast growing, highly educated, and well-paid segment of the workforce” (on whose expertise corporate profits depend), in industries ranging “from technology to entertainment, journalism to finance, high-end manufacturing to the arts” (Florida). Their common ethos is centered on individuality, diversity, and merit; eclipsing previous systems focused on ‘shopping’ and theme park consumerism and social conservatism (Eisinger). While doubts have since been raised about the size (Eisinger) and financial practices (Krätke 838) of the creative class (particularly in America), from an entertainment perspective at least, the class can be seen in full action. Extending to rich housewives, celebrity teen mothers and even eccentric duck hunters and swamp people, the creative class has caught up to the more traditional ‘star’ actor or music artist, and is increasingly marketable within world’s most sought after and expensive media spaces. Often reality celebrities make their mark for being the most outrageous, the cruelest (Peyser), or the weirdest (Gallagher; Peyser) personalities in the spotlight. Aspiring to the creative class thus, is a very public affair in television. Willing participants scamper for positions on shows, particularly those with long running, heavyweight titles such as Big Brother, The Bachelor, Survivor and the Idol series (Hill 35). The better known formats provide high visibility, with the opportunity to perform in front of millions around the globe (Frere-Jones, Day). Tapping into the deeply ingrained upward-mobility rhetoric of America, and of Western society, shows are aided in large part by 24-hour news, social media, the proliferation of celebrity gossip and the successful correlation between pop culture and an entertainment-style democratic ideal. As some have noted, dramatized reality is closely tied to the rise of individualization, and trans-national capitalism (Darling-Wolf 127). Its creative dynamism indeed delivers multi-lateral benefits: audiences believe the road to fame and fortune is always just within reach, consumerism thrives, and, politically, themes of liberty, egalitarianism and freedom ‘provide a cushioning comfort’ (Peyser; Pinter) from the domestic and international ills that would otherwise dispel such optimism. As the trials and tests within the reality genre heighten the seriousness of, and excitement about ascending toward the creative elite, show creators reproduce the same upward-mobility themed narrative across formats all over the world. The artifice is further supported by the festival-like (Grodin 46) symbology of the live audience, mass viewership and the online voting community, which in economic terms, speaks to the creative power of the material. Whether through careful manipulation of extra media space, ‘game strategy’, or other devices, those who break through are even more idolized for the achievement of metamorphosing into a creative hero. For the creative elite however, who wins ‘doesn’t matter much’. Vertical integration is the priority, where the process of making contestants famous is as lucrative as the profits they will earn thereafter; it’s a form of “one-stop shopping” as the makers of Idol put it according to Frere-Jones. Furthermore, as Florida’s measures and indicators suggested, the geographically mobile new creative class is driven by lifestyle values, recreation, participatory culture and diversity. Reality shows are the embodiment this idea of creativity, taking us beyond stale police procedural dramas (Hirschorn) and racially typecast family sitcoms, into a world of possibility. From a social equality perspective, while there has been a notable rise in gay and transgender visibility (Gamson) and stories about lower socio-economic groups – fast food workers and machinists for example – are told in a way they never were before, the extent to which shows actually unhinge traditional power structures is, as scholars have noted (Andrejevic and Colby 197; Schroeder) open to question. As boundaries are nonetheless crossed in the age of neoliberal creativity, the aspirational paradigm of joining a new elite in real life is as potent as ever. Reality Television’s Mentors: How to Understand Their ‘Role’Reality television narratives rely heavily on the juxtaposition between celebrity glamour and comfort, and financial instability. As mentees put it ‘all on the line’, storylines about personal suffering are hyped and molded for maximum emotional impact. In the best case scenarios mentors such as Caitlyn Jenner will help a trans mentee discover their true self by directing them in a celebrity-style photo shoot (see episode featuring Caitlyn and Zeam, Logo TV 2015). In more extreme cases the focus will be on an adopted contestant’s hopes that his birth mother will hear him sing (The X Factor USA, Season 2, Episode 11 Part 1), or on a postal clerk’s fear that elimination will mean she has to go back “to selling stamps” (The X Factor US - Season 2 Episode 11 Part 2). In the entrepreneurship format, as Woodward pointed out, it is not ‘help’ that mentees are given, but condescension. “I have to tell you, my friend, that this is the worst idea I’ve ever heard. You don’t have a clue about how to set up a business or market a product,” Woodward noted as the feedback given by one elite businessman on The Shark Tank (Woodward). “This is a five million dollar contract and I have to know that you can go the distance” (The X Factor US – Season 2 Episode 11, Part 1) Britney Spears warned to a thirteen-year-old contestant before accepting her as part of her team. In each instance the fictitious premise of being either an ‘enabler’ or destroyer of dreams is replayed and slightly adapted for ongoing consumer interest. This lack of shared experience and mutual recognition in reality television also highlights the overt, yet rarely analyzed focus on the wealth of mentors as contrasted with their unstable mentees. In the respective cases of The X Factor and I Am Cait, one of the wealthiest moguls in entertainment, Cowell, reportedly contracts mentors for up to $15 million per season (Nair); Jenner’s performance in I Am Cait was also set to significantly boost the Kardashian empire (reportedly already worth $300 million, Pavia). In both series, significant screen time has been dedicated to showing the mentors in luxurious beachside houses, where mentees may visit. Despite the important social messages embedded in Caitlyn’s story (which no doubt nourishes the Kardashian family’s generally more ersatz material), the question, from a moral point of view becomes: would these mentors still interact with that particular mentee without the money? Regardless, reality participants insist they are fulfilling their dreams when they appear. Despite the preplanning, possibility of distress (Australia Network News; Bleasby) and even suicide (Schuster), as well as the ferocity of opinion surrounding shows (Marche) the parade of a type of ‘road of trials’ (Vogler 189) is enough to keep a huge fan base interested, and hungry for their turn to experience the fortune of being touched by the creative elite; or in narrative terms, a supernatural aid. ConclusionThe key differences between reality television and artistic narrative portrayals of mentors can be found in the use of archetypes for narrative conflict and resolution, in the ways themes are explored and the ways dialogue is put to use, and in the focus on and visibility of material wealth (Frere-Jones; Peyser). These differences highlight the political, cultural and social implications of exchanging stories about potential fulfillment, for stories about ascension to the creative class. Rather than being based on genuine reciprocity, and understanding of human issues, reality shows create drama around the desperation to penetrate the inner sanctum of celebrity fame and fortune. In fiction we see themes based on becoming famous, on gender transformation, and wealth acquisition, such as in the films and series Almost Famous (2000), The Bill Silvers Show (1955-1959), Filthy Rich (1982-1983), and Tootsie (1982), but these stories at least attempt to address a moral question. Critically, in an artistic - rather than commercial context – the actors (who may play mentees) are not at risk of exploitation (Australia Network News; Bleasby; Crouch). Where actors are paid and recognized creatively for their contribution to an artistic work (Rupel), the mentee in reality television has no involvement in the ways action may be set up for maximum voyeuristic enjoyment, or manipulated to enhance scandalous and salacious content which will return show and media profits (“Reality Show Fights”; Skeggs and Wood 64). The emphasis, ironically, from a reality production point of view, is wholly on making the audience believe (Papacharissi and Mendelson 367) that the content is realistic. 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Creators and Creation Creation is a troubling word today, because it suggests an impossible act, indeed a miracle: the formation of something out of nothing. Today we no longer believe in miracles, yet we see all around us myriad acts which we routinely define as creative. Here, I am not referring to the artistic performances and works of gifted individuals, which have their own genealogy of creativity in the lineages of Western art. Rather, I am referring to the small, personal events that we see within the mediated spaces of the everyday (on the television screen, in magazines and newspapers) where lives are suddenly changed for the better through the consumption of products designed to fulfil our personal desires. In this paper, I want to explore the implications of thinking about everyday creativity as a modern cultural form. I want to suggest that not only is such an impossible possibility possible, but that its meaning has been at the centre of the desire to name, to gain status from, and to market the products of modern industrialisation. Furthermore I want to suggest that beyond any question of marketing rhetoric, we need to attend to this desire as the ghost of a certain kind of immanence which has haunted modernity and its projects from the very beginning, linking the great thoughts of modern philosophy with the lowliest products of modern life. Immanence, Purity and the Cogito In Descartes' famous Discourse on Method, the author-narrator (let's call him Descartes) recounts how he came about the idea of the thinking self or cogito, as the foundation of worldly knowledge: And so because sometimes our senses deceive us, I made up my mind to suppose that they always did. . . . I resolved to pretend that everything that had ever entered my mind was as false as the figments of my dreams. But then as I strove to think of everything false, I realized that, in the very act of thinking everything false, I was aware of myself as something real. (60-61) These well known lines are, of course, the beginnings of a remarkable philosophical enterprise, reaching forward to Husserl and beyond, in which the external world is bracketed, all the better to know it in the name of reason. Through an act of pretence ("I resolved to pretend"), Descartes disavows the external world as the source of certain knowledge, and, turning to the only thing left: the thought of himself—"I was aware of myself as something real"—makes his famous declaration, "I think therefore I am". But what precisely characterises this thinking being, destined to become the cogito of all modernity? Is it purely this act of self-reflection?: Then, from reflecting on the fact that I had doubts, and that consequently my existence was not wholly perfect, it occurred to me to enquire how I learned to think of something more perfect than myself, and it became evident to me that it must be through some nature which was in fact more perfect. (62) Descartes has another thought that "occurred to me" almost at the same moment that he becomes aware of his own thinking self. This second thought makes him aware that the cogito is not complete, requiring yet a further thought, that of a perfection drawn from something "more perfect than myself". The creation of the cogito does not occur, as we might have first surmised, within its own space of self-reflection, but becomes lodged within what might be called, following Deleuze and Guattari, a "plane of immanence" coming from the outside: "The plane of immanence is . . . an outside more distant than any external world because it is an inside deeper than any internal world: it is immanence" (59). Here we are left with a puzzling question: what of this immanence that made him aware of his own imperfection at the very moment of the cogito's inception? Can this immanence be explained away by Descartes' appeal to God as a state of perfection? Or is it the very material upon which the cogito is brought into existence, shaping it towards perfection? We are forced to admit that, irrespective of the source of this perfection, the cogito requires something from the outside which, paradoxically, is already on the inside, in order to create itself as a pure form. Following the contours of Descartes' own writing, we cannot account for modernity purely in terms of self-reflection, if, in the very act of its self-creation, the modern subject is shot through with immanence that comes from the outside. Rather what we must do is describe the various forms this immanence takes. Although there is no necessary link between immanence and perfection (that is, one does not logically depend on the other as its necessary cause) their articulation nevertheless produces something (the cogito for instance). Furthermore, this something is always characterised as a creation. In its modern form, creation is a form of immanence within materiality—a virtualisation of material actuality, that produces idealised states, such as God, freedom, reason, uniqueness, originality, love and perfection. As Bruno Latour has argued, the "modern critical stance" creates unique, pure objects, by purging the material "networks" from which they are formed, of their impurities (11-12). Immanence is characterised by a process of sifting and purification which brings modern objects into existence: "the plane of immanence . . . acts like a sieve" (Deleuze and Guattari 42). The nation, the state, the family, the autonomous subject, and the work of art—all of these are modern when their 'material' is purged of impurities by an immanence that 'comes from the outside' yet is somehow intrinsic to the material itself. As Zygmunt Bauman points out, the modern nation exists by virtue of a capacity to convert strangers into citizens; by purging itself of impurities inhabiting it from within but coming from the outside (63). The modern work of art is created by purging itself of the vulgarities and impurities of everyday life (Berman 30); by reducing its contingent and coincidental elements to a geometrical, punctual or serialised form. The modern nuclear family is created by converting the community-based connections between relatives and friends into a single, internally consistent self-reproducing organism. All of these examples require us to think of creativity as an act which brings something new into existence from within a material base that must be purged and disavowed, but which, simultaneously, must also be retained as its point of departure that it never really leaves. Immanence should not be equated with essence, if by essence we mean a substratum of materiality inherent in things; a quality or quiddity to which all things can be reduced. Rather, immanence is the process whereby things appear as they are to others, thereby forming themselves into 'objects' with certain identifiable characteristics. Immanence draws the 'I' and the 'we' into relations of subjectivity to the objects thus produced. Immanence is not in things; it is the thing's condition of objectivity in a material, spatial and temporal sense; its 'becoming object' before it can be 'perceived' by a subject. As Merleau-Ponty has beautifully argued, seeing as a bodily effect necessarily comes before perception as an inner ownership (Merleau-Ponty 3-14). Since immanence always comes from elsewhere, no intensive scrutiny of the object in itself will bring it to light. But since immanence is already inside the object from the moment of its inception, no amount of examination of its contextual conditions—the social, cultural, economic, institutional and authorial conditions under which the object was created—will bring us any closer to it. Rather, immanence can only be 'seen' (if this is the right word) in terms of the objects it creates. We should stop seeking immanence as a characteristic of objects considered in themselves, and rather see it in terms of a virtual field or plane, in which objects appear, positioned in a transversally related way. This field does not exist transcendentally to the objects, like some overarching principle of order, but as a radically exteriorised stratum of 'immaterial materiality' with a specific image-content, capable of linking objects together as a series of creations, all with the stamp of their own originality, individuality and uniqueness, yet all bound together by a common set of image relations (Deleuze 34-35). If, as Foucault argues, modern objects emerge in a "field of exteriority"—a complex web of discursive interrelations, with contingent rather than necessary connections to one another (Foucault 45)—then it should be possible to map the connections between these objects in terms of the "schema of correspondence" (74) detected in the multiplicities thrown up by the regularities of modern production and consumption. Commodities and Created Objects We can extend the idea of creation to include not only aesthetic acts and their objects, but also the commodity-products of modern industrialisation. Let's begin by plunging straight into the archive, where we might find traces of these small modern miracles. An illustrated advertisement for 'Hudson's Extract of Soap' appeared in the Illustrated Sydney News, on Saturday February 22nd, 1888. The illustration shows a young woman with a washing basket under her arm, standing beside a sign posted to a wall, which reads 'Remarkable Disappearance of all Dirt from Everything by using Hudson's Extract of Soap' (see Figure 1). The woman has her head turned towards the poster, as if reading it. Beneath these words, is another set of words offering a reward: 'Reward !!! Purity, Health, Perfection, Satisfaction. By its regular daily use'. Here we are confronted with a remarkable proposition: soap does not make things clean, rather it makes dirt disappear. Soap purifies things by making their impurities disappear. The claim made applies to 'everything', drawing attention to a desire for a certain state of perfection, exemplified by the pure body, cleansed of dirt and filth. The pure exists in potentia as a perfect state of being, realised by the purgation of impurities. Fig 1: Hudson's Soap. Illustrated Sydney News, on Saturday February 22nd, 1888 Here we might be tempted to trace the motivation of this advertisement to a concern in the nineteenth century for a morally purged, purified body, regulated according to bourgeois values of health, respectability and decorum. As Catherine Gallagher has pointed out, the body in the nineteenth century was at the centre of a sick society requiring "constant flushing, draining, and excising of various deleterious elements" (Gallagher 90). But this is only half the story. The advertisement offers a certain image of purity; an image which exceeds the immediate rhetorical force associated with selling a product, one which cannot be simply reduced to its contexts of use. The image of perfection in the Hudson's soap advertisement belongs to a network of images spread across a far-flung field; a network in which we can 'see' perfection as a material immanence embodied in things. In modernity, commodities are created objects par excellence, which, in their very ordinariness, bear with them an immanence, binding consumers together into consumer formations. Each act of consumption is not simply driven by necessity and need, but by a desire for self-transformation, embodied in the commodity itself. Indeed, self-transformation becomes one of the main creative processes in what Marshal Berman has identified as the "third" phase of modernity, where, paraphrasing Nietzsche, "modern mankind found itself in the midst of a great absence and emptiness of values and yet, at the same time, a remarkable abundance of possibilities" (Berman 21). Commodification shifts human desire away from the thought of the other as a transcendental reality remote from the senses, and onto a future oriented material plane, in which the self is capable of becoming an other in a tangible, specific way (Massumi 35 ff.). By the end of the nineteenth century, commodities had become associated with scenarios of self-transformation embedded in human desire, which then began to shape the needs of society itself. Consumer formations are not autonomous realms; they are transversally located within and across social strata. This is because commodities bear with them an immanence which always exceeds their context of production and consumption, spreading across vast cultural terrains. An individual consumer is thus subject to two forces: the force of production that positions her within the social strata as a member of a class or social grouping, and the force of consumption that draws her away from, or indeed, further into a social positioning. While the consumption of commodities remained bound to ideologies relating to the formation of class in terms of a bourgeois moral order, as it was in Britain, America and Europe throughout the nineteenth century, then the discontinuity between social strata and cultural formation was felt in terms of the possibility of self-transformation by moving up a class. In the nineteenth century, working class families flocked to the new photographic studios to have their portraits taken, emulating the frozen moral rectitude of the ideal bourgeois type, or scrimped and saved to purchase parlour pianos and other such cultural paraphernalia, thereby signalling a certain kind of leisured freedom from the grind of work (Sekula 8). But when the desire for self-transformation starts to outstrip the ideological closure of class; that is, when the 'reality' of commodities starts to overwhelm the social reality of those who make them, then desire itself takes on an autonomy, which can then be attached to multiple images of the other, expressed in imaginary scenarios of escape, freedom, success and hyper-experience. This kind of free-floating desire has now become a major trigger for transformations in consumer formations, linked to visual technologies where images behave like quasi-autonomous beings. The emergence of these images can be traced back at least to the mid-nineteenth century where products of industrialisation were transformed into commodities freely available as spectacles within the public spaces of exhibitions and in mass advertising in the press, for instance in the Great Exhibition of 1851 held at London's Crystal Palace (Richards 28 ff.) Here we see the beginnings of a new kind of object-image dislocated from the utility of the product, with its own exchange value and logic of dispersal. Bataille's notion of symbolic exchange can help explain the logic of dispersal inherent in commodities. For Bataille, capitalism involves both production utility and sumptuary expenditure, where the latter is not simply a calculated version of the former (Bataille 120 ff.) Sumptuary expenditure is a discharge of an excess, and not a drawing in of demand to match the needs of supply. Consumption thus has a certain 'uncontrolled' element embedded in it, which always moves beyond the machinations of market logic. Under these conditions, the commodity image always exceeds production and use, taking on a life of its own, charged with desire. In the late nineteenth century, the convergence of photography and cartes-de-visites released a certain scopophilic desire in the form of postcard pornography, which eventually migrated to the modern forms of advertising and public visual imagery that we see today. According to Suren Lalvani, the "onset of scopophilia" in modern society is directly attributable to the convergence of photographic technology and erotic display in the nineteenth century (Lalvani). In modern consumer cultures, desire does not lag behind need, but enters into the cycle of production and consumption from the outside, where it becomes its driving force. In this way, modern consumer cultures transform themselves by ecstasis (literally, by standing outside oneself) when the body becomes virtualised into its other. Here, the desire for self-transformation embodied in the act of consumption intertwines with, and eventually redefines, the social positioning of the subject. Indeed the 'laws' of capital and labour where each person or family group is assigned a place and regime of duties, are constantly undone and redefined by the superfluity of consumption, gradually gathering pace throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These tremendous changes operating throughout all capitalist consumer cultures for some time, do not occur in a calculated way, as if controlled by the forces of production alone. Rather, they occur through myriad acts of self-transformation, operating transversally, linking consumer to consumer within what I have defined earlier as a field of immanence. Here, the laws of supply and demand are inadequate to predict the logic of this operation; they only describe the effects of consumption after desire has been spent. Or, to put this another way, they misread desire as need, thereby transcribing the primary force of consumption into a secondary component of the production/labour cycle. This error is made by Humphrey McQueen in his recent book The Essence of Capitalism: the origins of our future (2001). In chapter 8, McQueen examines the logic of the consumer market through a critique of the marketeer's own notion of desire, embodied in the "sovereign consumer", making rational choices. Here desire is reduced back to a question of calculated demand, situated within the production/consumption cycle. McQueen leaves himself no room to manoeuvre outside this cycle; there is no way to see beyond the capitalist cycle of supply/demand which accelerates across ever-increasing horizons. To avoid this error, desire needs to be seen as immanent to the production/consumption cycle; as produced by it, yet superfluous to its operations. We need therefore to situate ourselves not on the side of production, but in the superfluity of consumption in order to recognise the transformational triggers that characterise modern consumer cultures, and their effects on the social order. In order to understand the creative impulse in modernity today, we need to come to grips with the mystery of consumption, where the thing consumed operates on the consumer in both a material and an immaterial way. This mystification of the commodity was, of course, well noted by Marx: A commodity is . . . a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. (Marx 43, my emphasis) When commodities take on such a powerful force that their very presence starts to drive and shape the social relations that have given rise to them; that is, when desire replaces need as the shaping force of societies, then we are obliged to redefine the commodity and its relation to the subject. Under these conditions, the mystery of the commodity is no longer something to be dispelled in order to retrieve the real relation between labour and capital, but becomes the means whereby "men's labour" is actually shaped and formed as a specific mode of production. Eric Alliez and Michel Feher (1987) point out that in capitalism "the subjection framework which defines the wage relation has penetrated society to such an extent that we can now speak not only of the formal subsumption of labor by capital but of the actual or 'real' subsumption by capital of society as a whole" (345). In post-Fordist economic contexts, individuals' relation to capital is no longer based on subjection but incorporation: "space is subsumed under a time entirely permeated by capital. In so doing, they [neo-Fordist strategies] also instigate a regime in which individuals are less subject to than incorporated by capital" (346). In societies dominated by the subjection of workers to capital, the commodity's exchange value is linked strongly to the classed position of the worker, consolidating his interests within the shadow of a bourgeois moral order. But where the worker is incorporated into capital, his 'real' social relations go with him, making it difficult to see how they can be separated from the commodities he produces and which he also consumes at leisure: "If the capitalist relation has colonized all of the geographical and social space, it has no inside into which to integrate things. It has become an unbounded space—in other words, a space coextensive with its own inside and outside. It has become a field of immanence" (Massumi 18). It therefore makes little sense to initiate critiques of the capital relation by overthrowing the means of subjection. Instead, what is required is a way through the 'incorporation' of the individual into the capitalist system, an appropriation of the means of consumption in order to invent new kinds of selfhood. Or at the very least, to expose the process of self-formation to its own means of consumption. What we need to do, then, is to undertake a description of the various ways in which desire is produced within consumer cultures as a form of self-creation. As we have seen, in modernity, self-creation occurs when human materiality is rendered immaterial through a process purification. Borrowing from Deleuze and Guattari, I have characterised this process in terms of immanence: a force coming from the outside, but which is already inside the material itself. In the necessary absence of any prime mover or deity, pure immanence becomes the primary field in which material is rendered into its various and specific modern forms. Immanence is not a transcendental power operating over things, but that which is the very motor of modernity; its specific way of appearing to itself, and of relating to itself in its various guises and manifestations. Through a careful mapping of the network of commodity images spread through far-flung fields, cutting through specific contexts of production and consumption, we can see creation at work in one of its specific modern forms. Immanence, and the power of creation it makes possible, can be found in all modern things, even soap powder! References Alliez, Eric and Michel Feher. "The Luster of Capital." Zone 1(2) 1987: 314-359. Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity, 1991. Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts into Air. New York: Penguin, 1982. Bataille, George. "The Notion of Expenditure." George Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Trans. Alan Stoekl, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995, pp.116-129. 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David McLellan (Ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Massumi, Brian. "Everywhere You Want to Be: Introduction to Fear" in Brian Massumi (Ed.). The Politics of Everyday Fear. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993: 3-37. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis, Evanston: Northwest University Press, 1968. McQueen, Humphrey. The Essence of Capitalism: the Origins of Our Future. Sydney: Sceptre, 2001. Richards, Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851-1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Sekula, Allan. "The Body and the Archive." October, 39, 1986: 3-65.

Probably the most (in)famous Australian teenager of recent times, now-17-year-old Kim Duthie—better known as the “St Kilda Schoolgirl”—first came to public attention when she posted naked pictures of two prominent St Kilda Australian Football League (AFL) players on Facebook. She claimed to be seeking revenge on the players’ teammate for getting her pregnant. This turned out to be a lie. Duthie also claimed that 47-year-old football manager Ricky Nixon gave her drugs and had sex with her. She then said this was a lie, then that she lied about lying. That she lied at least twice is clear, and in doing so, she arguably reinforced the pervasive myth that women are prone to lie about rape and sexual abuse. Precisely what occurred, and why Duthie posted the naked photographs will probably never be known. However, it seems clear that Duthie felt herself wronged. Can she therefore be held entirely to blame for the way she went about seeking redress from a group of men with infinitely more power than she—socially, financially and (in terms of the priority given to elite football in Australian society) culturally? The many judgements passed on Duthie’s behaviour in the media highlight the crucial, seldom-discussed issue of how problematic behaviour on the part of women might reinforce patriarchal norms. This is a particularly sensitive issue in the context of a spate of alleged sexual assaults committed by elite Australian footballers over the past decade. Given that representations of alleged rape cases in the media and elsewhere so often position women as blameworthy for their own mistreatment and abuse, the question of whether or not women can and should be held accountable in certain situations is particularly fraught. By exploring media representations of one of these complex scenarios, we consider how the issue of “complicity” might be understood in a rape culture. In doing so, we employ Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi’s highly influential concept of the “grey zone,” which signifies a complex and ambiguous realm that challenges both judgement and representation. Primo Levi’s “Grey Zone,” Patriarchy and the Problem of Judgement In his essay titled “The Grey Zone” (published in 1986), Levi is chiefly concerned with Jewish prisoners in the Nazi-controlled camps and ghettos who obtained “privileged” positions in order to prolong their survival. Reflecting on the inherently complex power relations in such extreme settings, Levi positions the “grey zone” as a metaphor for moral ambiguity: a realm with “ill-defined outlines which both separate and join the two camps of masters and servants. [The ‘grey zone’] possesses an incredibly complicated internal structure, and contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge” (27). According to Levi, an examination of the scenarios and experiences that gave rise to the “grey zone” requires a rejection of the black-and-white binary opposition(s) of “friend” and “enemy,” “good” and “evil.” While Levi unequivocally holds the perpetrators of the Holocaust responsible for their actions, he warns that one should suspend judgement of victims who were entrapped in situations of moral ambiguity and “compromise.” However, recent scholarship on the representation of “privileged” Jews in Levi’s writings and elsewhere has identified a “paradox of judgement”: namely, that even if moral judgements of victims in extreme situations should be suspended, such judgements are inherent in the act of representation, and are therefore inevitable (see Brown). While the historical specificity of Levi’s reflections must be kept in mind, the corruptive influences of power at the core of the “grey zone”—along with the associated problems of judgement and representation—are clearly far more prevalent in human nature and experience than the Holocaust alone. Levi’s “grey zone” has been appropriated by scholars in the fields of Holocaust studies (Petropoulos and Roth xv-xviii), philosophy (Todorov 262), law (Luban 161–76), history (Cole 248–49), theology (Roth 53–54), and popular culture (Cheyette 226–38). Significantly, Claudia Card (The Atrocity Paradigm, “Groping through Gray Zones” 3–26) has recently applied Levi’s concept to the field of feminist philosophy. Indeed, Levi’s questioning of whether or not one can—or should—pass judgement on the behaviour of Holocaust victims has considerable relevance to the divisive issue of how women’s involvement in/with patriarchy is represented in the media. Expanding or intentionally departing from Levi’s ideas, many recent interpretations of the “grey zone” often misunderstand the historical specificity of Levi’s reflections. For instance, while applying Levi’s concept to the effects of patriarchy and domestic violence on women, Lynne Arnault makes the problematic statement that “in order to establish the cruelty and seriousness of male violence against women as women, feminists must demonstrate that the experiences of victims of incest, rape, and battering are comparable to those of war veterans, prisoners of war, political prisoners, and concentration camp inmates” (183, n.9). It is important to stress here that it is not our intention to make direct parallels between the Holocaust and patriarchy, or between “privileged” Jews and women (potentially) implicated in a rape culture, but to explore the complexity of power relations in society, what behaviour eventuates from these, and—most crucial to our discussion here—how such behaviour is handled in the mass media. Aware of the problem of making controversial (and unnecessary) comparisons, Card (“Women, Evil, and Gray Zones” 515) rightly stresses that her aim is “not to compare suffering or even degrees of evil but to note patterns in the moral complexity of choices and judgments of responsibility.” Card uses the notion of the “Stockholm Syndrome,” citing numerous examples of women identifying with their torturers after having been abused or held hostage over a prolonged period of time—most (in)famously, Patricia Hearst. While the medical establishment has responded to cases of women “suffering” from “Stockholm Syndrome” by absolving them from any moral responsibility, Card writes that “we may have a morally gray area in some cases, where there is real danger of becoming complicit in evildoing and where the captive’s responsibility is better described as problematic than as nonexistent” (“Women, Evil, and Gray Zones” 511). Like Levi, Card emphasises that issues of individual agency and moral responsibility are far from clear-cut. At the same time, a full awareness of the oppressive environment—in the context that this paper is concerned with, a patriarchal social system—must be accounted for. Importantly, the examples Card uses differ significantly from the issue of whether or not some women can be considered “complicit” in a rape culture; nevertheless, similar obstacles to understanding problematic situations exist here, too. In the context of a rape culture, can women become, to use Card’s phrase, “instruments of oppression”? And if so, how is their controversial behaviour to be understood and represented? Crucially, Levi’s reflections on the “grey zone” were primarily motivated by his concern that most historical and filmic representations “trivialised” the complexity of victim experiences by passing simplistic judgements. Likewise, the representation of sexual assault cases in the Australian mass media has often left much to be desired. Representing Sexual Assault: Australian Football and the Media A growing literature has critiqued the sexual culture of elite football in Australia—one in which women are reportedly treated with disdain, positioned as objects to be used and discarded. At least 20 distinct cases, involving more than 55 players and staff, have been reported in the media, with the majority of these incidents involving multiple players. Reports indicate that such group sexual encounters are commonplace for footballers, and the women who participate in sexual practices are commonly judged, even in the sports scholarship, as “groupies” and “sluts” who are therefore responsible for anything that happens to them, including rape (Waterhouse-Watson, “Playing Defence” 114–15; “(Un)reasonable Doubt”). When the issue of footballers and sexual assault was first debated in the Australian media in 2004, football insiders from both Australian rules and rugby league told the media of a culture of group sex and sexual behaviour that is degrading to women, even when consensual (Barry; Khadem and Nancarrow 4; Smith 1; Weidler 4). The sexual “culture” is marked by a discourse of abuse and objectification, in which women are cast as “meat” or a “bun.” Group sex is also increasingly referred to as “chop up,” which codes the practice itself as an act of violence. It has been argued elsewhere that footballers treating women as sexual objects is effectively condoned through the mass media (Waterhouse-Watson, “All Women Are Sluts” passim). The “Code of Silence” episode of ABC television program Four Corners, which reignited the debate in 2009, was even more explicit in portraying footballers’ sexual practices as abusive, presenting rape testimony from three women, including “Clare,” who remains traumatised following a “group sex” incident with rugby league players in 2002. Clare testifies that she went to a hotel room with prominent National Rugby League (NRL) players Matthew Johns and Brett Firman. She says that she had sex with Johns and Firman, although the experience was unpleasant and they treated her “like a piece of meat.” Subsequently, a dozen players and staff members from the team then entered the room, uninvited, some through the bathroom window, expecting sex with Clare. Neither Johns nor Firman has denied that this was the case. Clare went to the police five days later, saying that professional rugby players had raped her, although no charges were ever laid. The program further includes psychiatrists’ reports, and statements from the police officer in charge of the case, detailing the severe trauma that Clare suffered as a result of what the footballers called “sex.” If, as “Code of Silence” suggests, footballers’ practices of group sex are abusive, whether the woman consents or not, then it follows that such a “gang-bang culture” may in turn foster a rape culture, in which rape is more likely than in other contexts. And yet, many women insist that they enjoy group sex with footballers (Barry; Drill 86), complicating issues of consent and the degradation of women. Feminist rape scholarship documents the repetitive way in which complainants are deemed to have “invited” or “caused” the rape through their behaviour towards the accused or the way they were dressed: defence lawyers, judges (Larcombe 100; Lees 85; Young 442–65) and even talk show hosts, ostensibly aiming to expose the problem of rape (Alcoff and Gray 261–64), employ these tactics to undermine a victim’s credibility and excuse the accused perpetrator. Nevertheless, although no woman can be in any way held responsible for any man committing sexual assault, or other abuse, it must be acknowledged that women who become in some way implicated in a rape culture also assist in maintaining that culture, highlighting a “grey zone” of moral ambiguity. How, then, should these women, who in some cases even actively promote behaviour that is intrinsic to this culture, be perceived and represented? Charmyne Palavi, who appeared on “Code of Silence,” is a prime example of such a “grey zone” figure. While she stated that she was raped by a prominent footballer, Palavi also described her continuing practice of setting up footballers and women for casual sex through her Facebook page, and pursuing such encounters herself. This raises several problems of judgement and representation, and the issue of women’s sexual freedom. On the one hand, Palavi (and all other women) should be entitled to engage in any consensual (legal) sexual behaviour that they choose. But on the other, when footballers’ frequent casual sex is part of a culture of sexual abuse, there is a danger of them becoming complicit in, to use Card’s term, “evildoing.” Further, when telling her story on “Code of Silence,” Palavi hints that there is an element of increased risk in these situations. When describing her sexual encounters with footballers, which she states are “on her terms,” she begins, “It’s consensual for a start. I’m not drunk or on drugs and it’s in, [it] has an element of class to it. Do you know what I mean?” (emphasis added). If it is necessary to define sex “on her terms” as consensual, this implies that sometimes casual “sex” with footballers is not consensual, or that there is an increased likelihood of rape. She also claims to have heard about several incidents in which footballers she knows sexually abused and denigrated, if not actually raped, other women. Such an awareness of what may happen clearly does not make Palavi a perpetrator of abuse, but neither can her actions (such as “setting up” women with footballers using Facebook) be considered entirely separate. While one may argue, following Levi’s reflections, that judgement of a “grey zone” figure such as Palavi should be suspended, it is significant that Four Corners’s representation of Palavi makes implicit and simplistic moral judgements. The introduction to Palavi follows the story of “Caroline,” who states that first-grade rugby player Dane Tilse broke into her university dormitory room and sexually assaulted her while she slept. Caroline indicates that Tilse left when he “picked up that [she] was really stressed.” Following this story, the program’s reporter and narrator Sarah Ferguson introduces Palavi with, “If some young footballers mistakenly think all women want to have sex with them, Charmyne Palavi is one who doesn’t necessarily discourage the idea.” As has been argued elsewhere (Waterhouse-Watson, “Framing the Victim”), this implies that Palavi is partly responsible for players holding this mistaken view. By implication, she therefore encouraged Tilse to assume that Caroline would want to have sex with him. Footage is then shown of Palavi and her friends “applying the finishing touches”—bronzing their legs—before going to meet footballers at a local hotel. The lighting is dim and the hand-held camerawork rough. These techniques portray the women as artificial and “cheap,” techniques that are also employed in a remarkably similar fashion in the documentary Footy Chicks (Barry), which follows three women who seek out sex with footballers. In response to Ferguson’s question, “What’s the appeal of those boys though?” Palavi repeats several times that she likes footballers mainly because of their bodies. This, along with the program’s focus on the women as instigators of sex, positions Palavi as something of a predator (she was widely referred to as a “cougar” following the program). In judging her “promiscuity” as immoral, the program implies she is partly responsible for her own rape, as well as acts of what can be termed, at the very least, sexual abuse of other women. The problematic representation of Palavi raises the complex question of how her “grey zone” behaviour should be depicted without passing trivialising judgements. This issue is particularly fraught when Four Corners follows the representation of Palavi’s “nightlife” with her accounts of footballers’ acts of sexual assault and abuse, including testimony that a well-known player raped Palavi herself. While Ferguson does not explicitly question the veracity of Palavi’s claim of rape, her portrayal is nevertheless largely unsympathetic, and the way the segment is edited appears to imply that she is blameworthy. Ferguson recounts that Palavi “says she was able to put [being raped] out of her mind, and it certainly didn’t stop her pursuing other football players.” This might be interpreted a positive statement about Palavi’s ability to move on from a rape; however, the tone of Ferguson’s authoritative voiceover is disapproving, which instead implies negative judgement. As the program makes clear, Palavi continues to organise sexual encounters between women and players, despite her knowledge of the “dangers,” both to herself and other women. Palavi’s awareness of the prevalence of incidents of sexual assault or abuse makes her position a problematic one. Yet her controversial role within the sexual culture of elite Australian football is complicated even further by the fact that she herself is disempowered (and her own allegation of being raped delegitimised) by the simplistic ideas about “assault” and “consent” that dominate social discourse. Despite this ambiguity, Four Corners constructs Palavi as more of a perpetrator of abuse than a victim—not even a victim who is “morally compromised.” Although we argue that careful consideration must be given to the issue of whether moral judgements should be applied to “grey zone” figures like Palavi, the “solution” is far from simple. No language (or image) is neutral or value-free, and judgements are inevitable in any act of representation. In his essay on the “grey zone,” Levi raises the crucial point that the many (mis)understandings of figures of moral ambiguity and “compromise” partly arise from the fact that the testimony and perspectives of these figures themselves is often the last to be heard—if at all (50). Nevertheless, an article Palavi published in Sydney tabloid The Daily Telegraph (19) demonstrates that such testimony can also be problematic and only complicate matters further. Palavi’s account begins: If you believed Four Corners, I’m supposed to be the NRL’s biggest groupie, a wannabe WAG who dresses up, heads out to clubs and hunts down players to have sex with… what annoys me about these tags and the way I was portrayed on that show is the idea I prey on them like some of the starstruck women I’ve seen out there. (emphasis added) Palavi clearly rejects the way Four Corners constructed her as a predator; however, rather than rejecting this stereotype outright, she reinscribes it, projecting it onto other “starstruck” women. Throughout her article, Palavi reiterates (other) women’s allegedly predatory behaviour, continually portraying the footballers as passive and the women as active. For example, she claims that players “like being contacted by girls,” whereas “the girls use the information the players put on their [social media profiles] to track them down.” Palavi’s narrative confirms this construction of men as victims of women’s predatory actions, lamenting the sacking of Johns following “Code of Silence” as “disgusting.” In the context of alleged sexual assault, the “predatory woman” stereotype is used in place of the raped woman in order to imply that sexual assault did not occur; hence Palavi’s problematic discourse arguably reinforces sexist attitudes. But can Palavi be considered complicit in validating this damaging stereotype? Can she be blamed for working within patriarchal systems of representation, of which she has also been a victim? The preceding analysis shows judgement to be inherent in the act of representation. The paucity of language is particularly acute when dealing with such extreme situations. Indeed, the language used to explore this issue in the present article cannot escape terminology that is loaded with meaning(s), which quotation marks can perhaps only qualify so far. Conclusion This paper does not claim to provide definitive answers to such complex dilemmas, but rather to highlight problems in addressing the sensitive issues of ambiguity and “complicity” in women’s interactions with patriarchal systems, and how these are represented in the mass media. Like the controversial behaviour of teenager Kim Duthie described earlier, Palavi’s position throws the problems of judgement and representation into disarray. There is no simple solution to these problems, though we do propose that these “grey zone” figures be represented in a self-reflexive, nuanced manner by explicitly articulating questions of responsibility rather than making simplistic judgements that implicitly lessen perpetrators’ culpability. Levi’s concept of the “grey zone” helps elucidate the fraught issue of women’s potential complicity in a rape culture, a subject that challenges both understanding and representation. Despite participating in a culture that promotes the abuse, denigration, and humiliation of women, the roles of women like Palavi cannot in any way be conflated with the roles of the perpetrators of sexual assault. These and other “grey zones” need to be constantly rethought and renegotiated in order to develop a fuller understanding of human behaviour. References Alcoff, Linda Martin, and Laura Gray. “Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation.” Signs 18.2 (1993): 260–90. 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Boxing is a purely masculine activity and it inhabits a purely masculine world. […] Boxing is for men, and it is about men, and is men. (Joyce Carol Oates) IntroductionWriting about boxing is an intimate, private, and unusual activity. Although a decade has passed since I first “stepped into the ring” (sparring or fighting), I have not engaged with boxing in academic terms. I undertook a doctoral degree from 2012 to 2016, during which I competed and won amateur titles in three different countries. Boxing, in a sense, shadowed my research. My fieldwork, researching heritage foods networks, brought me to various locales, situating my body in reference to participants and academics as well as my textual analysis. My daily interactions and reflections in the boxing gym, though, were marginalised to give priority to my doctorate. In a mirrored journey to Wacquant’s “carnal ethnography of the skilled body” (Habitus 87), I boxed as a hobby. It was a means to escape my life as a doctoral student, my thesis, and the library. Research belonged to the realm of academia; boxing, to the realm of the physical. In this paper, I seek to implode this self-imposed distinction.Practising the “noble art,” as boxing is commonly called, profoundly altered not only my body but also my way of seeing the world, myself, and others. I explore these themes through an autoethnographic account of my experience in the ring. Focusing on sparring, rather than competing, I explore conceptualisations of my face as a material, as well as part of my body, and also as a surface for violence and apprenticeship. Reflecting upon a decade of sparring, the analysis presented in this paper is grounded in the phenomenological tradition whereby knowledge is not an abstract notion that exists over and above felt experience: it is sensed and embodied through practice.I delve into the narratives of my personal “social logic of a bodily craft” of boxing (Wacquant, Habitus 85). More specifically, I reflect upon my experiences of getting hit in the face by men in the ring, and the acclimatisation required, evolving from feelings of intrusion, betrayal, and physical pain to habit, and at times, excitement. As a surface for punching, my face became both material and immaterial. It was a tool that had to be tuned to varying degrees of pain to inform me of my performance as well as my opponent’s. Simultaneously, it was a surface that was abstracted and side-lined in order to put myself purposefully in harm’s way as one does when stepping into the ring. Through reflecting on my face, I consider how the sport offered new embodied experiences through which I became keenly aware of my body as a delineated target for—as well as the source of—violence. In particular, my body boundaries were profoundly reconfigured in the ring: sparring partners demonstrated their respect by hitting me, validating both my body and my skill as a boxer. In this manner, I discuss the spatiality of the ring as eliciting transitions of felt and abstracted pain as well as shaping my self-image as a re-gendered boxer in the ring and out. Throughout my account, I briefly engage with Wacquant’s discussion of “pugilistic habitus” (Body 99) and his claims that boxing is the epitome of masculine valour. In the final section, I conclude with deliberations upon the new bodily awareness(es) I gained through the sport, and the re-materiality I experienced as a strong woman.Methodological and Conceptual FrameworksThe analysis in this paper is based on the hybrid narrative of ethnography and autobiography: autoethnography. In the words of Tami Spry, autoethnography is “a self-narrative that critiques the situatedness of self and others in social context” (710). As such, I take stock in hindsight (Bruner; Denzin) of the evolution of my thoughts on boxing, my stance as a boxer, and the ways the ring has affected my sense of self and my body.Unlike Wacquant's “carnal ethnography” (Habitus 83) whose involvement with boxing was foregrounded in an academic context where he wrote detailed field-notes and conducted participant observation, my involvement was deliberately non-academic until I began to write this paper. Based on hindsight, the data collected through this autoethnography are value-inflected in ways that differ from other modes of data collection. But I have sought to recreate a dialectic between perceptual experience and cultural practices and patterns, in a manner aligned with Csordas’s paradigm of embodiment. My method is to “retrospectively and selectively write about epiphanies that stem from, or are made possible by, being part of a culture” (Ellis et al. 276) of boxing. These epiphanies, as sensed and embodied knowledge, were not solely conceptual moments but also physical realisations that my body performed, such as understanding—and executing—a well-timed slip to the side to avoid a punch.Focusing on my embodied experiences in the ring and out, I have sought to uncover “somatic modes of attention:” the “culturally elaborated ways of attending to and with one’s body in surroundings that include the embodied presence of others” (Csordas 138). The aim of this engagement is to convey my self-representation as a boxer in the ring, which emerged in part through the inter-subjectivity of interacting with other boxers whilst prioritising representations of my face. As such, my personal narrative is enmeshed with insights gleaned during embodied epiphanies I had in the ring, interweaving storytelling with theory.I have chosen to use the conventions of storytelling (Ellis and Ellingson) to explore the defining moments that shaped the image I hold of myself as a boxer. My personal narrative—where I view myself as the phenomenon—seeks “to produce aesthetic and evocative thick descriptions of personal and interpersonal experience” (Ellis et al. 287) whilst striving to remain accessible to a broader audience than within academia (Bochner). Personal narratives offer an understanding of the “self or aspect of a life as it intersects with a cultural context, connect to other participants as co-researchers, and invite readers to enter the author's world and to use what they learn there to reflect on, understand, and cope with their own lives” (Ellis 14; see also Ellis et al. 289).As the focus of my narrative is my face, I used my body, in Longhurst et al.’s words, as the “primary tool through which all interactions and emotions filter in accessing subjects and their geographies” (208). As “the foundation of the entire pugilistic regimen”, the body is the site of an intimate self-awareness, of the “body-sense” (Heiskanen 26). Taking my body as the starting point of my analysis, my conceptual framework is heavily informed by Thrift’s non-representational theory, enabling me to inquire into the “skills and knowledges [people] get from being embodied beings” (127), and specifically, embodied boxers. The analysis presented here is thus based on an “epistemic reflexivity” (Wacquant, Habitus 89) and responds to what Wacquant coins the “pugilistic habitus” (Body 99): a set of acquired dispositions of the boxer. Bourdieu believes that people are social agents who actively construct social reality through “categories of perception, appreciation and action” (30). The boxing habitus needs to be grasped with one’s body: it intermingles “cognitive categories, bodily skills and desires which together define the competence and appetence specific to the boxer” (Wacquant, Habitus 87). Through this habitus, I construct an image of myself not only as a boxer, but also as a re-gendered being, directly critiquing Wacquant’s arguments of the “pugilist” as fundamentally male.Resistance to Female BoxingMischa Merz’s manuscript on her boxing experience is the most accurate narrative I have yet read on female boxing, as a visceral as well as incorporeal experience, which led Merz to question and reconsider her own identity. When Merz published her manuscript in 2000, six years before I put the gloves on, the boxing world was still resisting the presence of women in the ring. In the UK, licenses for boxing were refused to women until 1998, and in New South Wales, Australia, it was illegal for women to compete until December 2008. It was not until 2012 that female boxing became internationally recognised as a sport in its own right. During the London Olympics, after a sulphurous debate on whether women should be made to box in skirts to “differentiate” them from men, women were finally allowed to compete in three weight categories, compared to ten for men.When I first started training in 2006 at the age of 21, I was unaware of the long list of determined and courageous women who had carved their way—and facilitated mine—into the ring, fighting for their right to practise a sport considered men’s exclusive domain. By the time I started learning the “sweet science” (another popular term used for boxing), my presence was accepted, albeit still unusual. My university had decreed boxing a violent sport that could not be allowed on campus. As a result, I only started boxing when I obtained a driving licence, and could attend training sessions off-campus. My desire to box had been sparked five years before, when I viewed Girlfight, a film depicting a young woman’s journey into the ring. Until then, I had never imagined a woman could box, let alone be inspirational in the use of her strength, aggression, and violence; to be strong was, for me, to be manly—which, as a woman, translated as monstrous or a perversion. I suddenly recognised in boxing a possibility to rid myself of the burden of what I saw as my bulk, and transform my body into a graceful pugilist—a fighter.First Sparring SessionTwo months after I had first thrown a punch in my coach’s pad—the gear coaches wear to protect their hands when a boxer is punching them to train—I was allowed into the ring to spar. Building up to this moment, I had anticipated and dreaded my first steps in the ring as the test of my skill and worthiness as a boxer. This moment would show my physical conditioning: whether I had trained and dieted correctly, if I was strong or resilient enough to fight. More crucially, it would lay bare my personality, the strength of my character, the extent of my willpower and belief in myself: it would reveal, in boxing terminology, if I had “heart.” Needless to say I had fantasised often about this moment. It was my initiation into the art of being punched and I hoped I would prove myself a hardened individual, capable of withstanding pain without flinching or retreating.The memory of the first punch to my face—my nose, to be exact—remains clear and vivid. My sparring partner was my coach, a retired boxer who hit me repeatedly in the head during the entirety of my first round. Getting hit in the face for the first time is a profound moment of rupture. Until then, my face had been a bodily surface reserved for affective gestures by individuals of trust: kisses of greeting on the cheeks or caresses from lovers. Only once had I been slapped, in an act of aggression that had left me paralysed with shock and feeling violated. Now in the ring, being punched in the face by a man I trusted, vastly more experienced and stronger than I, provoked a violent reaction of indignation and betrayal. Feelings of deceit, physical intrusion, and confusion overwhelmed me; pain was an entirely secondary concern. I had, without realising, assumed my coach would “go easy” on me, softening his punches and giving me time to react adequately to his attacks as we had practised on the pads. A couple of endless minutes later, I stepped out of the ring, breathless and staring at the floor to hide my tears of humiliation and overwhelming frustration.It is a common experience amongst novices, when first stepping into the ring, to forget everything they have been taught: footwork, defence, combinations, chin down, guard up … etc. They often freeze, as I did, with the first physical contact. Suddenly and concretely, with the immediacy of pain, they become aware of the extent of the danger they have purposely placed themselves in. The disturbance I felt was matched in part by my belief that I was essentially a coward. In an act condemned by the boxing community, I had turned my face away from punches: I tried to escape the ring instead of dominating it. Merz succinctly describes this experience in the boxing realm: “aspects of my character were frequently tossed in my face for assessment. I saw gaping holes in my tenacity, my resilience, my courage, my athleticism” (49). That night, I felt an unfamiliar sting as I took my jumper off, noticing a slight yet painful bruise on the bridge of my nose. It reminded me of my inadequacy and, I believed at the time, a fundamental failure of character: I lacked heart.My Face: A Tool for Sensing and Ignoring PainTo get as accustomed as a punching bag to repeated hits without flinching I had to mould my face into a mask of impassivity, revealing little to my opponent. My face also became a calibrated tool to measure my opponent’s skill, strength, and intent through the levels of pain it would experience. If an opponent repeatedly targeted my nose, I knew the sparring session was not a “friendly encounter.” Most often though, we would nod at each other in acknowledgement of the other’s successful “contact,” such as when their punches hurt my body. The ring is the only space I know and inhabit where the display of physical violence can be interpreted as a “friendly gesture” (Merz 12).Boxers, like most athletes, are carefully attuned to measuring the degrees of pain they undergo during a fight and training, whilst accomplishing the paradoxical feat—when they are hit—of setting aside that pain lest it be a distraction. In other words, boxers’ bodies are both material and immaterial: they are sites for accessing sensory information, notably pain levels, as well as tools that—at times detrimentally—have learned to abstract pain in the effort to ignore physical limitations, impediments or fatigue. Boxers with “heart,” I believe, are those who inhabit this duality of material and immaterial bodies.I have systematically been questioned whether I fear bruising or scarring my face. It would seem illogical to many that a woman would voluntarily engage in an activity that could blemish her appearance. Beyond this concern lies the issue, as Merz puts it, that “physical prowess and femininity seem to be so fundamentally incompatible” (476). My face used to be solely a source of concern as a medium of beautification and the platform from which I believed the world judged my degree of attractiveness. It also served as a marker of distinction: those I trusted intimately could touch my face, others could not. Throughout my training, my face evolved and also became an instrument that I conditioned and used strategically in the ring. The bruises I received attested to my readiness to exchange punches, a mark of valour I came to relish more than looking “nice.”Boxing has taught me how to feel my body in new ways. I no longer inhabit an “absent body” (Leder). I intimately know the border between my skin and the world, aware of exactly how far my body extends into that world and how much “punishment” (getting hit) it can withstand: boxing—which Oates (26) observed as a spectator rather than boxer—“is an act of consummate self-determination—the constant re-establishment of the parameters of one’s being.” A strong initial allure of boxing was the strict discipline it gave to my eating habits, an anchor—and at times, a torture—for someone who suffered from decade-long eating disorders. Although boxing plagued me with the need to “make weight”—to fight in a designated weight category—I no longer sought to be as petite as I could manage. As a female boxer, I was reminded of my gender, and my “unusual” body, as I am uncommonly big, strong, and heavy compared to most female fighters. I still find it difficult to find women to spar with, let alone fight. Unlike in the world outside the gym, though, my size is something I continuously learn to value as an advantage in the ring, a tool for affirmation, and significantly, a means of acceptance by, and equality with, men.The Ring: A Place of Re-GenderingAs sparring became routine, I had an epiphany: what I had taken as an act of betrayal from my coach was actually one of respect. Opponents who threw “honest” (painful) punches esteemed me as a boxer. I have, to this day, very rarely sparred with women. I often get told that I punch “like a guy,” an ability with which I have sought to impress coaches and boxers alike. As such, I am usually partnered with men who believe, as they have told me, that hitting a “girl”—and even worse, hitting a girl in the face—is simply unacceptable. Many have admitted that they fear hurting me, though some have quickly wanted to after a couple of exchanges. I have found that their views of “acceptable” violence seem unchanged after a session, as I believe they have come to view me as a boxer first and as a woman second.It would be disingenuous to omit that boxing attracted me as much for the novelty status I have gained within and outside of it. I have often walked a thin line between revelling in the sense of belonging that boxing provides me—anchored in a feeling that gender no longer matters—and the acute sense of feeling special because I am a woman performing as a man in what is still considered a man’s world. I have wavered between feeling as though I am shrugging off the very notion of gender in the ring, to deeply reconsidering what my gender means to me and the world, embracing a more fluid and performative understanding of gender than I had before (Messner; Young).In a way, my sense of self is shaped conflictingly by the ways in which boxers behave towards me in the ring, and how others see me outside of the boxing gym. As de Bruin and de Haan suggest, my body, in its active dimension, is open to the other and grounds inter-subjectivity. This inter-subjectivity of embodiment—how other bodies constitute my own sensory and perceptual experience of being-in-the-world—remains ambivalent. It has led me to feel at times genderless—or rather, beyond gender—in the ring and, because of this feeling, I simultaneously question and continuously re-explore more vividly what can be understood as “female masculinity” (Halberstam). As training progressed, I increasingly felt that:If women are going to fight, we have to be reminded, at every chance available, time and again, that they are still feminine or capable, at least, of wearing the costume of femininity, being hobbled by high heels and constrained by tight dresses. All female athletes in a way are burdened with having to re-iterate this same public narrative. (Merz)As I learned to box, I also learned to delineate myself alongside the ring: as I questioned notions of gender inside, I consequently sought to reaffirm a specific and static idea of gender through overt femininity outside the ring, as other female athletes have also been seen to do (Duncan). During my first years of training, I was the only woman at the gyms I trained in. I believed I had to erase any physical reminders of femininity: my sport clothes were loose fitting, my hair short, and I never wore jewellery or make-up. I wanted to be seen as a boxer, not a woman: my physical attractiveness was, for once, irrelevant. Ironically, I could not conceive of myself as a woman in the ring, and did not believe I could be seen as a woman in the ring. Outside the gym, I increasingly sought to reassert a stereotypical feminine appearance, taking pleasure in subverting another set of beliefs. People are usually hesitant to visualise a woman in a skirt, without a broken nose, as a competitive fighter with a mouth guard and headgear. As Wacquant succinctly put it, “I led a sort of Dr. Jekyll-and-Mr. Hyde existence” (Habitus 86), which crystallised when one of my coaches failed to recognise me on three occasions outside the gym, in my “normal” clothes.I have now come to resent profoundly the marginal, sensationalised status that being a boxer denotes for a woman. This is premised on particular social norms surrounding gender, which dictate that if a woman boxes, she is not “your usual” woman. I have striven to re-gender my experience, especially in light of the recent explosion of interest in female boxing, where new norms are being established. As I have trained around the world, including in Cuba, France, and the USA, and competed in the UK, Mexico, and Belgium, I have valued the tacit connection between those who practice the “noble art.” Boxing fashions a particular habitus (Bourdieu), the “pugilistic habitus” (Wacquant, Body 12). Stepping into the ring, and being able to handle getting hit in the face, constitutes a common language that boxers around the world, male and female, understand, value, and share; a language that transcends the tacit everyday embodiments of gender and class. Boxing is habitually said to give access to an upward mobility (Wacquant, Habitus; Heiskanen). In my case, as a white, educated, middle-class woman, boxing has given me access to cross-class associations: I have trained alongside men who had been shot in Coventry, were jobless in Cuba, or dealt with drug gangs in Mexico. The ring is an equalising space, where social, gender—and in my experience, ethnic—divides can be smoothed down to leave the pugilistic valour, the property of boxing excellence, as the main metric of appreciation.The freedom I have found in the ring is one that has allowed my gendered identity to be thought of in new and creative ways that invite continuous revision. I have discovered myself not solely through the prism of a gendered lens, but as an emotive athlete, and as a person desperate to be accepted despite—or because of—her physical strength. I find myself returning to Merz’s eloquence: “boxing cannot help but make you question who you really are. You cannot hide from yourself in a boxing ring. It might seem a crazy path to self-knowledge, but to me it has been the most rich, rewarding, and perhaps, the only true one” (111). Using Wacquant’s own words to disprove his theory that boxing is fundamentally a virile activity that reaffirms specific notions of masculinity, to become a boxer is to “efface the distinction between the physical and the spiritual [...] to defy the border between reason and passion” (Body 20). In my view, it is to implode the oppositional definitions that have kept males inside the ring and females, out. The ring, in ways unrivalled elsewhere, has shown me that I am not reducible, as the world has at times convinced me, to my strength or my gender. I can, and indeed do, coalesce and transcend both.ConclusionAfter having pondered the significance of the ring to my life, I now begin to understand Merz’s journey as “so much more than a mere dalliance on the dark side of masculine culture” (21). When I box, I am always boxing against myself. The ring is the ultimate space of revelation, where one is starkly confronted with one’s own weaknesses and fears. As a naked mirror, the ring is also a place for redemption, where one can overcome flaws, and uncover facets of who one is. Having spent almost as much time at university as I have boxing, it was in the ring that I learned that “thinking otherwise entails being otherwise, relating to oneself, one’s body, and ambient beings in a new way” (Sharp 749). Through the “boxing habitus,” I have simultaneously developed a boxer’s body and habits as well as integrated new notions of gender. As an exercise in re-gendering, sparring has led me to reflect more purposefully on the multiplicity of meanings that gender can espouse, and on the possibilities of negotiating the world as both strong and female. Practising the “noble art” has given me new tools with which to carve out, within the structures of the society I inhabit, liberating possibilities of being a pugilistic woman. However, I have yet to determine if women have fashioned a space within the ring for themselves, or if they still need to reaffirm a gendered identity in the eyes of others to earn the right to get hit in the face.References Bochner, Arthur P. “It’s about Time: Narrative and the Divided Self.” Qualitative Inquiry 3.4 (1997): 418–438.Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 1990.Bruner, Jerome. “The Autobiographical Process.” The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation. Ed. Robert Folkenflik. Vol. 6. Stanford UP, 1993. 38–56.Csordas, Thomas. “Somatic Modes of Attention.” Cultural Anthropology 8.2 (1993): 135–156.De Bruin, Leon, and Sanneke de Haan. “Enactivism and Social Cognition: In Search of the Whole Story.” Cognitive Semiotics 4.1 (2009): 225–50.Denzin, Norman K. Interpretive Biography. London: Sage, 1989.Duncan, Margaret C. “Gender Warriors in Sport: Women and the Media.” Handbook of Sports and Media. Eds. Arthur A. Raney and Jennings Bryant. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006. 231–252.Ellis, Carolyn. The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004.Ellis, Carolyn, Tony E. Adams, and Arthur P. Bochner. “Autoethnography: An Overview.” Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung (2011): 273–90.Ellis, Carolyn, and Laura Ellingson. “Qualitative Methods.” Encyclopedia of Sociology. Eds. Edgar F. Borgatta and Rhonda JV Montgomery. Macmillan Library Reference, 2000. 2287–96.Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke UP, 1998.Heiskanen, Benita. The Urban Geography of Boxing: Race, Class, and Gender in the Ring. Vol. 13. Routledge, 2012.Girlfight. Dir. Karyn Kusama. Screen Gems, 2000.Leder, Drew. The Absent Body. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.Longhurst, Robyn, Elsie Ho, and Lynda Johnston. “Using ‘the Body’ as an Instrument of Research: Kimch’i and Pavlova.” Area 40.2 (2008): 208–17.Messner, Michael. Out of Play: Critical Essays on Gender and Sport. New York: SUNY Press, 2010.Merz, Mischa. Bruising: A Boxer’s Story. Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2000.Oates, Joyce Carol. On Boxing. Garden City, New York: Harper Collins, 1987.Sharp, Hasana. “The Force of Ideas in Spinoza.” Political Theory 35.6 (2007): 732–55.Spry, Tami. “Performing Autoethnography: An Embodied Methodological Praxis.” Qualitative Inquiry 7.6 (2001): 706–32.Thrift, Nigel. “The Still Point: Resistance, Expressive Embodiment and Dance.” Geographies of Resistance (1997): 124–51.Wacquant, Loïc. Body & Soul. New York: Oxford UP, 2004.———. “Habitus as Topic and Tool: Reflections on Becoming a Prizefighter.” Qualitative Research in Psychology 8.1 (2011): 81–92.Young, Iris Marion. Throwing like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana UP, 1990.

1991 An afternoon in late 1991 found me on a Sydney bus reading Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991). A disembarking passenger paused at my side and, as I glanced up, hissed, ‘I don’t know how you can read that filth’. As she continued to make her way to the front of the vehicle, I was as stunned as if she had struck me physically. There was real vehemence in both her words and how they were delivered, and I can still see her eyes squeezing into slits as she hesitated while curling her mouth around that final angry word: ‘filth’. Now, almost fifteen years later, the memory is remarkably vivid. As the event is also still remarkable; this comment remaining the only remark ever made to me by a stranger about anything I have been reading during three decades of travelling on public transport. That inflamed commuter summed up much of the furore that greeted the publication of American Psycho. More than this, and unusually, condemnation of the work both actually preceded, and affected, its publication. Although Ellis had been paid a substantial U.S. $300,000 advance by Simon & Schuster, pre-publication stories based on circulating galley proofs were so negative—offering assessments of the book as: ‘moronic … pointless … themeless … worthless (Rosenblatt 3), ‘superficial’, ‘a tapeworm narrative’ (Sheppard 100) and ‘vile … pornography, not literature … immoral, but also artless’ (Miner 43)—that the publisher cancelled the contract (forfeiting the advance) only months before the scheduled release date. CEO of Simon & Schuster, Richard E. Snyder, explained: ‘it was an error of judgement to put our name on a book of such questionable taste’ (quoted in McDowell, “Vintage” 13). American Psycho was, instead, published by Random House/Knopf in March 1991 under its prestige paperback imprint, Vintage Contemporary (Zaller; Freccero 48) – Sonny Mehta having signed the book to Random House some two days after Simon & Schuster withdrew from its agreement with Ellis. While many commented on the fact that Ellis was paid two substantial advances, it was rarely noted that Random House was a more prestigious publisher than Simon & Schuster (Iannone 52). After its release, American Psycho was almost universally vilified and denigrated by the American critical establishment. The work was criticised on both moral and aesthetic/literary/artistic grounds; that is, in terms of both what Ellis wrote and how he wrote it. Critics found it ‘meaningless’ (Lehmann-Haupt C18), ‘abysmally written … schlock’ (Kennedy 427), ‘repulsive, a bloodbath serving no purpose save that of morbidity, titillation and sensation … pure trash, as scummy and mean as anything it depicts, a dirty book by a dirty writer’ (Yardley B1) and ‘garbage’ (Gurley Brown 21). Mark Archer found that ‘the attempt to confuse style with content is callow’ (31), while Naomi Wolf wrote that: ‘overall, reading American Psycho holds the same fascination as watching a maladjusted 11-year-old draw on his desk’ (34). John Leo’s assessment sums up the passionate intensity of those critical of the work: ‘totally hateful … violent junk … no discernible plot, no believable characterization, no sensibility at work that comes anywhere close to making art out of all the blood and torture … Ellis displays little feel for narration, words, grammar or the rhythm of language’ (23). These reviews, as those printed pre-publication, were titled in similarly unequivocal language: ‘A Revolting Development’ (Sheppard 100), ‘Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity’ (Leo 23), ‘Designer Porn’ (Manguel 46) and ‘Essence of Trash’ (Yardley B1). Perhaps the most unambiguous in its message was Roger Rosenblatt’s ‘Snuff this Book!’ (3). Of all works published in the U.S.A. at that time, including those clearly carrying X ratings, the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) selected American Psycho for special notice, stating that the book ‘legitimizes inhuman and savage violence masquerading as sexuality’ (NOW 114). Judging the book ‘the most misogynistic communication’ the organisation had ever encountered (NOW L.A. chapter president, Tammy Bruce, quoted in Kennedy 427) and, on the grounds that ‘violence against women in any form is no longer socially acceptable’ (McDowell, “NOW” C17), NOW called for a boycott of the entire Random House catalogue for the remainder of 1991. Naomi Wolf agreed, calling the novel ‘a violation not of obscenity standards, but of women’s civil rights, insofar as it results in conditioning male sexual response to female suffering or degradation’ (34). Later, the boycott was narrowed to Knopf and Vintage titles (Love 46), but also extended to all of the many products, companies, corporations, firms and brand names that are a feature of Ellis’s novel (Kauffman, “American” 41). There were other unexpected responses such as the Walt Disney Corporation barring Ellis from the opening of Euro Disney (Tyrnauer 101), although Ellis had already been driven from public view after receiving a number of death threats and did not undertake a book tour (Kennedy 427). Despite this, the book received significant publicity courtesy of the controversy and, although several national bookstore chains and numerous booksellers around the world refused to sell the book, more than 100,000 copies were sold in the U.S.A. in the fortnight after publication (Dwyer 55). Even this success had an unprecedented effect: when American Psycho became a bestseller, The New York Times announced that it would be removing the title from its bestseller lists because of the book’s content. In the days following publication in the U.S.A., Canadian customs announced that it was considering whether to allow the local arm of Random House to, first, import American Psycho for sale in Canada and, then, publish it in Canada (Kirchhoff, “Psycho” C1). Two weeks later, when the book was passed for sale (Kirchhoff, “Customs” C1), demonstrators protested the entrance of a shipment of the book. In May, the Canadian Defence Force made headlines when it withdrew copies of the book from the library shelves of a navy base in Halifax (Canadian Press C1). Also in May 1991, the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC), the federal agency that administers the classification scheme for all films, computer games and ‘submittable’ publications (including books) that are sold, hired or exhibited in Australia, announced that it had classified American Psycho as ‘Category 1 Restricted’ (W. Fraser, “Book” 5), to be sold sealed, to only those over 18 years of age. This was the first such classification of a mainstream literary work since the rating scheme was introduced (Graham), and the first time a work of literature had been restricted for sale since Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969. The chief censor, John Dickie, said the OFLC could not justify refusing the book classification (and essentially banning the work), and while ‘as a satire on yuppies it has a lot going for it’, personally he found the book ‘distasteful’ (quoted in W. Fraser, “Sensitive” 5). Moreover, while this ‘R’ classification was, and remains, a national classification, Australian States and Territories have their own sale and distribution regulation systems. Under this regime, American Psycho remains banned from sale in Queensland, as are all other books in this classification category (Vnuk). These various reactions led to a flood of articles published in the U.S.A., Canada, Australia and the U.K., voicing passionate opinions on a range of issues including free speech and censorship, the corporate control of artistic thought and practice, and cynicism on the part of authors and their publishers about what works might attract publicity and (therefore) sell in large numbers (see, for instance, Hitchens 7; Irving 1). The relationship between violence in society and its representation in the media was a common theme, with only a few commentators (including Norman Mailer in a high profile Vanity Fair article) suggesting that, instead of inciting violence, the media largely reflected, and commented upon, societal violence. Elayne Rapping, an academic in the field of Communications, proposed that the media did actively glorify violence, but only because there was a market for such representations: ‘We, as a society love violence, thrive on violence as the very basis of our social stability, our ideological belief system … The problem, after all, is not media violence but real violence’ (36, 38). Many more commentators, however, agreed with NOW, Wolf and others and charged Ellis’s work with encouraging, and even instigating, violent acts, and especially those against women, calling American Psycho ‘a kind of advertising for violence against women’ (anthropologist Elliot Leyton quoted in Dwyer 55) and, even, a ‘how-to manual on the torture and dismemberment of women’ (Leo 23). Support for the book was difficult to find in the flood of vitriol directed against it, but a small number wrote in Ellis’s defence. Sonny Mehta, himself the target of death threats for acquiring the book for Random House, stood by this assessment, and was widely quoted in his belief that American Psycho was ‘a serious book by a serious writer’ and that Ellis was ‘remarkably talented’ (Knight-Ridder L10). Publishing director of Pan Macmillan Australia, James Fraser, defended his decision to release American Psycho on the grounds that the book told important truths about society, arguing: ‘A publisher’s office is a clearing house for ideas … the real issue for community debate [is] – to what extent does it want to hear the truth about itself, about individuals within the community and about the governments the community elects. If we care about the preservation of standards, there is none higher than this. Gore Vidal was among the very few who stated outright that he liked the book, finding it ‘really rather inspired … a wonderfully comic novel’ (quoted in Tyrnauer 73). Fay Weldon agreed, judging the book as ‘brilliant’, and focusing on the importance of Ellis’s message: ‘Bret Easton Ellis is a very good writer. He gets us to a ‘T’. And we can’t stand it. It’s our problem, not his. American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel that revolves around its own nasty bits’ (C1). Since 1991 As unlikely as this now seems, I first read American Psycho without any awareness of the controversy raging around its publication. I had read Ellis’s earlier works, Less than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987) and, with my energies fully engaged elsewhere, cannot now even remember how I acquired the book. Since that angry remark on the bus, however, I have followed American Psycho’s infamy and how it has remained in the public eye over the last decade and a half. Australian OFLC decisions can be reviewed and reversed – as when Pasolini’s final film Salo (1975), which was banned in Australia from the time of its release in 1975 until it was un-banned in 1993, was then banned again in 1998 – however, American Psycho’s initial classification has remained unchanged. In July 2006, I purchased a new paperback copy in rural New South Wales. It was shrink-wrapped in plastic and labelled: ‘R. Category One. Not available to persons under 18 years. Restricted’. While exact sales figures are difficult to ascertain, by working with U.S.A., U.K. and Australian figures, this copy was, I estimate, one of some 1.5 to 1.6 million sold since publication. In the U.S.A., backlist sales remain very strong, with some 22,000 copies sold annually (Holt and Abbott), while lifetime sales in the U.K. are just under 720,000 over five paperback editions. Sales in Australia are currently estimated by Pan MacMillan to total some 100,000, with a new printing of 5,000 copies recently ordered in Australia on the strength of the book being featured on the inaugural Australian Broadcasting Commission’s First Tuesday Book Club national television program (2006). Predictably, the controversy around the publication of American Psycho is regularly revisited by those reviewing Ellis’s subsequent works. A major article in Vanity Fair on Ellis’s next book, The Informers (1994), opened with a graphic description of the death threats Ellis received upon the publication of American Psycho (Tyrnauer 70) and then outlined the controversy in detail (70-71). Those writing about Ellis’s two most recent novels, Glamorama (1999) and Lunar Park (2005), have shared this narrative strategy, which also forms at least part of the frame of every interview article. American Psycho also, again predictably, became a major topic of discussion in relation to the contracting, making and then release of the eponymous film in 2000 as, for example, in Linda S. Kauffman’s extensive and considered review of the film, which spent the first third discussing the history of the book’s publication (“American” 41-45). Playing with this interest, Ellis continues his practice of reusing characters in subsequent works. Thus, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, who first appeared in The Rules of Attraction as the elder brother of the main character, Sean – who, in turn, makes a brief appearance in American Psycho – also turns up in Glamorama with ‘strange stains’ on his Armani suit lapels, and again in Lunar Park. The book also continues to be regularly cited in discussions of censorship (see, for example, Dubin; Freccero) and has been included in a number of university-level courses about banned books. In these varied contexts, literary, cultural and other critics have also continued to disagree about the book’s impact upon readers, with some persisting in reading the novel as a pornographic incitement to violence. When Wade Frankum killed seven people in Sydney, many suggested a link between these murders and his consumption of X-rated videos, pornographic magazines and American Psycho (see, for example, Manne 11), although others argued against this (Wark 11). Prosecutors in the trial of Canadian murderer Paul Bernardo argued that American Psycho provided a ‘blueprint’ for Bernardo’s crimes (Canadian Press A5). Others have read Ellis’s work more positively, as for instance when Sonia Baelo Allué compares American Psycho favourably with Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (1988) – arguing that Harris not only depicts more degrading treatment of women, but also makes Hannibal Lecter, his antihero monster, sexily attractive (7-24). Linda S. Kauffman posits that American Psycho is part of an ‘anti-aesthetic’ movement in art, whereby works that are revoltingly ugly and/or grotesque function to confront the repressed fears and desires of the audience and explore issues of identity and subjectivity (Bad Girls), while Patrick W. Shaw includes American Psycho in his work, The Modern American Novel of Violence because, in his opinion, the violence Ellis depicts is not gratuitous. Lost, however, in much of this often-impassioned debate and dialogue is the book itself – and what Ellis actually wrote. 21-years-old when Less than Zero was published, Ellis was still only 26 when American Psycho was released and his youth presented an obvious target. In 1991, Terry Teachout found ‘no moment in American Psycho where Bret Easton Ellis, who claims to be a serious artist, exhibits the workings of an adult moral imagination’ (45, 46), Brad Miner that it was ‘puerile – the very antithesis of good writing’ (43) and Carol Iannone that ‘the inclusion of the now famous offensive scenes reveals a staggering aesthetic and moral immaturity’ (54). Pagan Kennedy also ‘blamed’ the entire work on this immaturity, suggesting that instead of possessing a developed artistic sensibility, Ellis was reacting to (and, ironically, writing for the approval of) critics who had lauded the documentary realism of his violent and nihilistic teenage characters in Less than Zero, but then panned his less sensational story of campus life in The Rules of Attraction (427-428). Yet, in my opinion, there is not only a clear and coherent aesthetic vision driving Ellis’s oeuvre but, moreover, a profoundly moral imagination at work as well. This was my view upon first reading American Psycho, and part of the reason I was so shocked by that charge of filth on the bus. Once familiar with the controversy, I found this view shared by only a minority of commentators. Writing in the New Statesman & Society, Elizabeth J. Young asked: ‘Where have these people been? … Books of pornographic violence are nothing new … American Psycho outrages no contemporary taboos. Psychotic killers are everywhere’ (24). I was similarly aware that such murderers not only existed in reality, but also in many widely accessed works of literature and film – to the point where a few years later Joyce Carol Oates could suggest that the serial killer was an icon of popular culture (233). While a popular topic for writers of crime fiction and true crime narratives in both print and on film, a number of ‘serious’ literary writers – including Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Kate Millet, Margaret Atwood and Oates herself – have also written about serial killers, and even crossed over into the widely acknowledged as ‘low-brow’ true crime genre. Many of these works (both popular or more literary) are vivid and powerful and have, as American Psycho, taken a strong moral position towards their subject matter. Moreover, many books and films have far more disturbing content than American Psycho, yet have caused no such uproar (Young and Caveney 120). By now, the plot of American Psycho is well known, although the structure of the book, noted by Weldon above (C1), is rarely analysed or even commented upon. First person narrator, Patrick Bateman, a young, handsome stockbroker and stereotypical 1980s yuppie, is also a serial killer. The book is largely, and innovatively, structured around this seeming incompatibility – challenging readers’ expectations that such a depraved criminal can be a wealthy white professional – while vividly contrasting the banal, and meticulously detailed, emptiness of Bateman’s life as a New York über-consumer with the scenes where he humiliates, rapes, tortures, murders, mutilates, dismembers and cannibalises his victims. Although only comprising some 16 out of 399 pages in my Picador edition, these violent scenes are extreme and certainly make the work as a whole disgustingly confronting. But that is the entire point of Ellis’s work. Bateman’s violence is rendered so explicitly because its principal role in the novel is to be inescapably horrific. As noted by Baelo Allué, there is no shift in tone between the most banally described detail and the description of violence (17): ‘I’ve situated the body in front of the new Toshiba television set and in the VCR is an old tape and appearing on the screen is the last girl I filmed. I’m wearing a Joseph Abboud suit, a tie by Paul Stuart, shoes by J. Crew, a vest by someone Italian and I’m kneeling on the floor beside a corpse, eating the girl’s brain, gobbling it down, spreading Grey Poupon over hunks of the pink, fleshy meat’ (Ellis 328). In complete opposition to how pornography functions, Ellis leaves no room for the possible enjoyment of such a scene. Instead of revelling in the ‘spine chilling’ pleasures of classic horror narratives, there is only the real horror of imagining such an act. The effect, as Kauffman has observed is, rather than arousing, often so disgusting as to be emetic (Bad Girls 249). Ellis was surprised that his detractors did not understand that he was trying to be shocking, not offensive (Love 49), or that his overall aim was to symbolise ‘how desensitised our culture has become towards violence’ (quoted in Dwyer 55). Ellis was also understandably frustrated with readings that conflated not only the contents of the book and their meaning, but also the narrator and author: ‘The acts described in the book are truly, indisputably vile. The book itself is not. Patrick Bateman is a monster. I am not’ (quoted in Love 49). Like Fay Weldon, Norman Mailer understood that American Psycho posited ‘that the eighties were spiritually disgusting and the author’s presentation is the crystallization of such horror’ (129). Unlike Weldon, however, Mailer shied away from defending the novel by judging Ellis not accomplished enough a writer to achieve his ‘monstrous’ aims (182), failing because he did not situate Bateman within a moral universe, that is, ‘by having a murderer with enough inner life for us to comprehend him’ (182). Yet, the morality of Ellis’s project is evident. By viewing the world through the lens of a psychotic killer who, in many ways, personifies the American Dream – wealthy, powerful, intelligent, handsome, energetic and successful – and, yet, who gains no pleasure, satisfaction, coherent identity or sense of life’s meaning from his endless, selfish consumption, Ellis exposes the emptiness of both that world and that dream. As Bateman himself explains: ‘Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in. This was civilisation as I saw it, colossal and jagged’ (Ellis 375). Ellis thus situates the responsibility for Bateman’s violence not in his individual moral vacuity, but in the barren values of the society that has shaped him – a selfish society that, in Ellis’s opinion, refused to address the most important issues of the day: corporate greed, mindless consumerism, poverty, homelessness and the prevalence of violent crime. Instead of pornographic, therefore, American Psycho is a profoundly political text: Ellis was never attempting to glorify or incite violence against anyone, but rather to expose the effects of apathy to these broad social problems, including the very kinds of violence the most vocal critics feared the book would engender. Fifteen years after the publication of American Psycho, although our societies are apparently growing in overall prosperity, the gap between rich and poor also continues to grow, more are permanently homeless, violence – whether domestic, random or institutionally-sanctioned – escalates, and yet general apathy has intensified to the point where even the ‘ethics’ of torture as government policy can be posited as a subject for rational debate. The real filth of the saga of American Psycho is, thus, how Ellis’s message was wilfully ignored. While critics and public intellectuals discussed the work at length in almost every prominent publication available, few attempted to think in any depth about what Ellis actually wrote about, or to use their powerful positions to raise any serious debate about the concerns he voiced. Some recent critical reappraisals have begun to appreciate how American Psycho is an ‘ethical denunciation, where the reader cannot but face the real horror behind the serial killer phenomenon’ (Baelo Allué 8), but Ellis, I believe, goes further, exposing the truly filthy causes that underlie the existence of such seemingly ‘senseless’ murder. But, Wait, There’s More It is ironic that American Psycho has, itself, generated a mini-industry of products. A decade after publication, a Canadian team – filmmaker Mary Harron, director of I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), working with scriptwriter, Guinevere Turner, and Vancouver-based Lions Gate Entertainment – adapted the book for a major film (Johnson). Starring Christian Bale, Chloë Sevigny, Willem Dafoe and Reese Witherspoon and, with an estimated budget of U.S.$8 million, the film made U.S.$15 million at the American box office. The soundtrack was released for the film’s opening, with video and DVDs to follow and the ‘Killer Collector’s Edition’ DVD – closed-captioned, in widescreen with surround sound – released in June 2005. Amazon.com lists four movie posters (including a Japanese language version) and, most unexpected of all, a series of film tie-in action dolls. The two most popular of these, judging by E-Bay, are the ‘Cult Classics Series 1: Patrick Bateman’ figure which, attired in a smart suit, comes with essential accoutrements of walkman with headphones, briefcase, Wall Street Journal, video tape and recorder, knife, cleaver, axe, nail gun, severed hand and a display base; and the 18” tall ‘motion activated sound’ edition – a larger version of the same doll with fewer accessories, but which plays sound bites from the movie. Thanks to Stephen Harris and Suzie Gibson (UNE) for stimulating conversations about this book, Stephen Harris for information about the recent Australian reprint of American Psycho and Mark Seebeck (Pan Macmillan) for sales information. References Archer, Mark. “The Funeral Baked Meats.” The Spectator 27 April 1991: 31. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. First Tuesday Book Club. First broadcast 1 August 2006. Baelo Allué, Sonia. “The Aesthetics of Serial Killing: Working against Ethics in The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and American Psycho (1991).” Atlantis 24.2 (Dec. 2002): 7-24. Canadian Press. “Navy Yanks American Psycho.” The Globe and Mail 17 May 1991: C1. Canadian Press. “Gruesome Novel Was Bedside Reading.” Kitchener-Waterloo Record 1 Sep. 1995: A5. Dubin, Steven C. “Art’s Enemies: Censors to the Right of Me, Censors to the Left of Me.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 28.4 (Winter 1994): 44-54. Dwyer, Victor. “Literary Firestorm: Canada Customs Scrutinizes a Brutal Novel.” Maclean’s April 1991: 55. Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. London: Macmillan-Picador, 1991. ———. Glamorama. New York: Knopf, 1999. ———. The Informers. New York: Knopf, 1994. ———. Less than Zero. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. ———. Lunar Park. New York: Knopf, 2005. ———. The Rules of Attraction. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. Fraser, James. :The Case for Publishing.” The Bulletin 18 June 1991. Fraser, William. “Book May Go under Wraps.” The Sydney Morning Herald 23 May 1991: 5. ———. “The Sensitive Censor and the Psycho.” The Sydney Morning Herald 24 May 1991: 5. Freccero, Carla. “Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American Psycho.” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 27.2 (Summer 1997): 44-58. Graham, I. “Australian Censorship History.” Libertus.net 9 Dec. 2001. 17 May 2006 http://libertus.net/censor/hist20on.html>. Gurley Brown, Helen. Commentary in “Editorial Judgement or Censorship?: The Case of American Psycho.” The Writer May 1991: 20-23. Harris, Thomas. The Silence of the Lambs. New York: St Martins Press, 1988. Harron, Mary (dir.). American Psycho [film]. Edward R. Pressman Film Corporation, Lions Gate Films, Muse Productions, P.P.S. Films, Quadra Entertainment, Universal Pictures, 2004. Hitchens, Christopher. “Minority Report.” The Nation 7-14 January 1991: 7. Holt, Karen, and Charlotte Abbott. “Lunar Park: The Novel.” Publishers Weekly 11 July 2005. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA624404.html? pubdate=7%2F11%2F2005&display=archive>. Iannone, Carol. “PC & the Ellis Affair.” Commentary Magazine July 1991: 52-4. Irving, John. “Pornography and the New Puritans.” The New York Times Book Review 29 March 1992: Section 7, 1. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/lifetimes/25665.html>. Johnson, Brian D. “Canadian Cool Meets American Psycho.” Maclean’s 10 April 2000. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.macleans.ca/culture/films/article.jsp?content=33146>. Kauffman, Linda S. “American Psycho [film review].” Film Quarterly 54.2 (Winter 2000-2001): 41-45. ———. Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Kennedy, Pagan. “Generation Gaffe: American Psycho.” The Nation 1 April 1991: 426-8. Kirchhoff, H. J. “Customs Clears Psycho: Booksellers’ Reaction Mixed.” The Globe and Mail 26 March 1991: C1. ———. “Psycho Sits in Limbo: Publisher Awaits Customs Ruling.” The Globe and Mail 14 March 1991: C1. Knight-Ridder News Service. “Vintage Picks up Ellis’ American Psycho.” Los Angeles Daily News 17 November 1990: L10. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “Psycho: Wither Death without Life?” The New York Times 11 March 1991: C18. Leo, John. “Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity.” U.S. News & World Report 3 Dec. 1990: 23. Love, Robert. “Psycho Analysis: Interview with Bret Easton Ellis.” Rolling Stone 4 April 1991: 45-46, 49-51. Mailer, Norman. “Children of the Pied Piper: Mailer on American Psycho.” Vanity Fair March 1991: 124-9, 182-3. Manguel, Alberto. “Designer Porn.” Saturday Night 106.6 (July 1991): 46-8. Manne, Robert. “Liberals Deny the Video Link.” The Australian 6 Jan. 1997: 11. McDowell, Edwin. “NOW Chapter Seeks Boycott of ‘Psycho’ Novel.” The New York Times 6 Dec. 1990: C17. ———. “Vintage Buys Violent Book Dropped by Simon & Schuster.” The New York Times 17 Nov. 1990: 13. Miner, Brad. “Random Notes.” National Review 31 Dec. 1990: 43. National Organization for Women. Library Journal 2.91 (1991): 114. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Three American Gothics.” Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews and Prose. New York: Plume, 1999. 232-43. Rapping, Elayne. “The Uses of Violence.” Progressive 55 (1991): 36-8. Rosenblatt, Roger. “Snuff this Book!: Will Brett Easton Ellis Get Away with Murder?” New York Times Book Review 16 Dec. 1990: 3, 16. Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint. New York: Random House, 1969. Shaw, Patrick W. The Modern American Novel of Violence. Troy, NY: Whitson, 2000. Sheppard, R. Z. “A Revolting Development.” Time 29 Oct. 1990: 100. Teachout, Terry. “Applied Deconstruction.” National Review 24 June 1991: 45-6. Tyrnauer, Matthew. “Who’s Afraid of Bret Easton Ellis?” Vanity Fair 57.8 (Aug. 1994): 70-3, 100-1. Vnuk, Helen. “X-rated? Outdated.” The Age 21 Sep. 2003. 17 May 2006 http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/09/19/1063625202157.html>. Wark, McKenzie. “Video Link Is a Distorted View.” The Australian 8 Jan. 1997: 11. Weldon, Fay. “Now You’re Squeamish?: In a World as Sick as Ours, It’s Silly to Target American Psycho.” The Washington Post 28 April 1991: C1. Wolf, Naomi. “The Animals Speak.” New Statesman & Society 12 April 1991: 33-4. Yardley, Jonathan. “American Psycho: Essence of Trash.” The Washington Post 27 Feb. 1991: B1. Young, Elizabeth J. “Psycho Killers. Last Lines: How to Shock the English.” New Statesman & Society 5 April 1991: 24. Young, Elizabeth J., and Graham Caveney. Shopping in Space: Essays on American ‘Blank Generation’ Fiction. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992. Zaller, Robert “American Psycho, American Censorship and the Dahmer Case.” Revue Francaise d’Etudes Americaines 16.56 (1993): 317-25. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brien, Donna Lee. "The Real Filth in : A Critical Reassessment." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>. APA Style Brien, D. (Nov. 2006) "The Real Filth in American Psycho: A Critical Reassessment," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>.

Photo ID 158378414 © Eduard Muzhevskyi | Dreamstime.com ABSTRACT There is a debate about the ethical implications of using human embryos in stem cell research, which can be influenced by cultural, moral, and social values. This paper argues for an adaptable framework to accommodate diverse cultural and religious perspectives. By using an adaptive ethics model, research protections can reflect various populations and foster growth in stem cell research possibilities. INTRODUCTION Stem cell research combines biology, medicine, and technology, promising to alter health care and the understanding of human development. Yet, ethical contention exists because of individuals’ perceptions of using human embryos based on their various cultural, moral, and social values. While these disagreements concerning policy, use, and general acceptance have prompted the development of an international ethics policy, such a uniform approach can overlook the nuanced ethical landscapes between cultures. With diverse viewpoints in public health, a single global policy, especially one reflecting Western ethics or the ethics prevalent in high-income countries, is impractical. This paper argues for a culturally sensitive, adaptable framework for the use of embryonic stem cells. Stem cell policy should accommodate varying ethical viewpoints and promote an effective global dialogue. With an extension of an ethics model that can adapt to various cultures, we recommend localized guidelines that reflect the moral views of the people those guidelines serve. BACKGROUND Stem cells, characterized by their unique ability to differentiate into various cell types, enable the repair or replacement of damaged tissues. Two primary types of stem cells are somatic stem cells (adult stem cells) and embryonic stem cells. Adult stem cells exist in developed tissues and maintain the body’s repair processes.[1] Embryonic stem cells (ESC) are remarkably pluripotent or versatile, making them valuable in research.[2] However, the use of ESCs has sparked ethics debates. Considering the potential of embryonic stem cells, research guidelines are essential. The International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) provides international stem cell research guidelines. They call for “public conversations touching on the scientific significance as well as the societal and ethical issues raised by ESC research.”[3] The ISSCR also publishes updates about culturing human embryos 14 days post fertilization, suggesting local policies and regulations should continue to evolve as ESC research develops.[4] Like the ISSCR, which calls for local law and policy to adapt to developing stem cell research given cultural acceptance, this paper highlights the importance of local social factors such as religion and culture. I. Global Cultural Perspective of Embryonic Stem Cells Views on ESCs vary throughout the world. Some countries readily embrace stem cell research and therapies, while others have stricter regulations due to ethical concerns surrounding embryonic stem cells and when an embryo becomes entitled to moral consideration. The philosophical issue of when the “someone” begins to be a human after fertilization, in the morally relevant sense,[5] impacts when an embryo becomes not just worthy of protection but morally entitled to it. The process of creating embryonic stem cell lines involves the destruction of the embryos for research.[6] Consequently, global engagement in ESC research depends on social-cultural acceptability. a. US and Rights-Based Cultures In the United States, attitudes toward stem cell therapies are diverse. The ethics and social approaches, which value individualism,[7] trigger debates regarding the destruction of human embryos, creating a complex regulatory environment. For example, the 1996 Dickey-Wicker Amendment prohibited federal funding for the creation of embryos for research and the destruction of embryos for “more than allowed for research on fetuses in utero.”[8] Following suit, in 2001, the Bush Administration heavily restricted stem cell lines for research. However, the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2005 was proposed to help develop ESC research but was ultimately vetoed.[9] Under the Obama administration, in 2009, an executive order lifted restrictions allowing for more development in this field.[10] The flux of research capacity and funding parallels the different cultural perceptions of human dignity of the embryo and how it is socially presented within the country’s research culture.[11] b. Ubuntu and Collective Cultures African bioethics differs from Western individualism because of the different traditions and values. African traditions, as described by individuals from South Africa and supported by some studies in other African countries, including Ghana and Kenya, follow the African moral philosophies of Ubuntu or Botho and Ukama, which “advocates for a form of wholeness that comes through one’s relationship and connectedness with other people in the society,”[12] making autonomy a socially collective concept. In this context, for the community to act autonomously, individuals would come together to decide what is best for the collective. Thus, stem cell research would require examining the value of the research to society as a whole and the use of the embryos as a collective societal resource. If society views the source as part of the collective whole, and opposes using stem cells, compromising the cultural values to pursue research may cause social detachment and stunt research growth.[13] Based on local culture and moral philosophy, the permissibility of stem cell research depends on how embryo, stem cell, and cell line therapies relate to the community as a whole. Ubuntu is the expression of humanness, with the person’s identity drawn from the “’I am because we are’” value.[14] The decision in a collectivistic culture becomes one born of cultural context, and individual decisions give deference to others in the society. Consent differs in cultures where thought and moral philosophy are based on a collective paradigm. So, applying Western bioethical concepts is unrealistic. For one, Africa is a diverse continent with many countries with different belief systems, access to health care, and reliance on traditional or Western medicines. Where traditional medicine is the primary treatment, the “’restrictive focus on biomedically-related bioethics’” [is] problematic in African contexts because it neglects bioethical issues raised by traditional systems.”[15] No single approach applies in all areas or contexts. Rather than evaluating the permissibility of ESC research according to Western concepts such as the four principles approach, different ethics approaches should prevail. Another consideration is the socio-economic standing of countries. In parts of South Africa, researchers have not focused heavily on contributing to the stem cell discourse, either because it is not considered health care or a health science priority or because resources are unavailable.[16] Each country’s priorities differ given different social, political, and economic factors. In South Africa, for instance, areas such as maternal mortality, non-communicable diseases, telemedicine, and the strength of health systems need improvement and require more focus[17] Stem cell research could benefit the population, but it also could divert resources from basic medical care. Researchers in South Africa adhere to the National Health Act and Medicines Control Act in South Africa and international guidelines; however, the Act is not strictly enforced, and there is no clear legislation for research conduct or ethical guidelines.[18] Some parts of Africa condemn stem cell research. For example, 98.2 percent of the Tunisian population is Muslim.[19] Tunisia does not permit stem cell research because of moral conflict with a Fatwa. Religion heavily saturates the regulation and direction of research.[20] Stem cell use became permissible for reproductive purposes only recently, with tight restrictions preventing cells from being used in any research other than procedures concerning ART/IVF. Their use is conditioned on consent, and available only to married couples.[21] The community's receptiveness to stem cell research depends on including communitarian African ethics. c. Asia Some Asian countries also have a collective model of ethics and decision making.[22] In China, the ethics model promotes a sincere respect for life or human dignity,[23] based on protective medicine. This model, influenced by Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), [24] recognizes Qi as the vital energy delivered via the meridians of the body; it connects illness to body systems, the body’s entire constitution, and the universe for a holistic bond of nature, health, and quality of life.[25] Following a protective ethics model, and traditional customs of wholeness, investment in stem cell research is heavily desired for its applications in regenerative therapies, disease modeling, and protective medicines. In a survey of medical students and healthcare practitioners, 30.8 percent considered stem cell research morally unacceptable while 63.5 percent accepted medical research using human embryonic stem cells. Of these individuals, 89.9 percent supported increased funding for stem cell research.[26] The scientific community might not reflect the overall population. From 1997 to 2019, China spent a total of $576 million (USD) on stem cell research at 8,050 stem cell programs, increased published presence from 0.6 percent to 14.01 percent of total global stem cell publications as of 2014, and made significant strides in cell-based therapies for various medical conditions.[27] However, while China has made substantial investments in stem cell research and achieved notable progress in clinical applications, concerns linger regarding ethical oversight and transparency.[28] For example, the China Biosecurity Law, promoted by the National Health Commission and China Hospital Association, attempted to mitigate risks by introducing an institutional review board (IRB) in the regulatory bodies. 5800 IRBs registered with the Chinese Clinical Trial Registry since 2021.[29] However, issues still need to be addressed in implementing effective IRB review and approval procedures. The substantial government funding and focus on scientific advancement have sometimes overshadowed considerations of regional cultures, ethnic minorities, and individual perspectives, particularly evident during the one-child policy era. As government policy adapts to promote public stability, such as the change from the one-child to the two-child policy,[30] research ethics should also adapt to ensure respect for the values of its represented peoples. Japan is also relatively supportive of stem cell research and therapies. Japan has a more transparent regulatory framework, allowing for faster approval of regenerative medicine products, which has led to several advanced clinical trials and therapies.[31] South Korea is also actively engaged in stem cell research and has a history of breakthroughs in cloning and embryonic stem cells.[32] However, the field is controversial, and there are issues of scientific integrity. For example, the Korean FDA fast-tracked products for approval,[33] and in another instance, the oocyte source was unclear and possibly violated ethical standards.[34] Trust is important in research, as it builds collaborative foundations between colleagues, trial participant comfort, open-mindedness for complicated and sensitive discussions, and supports regulatory procedures for stakeholders. There is a need to respect the culture’s interest, engagement, and for research and clinical trials to be transparent and have ethical oversight to promote global research discourse and trust. d. Middle East Countries in the Middle East have varying degrees of acceptance of or restrictions to policies related to using embryonic stem cells due to cultural and religious influences. Saudi Arabia has made significant contributions to stem cell research, and conducts research based on international guidelines for ethical conduct and under strict adherence to guidelines in accordance with Islamic principles. Specifically, the Saudi government and people require ESC research to adhere to Sharia law. In addition to umbilical and placental stem cells,[35] Saudi Arabia permits the use of embryonic stem cells as long as they come from miscarriages, therapeutic abortions permissible by Sharia law, or are left over from in vitro fertilization and donated to research.[36] Laws and ethical guidelines for stem cell research allow the development of research institutions such as the King Abdullah International Medical Research Center, which has a cord blood bank and a stem cell registry with nearly 10,000 donors.[37] Such volume and acceptance are due to the ethical ‘permissibility’ of the donor sources, which do not conflict with religious pillars. However, some researchers err on the side of caution, choosing not to use embryos or fetal tissue as they feel it is unethical to do so.[38] Jordan has a positive research ethics culture.[39] However, there is a significant issue of lack of trust in researchers, with 45.23 percent (38.66 percent agreeing and 6.57 percent strongly agreeing) of Jordanians holding a low level of trust in researchers, compared to 81.34 percent of Jordanians agreeing that they feel safe to participate in a research trial.[40] Safety testifies to the feeling of confidence that adequate measures are in place to protect participants from harm, whereas trust in researchers could represent the confidence in researchers to act in the participants’ best interests, adhere to ethical guidelines, provide accurate information, and respect participants’ rights and dignity. One method to improve trust would be to address communication issues relevant to ESC. Legislation surrounding stem cell research has adopted specific language, especially concerning clarification “between ‘stem cells’ and ‘embryonic stem cells’” in translation.[41] Furthermore, legislation “mandates the creation of a national committee… laying out specific regulations for stem-cell banking in accordance with international standards.”[42] This broad regulation opens the door for future global engagement and maintains transparency. However, these regulations may also constrain the influence of research direction, pace, and accessibility of research outcomes. e. Europe In the European Union (EU), ethics is also principle-based, but the principles of autonomy, dignity, integrity, and vulnerability are interconnected.[43] As such, the opportunity for cohesion and concessions between individuals’ thoughts and ideals allows for a more adaptable ethics model due to the flexible principles that relate to the human experience The EU has put forth a framework in its Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being allowing member states to take different approaches. Each European state applies these principles to its specific conventions, leading to or reflecting different acceptance levels of stem cell research. [44] For example, in Germany, Lebenzusammenhang, or the coherence of life, references integrity in the unity of human culture. Namely, the personal sphere “should not be subject to external intervention.”[45] Stem cell interventions could affect this concept of bodily completeness, leading to heavy restrictions. Under the Grundgesetz, human dignity and the right to life with physical integrity are paramount.[46] The Embryo Protection Act of 1991 made producing cell lines illegal. Cell lines can be imported if approved by the Central Ethics Commission for Stem Cell Research only if they were derived before May 2007.[47] Stem cell research respects the integrity of life for the embryo with heavy specifications and intense oversight. This is vastly different in Finland, where the regulatory bodies find research more permissible in IVF excess, but only up to 14 days after fertilization.[48] Spain’s approach differs still, with a comprehensive regulatory framework.[49] Thus, research regulation can be culture-specific due to variations in applied principles. Diverse cultures call for various approaches to ethical permissibility.[50] Only an adaptive-deliberative model can address the cultural constructions of self and achieve positive, culturally sensitive stem cell research practices.[51] II. Religious Perspectives on ESC Embryonic stem cell sources are the main consideration within religious contexts. While individuals may not regard their own religious texts as authoritative or factual, religion can shape their foundations or perspectives. The Qur'an states: “And indeed We created man from a quintessence of clay. Then We placed within him a small quantity of nutfa (sperm to fertilize) in a safe place. Then We have fashioned the nutfa into an ‘alaqa (clinging clot or cell cluster), then We developed the ‘alaqa into mudgha (a lump of flesh), and We made mudgha into bones, and clothed the bones with flesh, then We brought it into being as a new creation. So Blessed is Allah, the Best of Creators.”[52] Many scholars of Islam estimate the time of soul installment, marked by the angel breathing in the soul to bring the individual into creation, as 120 days from conception.[53] Personhood begins at this point, and the value of life would prohibit research or experimentation that could harm the individual. If the fetus is more than 120 days old, the time ensoulment is interpreted to occur according to Islamic law, abortion is no longer permissible.[54] There are a few opposing opinions about early embryos in Islamic traditions. According to some Islamic theologians, there is no ensoulment of the early embryo, which is the source of stem cells for ESC research.[55] In Buddhism, the stance on stem cell research is not settled. The main tenets, the prohibition against harming or destroying others (ahimsa) and the pursuit of knowledge (prajña) and compassion (karuna), leave Buddhist scholars and communities divided.[56] Some scholars argue stem cell research is in accordance with the Buddhist tenet of seeking knowledge and ending human suffering. Others feel it violates the principle of not harming others. Finding the balance between these two points relies on the karmic burden of Buddhist morality. In trying to prevent ahimsa towards the embryo, Buddhist scholars suggest that to comply with Buddhist tenets, research cannot be done as the embryo has personhood at the moment of conception and would reincarnate immediately, harming the individual's ability to build their karmic burden.[57] On the other hand, the Bodhisattvas, those considered to be on the path to enlightenment or Nirvana, have given organs and flesh to others to help alleviate grieving and to benefit all.[58] Acceptance varies on applied beliefs and interpretations. Catholicism does not support embryonic stem cell research, as it entails creation or destruction of human embryos. This destruction conflicts with the belief in the sanctity of life. For example, in the Old Testament, Genesis describes humanity as being created in God’s image and multiplying on the Earth, referencing the sacred rights to human conception and the purpose of development and life. In the Ten Commandments, the tenet that one should not kill has numerous interpretations where killing could mean murder or shedding of the sanctity of life, demonstrating the high value of human personhood. In other books, the theological conception of when life begins is interpreted as in utero,[59] highlighting the inviolability of life and its formation in vivo to make a religious point for accepting such research as relatively limited, if at all.[60] The Vatican has released ethical directives to help apply a theological basis to modern-day conflicts. The Magisterium of the Church states that “unless there is a moral certainty of not causing harm,” experimentation on fetuses, fertilized cells, stem cells, or embryos constitutes a crime.[61] Such procedures would not respect the human person who exists at these stages, according to Catholicism. Damages to the embryo are considered gravely immoral and illicit.[62] Although the Catholic Church officially opposes abortion, surveys demonstrate that many Catholic people hold pro-choice views, whether due to the context of conception, stage of pregnancy, threat to the mother’s life, or for other reasons, demonstrating that practicing members can also accept some but not all tenets.[63] Some major Jewish denominations, such as the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist movements, are open to supporting ESC use or research as long as it is for saving a life.[64] Within Judaism, the Talmud, or study, gives personhood to the child at birth and emphasizes that life does not begin at conception:[65] “If she is found pregnant, until the fortieth day it is mere fluid,”[66] Whereas most religions prioritize the status of human embryos, the Halakah (Jewish religious law) states that to save one life, most other religious laws can be ignored because it is in pursuit of preservation.[67] Stem cell research is accepted due to application of these religious laws. We recognize that all religions contain subsets and sects. The variety of environmental and cultural differences within religious groups requires further analysis to respect the flexibility of religious thoughts and practices. We make no presumptions that all cultures require notions of autonomy or morality as under the common morality theory, which asserts a set of universal moral norms that all individuals share provides moral reasoning and guides ethical decisions.[68] We only wish to show that the interaction with morality varies between cultures and countries. III. A Flexible Ethical Approach The plurality of different moral approaches described above demonstrates that there can be no universally acceptable uniform law for ESC on a global scale. Instead of developing one standard, flexible ethical applications must be continued. We recommend local guidelines that incorporate important cultural and ethical priorities. While the Declaration of Helsinki is more relevant to people in clinical trials receiving ESC products, in keeping with the tradition of protections for research subjects, consent of the donor is an ethical requirement for ESC donation in many jurisdictions including the US, Canada, and Europe.[69] The Declaration of Helsinki provides a reference point for regulatory standards and could potentially be used as a universal baseline for obtaining consent prior to gamete or embryo donation. For instance, in Columbia University’s egg donor program for stem cell research, donors followed standard screening protocols and “underwent counseling sessions that included information as to the purpose of oocyte donation for research, what the oocytes would be used for, the risks and benefits of donation, and process of oocyte stimulation” to ensure transparency for consent.[70] The program helped advance stem cell research and provided clear and safe research methods with paid participants. Though paid participation or covering costs of incidental expenses may not be socially acceptable in every culture or context,[71] and creating embryos for ESC research is illegal in many jurisdictions, Columbia’s program was effective because of the clear and honest communications with donors, IRBs, and related stakeholders. This example demonstrates that cultural acceptance of scientific research and of the idea that an egg or embryo does not have personhood is likely behind societal acceptance of donating eggs for ESC research. As noted, many countries do not permit the creation of embryos for research. Proper communication and education regarding the process and purpose of stem cell research may bolster comprehension and garner more acceptance. “Given the sensitive subject material, a complete consent process can support voluntary participation through trust, understanding, and ethical norms from the cultures and morals participants value. This can be hard for researchers entering countries of different socioeconomic stability, with different languages and different societal values.[72] An adequate moral foundation in medical ethics is derived from the cultural and religious basis that informs knowledge and actions.[73] Understanding local cultural and religious values and their impact on research could help researchers develop humility and promote inclusion. IV. Concerns Some may argue that if researchers all adhere to one ethics standard, protection will be satisfied across all borders, and the global public will trust researchers. However, defining what needs to be protected and how to define such research standards is very specific to the people to which standards are applied. We suggest that applying one uniform guide cannot accurately protect each individual because we all possess our own perceptions and interpretations of social values.[74] Therefore, the issue of not adjusting to the moral pluralism between peoples in applying one standard of ethics can be resolved by building out ethics models that can be adapted to different cultures and religions. Other concerns include medical tourism, which may promote health inequities.[75] Some countries may develop and approve products derived from ESC research before others, compromising research ethics or drug approval processes. There are also concerns about the sale of unauthorized stem cell treatments, for example, those without FDA approval in the United States. Countries with robust research infrastructures may be tempted to attract medical tourists, and some customers will have false hopes based on aggressive publicity of unproven treatments.[76] For example, in China, stem cell clinics can market to foreign clients who are not protected under the regulatory regimes. Companies employ a marketing strategy of “ethically friendly” therapies. Specifically, in the case of Beike, China’s leading stem cell tourism company and sprouting network, ethical oversight of administrators or health bureaus at one site has “the unintended consequence of shifting questionable activities to another node in Beike's diffuse network.”[77] In contrast, Jordan is aware of stem cell research’s potential abuse and its own status as a “health-care hub.” Jordan’s expanded regulations include preserving the interests of individuals in clinical trials and banning private companies from ESC research to preserve transparency and the integrity of research practices.[78] The social priorities of the community are also a concern. The ISSCR explicitly states that guidelines “should be periodically revised to accommodate scientific advances, new challenges, and evolving social priorities.”[79] The adaptable ethics model extends this consideration further by addressing whether research is warranted given the varying degrees of socioeconomic conditions, political stability, and healthcare accessibilities and limitations. An ethical approach would require discussion about resource allocation and appropriate distribution of funds.[80] CONCLUSION While some religions emphasize the sanctity of life from conception, which may lead to public opposition to ESC research, others encourage ESC research due to its potential for healing and alleviating human pain. Many countries have special regulations that balance local views on embryonic personhood, the benefits of research as individual or societal goods, and the protection of human research subjects. To foster understanding and constructive dialogue, global policy frameworks should prioritize the protection of universal human rights, transparency, and informed consent. In addition to these foundational global policies, we recommend tailoring local guidelines to reflect the diverse cultural and religious perspectives of the populations they govern. Ethics models should be adapted to local populations to effectively establish research protections, growth, and possibilities of stem cell research. For example, in countries with strong beliefs in the moral sanctity of embryos or heavy religious restrictions, an adaptive model can allow for discussion instead of immediate rejection. In countries with limited individual rights and voice in science policy, an adaptive model ensures cultural, moral, and religious views are taken into consideration, thereby building social inclusion. While this ethical consideration by the government may not give a complete voice to every individual, it will help balance policies and maintain the diverse perspectives of those it affects. Embracing an adaptive ethics model of ESC research promotes open-minded dialogue and respect for the importance of human belief and tradition. By actively engaging with cultural and religious values, researchers can better handle disagreements and promote ethical research practices that benefit each society. This brief exploration of the religious and cultural differences that impact ESC research reveals the nuances of relative ethics and highlights a need for local policymakers to apply a more intense adaptive model. - [1] Poliwoda, S., Noor, N., Downs, E., Schaaf, A., Cantwell, A., Ganti, L., Kaye, A. D., Mosel, L. I., Carroll, C. B., Viswanath, O., & Urits, I. (2022). Stem cells: a comprehensive review of origins and emerging clinical roles in medical practice. 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[14] Jecker, N. S., & Atuire, C. (2021). Bioethics in Africa: A contextually enlightened analysis of three cases. Developing World Bioethics, 22(2), 112–122. https://doi.org/10.1111/dewb.12324 [15] Jecker, N. S., & Atuire, C. (2021). Bioethics in Africa: A contextually enlightened analysis of three cases. Developing World Bioethics, 22(2), 112–122. https://doi.org/10.1111/dewb.12324 [16] Jackson, C.S., Pepper, M.S. Opportunities and barriers to establishing a cell therapy programme in South Africa. Stem Cell Res Ther 4, 54 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1186/scrt204; Pew Research Center. (2014, May 1). Public health a major priority in African nations. Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2014/05/01/public-health-a-major-priority-in-african-nations/ [17] Department of Health Republic of South Africa. (2021). Health Research Priorities (revised) for South Africa 2021-2024. National Health Research Strategy. https://www.health.gov.za/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/National-Health-Research-Priorities-2021-2024.pdf [18] Oosthuizen, H. (2013). Legal and Ethical Issues in Stem Cell Research in South Africa. In: Beran, R. (eds) Legal and Forensic Medicine. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32338-6_80, see also: Gaobotse G (2018) Stem Cell Research in Africa: Legislation and Challenges. J Regen Med 7:1. doi: 10.4172/2325-9620.1000142 [19] United States Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services. (1998). Tunisia: Information on the status of Christian conversions in Tunisia. UNHCR Web Archive. https://webarchive.archive.unhcr.org/20230522142618/https://www.refworld.org/docid/3df0be9a2.html [20] Gaobotse, G. (2018) Stem Cell Research in Africa: Legislation and Challenges. J Regen Med 7:1. doi: 10.4172/2325-9620.1000142 [21] Kooli, C. Review of assisted reproduction techniques, laws, and regulations in Muslim countries. Middle East Fertil Soc J 24, 8 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s43043-019-0011-0; Gaobotse, G. (2018) Stem Cell Research in Africa: Legislation and Challenges. J Regen Med 7:1. doi: 10.4172/2325-9620.1000142 [22] Pang M. C. (1999). Protective truthfulness: the Chinese way of safeguarding patients in informed treatment decisions. Journal of medical ethics, 25(3), 247–253. https://doi.org/10.1136/jme.25.3.247 [23] Wang, L., Wang, F., & Zhang, W. (2021). Bioethics in China’s biosecurity law: Forms, effects, and unsettled issues. Journal of law and the biosciences, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.1093/jlb/lsab019 https://academic.oup.com/jlb/article/8/1/lsab019/6299199 [24] Wang, Y., Xue, Y., & Guo, H. D. (2022). Intervention effects of traditional Chinese medicine on stem cell therapy of myocardial infarction. Frontiers in pharmacology, 13, 1013740. https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2022.1013740 [25] Li, X.-T., & Zhao, J. (2012). Chapter 4: An Approach to the Nature of Qi in TCM- Qi and Bioenergy. In Recent Advances in Theories and Practice of Chinese Medicine (p. 79). InTech. [26] Luo, D., Xu, Z., Wang, Z., & Ran, W. (2021). China's Stem Cell Research and Knowledge Levels of Medical Practitioners and Students. Stem cells international, 2021, 6667743. https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/6667743 [27] Luo, D., Xu, Z., Wang, Z., & Ran, W. (2021). China's Stem Cell Research and Knowledge Levels of Medical Practitioners and Students. Stem cells international, 2021, 6667743. https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/6667743 [28] Zhang, J. Y. (2017). Lost in translation? accountability and governance of Clinical Stem Cell Research in China. Regenerative Medicine, 12(6), 647–656. https://doi.org/10.2217/rme-2017-0035 [29] Wang, L., Wang, F., & Zhang, W. (2021). Bioethics in China’s biosecurity law: Forms, effects, and unsettled issues. Journal of law and the biosciences, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.1093/jlb/lsab019 https://academic.oup.com/jlb/article/8/1/lsab019/6299199 [30] Chen, H., Wei, T., Wang, H. et al. Association of China’s two-child policy with changes in number of births and birth defects rate, 2008–2017. BMC Public Health 22, 434 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-12839-0 [31] Azuma, K. Regulatory Landscape of Regenerative Medicine in Japan. Curr Stem Cell Rep 1, 118–128 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40778-015-0012-6 [32] Harris, R. (2005, May 19). Researchers Report Advance in Stem Cell Production. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2005/05/19/4658967/researchers-report-advance-in-stem-cell-production [33] Park, S. (2012). South Korea steps up stem-cell work. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2012.10565 [34] Resnik, D. B., Shamoo, A. E., & Krimsky, S. (2006). Fraudulent human embryonic stem cell research in South Korea: lessons learned. Accountability in research, 13(1), 101–109. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989620600634193. [35] Alahmad, G., Aljohani, S., & Najjar, M. F. (2020). Ethical challenges regarding the use of stem cells: interviews with researchers from Saudi Arabia. BMC medical ethics, 21(1), 35. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12910-020-00482-6 [36]Association for the Advancement of Blood and Biotherapies. https://www.aabb.org/regulatory-and-advocacy/regulatory-affairs/regulatory-for-cellular-therapies/international-competent-authorities/saudi-arabia [37] Alahmad, G., Aljohani, S., & Najjar, M. F. (2020). Ethical challenges regarding the use of stem cells: Interviews with researchers from Saudi Arabia. BMC medical ethics, 21(1), 35. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12910-020-00482-6 [38] Alahmad, G., Aljohani, S., & Najjar, M. F. (2020). Ethical challenges regarding the use of stem cells: Interviews with researchers from Saudi Arabia. BMC medical ethics, 21(1), 35. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12910-020-00482-6 Culturally, autonomy practices follow a relational autonomy approach based on a paternalistic deontological health care model. The adherence to strict international research policies and religious pillars within the regulatory environment is a great foundation for research ethics. However, there is a need to develop locally targeted ethics approaches for research (as called for in Alahmad, G., Aljohani, S., & Najjar, M. F. (2020). Ethical challenges regarding the use of stem cells: interviews with researchers from Saudi Arabia. BMC medical ethics, 21(1), 35. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12910-020-00482-6), this decision-making approach may help advise a research decision model. For more on the clinical cultural autonomy approaches, see: Alabdullah, Y. Y., Alzaid, E., Alsaad, S., Alamri, T., Alolayan, S. W., Bah, S., & Aljoudi, A. S. (2022). Autonomy and paternalism in Shared decision‐making in a Saudi Arabian tertiary hospital: A cross‐sectional study. Developing World Bioethics, 23(3), 260–268. https://doi.org/10.1111/dewb.12355; Bukhari, A. A. (2017). Universal Principles of Bioethics and Patient Rights in Saudi Arabia (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/124; Ladha, S., Nakshawani, S. A., Alzaidy, A., & Tarab, B. (2023, October 26). Islam and Bioethics: What We All Need to Know. Columbia University School of Professional Studies. https://sps.columbia.edu/events/islam-and-bioethics-what-we-all-need-know [39] Ababneh, M. A., Al-Azzam, S. I., Alzoubi, K., Rababa’h, A., & Al Demour, S. (2021). Understanding and attitudes of the Jordanian public about clinical research ethics. Research Ethics, 17(2), 228-241. https://doi.org/10.1177/1747016120966779 [40] Ababneh, M. A., Al-Azzam, S. I., Alzoubi, K., Rababa’h, A., & Al Demour, S. (2021). Understanding and attitudes of the Jordanian public about clinical research ethics. Research Ethics, 17(2), 228-241. https://doi.org/10.1177/1747016120966779 [41] Dajani, R. (2014). Jordan’s stem-cell law can guide the Middle East. Nature 510, 189. https://doi.org/10.1038/510189a [42] Dajani, R. (2014). Jordan’s stem-cell law can guide the Middle East. Nature 510, 189. https://doi.org/10.1038/510189a [43] The EU’s definition of autonomy relates to the capacity for creating ideas, moral insight, decisions, and actions without constraint, personal responsibility, and informed consent. However, the EU views autonomy as not completely able to protect individuals and depends on other principles, such as dignity, which “expresses the intrinsic worth and fundamental equality of all human beings.” Rendtorff, J.D., Kemp, P. (2019). Four Ethical Principles in European Bioethics and Biolaw: Autonomy, Dignity, Integrity and Vulnerability. In: Valdés, E., Lecaros, J. (eds) Biolaw and Policy in the Twenty-First Century. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 78. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05903-3_3 [44] Council of Europe. Convention for the protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with regard to the Application of Biology and Medicine: Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine (ETS No. 164) https://www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full-list?module=treaty-detail&treatynum=164 (forbidding the creation of embryos for research purposes only, and suggests embryos in vitro have protections.); Also see Drabiak-Syed B. K. (2013). New President, New Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research Policy: Comparative International Perspectives and Embryonic Stem Cell Research Laws in France. Biotechnology Law Report, 32(6), 349–356. https://doi.org/10.1089/blr.2013.9865 [45] Rendtorff, J.D., Kemp, P. (2019). Four Ethical Principles in European Bioethics and Biolaw: Autonomy, Dignity, Integrity and Vulnerability. In: Valdés, E., Lecaros, J. (eds) Biolaw and Policy in the Twenty-First Century. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 78. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05903-3_3 [46] Tomuschat, C., Currie, D. P., Kommers, D. P., & Kerr, R. (Trans.). (1949, May 23). Basic law for the Federal Republic of Germany. https://www.btg-bestellservice.de/pdf/80201000.pdf [47] Regulation of Stem Cell Research in Germany. Eurostemcell. (2017, April 26). https://www.eurostemcell.org/regulation-stem-cell-research-germany [48] Regulation of Stem Cell Research in Finland. Eurostemcell. (2017, April 26). https://www.eurostemcell.org/regulation-stem-cell-research-finland [49] Regulation of Stem Cell Research in Spain. Eurostemcell. (2017, April 26). https://www.eurostemcell.org/regulation-stem-cell-research-spain [50] Some sources to consider regarding ethics models or regulatory oversights of other cultures not covered: Kara MA. Applicability of the principle of respect for autonomy: the perspective of Turkey. J Med Ethics. 2007 Nov;33(11):627-30. doi: 10.1136/jme.2006.017400. PMID: 17971462; PMCID: PMC2598110. Ugarte, O. N., & Acioly, M. A. (2014). The principle of autonomy in Brazil: one needs to discuss it ... Revista do Colegio Brasileiro de Cirurgioes, 41(5), 374–377. https://doi.org/10.1590/0100-69912014005013 Bharadwaj, A., & Glasner, P. E. (2012). Local cells, global science: The rise of embryonic stem cell research in India. Routledge. For further research on specific European countries regarding ethical and regulatory framework, we recommend this database: Regulation of Stem Cell Research in Europe. Eurostemcell. (2017, April 26). https://www.eurostemcell.org/regulation-stem-cell-research-europe [51] Klitzman, R. (2006). Complications of culture in obtaining informed consent. The American Journal of Bioethics, 6(1), 20–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/15265160500394671 see also: Ekmekci, P. E., & Arda, B. (2017). Interculturalism and Informed Consent: Respecting Cultural Differences without Breaching Human Rights. Cultura (Iasi, Romania), 14(2), 159–172.; For why trust is important in research, see also: Gray, B., Hilder, J., Macdonald, L., Tester, R., Dowell, A., & Stubbe, M. (2017). Are research ethics guidelines culturally competent? Research Ethics, 13(1), 23-41. https://doi.org/10.1177/1747016116650235 [52] The Qur'an (M. Khattab, Trans.). (1965). Al-Mu’minun, 23: 12-14. https://quran.com/23 [53] Lenfest, Y. (2017, December 8). Islam and the beginning of human life. Bill of Health. https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2017/12/08/islam-and-the-beginning-of-human-life/ [54] Aksoy, S. (2005). Making regulations and drawing up legislation in Islamic countries under conditions of uncertainty, with special reference to embryonic stem cell research. Journal of Medical Ethics, 31:399-403.; see also: Mahmoud, Azza. "Islamic Bioethics: National Regulations and Guidelines of Human Stem Cell Research in the Muslim World." Master's thesis, Chapman University, 2022. https://doi.org/10.36837/ chapman.000386 [55] Rashid, R. (2022). When does Ensoulment occur in the Human Foetus. Journal of the British Islamic Medical Association, 12(4). ISSN 2634 8071. https://www.jbima.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/2-Ethics-3_-Ensoulment_Rafaqat.pdf. [56] Sivaraman, M. & Noor, S. (2017). Ethics of embryonic stem cell research according to Buddhist, Hindu, Catholic, and Islamic religions: perspective from Malaysia. Asian Biomedicine,8(1) 43-52. https://doi.org/10.5372/1905-7415.0801.260 [57] Jafari, M., Elahi, F., Ozyurt, S. & Wrigley, T. (2007). 4. Religious Perspectives on Embryonic Stem Cell Research. In K. Monroe, R. Miller & J. Tobis (Ed.), Fundamentals of the Stem Cell Debate: The Scientific, Religious, Ethical, and Political Issues (pp. 79-94). Berkeley: University of California Press. https://escholarship.org/content/qt9rj0k7s3/qt9rj0k7s3_noSplash_f9aca2e02c3777c7fb76ea768ba458f0.pdf https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520940994-005 [58] Lecso, P. A. (1991). The Bodhisattva Ideal and Organ Transplantation. Journal of Religion and Health, 30(1), 35–41. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27510629; Bodhisattva, S. (n.d.). The Key of Becoming a Bodhisattva. A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life. http://www.buddhism.org/Sutras/2/BodhisattvaWay.htm [59] There is no explicit religious reference to when life begins or how to conduct research that interacts with the concept of life. However, these are relevant verses pertaining to how the fetus is viewed. ((King James Bible. (1999). Oxford University Press. (original work published 1769)) Jerimiah 1: 5 “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee…” In prophet Jerimiah’s insight, God set him apart as a person known before childbirth, a theme carried within the Psalm of David. Psalm 139: 13-14 “…Thou hast covered me in my mother's womb. I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made…” These verses demonstrate David’s respect for God as an entity that would know of all man’s thoughts and doings even before birth. [60] It should be noted that abortion is not supported as well. [61] The Vatican. (1987, February 22). Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation Replies to Certain Questions of the Day. Congregation For the Doctrine of the Faith. https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19870222_respect-for-human-life_en.html [62] The Vatican. (2000, August 25). Declaration On the Production and the Scientific and Therapeutic Use of Human Embryonic Stem Cells. Pontifical Academy for Life. https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_academies/acdlife/documents/rc_pa_acdlife_doc_20000824_cellule-staminali_en.html; Ohara, N. (2003). Ethical Consideration of Experimentation Using Living Human Embryos: The Catholic Church’s Position on Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research and Human Cloning. Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Retrieved from https://article.imrpress.com/journal/CEOG/30/2-3/pii/2003018/77-81.pdf. [63] Smith, G. A. (2022, May 23). Like Americans overall, Catholics vary in their abortion views, with regular mass attenders most opposed. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/05/23/like-americans-overall-catholics-vary-in-their-abortion-views-with-regular-mass-attenders-most-opposed/ [64] Rosner, F., & Reichman, E. (2002). Embryonic stem cell research in Jewish law. Journal of halacha and contemporary society, (43), 49–68.; Jafari, M., Elahi, F., Ozyurt, S. & Wrigley, T. (2007). 4. Religious Perspectives on Embryonic Stem Cell Research. In K. Monroe, R. Miller & J. Tobis (Ed.), Fundamentals of the Stem Cell Debate: The Scientific, Religious, Ethical, and Political Issues (pp. 79-94). Berkeley: University of California Press. https://escholarship.org/content/qt9rj0k7s3/qt9rj0k7s3_noSplash_f9aca2e02c3777c7fb76ea768ba458f0.pdf https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520940994-005 [65] Schenker J. G. (2008). The beginning of human life: status of embryo. Perspectives in Halakha (Jewish Religious Law). Journal of assisted reproduction and genetics, 25(6), 271–276. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10815-008-9221-6 [66] Ruttenberg, D. (2020, May 5). The Torah of Abortion Justice (annotated source sheet). Sefaria. https://www.sefaria.org/sheets/234926.7?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en [67] Jafari, M., Elahi, F., Ozyurt, S. & Wrigley, T. (2007). 4. Religious Perspectives on Embryonic Stem Cell Research. In K. Monroe, R. Miller & J. Tobis (Ed.), Fundamentals of the Stem Cell Debate: The Scientific, Religious, Ethical, and Political Issues (pp. 79-94). Berkeley: University of California Press. https://escholarship.org/content/qt9rj0k7s3/qt9rj0k7s3_noSplash_f9aca2e02c3777c7fb76ea768ba458f0.pdf https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520940994-005 [68] Gert, B. (2007). Common morality: Deciding what to do. Oxford Univ. Press. [69] World Medical Association (2013). World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki: ethical principles for medical research involving human subjects. JAMA, 310(20), 2191–2194. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2013.281053 Declaration of Helsinki – WMA – The World Medical Association.; see also: National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. (1979). The Belmont report: Ethical principles and guidelines for the protection of human subjects of research. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/belmont-report/read-the-belmont-report/index.html [70] Zakarin Safier, L., Gumer, A., Kline, M., Egli, D., & Sauer, M. V. (2018). Compensating human subjects providing oocytes for stem cell research: 9-year experience and outcomes. Journal of assisted reproduction and genetics, 35(7), 1219–1225. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10815-018-1171-z https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6063839/ see also: Riordan, N. H., & Paz Rodríguez, J. (2021). Addressing concerns regarding associated costs, transparency, and integrity of research in recent stem cell trial. Stem Cells Translational Medicine, 10(12), 1715–1716. https://doi.org/10.1002/sctm.21-0234 [71] Klitzman, R., & Sauer, M. V. (2009). Payment of egg donors in stem cell research in the USA. Reproductive biomedicine online, 18(5), 603–608. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1472-6483(10)60002-8 [72] Krosin, M. T., Klitzman, R., Levin, B., Cheng, J., & Ranney, M. L. (2006). Problems in comprehension of informed consent in rural and peri-urban Mali, West Africa. Clinical trials (London, England), 3(3), 306–313. https://doi.org/10.1191/1740774506cn150oa [73] Veatch, Robert M. Hippocratic, Religious, and Secular Medical Ethics: The Points of Conflict. Georgetown University Press, 2012. [74] Msoroka, M. S., & Amundsen, D. (2018). One size fits not quite all: Universal research ethics with diversity. Research Ethics, 14(3), 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1177/1747016117739939 [75] Pirzada, N. (2022). The Expansion of Turkey’s Medical Tourism Industry. Voices in Bioethics, 8. https://doi.org/10.52214/vib.v8i.9894 [76] Stem Cell Tourism: False Hope for Real Money. Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI). (2023). https://hsci.harvard.edu/stem-cell-tourism, See also: Bissassar, M. (2017). Transnational Stem Cell Tourism: An ethical analysis. Voices in Bioethics, 3. https://doi.org/10.7916/vib.v3i.6027 [77]Song, P. (2011) The proliferation of stem cell therapies in post-Mao China: problematizing ethical regulation, New Genetics and Society, 30:2, 141-153, DOI: 10.1080/14636778.2011.574375 [78] Dajani, R. (2014). Jordan’s stem-cell law can guide the Middle East. Nature 510, 189. https://doi.org/10.1038/510189a [79] International Society for Stem Cell Research. (2024). Standards in stem cell research. International Society for Stem Cell Research. https://www.isscr.org/guidelines/5-standards-in-stem-cell-research [80] Benjamin, R. (2013). People’s science bodies and rights on the Stem Cell Frontier. Stanford University Press.

If you cannot understand my argument, and declare “It’s Greek to me,” you are quoting Shakespeare.Bernard LevinPsoriatic arthritis, in its acute or “generalised” stage, is unbearably painful. Exacerbating the crippling of the joints, the entire surface of the skin is covered with lesions only moderately salved by anti-inflammatory ointment, the application of which is as painful as the ailment it seeks to relieve: NURSE MILLS: I’ll be as gentle as I can.Marlow’s face again fills the screen, intense concentration, comical strain, and a whispered urgency in the voice over—MARLOW: (Voice over) Think of something boring—For Christ’s sake think of something very very boring—Speech a speech by Ted Heath a sentence long sentence from Bernard Levin a quiz by Christopher Booker a—oh think think—! Really boring! A Welsh male-voice choir—Everything in Punch—Oh! Oh! — (Potter 17-18)Marlow’s collation of boring things as a frantic liturgy is an attempt to distract himself from a tumescence that is both unwanted and out of place. Although bed-ridden and in constant pain, he is still sensitive to erogenous stimulation, even when it is incidental. The act of recollection, of garnering lists of things that bore him, distracts him from his immediate situation as he struggles with the mental anguish of the prospect of a humiliating orgasm. Literary lists do many things. They provide richness of detail, assemble and corroborate the materiality of the world of which they are a part and provide insight into the psyche and motivation of the collator. The sheer desperation of Dennis Potter’s Marlow attests to the arbitrariness of the list, the simple requirement that discrete and unrelated items can be assembled in linear order, without any obligation for topical concatenation. In its interrogative form, the list can serve a more urgent and distressing purpose than distraction:GOLDBERG: What do you use for pyjamas?STANLEY: Nothing.GOLDBERG: You verminate the sheet of your birth.MCCANN: What about the Albigensenist heresy?GOLDBERG: Who watered the wicket in Melbourne?MCCANN: What about the blessed Oliver Plunkett?(Pinter 51)The interrogative non sequitur is an established feature of the art of intimidation. It is designed to exert maximum stress in the subject through the use of obscure asides and the endowing of trivial detail with profundity. Harold Pinter’s use of it in The Birthday Party reveals how central it was to his “theatre of menace.” The other tactic, which also draws on the logic of the inventory to be both sequential and discontinuous, is to break the subject’s will through a machine-like barrage of rhetorical questions that leave no time for answers.Pinter learned from Samuel Beckett the pitiless, unforgiving logic of trivial detail pushed to extremes. Think of Molloy’s dilemma of the sucking stones. In order for all sixteen stones that he carries with him to be sucked at least once to assuage his hunger, a reliable system has to be hit upon:Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced with a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced with the stone that was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones. And when the desire to suck took hold of me again, I drew again on the right pocket of my greatcoat, certain of not taking the same stone as the last time. And while I sucked it I rearranged the other stones in the way I have just described. And so on. (Beckett, Molloy 69)And so on for six pages. Exhaustive permutation within a finite lexical set is common in Beckett. In the novel Watt the eponymous central character is charged with serving his unseen master’s dinner as well as tidying up afterwards. A simple and bucolic enough task it would seem. But Beckett’s characters are not satisfied with conjecture, the simple assumption that someone must be responsible for Mr. Knott’s dining arrangements. Like Molloy’s solution to the sucking stone problem, all possible scenarios must be considered to explain the conundrum of how and why Watt never saw Knott at mealtime. Twelve possibilities are offered, among them that1. Mr. Knott was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that he was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.2. Mr. Knott was not responsible for the arrangement, but knew who was responsible for the arrangement, and knew that such an arrangement existed, and was content.(Beckett, Watt 86)This stringent adherence to detail, absurd and exasperating as it is, is the work of fiction, the persistence of a viable, believable thing called Watt who exists as long as his thought is made manifest on a page. All writers face this pernicious prospect of having to confront and satisfy “fiction’s gargantuan appetite for fact, for detail, for documentation” (Kenner 70). A writer’s writer (Philip Marlow) Dennis Potter’s singing detective struggles with the acute consciousness that words eventually will fail him. His struggle to overcome verbal entropy is a spectre that haunts the entire literary imagination, for when the words stop the world stops.Beckett made this struggle the very stuff of his work, declaring famously that all he wanted to do as a writer was to leave “a stain upon the silence” (quoted in Bair 681). His characters deteriorate from recognisable people (Hamm in Endgame, Winnie in Happy Days) to mere ciphers of speech acts (the bodiless head Listener in That Time, Mouth in Not I). During this process they provide us with the vocabulary of entropy, a horror most eloquently expressed at the end of The Unnamable: I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (Beckett, Molloy 418)The importance Beckett accorded to pauses in his writing, from breaks in dialogue to punctuation, stresses the pacing of utterance that is in sync with the rhythm of human breath. This is acutely underlined in Jack MacGowran’s extraordinary gramophone recording of the above passage from The Unnamable. There is exhaustion in his voice, but it is inflected by an urgent push for the next words to forestall the last gasp. And what might appear to be parsimony is in fact the very commerce of writing itself. It is an economy of necessity, when any words will suffice to sustain presence in the face of imminent silence.Hugh Kenner has written eloquently on the relationship between writing and entropy, drawing on field and number theory to demonstrate how the business of fiction is forever in the process of generating variation within a finite set. The “stoic comedian,” as he figures the writer facing the blank page, self-consciously practices their art in the full cognisance that they select “elements from a closed set, and then (arrange) them inside a closed field” (Kenner 94). The nouveau roman (a genre conceived and practiced in Beckett’s lean shadow) is remembered in literary history as a rather austere, po-faced formalism that foregrounded things at the expense of human psychology or social interaction. But it is emblematic of Kenner’s portrait of stoicism as an attitude to writing that confronts the nature of fiction itself, on its own terms, as a practice “which is endlessly arranging things” (13):The bulge of the bank also begins to take effect starting from the fifth row: this row, as a matter of fact, also possesses only twenty-one trees, whereas it should have twenty-two for a true trapezoid and twenty-three for a rectangle (uneven row). (Robbe-Grillet 21)As a matter of fact. The nouveau roman made a fine if myopic art of isolating detail for detail’s sake. However, it shares with both Beckett’s minimalism and Joyce’s maximalism the obligation of fiction to fill its world with stuff (“maximalism” is a term coined by Michel Delville and Andrew Norris in relation to the musical scores of Frank Zappa that opposes the minimalism of John Cage’s work). Kenner asks, in The Stoic Comedians, where do the “thousands on thousands of things come from, that clutter Ulysses?” His answer is simple, from “a convention” and this prosaic response takes us to the heart of the matter with respect to the impact on writing of Isaac Newton’s unforgiving Second Law of Thermodynamics. In the law’s strictest physical sense of the dissipation of heat, of the loss of energy within any closed system that moves, the stipulation of the Second Law predicts that words will, of necessity, stop in any form governed by convention (be it of horror, comedy, tragedy, the Bildungsroman, etc.). Building upon and at the same time refining the early work on motion and mass theorised by Aristotle, Kepler, and Galileo, inter alia, Newton refined both the laws and language of classical mechanics. It was from Wiener’s literary reading of Newton that Kenner segued from the loss of energy within any closed system (entropy) to the running silent out of words within fiction.In the wake of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic turn in thinking in the 1940s, which was highly influenced by Newton’s Second Law, fiction would never again be considered in the same way (metafiction was a term coined in part to recognise this shift; the nouveau roman another). Far from delivering a reassured and reassuring present-ness, an integrated and ongoing cosmos, fiction is an isometric exercise in the struggle against entropy, of a world in imminent danger of running out of energy, of not-being:“His hand took his hat from the peg over his initialled heavy overcoat…” Four nouns, and the book’s world is heavier by four things. One, the hat, “Plasto’s high grade,” will remain in play to the end. The hand we shall continue to take for granted: it is Bloom’s; it goes with his body, which we are not to stop imagining. The peg and the overcoat will fade. “On the doorstep he felt in his hip pocket for the latchkey. Not there. In the trousers I left off.” Four more things. (Kenner 87)This passage from The Stoic Comedians is a tour de force of the conjuror’s art, slowing down the subliminal process of the illusion for us to see the fragility of fiction’s precarious grip on the verge of silence, heroically “filling four hundred empty pages with combinations of twenty-six different letters” (xiii). Kenner situates Joyce in a comic tradition, preceded by Gustave Flaubert and followed by Beckett, of exhaustive fictive possibility. The stoic, he tells us, “is one who considers, with neither panic nor indifference, that the field of possibilities available to him is large perhaps, or small perhaps, but closed” (he is prompt in reminding us that among novelists, gamblers and ethical theorists, the stoic is also a proponent of the Second Law of Thermodynamics) (xiii). If Joyce is the comedian of the inventory, then it is Flaubert, comedian of the Enlightenment, who is his immediate ancestor. Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881) is an unfinished novel written in the shadow of the Encyclopaedia, an apparatus of the literate mind that sought complete knowledge. But like the Encyclopaedia particularly and the Enlightenment more generally, it is fragmentation that determines its approach to and categorisation of detail as information about the world. Bouvard and Pécuchet ends, appropriately, in a frayed list of details, pronouncements and ephemera.In the face of an unassailable impasse, all that is left Flaubert is the list. For more than thirty years he constructed the Dictionary of Received Ideas in the shadow of the truncated Bouvard and Pécuchet. And in doing so he created for the nineteenth century mind “a handbook for novelists” (Kenner 19), a breakdown of all we know “into little pieces so arranged that they can be found one at a time” (3): ACADEMY, FRENCH: Run it down but try to belong to it if you can.GREEK: Whatever one cannot understand is Greek.KORAN: Book about Mohammed, which is all about women.MACHIAVELLIAN: Word only to be spoken with a shudder.PHILOSOPHY: Always snigger at it.WAGNER: Snigger when you hear his name and joke about the music of the future. (Flaubert, Dictionary 293-330)This is a sample of the exhaustion that issues from the tireless pursuit of categorisation, classification, and the mania for ordered information. The Dictionary manifests the Enlightenment’s insatiable hunger for received ideas, an unwieldy background noise of popular opinion, general knowledge, expertise, and hearsay. In both Bouvard and Pécuchet and the Dictionary, exhaustion was the foundation of a comic art as it was for both Joyce and Beckett after him, for the simple reason that it includes everything and neglects nothing. It is comedy born of overwhelming competence, a sublime impertinence, though not of manners or social etiquette, but rather, with a nod to Oscar Wilde, the impertinence of being definitive (a droll epithet that, not surprisingly, was the title of Kenner’s 1982 Times Literary Supplement review of Richard Ellmann’s revised and augmented biography of Joyce).The inventory, then, is the underlining physio-semiotics of fictional mechanics, an elegiac resistance to the thread of fiction fraying into nothingness. The motif of thermodynamics is no mere literary conceit here. Consider the opening sentence in Borges:Of the many problems which exercised the reckless discernment of Lönnrot, none was so strange—so rigorously strange, shall we say—as the periodic series of bloody events which culminated at the villa of Triste-le-Roy, amid the ceaseless aroma of the eucalypti. (Borges 76)The subordinate clause, as a means of adjectival and adverbial augmentation, implies a potentially infinite sentence through the sheer force of grammatical convention, a machine-like resistance to running out of puff:Under the notable influence of Chesterton (contriver and embellisher of elegant mysteries) and the palace counsellor Leibniz (inventor of the pre-established harmony), in my idle afternoons I have imagined this story plot which I shall perhaps write someday and which already justifies me somehow. (72)In “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” a single adjective charmed with emphasis will do to imply an unseen network:The visible work left by this novelist is easily and briefly enumerated. (Borges 36)The annotation of this network is the inexorable issue of the inflection: “I have said that Menard’s work can be easily enumerated. Having examined with care his personal files, I find that they contain the following items.” (37) This is a sample selection from nineteen entries:a) A Symbolist sonnet which appeared twice (with variants) in the review La conque (issues of March and October 1899).o) A transposition into alexandrines of Paul Valéry’s Le cimitière marin (N.R.F., January 1928).p) An invective against Paul Valéry, in the Papers for the Suppression of Reality of Jacques Reboul. (37-38)Lists, when we encounter them in Jorge Luis Borges, are always contextual, supplying necessary detail to expand upon character and situation. And they are always intertextual, anchoring this specific fictional world to others (imaginary, real, fabulatory or yet to come). The collation and annotation of the literary works of an imagined author (Pierre Menard) of an invented author (Edmond Teste) of an actual author (Paul Valéry) creates a recursive, yet generative, feedback loop of reference and literary progeny. As long as one of these authors continues to write, or write of the work of at least one of the others, a persistent fictional present tense is ensured.Consider Hillel Schwartz’s use of the list in his Making Noise (2011). It not only lists what can and is inevitably heard, in this instance the European 1700s, but what it, or local aural colour, is heard over:Earthy: criers of artichokes, asparagus, baskets, beans, beer, bells, biscuits, brooms, buttermilk, candles, six-pence-a-pound fair cherries, chickens, clothesline, cockles, combs, coal, crabs, cucumbers, death lists, door mats, eels, fresh eggs, firewood, flowers, garlic, hake, herring, ink, ivy, jokebooks, lace, lanterns, lemons, lettuce, mackeral, matches […]. (Schwartz 143)The extended list and the catalogue, when encountered as formalist set pieces in fiction or, as in Schwartz’s case, non-fiction, are the expansive equivalent of le mot juste, the self-conscious, painstaking selection of the right word, the specific detail. Of Ulysses, Kenner observes that it was perfectly natural that it “should have attracted the attention of a group of scholars who wanted practice in compiling a word-index to some extensive piece of prose (Miles Hanley, Word Index to Ulysses, 1937). More than any other work of fiction, it suggests by its texture, often by the very look of its pages, that it has been painstakingly assembled out of single words…” (31-32). In a book already crammed with detail, with persistent reference to itself, to other texts, other media, such formalist set pieces as the following from the oneiric “Circe” episode self-consciously perform for our scrutiny fiction’s insatiable hunger for more words, for invention, the Latin root of which also gives us the word inventory:The van of the procession appears headed by John Howard Parnell, city marshal, in a chessboard tabard, the Athlone Poursuivant and Ulster King of Arms. They are followed by the Right Honourable Joseph Hutchinson, lord mayor Dublin, the lord mayor of Cork, their worships the mayors of Limerick, Galway, Sligo and Waterford, twentyeight Irish representative peers, sirdars, grandees and maharajahs bearing the cloth of estate, the Dublin Metropolitan Fire Brigade, the chapter of the saints of finance in their plutocratic order of precedence, the bishop of Down and Connor, His Eminence Michael cardinal Logue archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, His Grace, the most reverend Dr William Alexander, archbishop of Armagh, primate of all Ireland, the chief rabbi, the Presbyterian moderator, the heads of the Baptist, Anabaptist, Methodist and Moravian chapels and the honorary secretary of the society of friends. (Joyce, Ulysses 602-604)Such examples demonstrate how Joycean inventories break from narrative as architectonic, stand-alone assemblages of information. They are Rabelaisian irruptions, like Philip Marlow’s lesions, that erupt in swollen bas-relief. The exaggerated, at times hysterical, quality of such lists, perform the hallucinatory work of displacement and condensation (the Homeric parallel here is the transformation of Odysseus’s men into swine by the witch Circe). Freudian, not to mention Stindberg-ian dream-work brings together and juxtaposes images and details that only make sense as non-sense (realistic but not real), such as the extraordinary explosive gathering of civic, commercial, political, chivalric representatives of Dublin in this foreshortened excerpt of Bloom’s regal campaign for his “new Bloomusalem” (606).The text’s formidable echolalia, whereby motifs recur and recapitulate into leitmotifs, ensures that the act of reading Ulysses is always cross-referential, suggesting the persistence of a conjured world that is always already still coming into being through reading. And it is of course this forestalling of Newton’s Second Law that Joyce brazenly conducts, in both the textual and physical sense, in Finnegans Wake. The Wake is an impossible book in that it infinitely sustains the circulation of words within a closed system, creating a weird feedback loop of cyclical return. It is a text that can run indefinitely through the force of its own momentum without coming to a conclusion. In a text in which the author’s alter ego is described in terms of the technology of inscription (Shem the Penman) and his craft as being a “punsil shapner,” (Joyce, Finnegans 98) Norbert Wiener’s descriptive example of feedback as the forestalling of entropy in the conscious act of picking up a pencil is apt: One we have determined this, our motion proceeds in such a way that we may say roughly that the amount by which the pencil is not yet picked up is decreased at each stage. (Wiener 7) The Wake overcomes the book’s, and indeed writing’s, struggle with entropy through the constant return of energy into its closed system as a cycle of endless return. Its generative algorithm can be represented thus: “… a long the riverrun …” (628-3). The Wake’s sense of unending confounds and contradicts, in advance, Frank Kermode’s averring to Newton’s Second Law in his insistence that the progression of all narrative fiction is defined in terms of the “sense of an ending,” the expectation of a conclusion, whereby the termination of words makes “possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle” (Kermode 17). It is the realisation of the novel imagined by Silas Flannery, the fictitious author in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller, an incipit that “maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning” (Calvino 140). Finnegans Wake is unique in terms of the history of the novel (if that is indeed what it is) in that it is never read, but (as Joseph Frank observed of Joyce generally) “can only be re-read” (Frank 19). With Wiener’s allegory of feedback no doubt in mind, Jacques Derrida’s cybernetic account of the act of reading Joyce comes, like a form of echolalia, on the heels of Calvino’s incipit, his perpetual sustaining of the beginning: you stay on the edge of reading Joyce—for me this has been going on for twenty-five or thirty years—and the endless plunge throws you back onto the river-bank, on the brink of another possible immersion, ad infinitum … In any case, I have the feeling that I haven’t yet begun to read Joyce, and this “not having begun to read” is sometimes the most singular and active relationship I have with his work. (Derrida 148) Derrida wonders if this process of ongoing immersion in the text is typical of all works of literature and not just the Wake. The question is rhetorical and resonates into silence. And it is silence, ultimately, that hovers as a mute herald of the end when words will simply run out.Post(script)It is in the nature of all writing that it is read in the absence of its author. Perhaps the most typical form of writing, then, is the suicide note. In an extraordinary essay, “Goodbye, Cruel Words,” Mark Dery wonders why it has been “so neglected as a literary genre” and promptly sets about reviewing its decisive characteristics. Curiously, the list features amongst its many forms: I’m done with lifeI’m no goodI’m dead. (Dery 262)And references to lists of types of suicide notes are among Dery’s own notes to the essay. With its implicit generic capacity to intransitively add more detail, the list becomes in the light of the terminal letter a condition of writing itself. The irony of this is not lost on Dery as he ponders the impotent stoicism of the scribbler setting about the mordant task of writing for the last time. Writing at the last gasp, as Dery portrays it, is a form of dogged, radical will. But his concluding remarks are reflective of his melancholy attitude to this most desperate act of writing at degree zero: “The awful truth (unthinkable to a writer) is that eloquent suicide notes are rarer than rare because suicide is the moment when language fails—fails to hoist us out of the pit, fails even to express the unbearable weight” (264) of someone on the precipice of the very last word they will ever think, let alone write. Ihab Hassan (1967) and George Steiner (1967), it would seem, were latecomers as proselytisers of the language of silence. But there is a queer, uncanny optimism at work at the terminal moment of writing when, contra Dery, words prevail on the verge of “endless, silent night.” (264) Perhaps when Newton’s Second Law no longer has carriage over mortal life, words take on a weird half-life of their own. Writing, after Socrates, does indeed circulate indiscriminately among its readers. There is a dark irony associated with last words. When life ceases, words continue to have the final say as long as they are read, and in so doing they sustain an unlikely, and in their own way, stoical sense of unending.ReferencesBair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett: A Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978.Beckett, Samuel. Molloy Malone Dies. The Unnamable. London: John Calder, 1973.---. Watt. London: John Calder, 1976.Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths. Selected Stories & Other Writings. Ed. Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby. New York: New Directions, 1964.Calvino, Italo. If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. Trans. William Weaver, London: Picador, 1981.Delville, Michael, and Andrew Norris. “Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism.” Ed. Louis Armand. Contemporary Poetics: Redefining the Boundaries of Contemporary Poetics, in Theory & Practice, for the Twenty-First Century. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2007. 126-49.Derrida, Jacques. “Two Words for Joyce.” Post-Structuralist Joyce. Essays from the French. Ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. 145-59.Dery, Mark. I Must Not think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012.Frank, Joseph, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” Sewanee Review, 53, 1945: 221-40, 433-56, 643-53.Flaubert, Gustave. Bouvard and Pécuchet. Trans. A. J. KrailSheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Flaubert, Gustave. Dictionary of Received Ideas. Trans. A. J. KrailSheimer. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976.Hassan, Ihab. The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett. New York: Knopf, 1967.Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. London: Faber and Faber, 1975.---. Ulysses. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.Kenner, Hugh. The Stoic Comedians. Berkeley: U of California P, 1974.Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Narrative Fiction. New York: Oxford U P, 1966.‪Levin, Bernard. Enthusiasms. London: Jonathan Cape, 1983.MacGowran, Jack. MacGowran Speaking Beckett. Claddagh Records, 1966.Pinter, Harold. The Birthday Party. London: Methuen, 1968.Potter, Dennis. The Singing Detective. London, Faber and Faber, 1987.Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Jealousy. Trans. Richard Howard. London: John Calder, 1965.Schwartz, Hillel. Making Noise. From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond. New York: Zone Books, 2011.Steiner, George. Language and Silence: New York: Atheneum, 1967.Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics, Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965.

IntroductionTasmania hangs from the map of Australia like a drop in freefall from the substance of the mainland. Often the whole state is mislaid from Australian maps and logos (Reddit). Tasmania has, at least since federation, been considered peripheral—a region seen as isolated, a ‘problem’ economically, politically, and culturally. However, Tasmania not only cleaves to the ‘north island’ of Australia but is also subject to the gravitational pull of an even greater land mass—Antarctica. In this article, we upturn the political conventions of map-making that place both Antarctica and Tasmania in obscure positions at the base of the globe. We show how a changing global climate re-frames Antarctica and the Southern Ocean as key drivers of worldwide environmental shifts. The liquid and solid water between Tasmania and Antarctica is revealed not as a homogenous barrier, but as a dynamic and relational medium linking the Tasmanian archipelago with Antarctica. When Antarctica becomes the focus, the script is flipped: Tasmania is no longer on the edge, but core to a network of gateways into the southern land. The state’s capital of Hobart can from this perspective be understood as an “Antarctic city”, central to the geopolitics, economy, and culture of the frozen continent (Salazar et al.). Viewed from the south, we argue, Tasmania is not a problem, but an opportunity for a form of ecological, cultural, economic, and political sustainability that opens up the southern continent to science, discovery, and imagination.A Centre at the End of the Earth? Tasmania as ParadoxThe islands of Tasmania owe their existence to climate change: a period of warming at the end of the last ice age melted the vast sheets of ice covering the polar regions, causing sea levels to rise by more than one hundred metres (Tasmanian Climate Change Office 8). Eleven thousand years ago, Aboriginal people would have witnessed the rise of what is now called Bass Strait, turning what had been a peninsula into an archipelago, with the large island of Tasmania at its heart. The heterogeneous practices and narratives of Tasmanian regional identity have been shaped by the geography of these islands, and their connection to the Southern Ocean and Antarctica. Regions, understood as “centres of collective consciousness and sociospatial identities” (Paasi 241) are constantly reproduced and reimagined through place-based social practices and communications over time. As we will show, diverse and contradictory narratives of Tasmanian regionality often co-exist, interacting in complex and sometimes complementary ways. Ecocritical literary scholar C.A. Cranston considers duality to be embedded in the textual construction of Tasmania, writing “it was hell, it was heaven, it was penal, it was paradise” (29). Tasmania is multiply polarised: it is both isolated and connected; close and far away; rich in resources and poor in capital; the socially conservative birthplace of radical green politics (Hay 60). The weather, as if sensing the fine balance of these paradoxes, blows hot and cold at a moment’s notice.Tasmania has wielded extraordinary political influence at times in its history—notably during the settlement of Melbourne in 1835 (Boyce), and during protests against damming the Franklin River in the early 1980s (Mercer). However, twentieth-century historical and political narratives of Tasmania portray the Bass Strait as a barrier, isolating Tasmanians from the mainland (Harwood 61). Sir Bede Callaghan, who headed one of a long line of federal government inquiries into “the Tasmanian problem” (Harwood 106), was clear that Tasmania was a victim of its own geography:the major disability facing the people of Tasmania (although some residents may consider it an advantage) is that Tasmania is an island. Separation from the mainland adversely affects the economy of the State and the general welfare of the people in many ways. (Callaghan 3)This perspective may stem from the fact that Tasmania has maintained the lowest Gross Domestic Product per capita of all states since federation (Bureau of Infrastructure Transport and Regional Economics 9). Socially, economically, and culturally, Tasmania consistently ranks among the worst regions of Australia. Statistical comparisons with other parts of Australia reveal the population’s high unemployment, low wages, poor educational outcomes, and bad health (West 31). The state’s remoteness and isolation from the mainland states and its reliance on federal income have contributed to the whole of Tasmania, including Hobart, being classified as ‘regional’ by the Australian government, in an attempt to promote immigration and economic growth (Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development 1). Tasmania is indeed both regional and remote. However, in this article we argue that, while regionality may be cast as a disadvantage, the island’s remote location is also an asset, particularly when viewed from a far southern perspective (Image 1).Image 1: Antarctica (Orthographic Projection). Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons, Modified Shading of Tasmania and Addition of Captions by H. Nielsen.Connecting Oceans/Collapsing DistanceTasmania and Antarctica have been closely linked in the past—the future archipelago formed a land bridge between Antarctica and northern land masses until the opening of the Tasman Seaway some 32 million years ago (Barker et al.). The far south was tangible to the Indigenous people of the island in the weather blowing in from the Southern Ocean, while the southern lights, or “nuyina”, formed a visible connection (Australia’s new icebreaker vessel is named RSV Nuyina in recognition of these links). In the contemporary Australian imagination, Tasmania tends to be defined by its marine boundaries, the sea around the islands represented as flat, empty space against which to highlight the topography of its landscape and the isolation of its position (Davies et al.). A more relational geographic perspective illuminates the “power of cross-currents and connections” (Stratford et al. 273) across these seascapes. The sea country of Tasmania is multiple and heterogeneous: the rough, shallow waters of the island-scattered Bass Strait flow into the Tasman Sea, where the continental shelf descends toward an abyssal plain studded with volcanic seamounts. To the south, the Southern Ocean provides nutrient-rich upwellings that attract fish and cetacean populations. Tasmania’s coast is a dynamic, liminal space, moving and changing in response to the global currents that are driven by the shifting, calving and melting ice shelves and sheets in Antarctica.Oceans have long been a medium of connection between Tasmania and Antarctica. In the early colonial period, when the seas were the major thoroughfares of the world and inland travel was treacherous and slow, Tasmania’s connection with the Southern Ocean made it a valuable hub for exploration and exploitation of the south. Between 1642 and 1900, early European explorers were followed by British penal colonists, convicts, sealers, and whalers (Kriwoken and Williamson 93). Tasmania was well known to polar explorers, with expeditions led by Jules Dumont d’Urville, James Clark Ross, Roald Amundsen, and Douglas Mawson all transiting through the port of Hobart. Now that the city is no longer a whaling hub, growing populations of cetaceans continue to migrate past the islands on their annual journeys from the tropics, across the Sub-Antarctic Front and Antarctic circumpolar current, and into the south polar region, while southern species such as leopard seals are occasionally seen around Tasmania (Tasmania Parks and Wildlife). Although the water surrounding Tasmania and Antarctica is at times homogenised as a ‘barrier’, rendering these places isolated, the bodies of water that surround both are in fact permeable, and regularly crossed by both humans and marine species. The waters are diverse in their physical characteristics, underlying topography, sea life, and relationships, and serve to connect many different ocean regions, ecosystems, and weather patterns.Views from the Far SouthWhen considered in terms of its relative proximity to Antarctic, rather than its distance from Australia’s political and economic centres, Tasmania’s identity undergoes a significant shift. A sign at Cockle Creek, in the state’s far south, reminds visitors that they are closer to Antarctica than to Cairns, invoking a discourse of connectedness that collapses the standard ten-day ship voyage to Australia’s closest Antarctic station into a unit comparable with the routinely scheduled 5.5 hour flight to North Queensland. Hobart is the logistical hub for the Australian Antarctic Division and the French Institut Polaire Francais (IPEV), and has hosted Antarctic vessels belonging to the USA, South Korea, and Japan in recent years. From a far southern perspective, Hobart is not a regional Australian capital but a global polar hub. This alters the city’s geographic imaginary not only in a latitudinal sense—from “top down” to “bottom up”—but also a longitudinal one. Via its southward connection to Antarctica, Hobart is also connected east and west to four other recognized gateways: Cape Town in South Africa, Christchurch in New Zealand; Punta Arenas in Chile; and Ushuaia in Argentina (Image 2). The latter cities are considered small by international standards, but play an outsized role in relation to Antarctica.Image 2: H. Nielsen with a Sign Announcing Distances between Antarctic ‘Gateway’ Cities and Antarctica, Ushuaia, Argentina, 2018. Image Credit: Nicki D'Souza.These five cities form what might be called—to adapt geographer Klaus Dodds’ term—a ‘Southern Rim’ around the South Polar region (Dodds Geopolitics). They exist in ambiguous relationship to each other. Although the five cities signed a Statement of Intent in 2009 committing them to collaboration, they continue to compete vigorously for northern hemisphere traffic and the brand identity of the most prominent global gateway. A state government brochure spruiks Hobart, for example, as the “perfect Antarctic Gateway” emphasising its uniqueness and “natural advantages” in this regard (Tasmanian Government, 2016). In practice, the cities are automatically differentiated by their geographic position with respect to Antarctica. Although the ‘ice continent’ is often conceived as one entity, it too has regions, in both scientific and geographical senses (Terauds and Lee; Antonello). Hobart provides access to parts of East Antarctica, where the Australian, French, Japanese, and Chinese programs (among others) have bases; Cape Town is a useful access point for Europeans going to Dronning Maud Land; Christchurch is closest to the Ross Sea region, site of the largest US base; and Punta Arenas and Ushuaia neighbour the Antarctic Peninsula, home to numerous bases as well as a thriving tourist industry.The Antarctic sector is important to the Tasmanian economy, contributing $186 million (AUD) in 2017/18 (Wells; Gutwein; Tasmanian Polar Network). Unsurprisingly, Tasmania’s gateway brand has been actively promoted, with the 2016 Australian Antarctic Strategy and 20 Year Action Plan foregrounding the need to “Build Tasmania’s status as the premier East Antarctic Gateway for science and operations” and the state government releasing a “Tasmanian Antarctic Gateway Strategy” in 2017. The Chinese Antarctic program has been a particular focus: a Memorandum of Understanding focussed on Australia and China’s Antarctic relations includes a “commitment to utilise Australia, including Tasmania, as an Antarctic ‘gateway’.” (Australian Antarctic Division). These efforts towards a closer relationship with China have more recently come under attack as part of a questioning of China’s interests in the region (without, it should be noted, a concomitant questioning of Australia’s own considerable interests) (Baker 9). In these exchanges, a global power and a state of Australia generally classed as regional and peripheral are brought into direct contact via the even more remote Antarctic region. This connection was particularly visible when Chinese President Xi Jinping travelled to Hobart in 2014, in a visit described as both “strategic” and “incongruous” (Burden). There can be differences in how this relationship is narrated to domestic and international audiences, with issues of sovereignty and international cooperation variously foregrounded, laying the ground for what Dodds terms “awkward Antarctic nationalism” (1).Territory and ConnectionsThe awkwardness comes to a head in Tasmania, where domestic and international views of connections with the far south collide. Australia claims sovereignty over almost 6 million km2 of the Antarctic continent—a claim that in area is “roughly the size of mainland Australia minus Queensland” (Bergin). This geopolitical context elevates the importance of a regional part of Australia: the claims to Antarctic territory (which are recognised only by four other claimant nations) are performed not only in Antarctic localities, where they are made visible “with paraphernalia such as maps, flags, and plaques” (Salazar 55), but also in Tasmania, particularly in Hobart and surrounds. A replica of Mawson’s Huts in central Hobart makes Australia’s historic territorial interests in Antarctica visible an urban setting, foregrounding the figure of Douglas Mawson, the well-known Australian scientist and explorer who led the expeditions that proclaimed Australia’s sovereignty in the region of the continent roughly to its south (Leane et al.). Tasmania is caught in a balancing act, as it fosters international Antarctic connections (such hosting vessels from other national programs), while also playing a key role in administering what is domestically referred to as the Australian Antarctic Territory. The rhetoric of protection can offer common ground: island studies scholar Godfrey Baldacchino notes that as island narratives have moved “away from the perspective of the ‘explorer-discoverer-colonist’” they have been replaced by “the perspective of the ‘custodian-steward-environmentalist’” (49), but reminds readers that a colonising disposition still lurks beneath the surface. It must be remembered that terms such as “stewardship” and “leadership” can undertake sovereignty labour (Dodds “Awkward”), and that Tasmania’s Antarctic connections can be mobilised for a range of purposes. When Environment Minister Greg Hunt proclaimed at a press conference that: “Hobart is the gateway to the Antarctic for the future” (26 Apr. 2016), the remark had meaning within discourses of both sovereignty and economics. Tasmania’s capital was leveraged as a way to position Australia as a leader in the Antarctic arena.From ‘Gateway’ to ‘Antarctic City’While discussion of Antarctic ‘Gateway’ Cities often focuses on the economic and logistical benefit of their Antarctic connections, Hobart’s “gateway” identity, like those of its counterparts, stretches well beyond this, encompassing geological, climatic, historical, political, cultural and scientific links. Even the southerly wind, according to cartoonist Jon Kudelka, “has penguins in it” (Image 3). Hobart residents feel a high level of connection to Antarctica. In 2018, a survey of 300 randomly selected residents of Greater Hobart was conducted under the umbrella of the “Antarctic Cities” Australian Research Council Linkage Project led by Assoc. Prof. Juan Francisco Salazar (and involving all three present authors). Fourteen percent of respondents reported having been involved in an economic activity related to Antarctica, and 36% had attended a cultural event about Antarctica. Connections between the southern continent and Hobart were recognised as important: 71.9% agreed that “people in my city can influence the cultural meanings that shape our relationship to Antarctica”, while 90% agreed or strongly agreed that Hobart should play a significant role as a custodian of Antarctica’s future, and 88.4% agreed or strongly agreed that: “How we treat Antarctica is a test of our approach to ecological sustainability.” Image 3: “The Southerly” Demonstrates How Weather Connects Hobart and Antarctica. Image Credit: Jon Kudelka, Reproduced with Permission.Hobart, like the other gateways, activates these connections in its conscious place-branding. The city is particularly strong as a centre of Antarctic research: signs at the cruise-ship terminal on the waterfront claim that “There are more Antarctic scientists based in Hobart […] than at any other one place on earth, making Hobart a globally significant contributor to our understanding of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean.” Researchers are based at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS), the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), and the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD), with several working between institutions. Many Antarctic researchers located elsewhere in the world also have a connection with the place through affiliations and collaborations, leading journalist Jo Chandler to assert that “the breadth and depth of Hobart’s knowledge of ice, water, and the life forms they nurture […] is arguably unrivalled anywhere in the world” (86).Hobart also plays a significant role in Antarctica’s governance, as the site of the secretariats for the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) and the Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels (ACAP), and as host of the Antarctic Consultative Treaty Meetings on more than one occasion (1986, 2012). The cultural domain is active, with Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) featuring a permanent exhibit, “Islands to Ice”, emphasising the ocean as connecting the two places; the Mawson’s Huts Replica Museum aiming (among other things) to “highlight Hobart as the gateway to the Antarctic continent for the Asia Pacific region”; and a biennial Australian Antarctic Festival drawing over twenty thousand visitors, about a sixth of them from interstate or overseas (Hingley). Antarctic links are evident in the city’s natural and built environment: the dolerite columns of Mt Wellington, the statue of the Tasmanian Antarctic explorer Louis Bernacchi on the waterfront, and the wharfs that regularly accommodate icebreakers such as the Aurora Australis and the Astrolabe. Antarctica is figured as a southern neighbour; as historian Tom Griffiths puts it, Tasmanians “grow up with Antarctica breathing down their necks” (5). As an Antarctic City, Hobart mediates access to Antarctica both physically and in the cultural imaginary.Perhaps in recognition of the diverse ways in which a region or a city might be connected to Antarctica, researchers have recently been suggesting critical approaches to the ‘gateway’ label. C. Michael Hall points to a fuzziness in the way the term is applied, noting that it has drifted from its initial definition (drawn from economic geography) as denoting an access and supply point to a hinterland that produces a certain level of economic benefits. While Hall looks to keep the term robustly defined to avoid empty “local boosterism” (272–73), Gabriela Roldan aims to move the concept “beyond its function as an entry and exit door”, arguing that, among other things, the local community should be actively engaged in the Antarctic region (57). Leane, examining the representation of Hobart as a gateway in historical travel texts, concurs that “ingress and egress” are insufficient descriptors of Tasmania’s relationship with Antarctica, suggesting that at least discursively the island is positioned as “part of an Antarctic rim, itself sharing qualities of the polar region” (45). The ARC Linkage Project described above, supported by the Hobart City Council, the State Government and the University of Tasmania, as well as other national and international partners, aims to foster the idea of the Hobart and its counterparts as ‘Antarctic cities’ whose citizens act as custodians for the South Polar region, with a genuine concern for and investment in its future.Near and Far: Local Perspectives A changing climate may once again herald a shift in the identity of the Tasmanian islands. Recognition of the central role of Antarctica in regulating the global climate has generated scientific and political re-evaluation of the region. Antarctica is not only the planet’s largest heat sink but is the engine of global water currents and wind patterns that drive weather patterns and biodiversity across the world (Convey et al. 543). For example, Tas van Ommen’s research into Antarctic glaciology shows the tangible connection between increased snowfall in coastal East Antarctica and patterns of drought southwest Western Australia (van Ommen and Morgan). Hobart has become a global centre of marine and Antarctic science, bringing investment and development to the city. As the global climate heats up, Tasmania—thanks to its low latitude and southerly weather patterns—is one of the few regions in Australia likely to remain temperate. This is already leading to migration from the mainland that is impacting house prices and rental availability (Johnston; Landers 1). The region’s future is therefore closely entangled with its proximity to the far south. Salazar writes that “we cannot continue to think of Antarctica as the end of the Earth” (67). Shifting Antarctica into focus also brings Tasmania in from the margins. As an Antarctic city, Hobart assumes a privileged positioned on the global stage. This allows the city to present itself as central to international research efforts—in contrast to domestic views of the place as a small regional capital. The city inhabits dual identities; it is both on the periphery of Australian concerns and at the centre of Antarctic activity. Tasmania, then, is not in freefall, but rather at the forefront of a push to recognise Antarctica as entangled with its neighbours to the north.AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by the Australian Research Council under LP160100210.ReferencesAntonello, Alessandro. “Finding Place in Antarctica.” Antarctica and the Humanities. Eds. Peder Roberts, Lize-Marie van der Watt, and Adrian Howkins. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 181–204.Australian Government. 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Aug. 2012. 17 Apr. 2019 <http://www.dpac.tas.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/176331/Tasmanian_SeaLevelRisePlanningAllowance_TechPaper_Aug2012.pdf>.Tasmanian Government Department of State Growth. “Tasmanian Antarctic Gateway Strategy.” Hobart: Tasmanian Government, 12 Dec. 2017. 21 Feb. 2019 <https://www.antarctic.tas.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/164749/Tasmanian_Antarctic_Gateway_Strategy_12_Dec_2017.pdf>.———. “Tasmania Delivers…” Apr. 2016. 15 Apr. 2019 <https://www.antarctic.tas.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/66461/Tasmania_Delivers_Antarctic_Southern_Ocean_web.pdf>.———. “Antarctic Tasmania.” 17 Feb. 2019. 15 Apr. 2019 <https://www.antarctic.tas.gov.au/about/hobarts_antarctic_attractions>.Tasmanian Polar Network. “Welcome to the Tasmanian Polar Network.” 28 Feb. 2019 <https://www.tasmanianpolarnetwork.com.au/>.Terauds, Aleks, and Jasmine Lee. “Antarctic Biogeography Revisited: Updating the Antarctic Conservation Biogeographic Regions.” Diversity and Distributions 22 (2016): 836–40.Van Ommen, Tas, and Vin Morgan. “Snowfall Increase in Coastal East Antarctica Linked with Southwest Western Australian Drought.” Nature Geoscience 3 (2010): 267–72.Wells Economic Analysis. The Contribution of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Sector to the Tasmanian Economy 2017. 18 Nov. 2018. 15 Apr. 2019 <https://www.stategrowth.tas.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/185671/Wells_Report_on_the_Value_of_the_Antarctic_Sector_2017_18.pdf>.West, J. “Obstacles to Progress: What’s Wrong with Tasmania, Really?” Griffith Review: Tasmania: The Tipping Point? 39 (2013): 31–53.

Introduction Zines have a direct cultural link to the third wave feminist movement, with feminist zines rising to prominence in the early 1990s alongside the punk subculture known as “riot grrrl” (Piepmeier 8). Feminist zines provided an avenue for young women to write about their lived experiences of sexism or discrimination and to connect with other women who had shared experiences, much like the consciousness-raising groups of previous feminist activist movements (Duncombe 197). Contemporary feminist zines have continued to evolve in this manner, blending the personal with the political as zinemakers approach new topics and find new language and imagery to reflect their experiences. Physical and digital contemporary feminist zines recall this legacy of feminist activism through signifying historically traditional feminist craft practices such as quilting and scrapbooking in their material construction. Reynolds suggests that it is the unique modes of creative self-expression offered by the zine medium, rather than the actual content, that offer opportunities for political expression for zinemakers (12-13). Zines allow the maker to have complete, unmediated control over the content, production methods, and distribution reach outside of mainstream media and capitalist mass production (Reynolds 12). Zinemakers become empowered through self-representation and reclaiming one’s own narrative (Piepmeier 5). Here, the type of political and activist work undertaken is local and individual, where cultural change is promoted through autonomous media consumption and production (Piepmeier 5). Zines are most commonly defined as “noncommercial, nonprofessional, small-circulation magazines which their creators produce, publish, and distribute by themselves” (Duncombe 9). Prominent zine scholarship has historically analysed zines through the lens of subcultural or alternative publishing (Duncombe; Atton), as sites of resistance to mainstream representation (Schilt; Harris), and for their textual or narrative properties (Poletti; Piepmeier; Sinor). While the modes of production and content of zines promote unique lines of enquiry, the materiality of the zine also provides opportunity for informing and enhancing reading practices beyond the formal structures of traditionally printed materials. Duncombe suggests that the form of the zine “becomes part of the message from zine creators to their audience” (105). This is evident in contemporary feminist zines where the use of handcrafted elements adds layers of signification to the object, particularly concerning communal belonging through shared textual and visual narratives It is through this lens that I will examine two examples of contemporary feminist zines, Fine Cloth and She’s the Girl U Want. I argue that the use of unique handcrafted elements such as thread and fabric in zine construction signifies a shared legacy with feminist craft practices as a means of self-expression and communication. I will first examine how thread acts as a binding mechanism in Fine Cloth, where the reader is required to physically untie the zine to gain access to its interior. This action is an invitation to read the enclosed contents and suggests a kind of intimacy between reader and creator. I will then investigate how the felt fabric embroidered cover of She’s the Girl U Want promotes an enhanced reading of the interior pages, transforming the zine into an autobiographical object. I will also examine how these handcrafted elements can translate to digital and online zines using the example of e-zine She Began to Question. Feminist craft practices have evolved alongside technological advancements and digital zines continue to utilise both real and perceived handcrafted elements to signify this shared legacy. The effect of materiality is not lost by reading and interacting with digital zines. Rather than viewing the digital zine as a reproduction of the physical, digital zines instead open space for new iterations and interpretations through existing in a new cultural context and offers an opportunity to continue to sustain these practices. Intentional Construction: Quilts, Scrapbooks, and Zines In order to understand how the material properties of the contemporary zine signify a shared legacy with traditional feminine craft practices, it is useful to explore the existing research linking the two sites of enquiry. Zines scholars Alison Piepmeier and Anna Poletti have both connected contemporary zinemaking to a legacy of feminism activism by drawing comparison to traditionally feminine craft practices such as scrapbooking and quilting, respectively. Poletti and Piepmeier establish similarities from the intentional construction of the object for individual women to communicate and connect with a broader community of women, utilising tools, themes, and language relevant to their own cultural moment. Quiltmaking, scrapbooking and zinemaking are “conscious labouring choices” that privilege personal production as a means of communication and social connection (Poletti 55). The finished object tells the story of its labour, shown through seams, joins, stitches, and folds. Poletti explains, “the physical trace of the quilter is read by following generations, involving imaginative work which takes the object as a point of departure for constructing a sense of connection with one’s ancestry” (56). Quilts and scrapbooks are objects that are designed to be shared socially, but also passed on as an heirloom through generations, while zine distribution mimics this tradition through its unique gifting and trading culture (Poletti 56). Christensen concludes that “the physical properties of stuff shape the ways social connections happen”, reinforcing the significance of the materiality of the object in connecting a shared legacy (264). These traditions have provided women with a means of participating in cultural production, using their outputs as empowering statements of unfettered creative expression. When reading zines through the lens of historical craft tradition, it becomes apparent that the use of thread and fabric in contemporary zinemaking can be read as a conscious choice of the maker to draw a link to feminist lineage. The Use of Thread in Fine Cloth Fine Cloth is a single cardstock page, folded in half and approximately A6 in size. It is colour-printed, with the front cover featuring a taupe damask pattern and an ink stamp that reads “for THOSE with discerning taste to follow and CHERISH” (emphasis original). The back page is plain dark brown and features computer-printed text alongside the words “fine cloth” with a floral illustration. A clear plastic button has been hand sewn onto the front page with a length of white embroidery thread that loops around the exterior of the zine to wrap back around the button. This acts as an enclosure, meaning the inner contents of the folded page cannot be accessed while the thread is wrapped around the zine. There is a small paper tag on the end of the thread stamped in ink with the word “entry” on one side and “fine cloth” on the other side. These structural elements evoke a sense of the zine acting as a private invitation to the reader. The use of thread here is an intentional design element that blocks access to the inner pages and is therefore a significant element to consider when reading the zine. The act of unravelling the thread enclosure provides an interaction that is often not present in other text-objects. Piepmeier explains this act of “forcing the reader to untie the zine before reading it” means the reader becomes more invested in the act of reading (71). The ability to open, as well as deliberately close, the zine “evokes a sense of secrecy, of being invited to read hidden material” (Piepmeier 72). Fig. 1: Cover of Fine Cloth zine. Unwinding the thread from around the button and opening the zine reveals a double page spread of an intense and overwhelming digitally constructed collage. While the exterior of the zine appears quite formal and elicits an old-world sensibility through its print style, colouring, and font choice, the interior pages contrast this with the use of bold black, red, and yellow and extensive image layering. The reader’s eye is drawn to a misshapen plastic baby doll face surrounded by steampunk style ephemera such as an analogue clock, illustrated human hands, letter tiles, and accordion keys. The text of the inner spread is almost indecipherable due to the colouring and the busy background collaging. These design choices can be read as evoking a feeling of a scrapbook, a traditional item on the surface but its inner contents reveal a personal interpretation of the creator’s experiences. Poletti supports this notion, explaining that wrapping or encasing a zine is a transformative action in which the reader must first negotiate the zine as an object before it becomes a text (247-248). The additional sculptural elements beyond that of a traditionally printed book draw attention to the fact that each copy of the zine has been constructed by hand, thus humanising the creator of the object. The use of thread also acts as a reference to specific forms of women’s labour and skill (Poletti 56). The quilt is a visibly constructed item through its seams and joins, and the addition of this thread draws attention to the zine as a visibly constructed item (Poletti 54). Unlike the largely invisible binding or stapling of other printed matter, the thread here makes the hand of the maker visible on the object. Through interacting with the thread that has been sewn and wound, the reader is “registering the time expanded on each individual copy and positioning the contents as something gifted, prepared, contemplated, and special” (Poletti 247). This interaction promotes an embodied connection between creator and reader, thus promoting a feeling of intimacy. The Use of Fabric in She’s the Girl U Want She’s the Girl U Want is an A5-size booklet, folded and stapled along the spine. The front and back cover is made from bright yellow felt fabric with a crudely hand embroidered “#2” and a heart in black thread in the bottom right-hand corner. The inner pages of the zine are standard colour photocopied printer paper, mostly featuring drawings and doodles of femme-presenting characters alongside handwritten text. On the first inner page, the photocopy includes the ring-binding of a notebook, presumably where the drawing has been photocopied from. The middle spread has photocopied fabric pieces decorating the edges of the pages, bordering the hand-illustrated elements. The inclusion of the ring-binding and the fabric further draws attention to the zine as a handcrafted item, signifying to the reader that despite being photocopies, these internal pages are the result of a conscious labouring practice. Fig. 2: Cover of She’s the Girl U Want zine. The yellow felt shows signs of being cut by hand, with the sides cut on a slight angle and not sitting flush with the printer paper. The zine is also clearly folded and stapled by hand as the staples are off-centre, causing the pages to sit askew. Piepmeier refers to features such as these as “a scrappy messiness”, which is “an aesthetic that serves to humanize the creator and the zine” and enhances the sense of personal connection when engaging with the object (67). It reminds the reader “consciously or unconsciously, that there is a maker, a creator, behind this text” (Sinor 243). The reader understands that each page here has passed through the hand of the maker and was constructed with intention and care, situating the object as a labour of love. The fabric and thread of the exterior can therefore transform a reading of this zine from a booklet of doodles or scribbles to an autobiographical object. While books can contain the content of life writing, their formal structures remind “readers that they aren’t actually privy to someone’s confidential information” (Piepmeier 73). The handcrafted elements of the zine signify “fewer layers of separation between the reader and the creator”, and encourage the reader to approach the zine as a personal object, rather than a mass-produced object (Piepmeier 73). The fabric zine cover is thus a performative gesture of self-making and a statement of communal belonging. Smith draws on this notion of performativity to explain the prominence of shared narratives in feminist autobiographical texts, writing: “the history of an autobiographical subject is the history of recitations of the self. But if the self does not exist prior to its recitations, then autobiographical storytelling is a recitation of a recitation” (21). I suggest reframing this statement to the context of appropriating material qualities to construct an identity through history and legacy. Sinor suggests this is particularly apparent in feminist zines, where the performance of making the zine enacts a performance of identity, one that can be read to reflect a historical lineage of feminist craft practices (245). Online Community and the Digital Reproducibility of Zines Technological advancements have historically played a significant role in feminist craft practices and have lowered the barriers to cultural production (Ramdarshan Bold 217). The invention of sewing machines drastically altered quilt-making practices both in terms of quilt construction but also the surrounding social interactions (Christensen 267). Likewise, digital scrapbooking spaces have opened up opportunities for self-expression and sharing “without requiring outlays of money and space during production” (Christensen 268). While many anticipated the decline of zines with the rise of the Internet, zines have continued to flourish in both physical and online spaces (Duncombe 217). The technological impacts on physical zines can be considered in two ways. Firstly in terms of digital communities, that is the connecting and networking between members of the zine community that can occur in online spaces. The digital medium makes it easier for the reader to connect with the creator and for creators to connect more broadly with a like-minded network thanks to email and social media (Ramdarshan Bold 220). This means a more immediate and tangible sense of community is available to those making and reading zines, compared to the informal and distant networks of physical zines that primarily operate through the postal system (Ferris). Then, secondly, zines can be translated into a digital form known as e-zines, made through desktop publishing applications or simply as digitised copies of physical zines. Digital zines are arguably more accessible as they are more affordable to produce and distribute than their physical counterparts and therefore more affordable for readers to purchase (Ferris). E-zines hold the potential to reach wider networks and new audiences as they are not limited by print runs, thus providing an opportunity to sustain the practice and continue to build a lineage alongside advancements in technology (Christensen 263). While the unique material qualities of physical zines such as Fine Cloth and She’s the Girl U Want enhance reading practices and undoubtedly add complex layers of understanding to the zine as material object, it is important to understand that the zine form itself is inherently reproducible. It is rare that a physical zine is entirely original and homemade, with most zines undergoing processes of scanning and photocopying. I have argued here that the handmade qualities of zines can provide additional context in which to read that object, but I also argue that a digital reproduction of a zine opens space for new iterations and interpretations through existing in a new context (Burns 5). Burns argues that “the embodiment of the physical object is carried into the digital file”, and this is evident in the example of She’s the Girl U Want (7-8). The inclusion of scanned fabric pieces still reads as fabric even after the process of reproduction, continuing to call attention to the zine as a handmade object. This can also be seen in the e-zine She Began to Question, produced as a 17-page PDF. It is black and white and features handwriting, hand drawn illustrations and doodles, computer-typed text, and collaging. The cover of the zine appears to be a scan of the front page of a physical booklet, where the left side of the image (where the spine of a physical zine would be) appears to curve, suggesting that, rather than being a flat image that has been digitally manipulated, it was previously handcrafted. While the reader does not open the page in the same way they would a physical zine, the ascribed meaning here positions the reader to understand the intention and approach the object as handcrafted. Fig. 3: Inner page of She Began to Question zine. The collaging technique of the inner pages of She Began to Question mimics the scanned fabric found in She’s the Girl U Want. While the reader cannot determine exactly if this is fabric or scrapbooking paper, the cut and paste style calls to mind scrap pieces of fabric and the floral design suggests a pattern that is viewed as traditionally feminine, or even a reminder of the damask cover of Fine Cloth. The use of floral patterns here signifies to the reader that the zinemaker understands and acknowledges the ways feminist zines recall crafting traditions, and thus directly situates itself within that lineage. It is through the aesthetic and ideological performances of previous feminist craft practices that emerging practices continue to draw on this lineage, regardless of their materiality (Piepmeier 42). Conclusion Christensen suggests that the existence of the material object itself “suggests a desire to leave a durable legacy” (240). Zines, much like scrapbooks or quilts, may not be created with the explicit intention of becoming a historical record, but implicitly do so through the act of recalling traditional feminine craft practices. Contemporary zine creators align themselves with a feminist legacy through ideological or aesthetic similarities, shown here through the use of material items such as thread and fabric in physical zines and the signification of these material objects in digital zines (Piepmeier 39). Zines continue to participate as a record of communication in both physical and digital forms, adapting the use of physical ephemera and digital technology to reflect the cultural moment. References Atton, Chris. Alternative Media. London: Sage, 2002. Burns, Jasmine E. “The Aura of Materiality: Digital Surrogacy and the Preservation of Photographic Archives.” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 36.1 (2017): 1-8. Christensen, Danille Elise. “Materializing the Everyday: ‘Safe’ Scrapbooks, Aesthetic Mess, and the Rhetorics of Workmanship.” Journal of Folklore Research 54.3 (2017): 233-284. Duncombe, Stephen. Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture. Portland: Microcosm, 2017. Ferris, Melanie A. “Resisting Mainstream Media: Girls and the Act of Making Zines.” Canadian Woman Studies 20.4 (2001): 51-55. Harris, Anita. “GURL Scenes and Grrrl Zines: The Regulation and Resistance of Girls in Late Modernity.” Feminist Review 75 (2003): 38–56. Piepmeier, Alison. Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism. New York: New York UP, 2009. Poletti, Anna. Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture. Carlton: Melbourne UP, 2008. Ramdarshan Bold, Melanie. “Why Diverse Zines Matter: A Case Study of the People of Color Zines Project.” Publishing Research Quarterly 33.3 (2017): 215–28. Reynolds, Chelsea. “My Zines, So Far, Aren't as Political as Other Works I've Produced: Communicative Capitalism among Queer Feminist Zinesters”. Communication, Culture and Critique 13.1 (2020): 1-19. Schilt, Kristen. “‘I’ll Resist with Every Inch and Every Breath’: Girls and Zine Making as a Form of Resistance.” Youth & Society. 35.1 (2003): 71-97. Sinor, Jennifer. “Another Form of Crying: Girl Zines as Life Writing.” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 26.1-2 (2003): 240-264. Smith, Sidonie. “Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 10.1 (1995): 17-33. Sorensen, Alexa. She Began to Question. 2019. Wijango, Angela. She’s the Girl U Want #2.

Photo ID 131102170 © Geckophotos | Dreamstime.com INTRODUCTION Medical tourism should contribute to developing a more robust healthcare system that acts in the best interests of patients and ensures equal access to healthcare. This paper examines medical tourism in Colombia and argues that developing a system that aligns with bioethical principles is necessary. People traveling for care should have access to the Ministry of Health rather than only the Ministry of Industry and Tourism, emphasizing their purpose as patients seeking medical procedures or treatments rather than tourists engaging in leisure activities. Additionally, in the interest of justice, Colombian patients should benefit from the revenue derived from medical tourism. It is crucial to recognize that both patients traveling for care and people in the destination country can derive benefits from medical tourism. The Colombian government can protect the rights and well-being of patients seeking care and ensure that any benefits are distributed fairly among Colombian citizens. I. Background Medical tourism refers to people traveling to foreign countries to obtain health care.[1] Many individuals from high-income countries seek health care in less developed countries to take advantage of the lower costs. Destination countries are increasingly showing interest in becoming medical tourism hubs due to the significant financial potential of this multi-billion dollar industry. The global medical tourism market is projected to reach $207.9 billion by 2027.[2] This growth not only generates income but also creates employment opportunities and business prospects for local residents in sectors such as tourism, pharmaceuticals, and infrastructure. By establishing themselves as medical tourism destinations, countries can stimulate economic development and enhance their healthcare structure. Colombia is among the fastest-growing medical tourism destinations in the world. It has become a popular destination for medical tourists due to its advanced healthcare infrastructure, biotechnology, and highly skilled physicians who cater to international patients at affordable prices.[3] The healthcare entities in Colombia offer a wide range of medical procedures, including cardiovascular, bariatric, orthopedics, cosmetic surgery, dental care, and fertility treatments. [4] The Colombian government has actively promoted medical tourism to position the country as a destination for world-class medical services.[5] Through strategic economic policies, effective regulation, and digital marketing, medical tourism has emerged as a significant contributor to Colombia’s income. The Colombian Ministry of Industry and Tourism, which regulates medical tourism in Colombia, forecasts at least 2.8 million health tourists and a revenue of at least $6.3 billion by 2032.[6] Colombia intends to have medical tourism play a significant role in its economy. However, ethical issues exist. The Colombia Ministry of Industry and Tourism is more involved in medical tourism than the Ministry of Health is. Additionally, the government has not been held accountable for the shortcomings in the medical tourism industry. There should be an organization advocating for the rights and well-being of medical tourists. Furthermore, using public funds to attract international patients may divert funds from local communities. Last, the negative impacts of medical tourism on Colombian patients deserve attention. This paper aims to explore these ethical issues from two perspectives: that of medical tourists and that of Colombian citizens. I argue that the benefits of medical tourism outweigh the harms but that those traveling for health care deserve protection. II. Patients: Are They International Patients or Tourists? When medical tourists seek hospitals and physicians in a destination country, facilitators may direct them to non-licensed practitioners and questionable facilities. These facilitators, who receive commissions, may not act in the patient’s best interest. Rather, like travel agents, they base their referrals on the referral fees that hospitals or physicians pay.[7] International patients risk getting lower-quality health care from unregulated hospitals or providers. This can interfere with informed consent and increase the risk of infections. There may be an absence of medical malpractice coverage from physicians. Unregulated or unlicensed medical care may even lead to patient fatalities. Therefore, it is crucial for international patients to carefully evaluate the risks associated with “booking” their healthcare options. To mitigate these risks, it is important for international patients to thoroughly assess the accreditation status of the hospital or clinic they plan to visit. The Joint Commission International (JCI) accreditation can provide patients with an external quality assessment and assist them in making an informed decision.[8] International patients should proactively seek out certified and reputable healthcare providers and institutions to ensure both their safety and a high quality of care. Colombia has five hospitals and clinics with JCI accreditation.[9] Colombia is the third most-used destination for plastic surgery in the world; the first is Brazil, and the second is Turkey. In Colombia, one out of every three plastic surgery patients is an international patient.[10] The Colombian Association for Plastic Surgery advises all patients to check the hospital's accreditation. Patients should check the website of the local Secretary of Health in each city and see if the physician conducting the plastic surgery is listed.[11] Institutions and doctors must fully comply with requirements, including describing the procedure and obtaining informed consent from patients. It is very common to read in the media plastic surgeries conducted in what is known in Latin America as “clinicas de garage” (garage clinics) with negative results and deaths.[12] Official data covers plastic surgeries conducted at accredited institutions with registered doctors. There is a lack of data on garage clinics. There are a few things the government can do to make medical tourism safer. First, the Ministry of Health’s website should maintain a list of healthcare providers with JCI accreditation. In each city, the local Secretary of Health is responsible for providing patients with information about the quality of care of the hospitals in its region. Second, the government should take responsibility for providing accurate and comprehensive information to international patients, enabling them to make fully informed decisions regarding their medical procedures. In the context of informed consent, patients may have trouble understanding due to language barriers, terminology, and the complexity of the risks involved in medical procedures. Lastly, Congress should enact a legal framework that determines the responsibility of all parties involved in medical tourism.[13] In the unfortunate event that a medical tourist requires intensive care, it becomes imperative to determine who will bear the responsibility for their well-being and any potential financial implications. Medical tourists are not protected from errors and failures of medical procedures because the Colombia Constitution specifies that the healthcare system exclusively caters to its citizens, while coverage for foreigners is limited to emergencies only. The US State Department recommends that those traveling to Colombia have international health insurance.[14] International patients can sue doctors in Colombia for medical malpractice, referred to as medical liability.[15] The government should take responsibility for certifying medical institutions and issuing medical visas with specific requirements and regulations specific to medical tourism.[16] A new medical visa system is in place. Changing the terminology may help the government see those traveling for care as medical patients rather than medical tourists. That may lead to a different mindset and spur the government to protect them and ensure high-quality care. It may also help those traveling avoid tourism industry facilitators and find reputable surgeons and hospitals. III. Are Colombian Patients and the Local Healthcare System Benefiting from Medical Tourism? The main reason for the growth of medical tourism from developed countries to developing countries like Colombia is the excessive cost of treatment in wealthier nations.[17] Other reasons include the long queues for certain types of medical services in the home country, the availability of better technologies abroad, inadequate (or absence of) health insurance, and the unavailability[18] (or prohibition) of certain medical services in the home country.[19] The Colombian Constitution recognizes health as a fundamental right for all citizens.[20] Pursuant to the Constitution’s health mandate, Colombia designed a mandatory universal social health insurance system in 1993. It aims to achieve a fair distribution of resources, opportunities, and services while holding the government accountable.[21] Before 1993, less than 25 percent of the population had coverage; now, between 94 and 99 percent have it, regardless of income level or employment.[22] However, universal care does not entitle Colombian citizens to many of the modern surgical centers, technology, and doctors that tourists access. Local wealthy Colombian citizens tend to purchase private insurance that allows them many more healthcare options.[23] The OECD reports that only 41 percent of Colombian citizens were satisfied with the availability of the quality of care, while the OECD average is 67 percent. According to the OECD, the out-of-pocket health expenditure in Colombia is 14 percent, which is lower than the OECD average of 18 percent. Despite its recognized right to health care, the current system is not providing the quality of care that the people would prefer. Those traveling to Colombia for care are not covered by universal social health insurance and must pay for their health care[24] out of pocket or through their private insurers using international coverage.[25] Like local supplemental private insurance, medical tourists and their insurance plans tend to pay more for their care than the rate that the universal system would pay the providers for care provided to the general Colombian population. This situation often leads to higher revenue from medical tourists than local patients unless the local patients have supplemental private insurance. The mismatched payment schemes leave the local population with unequal access to healthcare resources[26] since healthcare providers prefer to cater to patients paying more than the government-subsidized insurance pays. Medical tourism “threatens to result in a dual market structure”[27] characterized by a higher-quality, expensive segment that serves wealthy nationals and foreigners alongside a lower-quality segment that caters to the poor, most of whom are covered by universal healthcare coverage.[28] Medical tourists should pay taxes or a special premium to improve the local healthcare system. While the medical tourism industry arguably generates tax revenue,[29] some additional money should flow from the medical tourists to the healthcare outlets that the local people use. Then, the country can benefit even more from promoting medical tourism while ensuring that the government and the healthcare system follow the principles of justice, beneficence, and public welfare.[30] In Colombia, Fundación Cardioinfantil, a private non-profit hospital known as “La Cardio,” is a good example of a regional leader committed to providing clinical excellence to both national and international patients.[31] About 20 years ago, La Cardio, well known for its cardiovascular health care, aimed to become the top hospital in the region (Latin America and the Caribbean) to obtain financial resources for improving its facilities. It became the first hospital in Colombia to achieve the JCI accreditation, attracting patients from countries with inadequate cardiovascular healthcare systems.[32] Foreign governments covered their citizens’ medical expenses, allowing La Cardio to fund system improvement. Currently ranked as the fifth-best clinic in Latin America and having won the Gold Award for Corporate Social Responsibility, La Cardio has received recognition for its dedication to serving economically disadvantaged Colombian patients.[33] This example demonstrates how introducing a high-paying market has not led to neglecting local patients, as resources from medical tourists are used to enhance the healthcare system for the local population. CONCLUSION The Colombian government needs to recognize that international patients are seeking medical services, not tourism or vacation experiences. Therefore, a new policy should categorize international patients separately from the tourism sector and treat them purely as patients. The introduction of medical visas may help this. Once establishing international patients are patients and not tourists, the Colombian government could impose taxes on them and allocate the funds generated to reinvest in the healthcare needs of its citizens, ensuring justice and promoting awareness of the ethical rights of international patients. At the same time, home country governments directing patients to a destination country should conduct thorough due diligence of the ethical principles applied to international patients as well as the accreditation of the destination country’s hospitals. Colombia may be aware of the implications of the difference in terms but unwilling to modify the language due to the associated costs, liabilities, and risks involved. - [1] Gaines, J., Lee, C. V. (2019). Medical tourism. Travel Medicine, 371–375. https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-323-54696-6.00039-2 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780323546966000392 [2] Forecasted Evolution of Medical Travels, 2023-2027: A Segmental View. ReportLinker. (2023, December). https://www.reportlinker.com/p06473784/Medical-Tourism-Market-Size-Share-Trends-and-Analysis-by-Region-Service-Provider-and-Segment-Forecast.html [3] Forecasted Evolution of Medical Travels, 2023-2027: A Segmental View. ReportLinker. (2023, December). [4] Arias-Aragonés, F.J.A., Payares, A.M.C., & Jiménez, O.J. (2020). Characterization of the healthcare tourism in the city of Bogotá and the District of Cartagena. Clío América, 14 (28), 486-492. https://doi.org/10.21676/23897848.3941 [5] Arias-Aragonés, et al. (2020). [6] Arias- Aragones, et al. (2020). https://www.colombiaproductiva.com/ptp-sectores/historico/turismo-salud (citing the Colombian Production Transformation Program (PTP)) [7] Glenn Cohen, Patients with Passports Medical Tourism, Law, and Ethics. New York Oxford University Press, 2015, p. 25 [8] Glenn, Cohen. (2015), p. 23-24. [9] A Global Leader for Health Care Quality and Patient Safety. Joint Commission International. https://www.jointcommissioninternational.org/ (The five Colombian hospitals and clinics with JCI accreditation are two hospitals in the capital city Bogota (la Cardio and Fundación Hospital Universitario Santa Fé de Bogotá), one hospital in Cali (Clinica Inbanaco), one hospital in Medellín (Hospital Pablo Tobón), and one clinic in Florida Blanca (Fundación Cardiovascular de Colombia). Nearby countries such as Venezuela and Trinidad Tobago do not have any accredited hospitals or clinics. Ecuador and Panamá have one each, Perú has eleven, and Brazil has seventy-one.) [10] International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery ISAPS (2023), ISAPS International Survey on Aesthetic/Cosmetic Procedures performed in 2022, p. 52. https://www.isaps.org/discover/about-isaps/global-statistics/reports-and-press-releases/global-survey-2022-full-report-and-press-releases/ (most frequently cited countries of foreign patients in Colombia are the US, Spain, and Panama.) [11] Why choose a member of the SCCP. (2023). Colombia Plastic Surgery Association (SCCP). https://cirugiaplastica.org.co/porque-elegir-un-miembro-de-la-sccp/ See also: To Find a Surgeon. (2023). Colombia Plastic Surgery Association (SCCP). https://cirugiaplastica.org.co (This website is helpful for checking the list of members of the SCCP.) [12] Cosmetic Surgeries Performed in Garage Offices can Become a Public Health Problem. Concejo de Bogotá D.C. (2022). https://concejodebogota.gov.co/cirugias-esteticas-practicadas-en-consultorios-de-garaje-se-pueden/cbogota/2015-07-17/100100.php (There are many cases of deaths resulting from illegal plastic surgeries. The local government in Bogota is aware of the deaths, as reported in the Bogota Counsel (2015)). See also Travel.State.Gov, US Department of State, Bureau of Consular Affairs. (August 17, 2023). https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-travel/International-Travel-Country-Information-Pages/Colombia.html (There is a warning that says: “Although Colombia has many elective/cosmetic surgery facilities that are on par with those found in the United States, the quality of care varies widely. If you plan to undergo surgery in Colombia, carefully research the doctor and recovery facility you plan to use. Make sure that emergency medical facilities are available, and that professionals are accredited and qualified. Share all health information (e.g., medical conditions, medications, allergies) with your doctor before surgery.") [13] Arias-Aragonés, F.J.A., Payares, A.M.C., & Jiménez, O.J. (2020), p. 490. (report “the absence of regulation and a legal framework that determines the responsibilities of each link in the production chain” as a difficulty that affects competitivity to become a leader in medical tourism in the Latin American region.) See also: Trujillo, M. A. (2023, November 24). Colombia’s New Bill on Regulating Cosmetic Surgeries. BNN Breaking. https://bnn.network/breaking-news/health/colombia-to-regulate-cosmetic-surgeries-a-step-towards-patient-safety/ (On November 22, 2023, as a response to rising cases of death and injuries associated with plastic surgeries, a bill was introduced in the Colombian House of Representatives to regulate the practice of cosmetic surgeries and protect the integrity of patients) [14] U.S. Department of State, Travel.State.Gov, Colombia. (August 17, 2023). Traveler’s Checklist, https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-travel/International-Travel-Country-Information-Pages/Colombia.html [15] U.S. Department of State, Travel.State.Gov, Colombia. (August 17, 2023). Traveler’s Checklist. See also: Medical Tourism and Elective Surgery. The Department of State informs that “U.S. citizens have suffered serious complications or died during or after having cosmetic surgery or other elective surgery“ and “the legal options in cases of malpractice are very limited in Colombia,” https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-travel/International-Travel-Country-Information-Pages/Colombia.html See also: The law firm Alvarez Gonzalez Tolosa Attorneys. (August 8, 2023). Medical Malpractice in Colombia, includes medical malpractice as one of the areas of expertise of the firm. https://www.agtattorneys.com/blog/medical-malpractice-in-colombia/ [16] Colombia recently enacted a new visa regulation (Resolution 5477 from July 22, 2022, issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) effective as of October 22, 2022. No data currently exists about a "medical treatment" visa because it is a new legislation. Even though the regulation refers to the visitor as a patient and includes requirements such as (1) a letter from the medical institution explaining the treatment and approximate duration, (2) a letter explaining costs and who will pay for the treatment, (3) insurance policy, and (4) the general requirements for tourists, the regulation specifically explains that this kind of visa is considered as a TOURISM visa (art 37). [17] Glenn, Cohen. 2015 [18] Frequently Asked Questions. Bioxcellerator. https://www.bioxcellerator.com/faqs (For example, Bioxellerator stem cell therapies conducted in Medellin, Colombia, are not FDA-approved.) [19] Vovk, Viktoriia, Lyudmila Beztelesna, and Olha Pliashko. (2021). "Identification of Factors for the Development of Medical Tourism in the World" International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18, no. 21: 11205. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph182111205 [20] Colombian Constitution. (1991). art. 49 [21] Ministry of Health and Protection. Columbia Ministry of Health. (2023). https://www.minsalud.gov.co/English/Paginas/Ministry.aspx [22] “Does Colombia’s Health System Need an Overhaul?” (March 2, 2023). The Dialogue, Latin America Advisor. https://www.thedialogue.org/analysis/does-colombias-health-system-need-an-overhaul/ [23] Health at a Glance 2021 Colombia Country Note. OECD. (2023). https://search.oecd.org/colombia/health-at-a-glance-Colombia-EN.pdf [24] Travel.State.Gov, US Department of State, Bureau of Consular Affairs. https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-travel/International-Travel-Country-Information-Pages/Colombia.html [25] Glenn, Cohen. (2015). p. 2-9. [26] Banco de la República. (2023). Regional Health Inequalities in Colombia. https://www.banrep.gov.co/en/regional-health-inequalities-colombia (The Central Bank of Colombia (“Banco de la República”) in reports that despite having relatively high health coverage compared with other countries, empirical results show persistent inequalities in the healthcare system. The aim is to reduce and eventually eliminate such inequalities.) [27] Glenn, Cohen (2015), p. 158-160, citing Rupa Chanda, an Indian business professor, Trade in Health Services, 80 Bull. World Health Org. 158, 160 (2002). [28] Banco de la República. (2023). Regional Health Inequalities in Columbia. https://investiga.banrep.gov.co/es/be-1233. (Under Colombian law, it is mandatory for all employees and employers to pay 4 percent and 8 percent of the applicable salary, respectively, to the universal healthcare system (EPS) to obtain coverage for the employee and family members. This is known as the contributive system, and the funding is known as parafiscal. The unemployed obtain coverage through the government-subsidized system known as SISBEN (System of Identification of Beneficiaries of Social programs), funded with taxpayers’ money, known as fiscal funding. According to the Central Bank of Colombia (Banco de la República), “in recent years, the healthcare sector has faced financial and administrative problems that have increased the need for fiscal resources for its financing and that could affect its sustainability. Regarding the composition of the outflow, it is worth noting the cost of ensuring the contributory and subsidized regime, which on average explains 80 percent of the total system expenses during the period 2011-2022.” “Additionally, pressures derived from the Covid-19 pandemic, Venezuelan migration” and expenses derived from the increase in the subsidized system due to the high rate of unemployment and informal employment are negatively impacting financing of the healthcare system in Colombia. Additional fiscal resources are needed because the health care Colombians receive costs more than what beneficiaries pay.) [29] Statista. (2023). Revenue of the medical tourism sector in Colombia from 2019 to 2024 https://www.statista.com/statistics/1156551/colombia-revenue-medical-tourism/ [30] Glenn, Cohen. (2015), p.218 (The beneficence principle is the general moral obligation to act for the benefit of others, and some of those acts are obligatory, as is the government’s obligation concerning healthcare.) [31] Hospital Cardioinfantil Bogotá, Colombia. https://cardioinfantil.org [32] Hospital Cardioinfantil https://cardioinfantil.org (Trinidad and Tobago, Aruba, Curacao, and Panamá were the first countries with international agreements with La Cardio.) [33] Hospital Cardioinfantil Bogotá, Colombia. https://www.lacardio.org/historia/

Pornography is neither a documentary media genre that documents what real sex in everyday life looks like, nor is it a pedagogical or moral media genre aimed at showing what ideal sex (in terms of health or morality) should look like. Instead, pornography is a fictional media genre that depicts sexual fantasies and explicitly presents naked bodies and sexual activities for the purpose of sexual arousal (Williams, 1989; McKee et al., 2020). Regarding media ethics and media effects, pornography has traditionally been viewed as highly problematic. Pornographic material has been accused of portraying sexuality in unhealthy, morally questionable and often sexist ways, thereby harming performers, audiences, and society at large. In the age of the Internet, pornography has become more diverse, accessible, and widespread than ever (Döring, 2009; Miller et al., 2020). Consequently, the depiction of sexuality in pornography is the focus of a growing number of content analyses of both mass media (e.g., erotic and pornographic novels and movies) and social media (e.g., erotic and pornographic stories, photos and videos shared via online platforms). Typically, pornography’s portrayals of sexuality are examined by measuring the prevalence and frequency of sexual practices and related gender roles via quantitative content analysis (for research reviews see Carrotte et al., 2020; Miller & McBain, 2022). It should be noted that the conceptual differentiation between erotica and pornography is complex and that “pornography” remains an ideologically charged, and often negatively connotated, concept. Hence, the research literature sometimes uses the broader and more neutral term “sexually explicit material” (SEM) in place of “pornographic material” (McKee et al., 2020). Furthermore, it must be emphasized that in the context of content analyses of SEM the focus is typically on legal pornography. Legal visual pornography is produced with adults who have given their informed consent for their image to be recorded, and then disseminated and marketed as SEM. Illegal pornography is usually beyond the scope of media content research, as the acquisition and use of illegal material would be unethical and illegal for researchers (e.g., the analysis of so-called “child pornography”, or what might be more accurately labeled “images of child sexual abuse”). Criminological and forensic research projects are exceptions to this rule. Field of application/theoretical foundation: The theories applied in pornographic media content research primarily come from four academic disciplines: communication science, psychology, sex research, and gender studies. These different theories are fairly similar in their core assumption that pornography users’ sexual cognitions and behaviors are molded by the ways in which sexuality is portrayed in pornographic material. Some of the theories also explain the typical content of pornography and point to the fact that audiences might not only be influenced by pornography but can also shape porn production through their preferences. All theories demand content analyses of pornographic material to back up their predictions. General Media Effects Theories Cultivation Theory and Social Cognitive Theory are the most commonly used media effects theories, irrespective of specific media content. They are often applied to pornographic material. Cultivation Theory (CT) was developed by communication researcher George Gerbner in the 1960s (Gerbner, 1998). CT claims that heavy media users’ perceptions of the prevalence of different societal phenomena (e.g., crimes) are shaped by the prevalence with which these phenomena occur in the media they consume (e.g., cop shows on TV). Applied to pornography, CT predicts that heavy users of pornography will severely overestimate the prevalence of sexual practices that are rare in reality, but widespread in pornography. Young people who lack real life sexual experience are regarded as particularly vulnerable for sexual cultivation effects in terms of biased perceptions of the popularity and normalcy of different performances of sexuality (e.g., name calling and slapping during sex). Another classic media effects theory that is widely adopted in pornography research is psychologist Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory (Bandura, 1971), later re-labeled as Social Cognitive Theory (SCT; Bandura, 2001). SCT claims that people imitate the behaviors of media role models. Applied to pornographic material, SCT predicts that media audiences will develop more favorable attitudes towards, and engage more frequently in, sexual behaviors portrayed positively in sexually explicit material. Such sexual imitation effects may influence not only attitudes toward, and engagement in, sex acts represented in pornography (e.g., anal sex), but also gender role behaviors (e.g., men acting dominantly, women acting submissively during sex), safer sex measures (e.g., lack of condom use), bodily appearance (e.g., breast augmentation), and consent communication (e.g., lack of explicitly asking for, or giving, consent to engage in different sex acts). Sexual Media Effects Theories While CT and SCT are broad media effects theories applicable to pornography as well as many other types of media content, Sexual Script Theory and the 3AM specifically address sexual media and their effects. Sexual Script Theory (SST) was developed by sociologists John Gagnon and William Simon in the 1970s (Gagnon & Simon, 1973; Simon & Gagnon, 2003; Wiederman, 2015). SST argues that human sexuality is not merely a biological instinct, but a highly complex set of cognitions and behaviors shaped by symbolic, social and cultural factors: People develop ideas about how to have sex in terms of organized cognitive schemas or “scripts” that reflect intra-psychic desires (e.g., their sexual fantasies), social norms (e.g., peers’ and partners’ sexual expectations), and cultural influences (e.g., representations of sexuality in the media they consume). SST stresses that the intra-psychic, social, and cultural determinants of individuals’ sexual scripts mutually influence each other and can change over time (Simon & Gagnon, 2003). However, in pornography research, usually only the third element of the theory (cultural influences through media representations of sexuality) is considered. Applied to pornography, SST predicts that sexual scripts presented in pornographic material (e.g., spontaneous anal sex with strangers without condoms or overt consent communication) can shape individuals’ sexual scripts. The Acquisition, Activation, and Application Model of Media Sexual Socialization (3AM) was developed more recently by communication researcher Paul Wright as a specification of SST regarding media influence (Wright, 2011). According to the 3AM, sexually explicit media content shapes cognitive schemas of sexuality in three ways: Pornography can foster the creation of new schemas (schema acquisition), it can prime extant schemas (schema activation), and it can facilitate the utilization of extant schemas to inform attitudes and behaviors (schema application). The 3AM differentiates between specific scripting effects of pornography (e.g., engaging in condom-free casual anal sex without sufficient consent communication after having observed this exact sexual script multiple times in pornography) versus abstract scripting effects (e.g., adopting a more permissive sexual worldview after having observed many people engaging in unrestricted sex in pornography). The aforementioned general and sexuality-specific media effects theories have been used predominantly to predict negative (unwanted, harmful) effects such as dangerously distorted views of sexuality and gender roles as well as engagement in risky or violent sexual behaviors, while potential positive effects have been mostly ignored. Only recently, has serious consideration been given to the beneficial effects of pornography use (e.g., sexual identity validation, sexual empowerment, improved couple communication, sexual skill acquisition, etc.) in the research literature (e.g., Döring, 2021; Döring & Mohseni, 2018; Döring et al., 2021; Kohut & Fisher, 2013; Kohut et al., 2017; Miller et al., 2018; Tillmann & Wells, 2022). Depending on specific negative and/or positive effect assumptions, different aspects of the representation of sexuality will be measured (e.g., expressions of aggression during sex or different types of sexual stimulation techniques). Gender Role, Feminist and Queer Theories Typically, analysis of the ways in which sexuality is represented in pornography involves considerations of gender relations, therefore gender role theories and feminist theories of gender (in-)equality are frequently drawn upon (e.g., Eagly, 1987). There are two main reasons for this additional theoretical focus on gender: 1) Most SEM depicts heterosexual encounters, hence the portrayal of sexuality in pornography implies a portrayal of sexual gender relations (Williams, 1989). 2) Gender relations in the media are often asymmetrical, depicting men and women in superior and subordinate positions, respectively. Such patriarchal gender relations are expected to be reflected, or even exaggerated, in pornographic material. Radical feminist approaches in particular characterize pornography as a portrayal of sexual degradation of women by men, that is so harmful to society that it should be prohibited (e.g., MacKinnon, 1991). Other feminist approaches are also critical of asymmetric gender relations in traditional mainstream pornography and call for more gender equality in SEM, such as in feminist pornography (Williams, 1989). Feminist criticism of gender roles and relations in pornography does not address the demographic variable of sex/gender alone, but also covers other diversity dimensions such as age, race/ethnicity, or disability. According to the analytical framework of intersectionality, the subordination and discrimination of women in society and media representations particularly affect those women who have multiple marginalized demographic characteristics (e.g., the representation of white women in pornography differs from that of black or Asian women; Fritz et al. 2021). Queer theory is also concerned with different racial/ethnic and sexual identities of women and their participation and representation in pornography (Ingraham 2013). Content analyses of pornography need to take into consideration that pornography is becoming increasingly diverse (Miller & McBain, 2022). Hence, content analyses need to differentiate between various pornographic sub-genres such as commercial heterosexual mainstream pornography (traditionally targeting men) versus, for example, women-friendly and couple-oriented pornography, feminist pornography, queer pornography, fetish and kink pornography, or authentic amateur and DIY (do it yourself) pornography in the form of visual or text pornography (Döring, 2021; McKee et al., 2008). Gender role, feminist, and queer theories predict that gender relations in mainstream pornography are more asymmetrical, stereotypical and patriarchal than in women- and couple-friendly, feminist and queer pornography. Sexual Fantasy and Desire Theories The above-mentioned effect theories do not address and explain the main intended effect of pornography, namely immediate sexual arousal, pleasure and satisfaction. The theories focus on linking the fictional pornographic content directly with real life opinions and behaviors, but mostly ignore the links between fictional pornographic content and sexual fantasies. Research shows that many sexual fantasies of people of all genders are unrealistic, extreme, clichéd, violent and norm-violating and that norm-violation is often what makes them arousing (e.g., Bivona et al., 2012; Critelli & Bivona, 2008; Joyal, 2015). The same might be true for pornographic content. Hence, measuring pornography, a fictional media genre, against standards of realism, health and morality might not always be in line with the main entertainment purpose of the genre. Erotizing the forbidden and dangerous (e.g, sex with family members, with mysterious strangers, with authority figures, with non-human creatures) is a common trope of sexual fantasies, hence meaningful variables to measure pornographic portrayals of sexuality could be derived from, and related to, theories of sexual fantasy and desire (e.g., Salmon et al., 2019; Stoller, 1985). Indulging in unrealistic and norm-violating fantasies and fictional media contents is part of media entertainment and may not necessarily lead to norm-violating behaviors. Competent media users should be able to differentiate between fiction and reality. Mold Theories versus Mirror Theories When analyzing and criticizing sexuality portrayals in pornography, it is important to realize that media do not just uni-directionally influence public opinions and behaviors (mold theory). Rather, media also bi-directionally reflect existing sexual relations and fantasies (mirror theory). Recent sex surveys, for example, demonstrate that engagement in consensual BDSM (Bondage/Discipline, Dominance/Submission, Sadism/Masochism) practices and rough sex (e.g., name calling, spanking, hair pulling) is fairly widespread in the general population and enjoyed by all genders (e.g., Burch & Salmon, 2019; Herbenick et al., 2021a, 2021b; Strizzi et al., 2022). Hence, it might not always be the adult industry that influences audiences’ sexualities, but also audiences’ sexual interests that influence porn production. Particularly in the digital pornography market, producers and vendors can easily analyze audience preferences through the analysis of search terms and download statistics and adopt their content accordingly. Furthermore, general beauty trends in society (e.g., regarding shaving of pubic and body hair, growing of beards, or multiple tattoos and other body art) might be mirrored in pornography (through its selection and presentation of performers) rather than of generated by it. References/combination with other methods of data collection: Manual quantitative content analyses of pornographic material can be combined with qualitative (e.g., Keft-Kennedy, 2008) as well as computational (e.g., Seehuus et al., 2019) content analyses. Furthermore, content analyses can be complemented with qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys to investigate perceptions and evaluations of the portrayals of sexuality in pornography among pornography’s creators and performers (e.g., West, 2019) and audiences (e.g., Cowan & Dunn, 1994; Hardy et al., 2022; Paasoonen, 2021; Shor, 2022). Additionally, experimental studies are helpful to measure directly how different dimensions of pornographic portrayals of sexuality are perceived and evaluated by recipients, and if and how these portrayals can affect audiences’ sexuality-related thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (e.g., Kohut & Fisher, 2013; Miller et al., 2019). Example studies for manual quantitative content analyses: Acknowledging the multidimensionality and complexity of portrayals of sexuality in pornography, a recent research review identified eight main dimensions of analysis (Miller & McBain, 2022) that are adopted and extended in this DOCA entry as: 1) violence, 2) degradation, 3) sex acts, 4) performer demographics (sex/gender, age, race/ethnicity), 5) performer bodily appearance, 6) safer sex practices, 7) relational context of sex, and 8) consent communication. Example studies and measures for all eight dimensions of pornographic portrayals of sexuality are presented in separate DOCA entries. 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A literature review of studies into the prevalence and frequency of men’s pornography use. American Journal of Sexuality Education, 15(4), 502–529. https://doi.org/10.1080/15546128.2020.1831676 Paasonen, S. (2021). “We watch porn for the fucking, not for romantic tiptoeing”: Extremity, fantasy and women’s porn use. Porn Studies, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2021.1956366 Salmon, C., Fisher, M. L., & Burch, R. L. (2019). Evolutionary approaches: Integrating pornography preferences, short-term mating, and infidelity. Personality and Individual Differences, 148, 45–49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2019.05.030 Seehuus, M., Stanton, A. M., & Handy, A. B. (2019). On the content of "real-world" sexual fantasy: Results from an analysis of 250,000+ anonymous text-based erotic fantasies. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 48(3), 725–737. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-018-1334-0 Shor, E. (2022). Who seeks aggression in pornography? Findings from interviews with viewers. 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Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash INTRODUCTION When the COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe, governments and healthcare systems scrambled to control it. While most of the global public health community agreed that actions against the COVID-19 pandemic needed to be prompt and efficient, there were disagreements on what those actions should be. Some governments opted to adopt a containment strategy while others implemented mitigation measures; each had reasons to support their course of action, whether rooted in governmental structures, scientific findings, beliefs, or ethical and moral values. However, the dramatically different response strategies may have led to disparate results. This divide is furthered when ethical and moral values and cultural norms are added to this equation. In this paper, I will examine China and Korea, two countries that implemented a preventative containment strategy, and the United States of America and the United Kingdom, which adopted mitigation strategies. I will examine the differences in their outcomes and whether there is a “correct” response to pandemics like COVID-19. l. Response in China and Korea After its initial discovery in December 2019, COVID-19 rapidly spread beyond China to surrounding countries, including South Korea, Japan, and Singapore. China implemented swift measures drawing on its experience with the SARS outbreak. Measures included lockdowns, contact tracing, testing all individuals exposed to the virus, and consequently enforcing isolation and quarantine provisions.[1] During the early stages, the public health systems and the national government moved to a “health care to all” system to avoid nationwide spread. The government and all sectors of society were mobilized to track, contain, and adapt to the overall state of the epidemic.[2] COVID-19 continued and spread in China during Lunar New Year celebrations when population movement within the country was at its peak. Thus, Wuhan entered lockdown to control the number of infected people leaving the city to contain the virus;[3] even in areas where there were few to no cases, the general population of China voluntarily abided by measures like those implemented in Wuhan. The measures included wearing masks, social distancing, and following stay-at-home orders. Furthermore, healthcare workers from all over the country volunteered to travel to Hubei, where Wuhan is, and assembled several Fangcang shelter hospitals.[4] Fangcang hospitals were designed based on emergency medical care cabins that were used after two devastating earthquakes in China and served as temporary quarantine housing and hospital facilities.[5] They are mobile, have fast deployment, and can adapt quickly to different environments. At the start of the pandemic, Wuhan converted gymnasiums, convention centers, sports arenas and training centers, factories, and other venues into Fangcang hospitals. Although temporary, these quarantine hospital facilities were equipped with full medical equipment and personnel, allowing for complete medical functions for “treatment, disease monitoring, diagnosis and other clinical tasks.”[6] Teams of psychologists were also assigned to each hospital to provide counseling for patients.[7] Beyond separating those who were infected from the rest of the population and thus having more control over the community spread of the virus, Fangcang hospitals played a vital role in reducing patient density in traditional hospitals and medical centers by expanding treatment capacities.[8] South Korea reported its first COVID-19 case in January 2020, and, within days, the government activated the Central Disaster and Safety Countermeasures Headquarters.[9] Similar to China, South Korea used existing epidemic protocols and implemented the 3Ts strategy, prioritizing testing, tracing, and treatment.[10] High-capacity screening facilities and working with the private sector to ensure an adequate supply of tests made South Korea’s efforts successful.[11] The South Korean government strictly regulated self-isolation and quarantine. Contact tracing efforts used various data sources, “including credit card transactions and closed-circuit television footage.”[12] The government also placed stringent restrictions on travel, beginning with designated entry lines and questionnaires, but expanding to include temperature checks, testing for all travelers at the border, and a mandatory fourteen-day monitored quarantine for anyone entering the country.[13] The majority of the population responded immediately with compliance, with national weekly movement decreasing by 38 percent between February 24, 2020, and March 1, 2020, compared to the corresponding week the previous month. Schools swiftly closed across the nation, and the entire country transitioned to remote learning until the gradual reopening in May and June 2020.[14] There was some discontentment within the population, especially with the South Korean government’s practice of publicly announcing the names of individuals who tested positive.[15] Critics of this practice say it is an infringement of patient privacy and can even be viewed as an invitation to public bullying.[16] However, even with some dissatisfaction with government regulations, a survey of 1,200 South Koreans in September 2020 asking people to agree if they were satisfied with the government’s response showed that the overwhelming majority either agreed or strongly agreed (44.08 percent and 19.75 percent, respectively), and less than 20 percent of the respondents either disagreed or strongly disagreed (11.50 percent and 5.08 percent, respectively).[17] Regulations surrounding isolation and quarantine were strict and applied to those with confirmed cases of COVID-19, anyone who traveled internationally, or individuals suspected to be infected. Individuals were required to use the Self-Quarantine Safety Protection app that tracked location for fourteen days to ensure that quarantine protocols were followed.[18] Case officers monitored the app, and violators not only faced a substantial fine but were also required to wear electronic wristbands that would alert the officers if the individual left the location of their mobile device.[19] ll. The Western Response: The UK and US COVID-19 was reported in many Western nations around January 2020. However, unlike South Korea, many countries did not immediately respond to the outbreak with surveillance and containment strategies but had a wait-and-see approach. As the pandemic worsened, they gradually adopted mitigation strategies to combat the disease as it progressed. While the US adopted a combination of containment and mitigation strategies, a concrete response from state and federal governments did not occur until March 2020.[20] Even then, many states did little to address the pandemic. Although equipped with a robust healthcare system, a shortage of ventilators and hospital beds became evident in some localities early on. The US healthcare system failed to acknowledge the pandemic and prepare a coordinated response in time to stop the momentum of the disease.[21] The goal became “flattening the curve” (keeping the number of cases that needed hospital care low enough to avoid overwhelming the hospital system) as it was clear containment would be impossible. Once tests were developed, poor coordination of testing efforts and insufficient resources to test at the necessary scale to provide comprehensive national surveillance of the disease further hindered efforts to contain infected individuals and decelerate its spread.[22] Eventually, regulations and mitigation measures were implemented, including mask mandates, school closures, caps or bans on in-person gatherings, and the closure of non-essential businesses.[23] However, enforcement of these measures proved difficult, and people instigated protests against many of the recommended policies and requirements. The UK and the US both encountered a shortage of personal protective equipment for healthcare workers.[24] However, a more prominent problem arose from the UK’s initial response to the pandemic. The UK first said COVID-19 was like influenza and therefore did not call for emergency measures to deter its spread.[25] Furthermore, in the first few weeks of the pandemic, the UK government believed herd immunity was the best course of action, stating that most people would have mild symptoms,[26] and the population would become mostly immune to the virus once enough people were infected.[27] In theory, herd immunity was a potentially effective strategy. The public health authorities thought that if the threshold for herd immunity was reached, enough people would have developed protective antibodies against any future infection.[28] However, the risks of COVID-19 were high and the cases “would lead to high rates of hospitalization and need for critical care, straining health service capacity past the breaking point.”[29] Furthermore, while getting COVID-19 would offer some natural immunity against reinfection, reinfection remained a possibility, especially during the early stages of the pandemic when vaccines were unavailable.[30] Later, when vaccines were available, a study showed that an unvaccinated person who contracted the virus was more than twice as likely to become reinfected than a fully vaccinated person.[31] The UK government also expressed concern for “behavioral fatigue.”[32] It claimed that if restrictions were enforced pre-emptively and prematurely, people might become progressively “uncooperative and less vigilant.”[33] Regarding the concern for “behavioral fatigue,” numerous behavioral scientists stated that they were unconvinced that this reason was enough to hold off implementing restrictions. There was a lack of evidence of this phenomenon, and a group of 681 UK behavioral scientists said in an open letter that “[s]uch evidence is necessary if we are to base a high-risk public health strategy on it.”[34] Fortunately, this strategy only remained under consideration for a short period. After rapid increases in confirmed cases and deaths due to COVID-19, the UK government implemented more strict measures, like city lockdown, school closures, and the closure of non-essential businesses.[35] These restrictions took legal effect on March 26th, 2020 – around two weeks after the first proposal of the “herd immunity” strategy.[36] lll. Comparing the Two Approaches The Eastern and Western countries experienced significant outbreaks of COVID-19. However, looking at the mortality rate and new confirmed cases, the differences between the two categories of response to COVID-19 are significant. As of December 31, 2020, the mortality rate per 100,000 population for China and South Korea were 0.3 and 1.8, respectively, and new confirmed cases per day per 100,000 population were 87 and 1,029, respectively. However, the mortality rates per 100,000 in the US and the UK were 107 and 108, respectively, and they had up to 234,133 and 56,029 new confirmed cases every day, respectively.[37] As of July 2022, total deaths in China were 22, 994[38] (population 1.45 billion)[39] and in South Korea 24,794[40] (population 51.36 million)[41] compared to 1,015,093[42] in the US (population 335.03 million)[43] and 182,727[44] in the UK (population 68.62 million).[45] Further differences can be seen in the varying sectors of society, such as healthcare systems and authority models, political structures, and cultural customs among these countries, which in turn affect the response and control strategies.[46] In the US and the UK, rights-based political structures affected the response, making tracking and surveillance more problematic early on. But Western countries did have strict lockdowns and quarantines. China and South Korea maintained a proactive approach by “identifying and managing cases, tracking and isolating close contacts, and strictly restricting or controlling population movement when feasible and appropriate.”[47] In contrast, the UK implemented nationwide lockdowns early on, and the US restrictions varied among states. Both the UK and the US focused on treating the severe cases and those with underlying conditions rather than proactively preventing new cases from developing in the early pandemic.[48] They did shift gears to mass testing schemes and attempts to slow transmission. By the time they implemented cohesive strategies, COVID-19 was widespread. Due to their slow initial responses, they needed to manage an onslaught of cases while trying to prevent transmission. lV. Ethical Implications The “West vs. Rest” culture divide emerges when comparing the COVID-19 response strategies of East Asian countries to those of Western countries. The differences in their strategies further highlight the differences in the prevailing moral values influencing public policy. The preventative stance adopted by many East Asian countries shows a stronger collective identity among citizens. But it also may show more substantial governmental power and less appetite for protest. In contrast, the mostly non-interfering nature of Western governments’ actions shows a reliance on the “autonomous and unanimous responsibility of individuals.”[49] The moral values in the US also may reflect the prioritized position of personal rights and the suspicion of intrusive government policies. Culturally, the populations of South Korea and China are generally more tolerant of personal data-sharing and monitoring, suggesting there is less concern for autonomy or privacy. However, many people in the US and UK would consider the use of location tracking apps and electronic bracelets to be violations of individual autonomy and privacy.[50] Sectors of the Western world also argue that mandating masking or social distancing imposes on individual autonomy and free will. Mask-wearing was an existing practice in East Asian countries, even without mandates or pandemics. Individuals wear masks for common colds and influenza and do not consider a mask requirement an infringement of their autonomy. Furthermore, whether it is due to the authoritarian nature of the government or not, there is a general tendency toward public compliance and accepting government policies in many East Asian countries,[51] and the lack of public dissent played an important part in making combating COVID-19 easier for countries like China and South Korea. The lack of initiative from Western nations arguably violates the bioethical principles of beneficence and nonmaleficence.[52] For example, the promotion of the “herd immunity” strategy from the UK government and consequently the government’s inaction, risked the well-being of its citizens. The government failed to avoid the harm that COVID-19 brought. Similarly, by delaying its response until nearly two months after the initial case was reported, the US also violated the principle of non-maleficence. The success seen in South Korea and China during the early pandemic better exemplifies beneficence and nonmaleficence. The strategy of contact tracing and strict containment saved lives. The consequences of the restrictions varied across the countries as well. Not everyone can afford to self-isolate or quarantine and being required to do so can significantly impact many individuals’ well-being. Furthermore, not everyone’s occupation allows them to work from home and business closures disadvantaged portions of the population disparately. For those who are essential workers, school closures may also burden parents who do not have access to affordable childcare. The stringent restrictions regarding quarantine and self-isolation in East Asian countries also harmed people disparately, raising problems surrounding the principle of justice. However, the speed at which China had COVID-19 contained allowed people there to return to their normal lives quickly. Compared to some Western countries’ waves of lockdown and reinforcement of restrictions, the “zero-COVID” strategy in countries like China showed success, at least during the early stages of the pandemic. The contact tracing and containment was likely financially beneficial. While the pandemic resulted in substantial economic growth downgrades and global recessions, regions like East Asia were estimated to grow by around 0.5 percent. In comparison, the economy in regions like Europe contracted by around 4.7 percent.[53] CONCLUSION China arguably had an advantage in combating COVID-19 since the outbreak was relatively concentrated in one region. This allowed early detection of symptoms and quick containment of the virus. Other countries, like the US, had new cases on both coasts early in the pandemic; thus, containment was more challenging than it was in China. However, the delayed and reluctant response from countries like the US and the UK did not benefit the well-being of their populations and proved to put more stress on their healthcare systems. While mass tracking of people is politically contentious, the promptness of actions many East Asian countries employed at the beginning of COVID-19 seemed to be the more effective course of action that best protected the well-being of their citizens. - [1] Chen, Haiqian, et al. “Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Comparison of Strategies in Six Countries.” Frontiers in Public Health, vol. 9, September 30, 2021, pp. 1-11. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2021.708496. [2] Chen, et al. [3] Chen, et al. [4] Chen, et al. [5] Wang, Ke-Wei, et al. “Fangcang shelter hospitals are a One Health approach for responding to the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China.” One Health, vol. 10, August 29th, 2020, pp. 1-6. doi: 10.1016/j.onehlt.2020.100167. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352771420302688. [6] Wang. [7] Wang. [8] Wang. [9] Kim, June-Ho, et al. “Emerging COVID-19 Success Story: South Korea Learned the Lesson of MERS.” Our World Data, University of Oxford, March 5, 2021. https://ourworldindata.org/covid-exemplar-south-korea. [10] Chen, Haiqian, et al. [11] Kim, et al. [12] Kim. [13] Kim. [14] Scott, Dylan and Jun Michael Park. “South Korea’s Covid-19 success story started with failure.” Vox, April 19, 2021. https://www.vox.com/22380161/south-korea-covid-19-coronavirus-pandemic-contact-tracing-testing.. [15] Scott and Park. [16] Rich, Timothy S., et al. “What Do South Koreans Think of Their Government’s COVID-19 Response?” The Diplomat, October 7, 2020. https://thediplomat.com/2020/10/what-do-south-koreans-think-of-their-governments-covid-19-response/. [17] Rich, et al. [18] Kim, et al. [19] Kim, et al. [20] Chen, et al. [21] Chen, et al. [22] Chen, et al. [23] Chen, et al. [24] Chen, et al. [25]Chen, et al. [26] Chen, et al. [27] O’Grady, Cathleen. “The U.K. backed off on herd immunity. To beat COVID-19, we’ll ultimately need it.” National Geographics, March 20, 2020. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/uk-backed-off-on-herd-immunity-to-beat-coronavirus-we-need-it. [28] “Herd immunity and COVID-19: What you need to know.” Mayo Clinic, April 20, 2022. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/herd-immunity-and-coronavirus/art-20486808?p=1. [29] O’Grady. [30] O’Grady. [31] Mayo Clinic, April 20, 2022. [32] Yong, Ed. “The UK’s Coronavirus ‘Herd Immunity’ Debacle.” The Atlantic, March 16, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/coronavirus-pandemic-herd-immunity-uk-boris-johnson/608065/. [33] Yong. [34] Harvey, Nigel. “Behavioral Fatigue: Real Phenomenon, Naïve Construct or Policy Contrivance?” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 11, November 6, 2020. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.589892, quoting a March 16, 2020 open letter to the UK government. [35] Chen, et al. [36]“Timeline of UK coronavirus lockdowns, March 2020 to March 2021.” Institute for Government Analysis. https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/timeline-lockdown-web.pdf. [37] Chen, et al. [38] “China: WHO Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard.” World Health Organization, 2022, https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/cn. [39] “China Population.” Worldometer, 2022, https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/china-population/. [40] “The Republic of South Korea: WHO Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard.” World Health Organization, 2022, https://covid19.who.int/region/wpro/country/kr. [41] “South Korea Population,” Worldometer, 2022, https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/south-korea-population/. [42] “The United States of America: WHO Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard.” World Health Organization, 2022, https://covid19.who.int/region/amro/country/us. [43] “United States Population,” Worldometer, 2022, https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population/. [44] “The United Kingdom: WHO Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Dashboard.” World Health Organization, 2022, https://covid19.who.int/region/euro/country/gb. [45] “U.K. Population,” Worldometer, 2022, https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/uk-population/. [46] Chen, et al. [47] Chen, et al., p 6. [48] Chen, et al. [49] Festing, Marion, Tobias Schumacher and Yong-Yueh Lee. “How Cultural Norms and Values Shape National Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic.” The London School of Economics and Political Science, April 15, 2021. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2021/04/15/how-cultural-norms-and-values-shaped-national-responses-to-the-covid-19-pandemic/. [50] Festing, et al. [51] Festing, et al. [52] Beauchamp, Tom L. and James F. Childress. Principles of Biomedical Ethics. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 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Historians of Modern Architecture have cultivated the image of the architect as a temperamental genius, unconcerned by issues of politeness or pragmatics—a reading reinforced in cultural representations of Modern Architects, such as Howard Roark, the protagonist in Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead (a character widely believed to be based on the architect Frank Lloyd Wright). The perception of the Modern Architect as an artistic hero or genius has also influenced the reception of their work. Despite their indisputable place within the architectural canon, many important works of Modern Architecture were contested on pragmatic grounds, such as cost, brief and particularly concerning issues of suitability and effectiveness in relation to climate and weather. A number of famed cases resulted in legal action between clients and architects, and in many more examples historians have critically framed these accounts to highlight alternate issues and agendas. “Complaints about the weather,” in relation to architecture, inevitably raise issues regarding a work’s “success,” particularly in view of the tensions between artistry and functionality inherent in the discipline of architecture. While in more recent decades these ideas have been framed around ideas of sustainability—particularly in relation to contemporary buildings—more traditionally they have been engaged through discussions of an architect’s ethical responsibility to deliver a habitable building that meets the client’s needs. This paper suggests these complaints often raise a broader range of issues and are used to highlight tensions inherent in the discipline. In the history of Modern Architecture, these complaints are often framed through gender studies, ethics and, more recently, artistic asceticism. Accounts of complaints and disputes are often invoked in the social construction (or deconstruction) of artistic genius – whether in a positive or negative light. Through its discussion of a number of famed examples, this paper will discuss the framing of climate in relation to the figure of the Modern Architect and the reception of the architectural “masterpiece.” Dear Monsieur Le Corbusier … In June 1930 Mme Savoye, the patron of the famed Villa Savoye on the outskirts of Paris, wrote to her architect, Le Corbusier, stating: “it is still raining in our garage” (Sbriglio 144)—a persistent theme in their correspondence. This letter followed another sent in March after discovering leaks in the garage and several bedrooms following a visit during inclement weather. While sent prior to the building’s completion, she also noted that rainfall on the bathroom skylight “makes a terrible noise […] which prevents us from sleeping in bad weather” (Sbriglio 142). Claiming to have warned Le Corbusier about the concern, the contractor refused to accept responsibility, prompting some rather fiery correspondence between the two. This problem, compounded by issues with the heating system, resulted in the house feeling, as Sbriglio notes, “cold and damp” and subject to “substantial heat loss due to the large glazing”—a cause for particular concern given the health problems of the clients’ only child, Roger Savoye, that saw him spend time in a French Sanatorium (Sbriglio 145). While the cause of Roger’s illness is not clear, at least one writer (albeit with a noticeable lack of footnotes or supporting evidence) has linked this directly to the villa (de Botton 65). Mme Savoye’s complaints about dampness, humidity, condensation and leaking in her home persisted in subsequent years, prompting Benton to summarise in 1987, “every autumn […] there were cries of distress from the Savoye family with the first rains” (Villas 204). These also extended to discussion of the heating system, which while proving insufficient was also causing flooding (Benton, "Villa" 93). In 1935 Savoye again wrote to Le Corbusier, wearily stating: It is raining in the hall, it’s raining on the ramp and the wall of the garage is absolutely soaked [….] it’s still raining in my bathroom, which floods in bad weather, as the water comes in through the skylight. The gardener’s walls are also wet through. (Sbriglio 146-7) Savoye’s understandable vexation with waterproofing problems in her home continued to escalate. With a mixture of gratitude and frustration, a letter sent two years later stated: “After innumerable demands you have finally accepted that this house which you built in 1929 in uninhabitable…. Please render it inhabitable immediately. I sincerely hope that I will not have to take recourse to legal action” (Sbriglio 147). Paradoxically, Le Corbusier was interested in the potential of architecture and urban planning to facilitate health and well-being, as well as the effects that climate may play in this. Early twentieth century medical thought advocated heliotherary (therapeutic exposure to sunlight) for a diverse range of medical conditions, ranging from rickets to tuberculosis. Similarly the health benefits of climate, such as the dryness of mountain air, had been recognised for much longer, and had led to burgeoning industries associated with health, travel and climate. The dangers of damp environments had also long been medically recognised. Le Corbusier’s awareness of the health benefits of sunshine led to the inclusion of a solarium in the villa that afforded both framed and unframed views of the surrounding countryside, such as those that were advocated in the seventeenth century as an antidote to melancholy (Burton 65-66). Both Benton and Sbriglio present Mme Savoye’s complaints as part of their comprehensive histories of an important and influential work of Modern Architecture. Each reproduce excerpts from archival letters that are not widely translated or accessible, and Benton’s 1984 essay is the source other authors generally cite in discussing these matters. In contrast, for example, Murphy’s 2002 account of the villa’s conversion from “house” to “historical monument” cites the same letters (via Benton) as part of a broader argument that highlights the “undomestic” or “unhomely” nature of the work by cataloguing such accounts of the client’s experience of discomfort while residing in the space – thus revisiting a number of common criticisms of Modern Architecture. Le Corbusier’s reputation for designing buildings that responded poorly to climate is often referenced in popular accounts of his work. For example, a 1935 article published in Time states: Though the great expanses of glass that he favors may occasionally turn his rooms into hothouses, his flat roofs may leak and his plans may be wasteful of space, it was Architect Le Corbusier who in 1923 put the entire philosophy of modern architecture into a single sentence: “A house is a machine to live in.” Reference to these issues are usually made rather minimally in academic accounts of his work, and few would agree with this article’s assertion that Le Corbusier’s influence as a phrasemaker would rival the impact of his architecture. In contrast, such issues, in relation to other architects, are often invoked more rhetorically as part of a variety of historical agendas, particularly in constructing feminist histories of architecture. While Corbusier and his work have often been the source of intellectual contention from feminist scholars—for example in regard to authorial disputes and fractious relationships with the likes of Eileen Gray or Charlotte Perriand – discussion of the functional failures in the Villa Savoye are rarely addressed from this perspective. Rather, feminist scholars have focussed their attention on a number of other projects, most notably the case of the Farnsworth House, another canonical work of Modernism. Dear Herr Mies van der Rohe … Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, completed in 1951 in Plano Illinois, was commissioned as a country weekend residence by an unmarried female doctor, a brief credited with freeing the architect from many of the usual pragmatic requirements of a permanent city residence. In response Mies designed a rectilinear steel and glass pavilion, which hovered (to avoid the flood levels) above the landscape, sheltered by maple trees, in close proximity to the Fox River. The refined architectural detail, elegant formal properties, and poetic relationship with the surrounding landscape – whether in its autumnal splendour or covered in a thick blanket of snow – captivated architects seeing it become, like the Villa Savoye, one of the most revered architectural works of the twentieth century. Prior to construction a model was exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and, upon completion the building became a pilgrimage site for architects and admirers. The exhibition of the design later fuelled debate about whether Dr Farnsworth constituted a patron or a client (Friedman 134); a distinction generating very different expectations for the responsibilities of the architect, particularly regarding the production of a habitable home that met the client’s brief versus producing a design of architectural merit. The house was intended as a frame for viewing and contemplating nature, thus seeing nature and climate aligned with the transcendental qualities of the design. Following a visit during construction, Farnsworth described the building’s relationship to the elements, writing: “the two horizontal planes of the unfinished building, floating over the meadows, were unearthly beautiful under a sun which glowed like a wild rose” (5). Similarly, in 1951, Arthur Drexler described the building as “a quantity of air caught between a floor and a roof” (Vandenberg 6). Seven years later the architect himself asserted that nature “gained a more profound significance” when viewed from within the house (Friedman 139). While the transparency of the house was “forgiven” by its isolated location and the lack of visibility from neighbouring properties, the issues a glass and steel box might pose for the thermal comfort of its occupant are not difficult to imagine. Following the house’s completion, Farnsworth fitted windows with insect screens and blinds (although Mies intended for curtains to be installed) that clumsily undermined the refined and minimalistic architectural details. Controversy surrounding the house was, in part, the result of its bold new architectural language. However, it was also due to the architect-client relationship, which turned acrimonious in a very public manner. A dispute between Mies and Farnsworth regarding unpaid fees was fought both in the courtroom and the media, becoming a forum for broader debate as various journals (for example, House Beautiful), publicly took sides. The professional female client versus the male architect and the framing of their dispute by historians and the media has seen this project become a seminal case-study in feminist architectural histories, such as Friedman’s Women and the Making of the Modern House of 1998. Beyond the conflict and speculation about the individuals involved, at the core of these discussions were the inadequacies of the project in relation to comfort and climate. For example, Farnsworth describes in her journal finding the house awash with several inches of water, leading to a court session being convened on the rooftop in order to properly ascertain the defects (14). Written retrospectively, after their relationship soured, Farnsworth’s journal delights in recounting any errors or misjudgements made by Mies during construction. For example, she described testing the fireplace to find “the house was sealed so hermetically that the attempt of a flame to go up the chimney caused an interior negative pressure” (2). Further, her growing disenchantment was reflected in bleak descriptions aligning the building with the weather. Describing her first night camping in her home, she wrote: “the expanses of the glass walls and the sills were covered with ice. The silent meadows outside white with old and hardened snow reflected the bleak [light] bulb within, as if the glass house itself were an unshaded bulb of uncalculated watts lighting the winter plains” (9). In an April 1953 article in House Beautiful, Elizabeth Gordon publicly sided with Farnsworth as part of a broader campaign against the International Style. She condemned the home, and its ‘type’ as “unlivable”, writing: “You burn up in the summer and freeze in the winter, because nothing must interfere with the ‘pure’ form of their rectangles” (250). Gordon included the lack of “overhanging roofs to shade you from the sun” among a catalogue of “human qualities” she believed architects sacrificed for the expression of composition—a list that also included possessions, children, pets and adequate kitchen facilities (250). In 1998 excerpts from this article were reproduced by Friedman, in her seminal work of feminist architectural history, and were central in her discussion of the way that debates surrounding this house were framed through notions of gender. Responding to this conflict, and its media coverage, in 1960 Peter Blake wrote: All great houses by great architects tend to be somewhat impractical; many of Corbu’s and Wright’s house clients find that they are living in too expensive and too inefficient buildings. Yet many of these clients would never exchange their houses for the most workable piece of mediocrity. (88) Far from complaining about the weather, the writings of its second owner, Peter Palumbo, poetically meditate the building’s relationship to the seasons and the elements. In his foreword to a 2003 monograph, he wrote: life inside the house is very much a balance with nature, and an extension of nature. A change in the season or an alteration of the landscape creates a marked change in the mood inside the house. With an electric storm of Wagnerian proportions illuminating the night sky and shaking the foundations of the house to their very core, it is possible to remain quite dry! When, with the melting snows of spring, the Fox River becomes a roaring torrent that bursts its banks, the house assumes a character of a house-boat, the water level sometimes rising perilously close to the front door. On such occasions, the approach to the house is by canoe, which is tied to the steps of the upper terrace. (Vandenberg 5) Palumbo purchased the house from Farnsworth and commissioned Mies’s grandson to restore it to its original condition, removing the blinds and insect screens, and installing an air-conditioning system. The critical positioning of Palumbo has been quite different from that of Farnsworth. His restoration and writings on the project have in some ways seen him positioned as the “real” architectural patron. Furthermore, his willingness to tolerate some discomfort in his inhabitation has seen him in some ways prefigure the type of resident that will be next be discussed in reference to recent owners of Wright properties. Dear Mr Wright … Accounts of weatherproofing problems in buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright have become the basis of mythology in the architectural discipline. For example, in 1936 Herbert Johnson and J. Vernon Steinle visited Wright’s Richard Lloyd Jones house in Oklahoma. As Jonathan Lipman wrote, “Steinle’s most prominent recollection of the house was that there were scores of tubs and canning jars in the house catching water leaking through the roof” (45). While Lipman notes the irony that both the house and office Wright designed for Johnson would suffer the same problem, it is the anecdotal accounts of the former that have perhaps attracted the most interest. An oft-recounted story tells of Johnson telephoning Wright, during a dinner party, with regard to water dripping from the ceiling into his guest-of-honour’s soup; the complaint was reportedly rebuffed unsympathetically by Wright who suggested the lady should move her chair (Farr 272). Wright himself addressed his reputation for designing buildings that leaked in his Autobiography. In reference to La Miniatura in Pasadena, of 1923, he contextualised difficulties with the local climate, which he suggested was prone to causing leaks, writing: “The sun bakes the roof for eleven months, two weeks and five days, shrinking it to a shrivel. Then giving the roof no warning whatever to get back to normal if it could, the clouds burst. Unsuspecting roof surfaces are deluged by a three inch downpour.” He continued, stating: I knew all this. And I know there are more leaking roofs in Southern California than in all the rest of the world put together. I knew that the citizens come to look upon water thus in a singularly ungrateful mood. I knew that water is all that enables them to have their being there, but let any of it through on them from above, unexpectedly, in their houses and they go mad. It is a kind of phobia. I knew all this and I have taken seriously precautions in the details of this little house to avoid such scenes as a result of negligible roofs. This is the truth. (250) Wright was quick to attribute blame—directed squarely at the builder. Never one for quiet diplomacy, he complained that the “builder had lied to [him] about the flashing under and within the coping walls” (250) and he was ignorant of the incident because the client had not informed him of the leak. He suggested the client’s silence was undoubtedly due to her “not wishing to hurt [his] feelings”. Although given earlier statements it might be speculated that she did not wish to be accused of pandering to a phobia of leaks. Wright was dismissive of the client’s inconvenience, suggesting she would be able to continue as normal until the next rains the following year and claiming he “fixed the house” once he “found out about it” (250). Implicit in this justification was the idea that it was not unreasonable to expect the client to bear a few days of “discomfort” each year in tolerance of the local climate. In true Wright style, discussions of these problems in his autobiography were self-constructive concessions. While Wright refused to take responsibility for climate-related issues in La Minatura, he was more forthcoming in appreciating the triumphs of his Imperial Hotel in Japan—one of the only buildings in the vicinity to survive the 1923 earthquake. In a chapter of his autobiography titled “Building against Doomsday (Why the Great Earthquake did not destroy the Imperial Hotel),” Wright reproduced a telegram sent by Okura Impeho stating: “Hotel stands undamaged as monument of your genius hundreds of homeless provided perfectly maintained service. Congratulations” (222). Far from unconcerned by nature or climate, Wright’s works celebrated and often went to great effort to accommodate the poetic qualities of these. In reference to his own home, Taliesin, Wright wrote: I wanted a home where icicles by invitation might beautify the eaves. So there were no gutters. And when the snow piled deep on the roofs […] icicles came to hang staccato from the eaves. Prismatic crystal pendants sometimes six feet long, glittered between the landscape and the eyes inside. Taliesin in winter was a frosted palace roofed and walled with snow, hung with iridescent fringes. (173) This description was, in part, included as a demonstration of his “superior” understanding and appreciation of nature and its poetic possibilities; an understanding not always mirrored by his clients. Discussing the Lloyd Lewis House in Libertyville, Illinois of 1939, Wright described his endeavours to keep the house comfortable (and avoid flooding) in Spring, Autumn and Summer months which, he conceded, left the house more vulnerable to winter conditions. Utilising an underfloor heating system, which he argued created a more healthful natural climate rather than an “artificial condition,” he conceded this may feel inadequate upon first entering the space (495). Following the client’s complaints that this system and the fireplace were insufficient, particularly in comparison with the temperature levels he was accustomed to in his workplace (at The Daily News), Wright playfully wrote: I thought of various ways of keeping the writer warm, I thought of wiring him to an electric pad inside his vest, allowing lots of lead wire so he could get around. But he waved the idea aside with contempt. […] Then I suggested we appeal to Secretary Knox to turn down the heat at the daily news […] so he could become acclimated. (497) Due to the client’s disinclination to bear this discomfort or use any such alternate schemes, Wright reluctantly refit the house with double-glazing (at the clients expense). In such cases, discussion of leaks or thermal discomfort were not always negative, but were cited rhetorically implying that perfunctory building techniques were not yet advanced enough to meet the architect’s expectations, or that their creative abilities were suppressed by conservative or difficult clients. Thus discussions of building failures have often been invoked in the social construction of the “architect-genius.” Interestingly accounts of the permeability of Wright’s buildings are more often included in biographical rather that architectural writings. In recent years, these accounts of weatherproofing problems have transformed from accusing letters or statements implying failure to a “badge of honour” among occupants who endure discomfort for the sake of art. This changing perspective is usually more pronounced in second generation owners, like Peter Palumbo (who has also owned Corbusier and Wright designed homes), who are either more aware of the potential problems in owning such a house or are more tolerant given an understanding of the historical worth of these projects. This is nowhere more evident than in a profile published in the real estate section of the New York Times. Rather than concealing these issues to preserve the resale value of the property, weatherproofing problems are presented as an endearing quirk. The new owners of Wright’s Prefab No. 1 of 1959, on Staten Island declared they initially did not have enough pots to place under the fifty separate leaks in their home, but in December 2005 proudly boasted they were ‘down to only one leak’ (Bernstein, "Living"). Similarly, in 2003 the resident of a Long Island Wright-designed property, optimistically claimed that while his children often complained their bedrooms were uncomfortably cold, this encouraged the family to spend more time in the warmer communal spaces (Bernstein, "In a House"). This client, more than simply optimistic, (perhaps unwittingly) implies an awareness of the importance of “the hearth” in Wright’s architecture. In such cases complaints about the weather are re-framed. The leaking roof is no longer representative of gender or power relationships between the client and the uncompromising artistic genius. Rather, it actually empowers the inhabitant who rises above their circumstances for the sake of art, invoking a kind of artistic asceticism. While “enlightened” clients of famed architects may be willing to suffer the effects of climate in the interiors of their homes, their neighbours are less tolerant as suggested in a more recent example. Complaints about the alteration of the micro-climate surrounding Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles prompted the sandblasting of part of the exterior cladding to reduce glare. In 2004, USA Today reported that reflections from the stainless steel cladding were responsible for raising the temperature in neighbouring buildings by more than 9° Celsius, forcing neighbours to close their blinds and operate their air-conditioners. There were also fears that the glare might inadvertently cause traffic problems. Further, one report found that average ground temperatures adjacent to the building peaked at approximately 58° Celsius (Schiler and Valmont). Unlike the Modernist examples, this more recent project has not yet been framed in aid of a critical agenda, and has seemingly been reported simply for being “newsworthy.” Benign Conversation Discussion of the suitability of Modern Architecture in relation to climate has proven a perennial topic of conversation, invoked in the course of recurring debates and criticisms. The fascination with accounts of climate-related problems—particularly in discussing the work of the great Modernist Architects like Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright—is in part due to a certain Schadenfreude in debunking the esteem and authority of a canonical figure. This is particularly the case with one, such as Wright, who was characterised by significant self-confidence and an acerbic wit often applied at the expense of others. Yet these accounts have been invoked as much in the construction of the figure of the architect as a creative genius as they have been in the deconstruction of this figure—as well as the historical construction of the client and the historians involved. In view of the growing awareness of the threats and realities of climate change, complaints about the weather are destined to adopt a new significance and be invoked in support of a different range of agendas. While it may be somewhat anachronistic to interpret the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe in terms of current discussions about sustainability in architecture, these topics are often broached when restoring, renovating or adapting the designs of such architects for new or contemporary usage. In contrast, the climatic problems caused by Gehry’s concert hall are destined to be framed according to a different set of values—such as the relationship of his work to the time, or perhaps in relation to contemporary technology. While discussion of the weather is, in the conversational arts, credited as benign topic, this is rarely the case in architectural history. References Benton, Tim. The Villas of Le Corbusier 1920-1930. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987. ———. “Villa Savoye and the Architects’ Practice (1984).” Le Corbusier: The Garland Essays. Ed. H. Allen Brooks. New York: Garland, 1987. 83-105. Bernstein, Fred A. “In a House That Wright Built.” New York Times 21 Sept. 2003. 3 Aug. 2009 < http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/21/nyregion/in-a-house-that-wright-built.html >. ———. “Living with Frank Lloyd Wright.” New York Times 18 Dec. 2005. 30 July 2009 < http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/realestate/18habi.html >. Blake, Peter. Mies van der Rohe: Architecture and Structure. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963 (1960). Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. II. Eds. Nicolas K. Kiessling, Thomas C. Faulkner and Rhonda L. Blair. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995 (1610). Campbell, Margaret. “What Tuberculosis Did for Modernism: The Influence of a Curative Environment on Modernist Design and Architecture.” Medical History 49 (2005): 463–488. “Corbusierismus”. Art. Time 4 Nov. 1935. 18 Aug. 2009 < http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,755279,00.html >. De Botton, Alain. The Architecture of Happiness. London: Penguin, 2006. Farnsworth, Edith. ‘Chapter 13’, Memoirs. Unpublished journals in three notebooks, Farnsworth Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, unpaginated (17pp). 29 Jan. 2009 < http://www.farnsworthhouse.org/pdf/edith_journal.pdf >. Farr, Finis. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1961. Friedman, Alice T. Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998. Gordon, Elizabeth. “The Threat to the Next America.” House Beautiful 95.4 (1953): 126-30, 250-51. Excerpts reproduced in Friedman. Women and the Making of the Modern House. 140-141. Hardarson, Ævar. “All Good Architecture Leaks—Witticism or Word of Wisdom?” Proceedings of the CIB Joint Symposium 13-16 June 2005, Helsinki < http://www.metamorfose.ntnu.no/Artikler/Hardarson_all_good_architecture_leaks.pdf >. Huck, Peter. “Gehry’s Hall Feels Heat.” The Age 1 March 2004. 22 Aug. 2009 < http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/02 /27/1077676955090.html >. Lipman, Jonathan. Frank Lloyd Wright and the Johnson Wax Buildings. Introduction by Kenneth Frampton. London: Architectural Press, 1984. Murphy, Kevin D. “The Villa Savoye and the Modernist Historic Monument.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61.1 (2002): 68-89. “New L.A. Concert Hall Raises Temperatures of Neighbours.” USA Today 24 Feb. 2004. 24 Aug. 2009 < http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-02-24-concert-hall_x.htm >. Owens, Mitchell. “A Wright House, Not a Shrine.” New York Times 25 July 1996. 30 July 2009 . Sbriglio, Jacques. Le Corbusier: La Villa Savoye, The Villa Savoye. Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier; Basel: Birkhäuser, 1999. Schiler, Marc, and Elizabeth Valmont. “Microclimatic Impact: Glare around the Walt Disney Concert Hall.” 2005. 24 Aug. 2009 < http://www.sbse.org/awards/docs/2005/1187.pdf >. Vandenberg, Maritz. Farnsworth House. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Foreword by Lord Peter Palumbo. London: Phaidon Press, 2003. Wright, Frank Lloyd. An Autobiography. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943.

Introduction“From every kind of man obedience I expect; I’m the Emperor of Japan.” (“Miyasama,” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s musical The Mikado, 1885)This commentary is facilitated by—surprisingly resilient—oriental stereotypes of an imagined Japan (think of Oscar Wilde’s assertion, in 1889, that Japan was a European invention). During the Victorian era, in Britain, there was a craze for all things oriental, particularly ceramics and “there was a craze for all things Japanese and no middle class drawing room was without its Japanese fan or teapot.“ (V&A Victorian). These pastoral depictions of the ‘oriental life’ included the figures of men and women in oriental garb, with fans, stilt shoes, kimono-like robes, and appropriate headdresses, engaging in garden-based activities, especially tea ceremony variations (Landow). In fact, tea itself, and the idea of a ceremony of serving it, had taken up a central role, even an obsession in middle- and upper-class Victorian life. Similarly, landscapes with wild seas, rugged rocks and stunted pines, wizened monks, pagodas and temples, and particular fauna and flora (cranes and other birds flying through clouds of peonies, cherry blossoms and chrysanthemums) were very popular motifs (see Martin and Koda). Rather than authenticity, these designs heightened the Western-based romantic stereotypes associated with a stylised form of Japanese life, conducted sedately under rule of the Japanese Imperial Court. In reality, prior to the Meiji period (1868–1912), the Emperor was largely removed from everyday concerns, residing as an isolated, holy figure in Kyoto, the traditional capital of Japan. Japan was instead ruled from Edo (modern day Tokyo) led by the Shogun and his generals, according to a strict Confucian influenced code (see Keene). In Japan, as elsewhere, the presence of feudal-style governance includes policies that determine much of everyday life, including restrictions on clothing (Rall 169). The Samurai code was no different, and included a series of protocols that restricted rank, movement, behaviour, and clothing. As Vincent has noted in the case of the ‘lace tax’ in Great Britain, these restrictions were designed to punish those who seek to penetrate the upper classes through their costume (28-30). In Japan, pre-Meiji sumptuary laws, for example, restricted the use of gold, and prohibited the use of a certain shade of red by merchant classes (V&A Kimono).Therefore, in the governance of pre-globalised societies, the importance of clothing and textile is evident; as Jones and Stallybrass comment: We need to understand the antimatedness of clothes, their ability to “pick up” subjects, to mould and shape them both physically and socially—to constitute subjects through their power as material memories […] Clothing is a worn world: a world of social relations put upon the wearer’s body. (2-3, emphasis added)The significant re-imagining of Japanese cultural and national identities are explored here through the cataclysmic impact of Western ideologies on Japanese cultural traditions. There are many ways to examine how indigenous cultures respond to European, British, or American (hereafter Western) influences, particularly in times of conflict (Wilk). Western ideology arrived in Japan after a long period of isolation (during which time Japan’s only contact was with Dutch traders) through the threat of military hostility and war. It is after this outside threat was realised that Japan’s adoption of military and industrial practices begins. The re-imagining of their national identity took many forms, and the inclusion of a Western-style military costuming as a schoolboy uniform became a highly visible indicator of Japan’s mission to protect its sovereign integrity. A brief history of Japan’s rise from a collection of isolated feudal states to a unified military power, in not only the Asian Pacific region but globally, demonstrates the speed at which they adopted the Western mode of warfare. Gunboats on Japan’s ShorelinesJapan was forcefully opened to the West in the 1850s by America under threat of First Name Perry’s ‘gunboat diplomacy’ (Hillsborough 7-8). Following this, Japan underwent a rapid period of modernisation, and an upsurge in nationalism and military expansion that was driven by a desire to catch up to the European powers present in the Pacific. Noted by Ian Ferguson in Civilization: The West and the Rest, Unsure, the Japanese decided […] to copy everything […] Japanese institutions were refashioned on Western models. The army drilled like Germans; the navy sailed like Britons. An American-style system of state elementary and middle schools was also introduced. (221, emphasis added)This was nothing short of a wide-scale reorganisation of Japan’s entire social structure and governance. Under the Emperor Meiji, who wrested power from the Shogunate and reclaimed it for the Imperial head, Japan steamed into an industrial revolution, achieving in a matter of years what had taken Europe over a century.Japan quickly became a major player-elect on the world stage. However, as an island nation, Japan lacked the essentials of both coal and iron with which to fashion not only industrial machinery but also military equipment, the machinery of war. In 1875 Japan forced Korea to open itself to foreign (read: Japanese) trade. In the same treaty, Korea was recognised as a sovereign nation, separate from Qing China (Tucker 1461). The necessity for raw materials then led to the Sino-Japanese War (1894–95), a conflict between Japan and China that marked the emergence of Japan as a major world power. The Korean Peninsula had long been China’s most important client state, but its strategic location adjacent to the Japanese archipelago, and its natural resources of coal and iron, attracted Japan’s interest. Later, the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), allowed a victorious Japan to force Russia to abandon its expansionist policy in the Far East, becoming the first Asian power in modern times to defeat a European power. The Russo-Japanese War developed out of the rivalry between Russia and Japan for dominance in Korea and Manchuria, again in the struggle for natural resources (Tucker 1534-46).Japan’s victories, together with the county’s drive for resources, meant that Japan could now determine its role within the Asia-Pacific sphere of influence. As Japan’s military, and their adoption of Westernised combat, proved effective in maintaining national integrity, other social institutions also looked to the West (Ferguson 221). In an ironic twist—while Victorian and Continental fashion was busy adopting the exotic, oriental look (Martin and Koda)—the kimono, along with other essentials of Japanese fashions, were rapidly altered (both literally and figuratively) to suit new, warlike ideology. It should be noted that kimono literally means ‘things that you wear’ and which, prior to exposure to Western fashions, signified all worn clothing (Dalby 65-119). “Wearing Things” in Westernised JapanAs Japan modernised during the late 1800s the kimono was positioned as symbolising barbaric, pre-modern, ‘oriental’ Japan. Indeed, on 17 January 1887 the Meiji Empress issued a memorandum on the subject of women’s clothing in Japan: “She [the Empress] believed that western clothes were in fact closer to the dress of women in ancient Japan than the kimonos currently worn and urged that they be adopted as the standard clothes of the reign” (Keene 404). The resemblance between Western skirts and blouses and the simple skirt and separate top that had been worn in ancient times by a people descended from the sun goddess, Amaterasu wo mikami, was used to give authority and cultural authenticity to Japan’s modernisation projects. The Imperial Court, with its newly ennobled European style aristocrats, exchanged kimono silks for Victorian finery, and samurai armour for military pomp and splendour (Figure 1).Figure 1: The Meiji Emperor, Empress and Crown Prince resplendent in European fashions on an outing to Asukayama Park. Illustration: Toyohara Chikanobu, circa 1890.It is argued here that the function of a uniform is to prepare the body for service. Maids and butlers, nurses and courtesans, doctors, policemen, and soldiers are all distinguished by their garb. Prudence Black states: “as a technology, uniforms shape and code the body so they become a unit that belongs to a collective whole” (93). The requirement to discipline bodies through clothing, particularly through uniforms, is well documented (see Craik, Peoples, and Foucault). The need to distinguish enemies from allies on the battlefield requires adherence to a set of defined protocols, as referenced in military fashion compendiums (see Molloy). While the postcolonial adoption of Western-based clothing reflects a new form of subservience (Rall, Kuechler and Miller), in Japan, the indigenous garments were clearly designed in the interests of ideological allegiance. To understand the Japanese sartorial traditions, the kimono itself must be read as providing a strong disciplinary element. The traditional garment is designed to represent an upright and unbending column—where two meters of under bindings are used to discipline the body into shape are then topped with a further four meters of a stiffened silk obi wrapped around the waist and lower chest. To dress formally in such a garment requires helpers (see Dalby). The kimono both constructs and confines the women who wear it, and presses them into their roles as dutiful, upper-class daughters (see Craik). From the 1890s through to the 1930s, when Japan again enters a period of militarism, the myth of the kimono again changes as it is integrated into the build-up towards World War II.Decades later, when Japan re-established itself as a global economic power in the 1970s and 1980s, the kimono was re-authenticated as Japan’s ‘traditional’ garment. This time it was not the myth of a people descended from solar deities that was on display, but that of samurai strength and propriety for men, alongside an exaggerated femininity for women, invoking a powerful vision of Japanese sartorial tradition. This reworking of the kimono was only possible as the garment was already contained within the framework of Confucian family duty. However, in the lead up to World War II, Japanese military advancement demanded of its people soldiers that could win European-style wars. The quickest solution was to copy the military acumen and strategies of global warfare, and the costumes of the soldiery and seamen of Europe, including Great Britain (Ferguson). It was also acknowledged that soldiers were ‘made not born’ so the Japanese educational system was re-vamped to emulate those of its military rivals (McVeigh). It was in the uptake of schoolboy uniforms that this re-imagining of Japanese imperial strength took place.The Japanese Schoolboy UniformCentral to their rapid modernisation, Japan adopted a constitutional system of education that borrowed from American and French models (Tipton 68-69). The government viewed education as a “primary means of developing a sense of nation,” and at its core, was the imperial authorities’ obsession with defining “Japan and Japaneseness” (Tipton 68-69). Numerous reforms eventually saw, after an abolition of fees, nearly 100% attendance by both boys and girls, despite a lingering mind-set that educating women was “a waste of time” (Tipton 68-69). A boys’ uniform based on the French and Prussian military uniforms of the 1860s and 1870s respectively (Kinsella 217), was adopted in 1879 (McVeigh 47). This jacket, initially with Prussian cape and cap, consists of a square body, standing mandarin style collar and a buttoned front. It was through these education reforms, as visually symbolised by the adoption of military style school uniforms, that citizen making, education, and military training became interrelated aspects of Meiji modernisation (Kinsella 217). Known as the gakuran (gaku: to study; ran: meaning both orchid, and a pun on Horanda, meaning Holland, the only Western country with trading relations in pre-Meiji Japan), these jackets were a symbol of education, indicating European knowledge, power and influence and came to reflect all things European in Meiji Japan. By adopting these jackets two objectives were realised:through the magical power of imitation, Japan would, by adopting the clothing of the West, naturally rise in military power; and boys were uniformed to become not only educated as quasi-Europeans, but as fighting soldiers and sons (suns) of the nation.The gakuran jacket was first popularised by state-run schools, however, in the century and a half that the garment has been in use it has come to symbolise young Japanese masculinity as showcased in campus films, anime, manga, computer games, and as fashion is the preeminent garment for boybands and Japanese hipsters.While the gakuran is central to the rise of global militarism in Japan (McVeigh 51-53), the jacket would go on to form the basis of the Sun Yat Sen and Mao Suits as symbols of revolutionary China (see McVeigh). Supposedly, Sun Yat Sen saw the schoolboy jacket in Japan as a utilitarian garment and adopted it with a turn down collar (Cumming et al.). For Sun Yat Sen, the gakuran was the perfect mix of civilian (school boy) and military (the garment’s Prussian heritage) allowing him to walk a middle path between the demands of both. Furthermore, the garment allowed Sun to navigate between Western style suits and old-fashioned Qing dynasty styles (Gerth 116); one was associated with the imperialism of the National Products Movement, while the other represented the corruption of the old dynasty. In this way, the gakuran was further politicised from a national (Japanese) symbol to a global one. While military uniforms have always been political garments, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, as the world was rocked by revolutions and war, civilian clothing also became a means of expressing political ideals (McVeigh 48-49). Note that Mahatma Ghandi’s clothing choices also evolved from wholly Western styles to traditional and emphasised domestic products (Gerth 116).Mao adopted this style circa 1927, further defining the style when he came to power by adding elements from the trousers, tunics, and black cotton shoes worn by peasants. The suit was further codified during the 1960s, reaching its height in the Cultural Revolution. While the gakuran has always been a scholarly black (see Figure 2), subtle differences in the colour palette differentiated the Chinese population—peasants and workers donned indigo blue Mao jackets, while the People’s Liberation Army Soldiers donned khaki green. This limited colour scheme somewhat paradoxically ensured that subtle hierarchical differences were maintained even whilst advocating egalitarian ideals (Davis 522). Both the Sun Yat Sen suit and the Mao jacket represented the rejection of bourgeois (Western) norms that objectified the female form in favour of a uniform society. Neo-Maoism and Mao fever of the early 1990s saw the Mao suit emerge again as a desirable piece of iconic/ironic youth fashion. Figure 2: An example of Gakuran uniform next to the girl’s equivalent on display at Ichikawa Gakuen School (Japan). Photo: Emerald King, 2015.There is a clear and vital link between the influence of the Prussian style Japanese schoolboy uniform on the later creation of the Mao jacket—that of the uniform as an integral piece of worn propaganda (Atkins).For Japan, the rapid deployment of new military and industrial technologies, as well as a sartorial need to present her leaders as modern (read: Western) demanded the adoption of European-style uniforms. The Imperial family had always been removed from Samurai battlefields, so the adoption of Western military costume allowed Japan’s rulers to present a uniform face to other global powers. When Japan found itself in conflict in the Asia Pacific Region, without an organised military, the first requirement was to completely reorganise their system of warfare from a feudal base and to train up national servicemen. Within an American-style compulsory education system, the European-based curriculum included training in mathematics, engineering and military history, as young Britons had for generations begun their education in Greek and Latin, with the study of Ancient Greek and Roman wars (Bantock). It is only in the classroom that ideological change on a mass scale can take place (Reference Please), a lesson not missed by later leaders such as Mao Zedong.ConclusionIn the 1880s, the Japanese leaders established their position in global politics by adopting clothing and practices from the West (Europeans, Britons, and Americans) in order to quickly re-shape their country’s educational system and military establishment. The prevailing military costume from foreign cultures not only disciplined their adopted European bodies, they enforced a new regime through dress (Rall 157-174). For boys, the gakuran symbolised the unity of education and militarism as central to Japanese masculinity. Wearing a uniform, as many authors suggest, furthers compliance (Craik, Nagasawa Kaiser and Hutton, and McVeigh). As conscription became a part of Japanese reality in World War II, the schoolboys just swapped their military-inspired school uniforms for genuine military garments.Re-imagining a Japanese schoolboy uniform from a European military costume might suit ideological purposes (Atkins), but there is more. The gakuran, as a uniform based on a close, but not fitted jacket, was the product of a process of advanced industrialisation in the garment-making industry also taking place in the 1800s:Between 1810 and 1830, technical calibrations invented by tailors working at the very highest level of the craft [in Britain] eventually made it possible for hundreds of suits to be cut up and made in advance [...] and the ready-to-wear idea was put into practice for men’s clothes […] originally for uniforms for the War of 1812. (Hollander 31) In this way, industrialisation became a means to mass production, which furthered militarisation, “the uniform is thus the clothing of the modern disciplinary society” (Black 102). There is a perfect resonance between Japan’s appetite for a modern military and their rise to an industrialised society, and their conquests in Asia Pacific supplied the necessary material resources that made such a rapid deployment possible. The Japanese schoolboy uniform was an integral part of the process of both industrialisation and militarisation, which instilled in the wearer a social role required by modern Japanese society in its rise for global power. Garments are never just clothing, but offer a “world of social relations put upon the wearer’s body” (Jones and Stallybrass 3-4).Today, both the Japanese kimono and the Japanese schoolboy uniform continue to interact with, and interrogate, global fashions as contemporary designers continue to call on the tropes of ‘military chic’ (Tonchi) and Japanese-inspired clothing (Kawamura). References Atkins, Jaqueline. Wearing Propaganda: Textiles on the Home Front in Japan, Britain, and the United States. Princeton: Yale UP, 2005.Bantock, Geoffrey Herman. Culture, Industrialisation and Education. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1968.Black, Prudence. “The Discipline of Appearance: Military Style and Australian Flight Hostess Uniforms 1930–1964.” Fashion & War in Popular Culture. Ed. Denise N. Rall. Bristol: Intellect/U Chicago P, 2014. 91-106.Craik, Jenifer. Uniforms Exposed: From Conformity to Transgression. Oxford: Berg, 2005.Cumming, Valerie, Cecil Williet Cunnington, and Phillis Emily Cunnington. “Mao Style.” The Dictionary of Fashion History. Eds. Valerie Cumming, Cecil Williet Cunnington, and Phillis Emily Cunnington. Oxford: Berg, 2010.Dalby, Liza, ed. Kimono: Fashioning Culture. London: Vintage, 2001.Davis, Edward L., ed. Encyclopaedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture. London: Routledge, 2005.Dees, Jan. Taisho Kimono: Speaking of Past and Present. Milan: Skira, 2009.Ferguson, N. Civilization: The West and the Rest. London: Penguin, 2011.Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1997. Gerth, Karl. China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of the Nation, Cambridge: East Asian Harvard Monograph 224, 2003.Gilbert, W.S., and Arthur Sullivan. The Mikado or, The Town of Titipu. 1885. 16 Nov. 2015 ‹http://math.boisestate.edu/gas/mikado/mk_lib.pdf›. Hillsborough, Romulus. Samurai Revolution: The Dawn of Modern Japan Seen through the Eyes of the Shogun's Last Samurai. Vermont: Tuttle, 2014.Jones, Anne R., and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.Keene, Donald. Emperor of Japan: Meiji and His World, 1852-1912. New York: Columbia UP, 2002.King, Emerald L. “Schoolboys and Kimono Ladies.” Presentation to the Un-Thinking Asian Migrations Conference, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, 24-26 Aug. 2014. Kinsella, Sharon. “What’s Behind the Fetishism of Japanese School Uniforms?” Fashion Theory 6.2 (2002): 215-37. Kuechler, Susanne, and Daniel Miller, eds. Clothing as Material Culture. Oxford: Berg, 2005.Landow, George P. “Liberty and the Evolution of the Liberty Style.” 22 Aug. 2010. ‹http://www.victorianweb.org/art/design/liberty/lstyle.html›.Martin, Richard, and Harold Koda. Orientalism: Vision of the East in Western Dress. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994.McVeigh, Brian J. Wearing Ideology: State, Schooling, and Self-Presentation in Japan. Oxford: Berg, 2000.Molloy, John. Military Fashion: A Comparative History of the Uniforms of the Great Armies from the 17th Century to the First World War. New York: Putnam, 1972.Peoples, Sharon. “Embodying the Military: Uniforms.” Critical Studies in Men’s Fashion 1.1 (2014): 7-21.Rall, Denise N. “Costume & Conquest: A Proximity Framework for Post-War Impacts on Clothing and Textile Art.” Fashion & War in Popular Culture, ed. Denise N. Rall. Bristol: Intellect/U Chicago P, 2014. 157-74. Tipton, Elise K. Modern Japan: A Social and Political History. 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2016.Tucker, Spencer C., ed. A Global Chronology of Conflict: From the Ancient World to the Modern Middle East. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2013.V&A Kimono. Victoria and Albert Museum. “A History of the Kimono.” 2004. 2 Oct. 2015 ‹http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/h/a-history-of-the-kimono/›.V&A Victorian. Victoria and Albert Museum. “The Victorian Vision of China and Japan.” 10 Nov. 2015 ‹http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/t/the-victorian-vision-of-china-and-japan/›.Vincent, Susan J. The Anatomy of Fashion: Dressing the Body from the Renaissance to Today. Berg: Oxford, 2009.Wilde, Oscar. “The Decay of Lying.” 1889. In Intentions New York: Berentano’s 1905. 16 Nov. 2015 ‹http://virgil.org/dswo/courses/novel/wilde-lying.pdf›. Wilk, Richard. “Consumer Goods as a Dialogue about Development.” Cultural History 7 (1990) 79-100.

IntroductionThe wandering narrator is a familiar figure in contemporary literature. This narrator is often searching for something abstract or ill-defined connected to the past and the traces it leaves behind. The works of the German writer W.G. Sebald inspired a number of theories on the various ways a writer might intersect place, memory, and representation through seemingly aimless wandering. This article expands on the scholarship around Sebald’s themes to identify two modes of investigative wandering: (1) wandering “in place”, through a city where a past trauma has occurred, and (2) wandering “out of place”, which occurs when a wanderer encounters a city that is a holding place of traumas experienced elsewhere.Sebald’s narrators mostly conduct wandering “in place” because they are actively immersed in, and wandering through, locations that trigger both memory and thought. In this article, after exploring both Sebald’s work and theories of place in literature, I analyse another example of wandering in place, in the Paris of Patrick Modiano’s novel, The Search Warrant (2014). I conclude by discussing how I encountered this mode of wandering myself when in Moscow and St Petersburg researching my first novel, The Memory Artist (2016). In contrasting these two modes of wandering, my aim is to contribute further nuance to the interpretation of conceptions of place in literature. By articulating the concept of wandering “out of place”, I identify a category of wanderer and writer who, like myself, finds connection with places and their stories without having a direct encounter with that place. Theories of Place and Wandering in W.G. Sebald’s WorkIn this section, I introduce Sebald as a literary wanderer. Born in the south of Germany in 1944, Sebald is perhaps best known for his four “prose fictions”— Austerlitz published in 2001, The Emigrants published in 1996, The Rings of Saturn published in 1998, and Vertigo published in 2000—all of which blend historiography and fiction in mostly plot-less narratives. These works follow a closely autobiographical narrator as he traverses Europe, visiting people and places connected to Europe’s turbulent twentieth century. He muses on the difficulty of preserving the truths of history and speaking of others’ traumas. Sebald describes how “places do seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them” (Sebald quoted in Jaggi). Sebald left his native Germany in 1966 and moved to England, where he lived until his untimely death in a car accident in 2001 (Gussow). His four prose fictions feature the same autobiographical narrator: a middle-aged German man who lives in northern England. The narrator traverses Europe with a compulsion to research, ponder, and ultimately, represent historical catastrophes and traumas that haunt him. Anna MacDonald describes how Sebald’s texts “move freely between history and memory, biography, autobiography and fiction, travel writing and art criticism, scientific observation and dreams, photographic and other textual images” (115). The Holocaust and human displacement are simultaneously at the forefront of the narrator’s preoccupations but rarely referenced directly. This singular approach has caused many commentators to remark that Sebald’s works are “haunted” by these traumatic events (Baumgarten 272).Sebald’s narrators are almost constantly on the move, obsessively documenting the locations, buildings, and people they encounter or the history of that place. As such, it is helpful to consider Sebald’s wandering narrator through theories of landscape and its representation in art. Heike Polster describes the development of landscape from a Western European conception and notes how “the landscape idea in art and the techniques of linear perspective appear simultaneously” (88). Landscape is distinguished from raw physical environment by the role of the human mind: “landscape was perceived and constructed by a disembodied outsider” (88). As such, landscape is something created by our perceptions of place. Ulrich Baer makes a similar observation: “to look at a landscape as we do today manifests a specifically modern sense of self-understanding, which may be described as the individual’s ability to view herself within a larger, and possibly historical, context” (43).These conceptions of landscape suggest a desire for narrative. The attempt to fix our understanding of a place according to what we know about it, its past, and our own relationship to it, makes landscape inextricable from representation. To represent a landscape is to offer a representation of subjective perception. This understanding charges the landscapes of literature with meaning: the perceptions of a narrator who wanders and encounters place can be studied for their subjective properties.As I will highlight through the works of Sebald and Modiano, the wandering narrator draws on a number of sources in their representations of both place and memory, including their perceptions as they walk in place, the books they read, the people they encounter, as well as their subjective and affective responses. This multi-dimensional process aligns with Polster’s contention that “landscape is as much the external world as it is a visual and philosophical principle, a principle synthesizing the visual experience of material and geographical surroundings with our knowledge of the structures, characteristics, and histories of these surroundings” (70). The narrators in the works of Sebald and Modiano undertake this synthesised process as they traverse their respective locations. As noted, although their objectives are often vague, part of their process of drawing together experience and knowledge is a deep desire to connect with the pasts of those places. The particular kind of wanderer “in place” who I consider here is preoccupied with the past. In his study of Sebald’s work, Christian Moser describes how “the task of the literary walker is to uncover and decipher the hidden track, which, more often than not, is buried in the landscape like an invisible wound” (47-48). Pierre Nora describes places of memory, lieux de memoire, as locations “where memory crystallizes and secretes itself”. Interest in such sites arises when “consciousness of a break with the past is bound up with a sense that memory has been torn—but torn in such a way as to pose the problem of the embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists” (Nora 7).Encountering and contemplating sites of memory, while wandering in place, can operate simultaneously as encounters with traumatic stories. According to Tim Ingold, “the landscape is constituted as an enduring record of—and testimony to—the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in doing so, have left something of themselves […] landscape tells – or rather is – a story” (153). Such occurrences can be traced in the narratives of Sebald and Modiano, as their narrators participate both in the act of reading the story of landscape, through their wandering and their research about a place, but also in contributing to the telling of those stories, by inserting their own layer of subjective experience. In this way, the synthesised process of landscape put forward by Polster takes place.To perceive the landscape in this way is to “carry out an act of remembrance” (Ingold 152). The many ways that a person experiences and represents the stories that make up a landscape are varied and suited to a wandering methodology. MacDonald, for example, characterises Sebald’s methodology of “representation-via-digressive association”, which enables “writer, narrator, and reader alike to draw connections in, and through, space between temporally distant historical events and the monstrous geographies they have left in their wake” (MacDonald 116).Moser observes that Sebald’s narrative practice suggests an opposition between the pilgrimage, “devoted to worship, asceticism, and repentance”, and tourism, aimed at “entertainment and diversion” (Moser 37). If the pilgrim contemplates the objects, monuments, and relics they encounter, and the tourist is “given to fugitive consumption of commercialized sights”, Sebald’s walker is a kind of post-traumatic wanderer who “searches for the traces of a silent catastrophe that constitutes the obverse of modernity and its history of progress” (Moser 37). Thus, wandering tends to “cultivate a certain mode of perception”, one that is highly attuned to the history of a place, that looks for traces rather than common sites of consumption (Moser 37).It is worth exploring the motivations of a wandering narrator. Sebald’s narrator in The Rings of Saturn (2002) provides us with a vague impetus for his wandering: “in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that had taken hold of me after the completion of a long stint of work” (3). In Vertigo (2002), Sebald’s narrator walks with seemingly little purpose, resulting in a sense of confusion or nausea alluded to in the book’s title: “so what else could I do … but wander aimlessly around until well into the night”. On the next page, he refers again to his “aimlessly wandering about the city”, which he continues until he realises that his shoes have fallen apart (35-37). What becomes apparent from such comments is that the process of wandering is driven by mostly subconscious compulsions. The restlessness of Sebald’s wandering narrators represents their unease about our capacity to forget the history of a place, and thereby lose something intangible yet vital that comes from recognising traumatic pasts.In Sebald’s work, if there is any logic to the wanderer’s movement, it is mostly hidden from them while wandering. The narrator of Vertigo, after days of wandering through northern Italian cities, remarks that “if the paths I had followed had been inked in, it would have seemed as though a man had kept trying out new tracks and connections over and over, only to be thwarted each time by the limitations of his reason, imagination or willpower” (Sebald, Vertigo 34). Moser writes how “the hidden order that lies behind the peripatetic movement becomes visible retroactively – only after the walker has consulted a map. It is the map that allows Sebald to decode the ‘writing’ of his steps” (48). Wandering in place enables digressions and preoccupations, which then constitute the landscape ultimately represented. Wandering and reading the map of one’s steps afterwards form part of the same process: the attempt to piece together—to create a landscape—that uncovers lost or hidden histories. Sebald’s Vertigo, divided into four parts, layers the narrator’s personal wandering through Italy, Austria, and Germany, with the stories of those who were there before him, including the writers Stendhal, Kafka, and Casanova. An opposing factor to memory is a landscape’s capacity to forget; or rather, since landscape conceived here is a construction of our own minds, to reflect our own amnesia. Lewis observes that Sebald’s narrator in Vertigo “is disturbed by the suppression of history evident even in the landscape”. Sebald’s narrator describes Henri Beyle (the writer Stendhal) and his experience visiting the location of the Battle of Marengo as such:The difference between the images of the battle which he had in his head and what he now saw before him as evidence that the battle had in fact taken place occasioned in him a vertiginous sense of confusion […] In its shabbiness, it fitted neither with his conception of the turbulence of the Battle of Marengo nor the vast field of the dead on which he was now standing, alone with himself, like one meeting his doom. (17-18)The “vertiginous sense of confusion” signals a preoccupation with attempting to interpret sites of memory and, importantly, what Nora calls a “consciousness of a break with the past” (Nora 7) that characterises an interest in lieux de memoire. The confusion and feeling of unknowing is, I suggest, a characteristic of a wandering narrator. They do not quite know what they are looking for, nor what would constitute a finished wandering experience. This lack of resolution is a hallmark of the wandering narrative. A parallel can be drawn here with trauma fiction theory, which categorises a particular kind of literature that aims to recognise and represent the ethical and psychological impediments to representing trauma (Whitehead). Baumgarten describes the affective response to Sebald’s works:Here there are neither answers nor questions but a haunted presence. Unresolved, fragmented, incomplete, relying on shards for evidence, the narrator insists on the inconclusiveness of his experience: rather than arriving at a conclusion, narrator and reader are left disturbed. (272)Sebald’s narrators are illustrative literary wanderers. They demonstrate a conception of landscape that theorists such as Polster, Baer, and Ingold articulate: landscapes tell stories for those who investigate them, and are constituted by a synthesis of personal experience, the historical record, and the present condition of a place. This way of encountering a place is necessarily fragmented and can be informed by the tenets of trauma fiction, which seeks ways of representing traumatic histories by resisting linear narratives and conclusive resolutions. Modiano: Wandering in Place in ParisModiano’s The Search Warrant is another literary example of wandering in place. This autobiographical novel similarly illustrates the notion of landscape as a construction of a narrator who wanders through cities and forms landscape through an amalgamation of perception, knowledge, and memory.Although Modiano’s wandering narrator appears to be searching the Paris of the 1990s for traces of a Jewish girl, missing since the Second World War, he is also conducting an “aimless” wandering in search of traces of his own past in Paris. The novel opens with the narrator reading an old newspaper article, dated 1942, and reporting a missing fourteen-year-old girl in Paris. The narrator becomes consumed with a need to learn the fate of the girl. The search also becomes a search for his own past, as the streets of Paris from which Dora Bruder disappeared are also the streets his father worked among during the Nazi Occupation of Paris. They are also the same streets along which the narrator walked as an angst-ridden youth in the 1960s.Throughout the novel, the narrator uses a combination of facts uncovered by research, documentary evidence, and imagination, which combine with his own memories of walking in Paris. Although the fragmentation of sources creates a sense of uncertainty, together there is an affective weight, akin to Sebald’s “haunted presence”, in the layers Modiano’s narrator compiles. One chapter opens with an entry from the Clignancourt police station logbook, which records the disappearance of Dora Bruder:27 December 1941. Bruder, Dora, born Paris.12, 25/2/26, living at 41 Boulevard Ornano.Interview with Bruder, Ernest, age 42, father. (Modiano 69)However, the written record is ambiguous. “The following figures”, the narrator continues, “are written in the margin, but I have no idea what they stand for: 7029 21/12” (Modiano 69). Moreover, the physical record of the interview with Dora’s father is missing from the police archives. All he knows is that Dora’s father waited thirteen days before reporting her disappearance, likely wary of drawing attention to her: a Jewish girl in Occupied Paris. Confronted by uncertainty, the narrator recalls his own experience of running away as a youth in Paris: “I remember the intensity of my feelings while I was on the run in January 1960 – an intensity such as I have seldom known. It was the intoxication of cutting all ties at a stroke […] Running away – it seems – is a call for help and occasionally a form of suicide” (Modiano 71). The narrator’s construction of landscape is multi-layered: his past, Dora’s past, his present. Overhanging this is the history of Nazi-occupied Paris and the cultural memory of France’s collaboration with Nazi Germany.With the aid of other police documents, the narrator traces Dora’s return home, and then her arrest and detainment in the Tourelles barracks in Paris. From Tourelles, detainees were deported to Drancy concentration camp. However, the narrator cannot confirm whether Dora was deported to Drancy. In the absence of evidence, the narrator supplies other documents: profiles of those known to be deported, in an attempt to construct a story.Hena: I shall call her by her forename. She was nineteen … What I know about Hena amounts to almost nothing: she was born on 11 December 1922 at Pruszkow in Poland, and she lived at no. 42 Rue Oberkampf, the steeply sloping street I have so often climbed. (111)Unable to make conclusions about Dora’s story, the narrator is drawn back to a physical location: the Tourelles barracks. He describes a walk he took there in 1996: “Rue des Archives, Rue de Bretagne, Rue des-Filles-du-Calvaire. Then the uphill slope of the Rue Oberkampf, where Hena had lived” (Modiano 124). The narrator combines what he experiences in the city with the documentary evidence left behind, to create a landscape. He reaches the Tourelles barracks: “the boulevard was empty, lost in a silence so deep I could hear the rustling of the planes”. When he sees a sign that says “MILITARY ZONE. FILMING OR PHOTOGRAPHY PROHIBITED”, the cumulative effect of his solitary and uncertain wandering results in despair at the difficulty of preserving the past: “I told myself that nobody remembers anything anymore. A no-man’s-land lay beyond that wall, a zone of emptiness and oblivion” (Modiano 124). The wandering process here, including the narrator’s layering of his own experience with Hena’s life, the lack of resolution, and the wandering narrator’s disbelief at the seemingly incongruous appearance of a place today in relation to its past, mirrors the feeling of Sebald’s narrator at the site of the Battle of Marengo, quoted above.Earlier in the novel, after frustrated attempts to find information about Dora’s mother and father, the narrator reflects that “they are the sort of people who leave few traces. Virtually anonymous” (Modiano 23). He remarks that Dora’s parents are “inseparable from those Paris streets, those suburban landscapes where, by chance, I discovered they had lived” (Modiano 23). There is a disjunction between knowledge and something deeper, the undefined impetus that drives the narrator to walk, to search, and therefore to write: “often, what I know about them amounts to no more than a simple address. And such topographical precision contrasts with what we shall never know about their life—this blank, this mute block of the unknown” (Modiano 23). This contrast of topographical precision and the “unknown” echoes the feeling of Sebald’s narrator when contemplating sites of memory. One may wander “in place” yet still feel a sense of confusion and gaps in knowledge: this is, I suggest, an intended aesthetic effect by both authors. Reader and narrator alike feel a sense of yearning and melancholy as a result of the narrator’s wandering. Wandering out of Place in Moscow and St PetersburgWhen I travelled to Russia in 2015, I sought to document, with a Sebaldian wandering methodology, processes of finding memory both in and out of place. Like Sebald and Modiano, I was invested in hidden histories and the relationship between the physical environment and memory. Yet unlike those authors, I focused my wandering mostly on places that reflected or referenced events that occurred elsewhere rather than events that happened in that specific place. As such, I was wandering out of place.The importance of memory, both in and out of place, is a central concept in my novel The Memory Artist. The narrator, Pasha, reflects the concerns of current and past members of Russia’s civic organisation named Memorial, which seeks to document and preserve the memory of victims of Communism. Contemporary activists lament that in modern Russia the traumas of the Gulag labour camps, collectivisation, and the “Terror” of executions under Joseph Stalin, are inadequately commemorated. In a 2012 interview, Irina Flige, co-founder of the civic body Memorial Society in St Petersburg, encapsulated activists’ disappointment at seeing burial sites of Terror victims fall into oblivion:By the beginning of 2000s these newly-found sites of mass burials had been lost. Even those that had been marked by signs were lost for a second time! Just imagine: a place was found [...] people came and held vigils in memory of those who were buried there. But then this generation passed on and a new generation forgot the way to these sites – both literally and metaphorically. (Flige quoted in Karp)A shift in generation, and a culture of secrecy or inaction surrounding efforts to preserve the locations of graves or former labour camps, perpetuate a “structural deficit of knowledge”, whereby knowledge of the physical locations of memory is lost (Anstett 2). This, in turn, affects the way people and societies construct their memories. When sites of past trauma are not documented or acknowledged as such, it is more difficult to construct a narrative about those places, particularly those that confront and document a violent past. Physical absence in the landscape permits a deficit of storytelling.This “structural deficit of knowledge” is exacerbated when sites of memory are located in distant locations. The former Soviet labour camps and locations of some mass graves are scattered across vast locations far from Russia’s main cities. Yet for some, those cities now act as holding environments for the memory of lost camp locations, mass graves, and histories. For example, a monument in Moscow may commemorate victims of an overseas labour camp. Lieux de memoire shift from being “in place” to existing “out of place”, in monuments and memorials. As I walked through Moscow and St Petersburg, I had the sensation I was wandering both in and out of place, as I encountered the histories of memories physically close but also geographically distant.For example, I arrived early one morning at the Lubyanka building in central Moscow, a pre-revolutionary building with yellow walls and terracotta borders, the longstanding headquarters of the Soviet and now Russian secret police (image 1). Many victims of the worst repressive years under Stalin were either shot here or awaited deportation to Gulag camps in Siberia and other remote areas. The place is both a site of memory and one that gestures to traumatic pasts inflicted elsewhere.Image 1: The Lubyanka, in Central MoscowA monument to victims of political repression was erected near the Lubyanka Building in 1990. The monument takes the form of a stone taken from the Solovetsky Islands, an archipelago in the far north, on the White Sea, and the location of the Solovetsky Monastery that Lenin turned into a prison camp in 1921 (image 2). The Solovetsky Stone rests in view of the Lubyanka. In the 1980s, the stone was taken by boat to Arkhangelsk and then by train to Moscow. The wanderer encounters memory in place, in the stone and building, and also out of place, in the signified trauma that occurred elsewhere. Wandering out of place thus has the potential to connect a wanderer, and a reader, to geographically remote histories, not unlike war memorials that commemorate overseas battles. This has important implications for the preservation of stories. The narrator of The Memory Artist reflects that “the act of taking a stone all the way from Solovetsky to Moscow … was surely a sign that we give things and objects and matter a little of our own minds … in a way I understood that [the stone’s] presence would be a kind of return for those who did not, that somehow the stone had already been there, in Moscow” (Brabon 177).Image 2: The Monument to Victims of Political Repression, Near the LubyankaIn some ways, wandering out of place is similar to the examples of wandering in place considered here: in both instances the person wandering constructs a landscape that is a synthesis of their present perception, their individual history, and their knowledge of the history of a place. Yet wandering out of place offers a nuanced understanding of wandering by revealing the ways one can encounter the history, trauma, and memory that occur in distant places, highlighting the importance of symbols, memorials, and preserved knowledge. Image 3: Reflectons of the LubyankaConclusionThe ways a writer encounters and represents the stories that constitute a landscape, including traumatic histories that took place there, are varied and well-suited to a wandering methodology. There are notable traits of a wandering narrator: the digressive, associative form of thinking and writing, the unmapped journeys that are, despite themselves, full of compulsive purpose, and the lack of finality or answers inherent in a wanderer’s narrative. Wandering permits an encounter with memory out of place. The Solovetsky Islands remain a place I have never been, yet my encounter with the symbolic stone at the Lubyanka in Moscow lingers as a historical reminder. This sense of never arriving, of not reaching answers, echoes the narrators of Sebald and Modiano. Continued narrative uncertainty generates a sense of perpetual wandering, symbolic of the writer’s shadowy task of representing the past.ReferencesAnstett, Elisabeth. “Memory of Political Repression in Post-Soviet Russia: The Example of the Gulag.” Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, 13 Sep. 2011. 2 Aug. 2019 <https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/memory-political-repression-post-soviet-russia-example-gulag>.Baer, Ulrich. “To Give Memory a Place: Holocaust Photography and the Landscape Tradition.” Representations 69 (2000): 38–62.Baumgarten, Murray. “‘Not Knowing What I Should Think:’ The Landscape of Postmemory in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 5.2 (2007): 267–87.Brabon, Katherine. The Memory Artist. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2016.Gussow, Mel. “W.G. Sebald, Elegiac German Novelist, Is Dead at 57.” The New York Times 15 Dec. 2001. 2 Aug. 2019 <https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/15/books/w-g-sebald-elegiac-german-novelist-is-dead-at-57.html>.Ingold, Tim. “The Temporality of the Landscape.” World Archaeology 25.2 (1993): 152–174.Jaggi, Maya. “The Last Word: An Interview with WG Sebald.” The Guardian 22 Sep. 2001. 2 Aug. 2019 <www.theguardian.com/books/2001/sep/22/artsandhumanities.highereducation>.Karp, Masha. “An Interview with Irina Flige.” RightsinRussia.com 11 Apr. 2012. 2 Aug. 2019 <http://www.rightsinrussia.info/archive/interviews-1/irina-flige/masha-karp>.Lewis, Tess. “WG Sebald: The Past Is Another Country.” New Criterion 20 (2001).MacDonald, Anna. “‘Pictures in a Rebus’: Puzzling Out W.G. Sebald’s Monstrous Geographies.” In Monstrous Spaces: The Other Frontier. Eds. Niculae Liviu Gheran and Ken Monteith. Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, 2013. 115–25.Modiano, Patrick. The Search Warrant. Trans. Joanna Kilmartin. London: Harvill Secker, 2014.Moser, Christian. “Peripatetic Liminality: Sebald and the Tradition of the Literary Walk.” In The Undiscover’d Country: W.G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel. Ed. Markus Zisselsberger. Rochester New York: Camden House, 2010. 37–62. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.” Representations 26: (Spring 1989): 7–24.Polster, Heike. The Aesthetics of Passage: The Imag(in)ed Experience of Time in Thomas Lehr, W.G. Sebald, and Peter Handke. Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2009.Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Vintage, 2002. ———. Vertigo. Trans. Michael Hulse. London: Vintage, 2002.Whitehead, Anne. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.

This paper argues that artist Dope Saint Jude is transforming South African hip-hop by queering a genre that has predominantly been male and heteronormative. Specifically, I analyse the opening skit of her music video “Keep in Touch” in order to unpack the ways which she revives Gayle, a gay language that adopted double-coded forms of speech during the apartheid era—a context in which homosexuals were criminalised. The use of Gayle and spaces close to the city centre of Cape Town (such as Salt River and Woodstock) speaks to the city as it was before it was transformed by the decline of industries due to the country’s adoption of neoliberal economics and, more recently, by the gentrification of these spaces. Dope Saint Jude therefore reclaims these city spaces through her use of gay modes of speech that have a long history in Cape Town and by positioning her work as hip-hop, which has been popular in the city for well over two decades. Her inclusion of transgender MC and DJ Angel Ho pushes the boundaries of hegemonic and binary conceptions of gender identity even further. In essence, Dope Saint Jude is transforming local hip-hop in a context that is shaped significantly by US cultural imperialism. The artist is also transforming our perspective of spaces that have been altered by neoliberal economics.Setting the SceneDope Saint Jude (DSJ) is a queer MC from Elsies River, a working class township located on Cape Town's Cape Flats in South Africa. Elsies River was defined as a “coloured” neighbourhood under the apartheid state's Group Areas Act, which segregated South Africans racially. With the aid of the Population Registration Act, citizens were classified, not merely along the lines of white, Asian, or black—black subjects were also divided into further categories. The apartheid state also distinguished between black and “coloured” subjects. Michael MacDonald contends that segregation “ordained blacks to be inferior to whites; apartheid cast them to be indelibly different” (11). Apartheid declared “African claims in South Africa to be inferior to white claims” and effectively claimed that black subjects “belonged elsewhere, in societies of their own, because their race was different” (ibid). The term “coloured” defined people as “mixed race” to separate communities that might otherwise have identified as black in the broad and inclusive sense (Erasmus 16). Racial categorisation was used to create a racial hierarchy with white subjects at the top of that hierarchy and those classified as black receiving the least resources and benefits. This frustrated attempts to establish broad alliances of black struggles against apartheid. It is in this sense that race is socially and politically constructed and continues to have currency, despite the fact that biologically essentialist understandings of race have been discredited (Yudell 13–14). Thanks to apartheid town planning and resource allocation, many townships on the Cape Flats were poverty-stricken and plagued by gang violence (Salo 363). This continues to be the case because post-apartheid South Africa's embrace of neoliberal economics failed to address racialised class inequalities significantly (Haupt, Static 6–8). This is the '90s context in which socially conscious hip-hop crews, such as Prophets of da City or Black Noise, came together. They drew inspiration from Black Consciousness philosophy via their exposure to US hip-hop crews such as Public Enemy in order to challenge apartheid policies, including their racial interpellation as “coloured” as distinct from the more inclusive category, black (Haupt, “Black Thing” 178). Prophets of da City—whose co-founding member, Shaheen Ariefdien, also lived in Elsies River—was the first South African hip-hop outfit to record an album. Whilst much of their work was performed in English, they quickly transformed the genre by rapping in non-standard varieties of Afrikaans and by including MCs who rap in African languages (ibid). They therefore succeeded in addressing key issues related to race, language, and class disparities in relation to South Africa's transition to democracy (Haupt, “Black Thing”; Haupt, Stealing Empire). However, as is the case with mainstream US hip-hop, specifically gangsta rap (Clay 149), South African hip-hop has been largely dominated by heterosexual men. This includes the more commercial hip-hop scene, which is largely perceived to be located in Johannesburg, where male MCs like AKA and Cassper Nyovest became celebrities. However, certain female MCs have claimed the genre, notably EJ von Lyrik and Burni Aman who are formerly of Godessa, the first female hip-hop crew to record and perform locally and internationally (Haupt, Stealing Empire 166; Haupt, “Can a Woman in Hip-Hop”). DSJ therefore presents the exception to a largely heteronormative and male-dominated South African music industry and hip-hop scene as she transforms it with her queer politics. While queer hip-hop is not new in the US (Pabón and Smalls), this is new territory for South Africa. Writing about the US MC Jean Grae in the context of a “male-dominated music industry and genre,” Shanté Paradigm Smalls contends,Heteronormativity blocks the materiality of the experiences of Black people. Yet, many Black people strive for a heteronormative effect if not “reality”. In hip hop, there is a particular emphasis on maintaining the rigidity of categories, even if those categories fail [sic]. (87) DSJ challenges these rigid categories. Keep in TouchDSJ's most visible entry onto the media landscape to date has been her appearance in an H&M recycling campaign with British Sri Lankan artist MIA (H&M), some fashion shoots, her new EP—Reimagine (Dope Saint Jude)—and recent Finnish, US and French tours as well as her YouTube channel, which features her music videos. As the characters’ theatrical costumes suggest, “Keep in Touch” is possibly the most camp and playful music video she has produced. It commences somewhat comically with Dope Saint Jude walking down Salt River main road to a public telephone, where she and a young woman in pig tails exchange dirty looks. Salt River is located at the foot of Devil's Peak not far from Cape Town's CBD. Many factories were located there, but the area is also surrounded by low-income housing, which was designated a “coloured” area under apartheid. After apartheid, neighbourhoods such as Salt River, Woodstock, and the Bo-Kaap became increasingly gentrified and, instead of becoming more inclusive, many parts of Cape Town continued to be influenced by policies that enable racialised inequalities. Dope Saint Jude calls Angel Ho: DSJ: Awêh, Angie! Yoh, you must check this kak sturvy girl here by the pay phone. [Turns to the girl, who walks away as she bursts a chewing gum bubble.] Ja, you better keep in touch. Anyway, listen here, what are you wys?Angel Ho: Ah, just at the salon getting my hair did. What's good? DSJ: Wanna catch on kak today?Angel Ho: Yes, honey. But, first, let me Gayle you this. By the jol by the art gallery, this Wendy, nuh. This Wendy tapped me on the shoulder and wys me, “This is a place of decorum.”DSJ: What did she wys?Angel Ho: De-corum. She basically told me this is not your house. DSJ: I know you told that girl to keep in touch!Angel Ho: Yes, Mama! I'm Paula, I told that bitch, “Keep in touch!” [Points index finger in the air.](Saint Jude, Dope, “Keep in Touch”)Angel Ho's name is a play on the male name Angelo and refers to the trope of the ho (whore) in gangsta rap lyrics and in music videos that present objectified women as secondary to male, heterosexual narratives (Sharpley-Whiting 23; Collins 27). The queering of Angelo, along with Angel Ho’s non-binary styling in terms of hair, make-up, and attire, appropriates a heterosexist, sexualised stereotype of women in order to create room for a gender identity that operates beyond heteronormative male-female binaries. Angel Ho’s location in a hair salon also speaks to stereotypical associations of salons with women and gay subjects. In a discussion of gender stereotypes about hair salons, Kristen Barber argues that beauty work has traditionally been “associated with women and with gay men” and that “the body beautiful has been tightly linked to the concept of femininity” (455–56). During the telephonic exchange, Angel Ho and Dope Saint Jude code-switch between standard and non-standard varieties of English and Afrikaans, as the opening appellation, “Awêh,” suggests. In this context, the term is a friendly greeting, which intimates solidarity. “Sturvy” means pretentious, whilst “kak” means shit, but here it is used to qualify “sturvy” and means that the girl at the pay phone is very pretentious or “full of airs.” To be “wys” means to be wise, but it can also mean that you are showing someone something or educating them. The meanings of these terms shift, depending on the context. The language practices in this skit are in line with the work of earlier hip-hop crews, such as Prophets of da City and Brasse vannie Kaap, to validate black, multilingual forms of speech and expression that challenge the linguistic imperialism of standard English and Afrikaans in South Africa, which has eleven official languages (Haupt, “Black Thing”; Haupt, Stealing Empire; Williams). Henry Louis Gates’s research on African American speech varieties and literary practices emerging from the repressive context of slavery is essential to understanding hip-hop’s language politics. Hip-hop artists' multilingual wordplay creates parallel discursive universes that operate both on the syntagmatic axis of meaning-making and the paradigmatic axis (Gates 49; Haupt, “Stealing Empire” 76–77). Historically, these discursive universes were those of the slave masters and the slaves, respectively. While white hegemonic meanings are produced on the syntagmatic axis (which is ordered and linear), black modes of speech as seen in hip-hop word play operate on the paradigmatic axis, which is connotative and non-linear (ibid). Distinguishing between Signifyin(g) / Signification (upper case, meaning black expression) and signification (lower case, meaning white dominant expression), he argues that “the signifier ‘Signification’ has remained identical in spelling to its white counterpart to demonstrate [. . .] that a simultaneous, but negated, parallel discursive (ontological, political) universe exists within the larger white discursive universe” (Gates 49). The meanings of terms and expressions can change, depending on the context and manner in which they are used. It is therefore the shared experiences of speech communities (such as slavery or racist/sexist oppression) that determine the negotiated meanings of certain forms of expression. Gayle as a Parallel Discursive UniverseDSJ and Angel Ho's performance of Gayle takes these linguistic practices further. Viewers are offered points of entry into Gayle via the music video’s subtitles. We learn that Wendy is code for a white person and that to keep in touch means exactly the opposite. Saint Jude explains that Gayle is a very fun queer language that was used to kind of mask what people were saying [. . .] It hides meanings and it makes use of women's names [. . . .] But the thing about Gayle is it's constantly changing [. . .] So everywhere you go, you kind of have to pick it up according to the context that you're in. (Ovens, Saint Jude and Haupt)According to Kathryn Luyt, “Gayle originated as Moffietaal [gay language] in the coloured gay drag culture of the Western Cape as a form of slang amongst Afrikaans-speakers which over time, grew into a stylect used by gay English and Afrikaans-speakers across South Africa” (Luyt 8; Cage 4). Given that the apartheid state criminalised homosexuals, Gayle was coded to evade detection and to seek out other members of this speech community (Luyt 8). Luyt qualifies the term “language” by arguing, “The term ‘language’ here, is used not as a constructed language with its own grammar, syntax, morphology and phonology, but in the same way as linguists would discuss women’s language, as a way of speaking, a kind of sociolect” (Luyt 8; Cage 1). However, the double-coded nature of Gayle allows one to think of it as creating a parallel discursive universe as Gates describes it (49). Whereas African American and Cape Flats discursive practices function parallel to white, hegemonic discourses, gay modes of speech run parallel to heteronormative communication. Exclusion and MicroaggressionsThe skit brings both discursive practices into play by creating room for one to consider that DSJ queers a male-dominated genre that is shaped by US cultural imperialism (Haupt, Stealing Empire 166) as a way of speaking back to intersectional forms of marginalisation (Crenshaw 1244), which are created by “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks 116). This is significant in South Africa where “curative rape” of lesbians and other forms of homophobic violence are prominent (cf. Gqola; Hames; Msibi). Angel Ho's anecdote conveys a sense of the extent to which black individuals are subject to scrutiny. Ho's interpretation of the claim that the gallery “is a place of decorum” is correct: it is not Ho's house. Black queer subjects are not meant to feel at home or feel a sense of ownership. This functions as a racial microaggression: “subtle insults (verbal, nonverbal, and/or visual) directed toward people of color, often automatically or unconsciously” (Solorzano, Ceja, and Yosso 60). This speaks to DSJ's use of Salt River, Woodstock, and Bo-Kaap for the music video, which features black queer bodies in performance—all of these spaces are being gentrified, effectively pushing working class people of colour out of the city (cf. Didier, Morange, and Peyroux; Lemanski). Gustav Visser explains that gentrification has come to mean a unit-by-unit acquisition of housing which replaces low-income residents with high-income residents, and which occurs independent of the structural condition, architecture, tenure or original cost level of the housing (although it is usually renovated for or by the new occupiers). (81–82) In South Africa this inequity plays out along racial lines because its neoliberal economic policies created a small black elite without improving the lives of the black working class. Instead, the “new African bourgeoisie, because it shares racial identities with the bulk of the poor and class interests with white economic elites, is in position to mediate the reinforcing cleavages between rich whites and poor blacks without having to make more radical changes” (MacDonald 158). In a news article about a working class Salt River family of colour’s battle against an eviction, Christine Hogg explains, “Gentrification often means the poor are displaced as the rich move in or buildings are upgraded by new businesses. In Woodstock and Salt River both are happening at a pace.” Angel Ho’s anecdote, as told from a Woodstock hair salon, conveys a sense of what Woodstock’s transformation from a coloured, working class Group Area to an upmarket, trendy, and arty space would mean for people of colour, including black, queer subjects. One could argue that this reading of the video is undermined by DSJ’s work with global brand H&M. Was she was snared by neoliberal economics? Perhaps, but one response is that the seeds of any subculture’s commercial co-option lie in the fact it speaks through commodities (for example clothing, make-up, CDs, vinyl, or iTunes / mp3 downloads (Hebdige 95; Haupt, Stealing Empire 144–45). Subcultures have a window period in which to challenge hegemonic ideologies before they are delegitimated or commercially co-opted. Hardt and Negri contend that the means that extend the reach of corporate globalisation could be used to challenge it from within it (44–46; Haupt, Stealing Empire 26). DSJ utilises her H&M work, social media, the hip-hop genre, and international networks to exploit that window period to help mainstream black queer identity politics.ConclusionDSJ speaks back to processes of exclusion from the city, which was transformed by apartheid and, more recently, gentrification, by claiming it as a creative and playful space for queer subjects of colour. She uses Gayle to lay claim to the city as it has a long history in Cape Town. In fact, she says that she is not reviving Gayle, but is simply “putting it on a bigger platform” (Ovens, Saint Jude, and Haupt). The use of subtitles in the video suggests that she wants to mainstream queer identity politics. Saint Jude also transforms hip-hop heteronormativity by queering the genre and by locating her work within the history of Cape hip-hop’s multilingual wordplay. ReferencesBarber, Kristin. “The Well-Coiffed Man: Class, Race, and Heterosexual Masculinity in the Hair Salon.” Gender and Society 22.4 (2008): 455–76.Cage, Ken. “An Investigation into the Form and Function of Language Used by Gay Men in South Africa.” Rand Afrikaans University: MA thesis, 1999.Clay, Andreana. “‘I Used to Be Scared of the Dick’: Queer Women of Color and Hip-Hop Masculinity.” Home Girls Make Some Noise: Hip Hop Feminism Anthology. Ed. Gwendolyn D. Pough, Elain Richardson, Aisha Durham, and Rachel Raimist. California: Sojourns, 2007.Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge, 2005. Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color”. Stanford Law Review 43.6 (1991): 1241–299.Didier, Sophie, Marianne Morange, and Elisabeth Peyroux. “The Adaptative Nature of Neoliberalism at the Local Scale: Fifteen Years of City Improvement Districts in Cape Town and Johannesburg.” Antipode 45.1 (2012): 121–39.Erasmus, Zimitri. “Introduction.” Coloured by History, Shaped by Place. Ed. Zimitri Erasmus. Cape Town: Kwela Books & SA History Online, 2001. Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988.Gqola, Pumla Dineo. Rape: A South African Nightmare. Johannesburg: Jacana, 2015.Hames, Mary. “Violence against Black Lesbians: Minding Our Language.” Agenda 25.4 (2011): 87–91.Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. London: Harvard UP, 2000.Haupt, Adam. “Can a Woman in Hip Hop Speak on Her Own Terms?” Africa Is a Country. 23 Mar. 2015. <http://africasacountry.com/2015/03/the-double-consciousness-of-burni-aman-can-a-woman-in-hip-hop-speak-on-her-own-terms/>.Haupt, Adam. Static: Race & Representation in Post-Apartheid Music, Media & Film. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2012. Haupt, Adam. Stealing Empire: P2P, Intellectual Property and Hip-Hop Subversion. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2008. Haupt, Adam. “Black Thing: Hip-Hop Nationalism, ‘Race’ and Gender in Prophets of da City and Brasse vannie Kaap.” Coloured by History, Shaped by Place. Ed. Zimitri Erasmus. Cape Town: Kwela Books & SA History Online, 2001. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1979.Hogg, Christine. “In Salt River Gentrification Often Means Eviction: Family Set to Lose Their Home of 11 Years.” Ground Up. 15 June 2016. <http://www.groundup.org.za/article/salt-river-gentrification-often-means-eviction/>.hooks, bell. Outlaw: Culture: Resisting Representations. New York: Routledge, 1994.Lemanski, Charlotte. “Hybrid Gentrification in South Africa: Theorising across Southern and Northern Cities.” Urban Studies 51.14 (2014): 2943–60.Luyt, Kathryn. “Gay Language in Cape Town: A Study of Gayle – Attitudes, History and Usage.” University of Cape Town: MA thesis, 2014.MacDonald, Michael. Why Race Matters in South Africa. University of Kwazulu-Natal Press: Scottsville, 2006.Msibi, Thabo. “Not Crossing the Line: Masculinities and Homophobic Violence in South Africa”. Agenda. 23.80 (2009): 50–54.Pabón, Jessica N., and Shanté Paradigm Smalls. “Critical Intimacies: Hip Hop as Queer Feminist Pedagogy.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory (2014): 1–7.Salo, Elaine. “Negotiating Gender and Personhood in the New South Africa: Adolescent Women and Gangsters in Manenberg Township on the Cape Flats.” Journal of European Cultural Studies 6.3 (2003): 345–65.Solórzano, Daniel, Miguel Ceja, and Tara Yosso. “Critical Race Theory, Racial Microaggressions, and Campus Racial Climate: The Experiences of African American College Students.” Journal of Negro Education 69.1/2 (2000): 60–73.Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Pimps Up, Ho’s Down: Hip Hop’s Hold on Young Black Women. New York: New York UP, 2007.Smalls, Shanté Paradigm. “‘The Rain Comes Down’: Jean Grae and Hip Hop Heteronormativity.” American Behavioral Scientist 55.1 (2011): 86–95.Visser, Gustav. “Gentrification: Prospects for Urban South African Society?” Acta Academica Supplementum 1 (2003): 79–104.Williams, Quentin E. “Youth Multilingualism in South Africa’s Hip-Hop Culture: a Metapragmatic Analysis.” Sociolinguistic Studies 10.1 (2016): 109–33.Yudell, Michael. “A Short History of the Race Concept.” Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture. Ed. Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan. New York: Columbia UP, 2011.InterviewsOvens, Neil, Dope Saint Jude, and Adam Haupt. One FM Radio interview. Cape Town. 21 Apr. 2016.VideosSaint Jude, Dope. “Keep in Touch.” YouTube. 23 Feb. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2ux9R839lE>. H&M. “H&M World Recycle Week Featuring M.I.A.” YouTube. 11 Apr. 2016. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7MskKkn2Jg>. MusicSaint Jude, Dope. Reimagine. 15 June 2016. <https://dopesaintjude.bandcamp.com/album/reimagine>.