Journal articles on the topic 'Blisks GTE'

Primocane-fruiting (PF) red raspberry (Rubus idaeus L.) cultivars are being grown in many regions as their popularity increases. However, testing of this perennial fruit crop is expensive and requires many years. Large genotype (G) × environment (E) interactions can make identification of superior genotypes difficult. The G/G × E (GGE) biplot can be used to measure cultivar performance and group locations into mega-environments. The GGE biplot was applied to yield trial data of three PF red raspberry cultivars Autumn Bliss, Heritage, and Redwing grown in 17 environments (year-location combinations). The 17 environments encompassed six locations in Ontario and Quebec, Canada between 1989 and 1996. `Autumn Bliss' produced the highest yields in 11 of 17 environments. `Heritage' was usually the lowest yielding cultivar. Two mega-environments were identified based on the performance of `Autumn Bliss' and `Redwing'. Some environmental variables were likely to be responsible for the discriminating ability of the test environments as they were correlated with the primary effects. The GGE biplot was an effective analysis to determine mega-environments and the cultivars best adapted to each.

The more advanced the technology and the greater the community's need to carry out activities every day, the number of vehicles on the highway is getting crowded. From year to year, the greater the level of traffic accidents caused by many factors, among the usual reasons is the loss of awareness of the driver when driving a vehicle especially drowsiness. One of the drowsiness parameters is the frequency eye blinks. Therefore, to get the drowsiness symptoms, the purpose of this research is to detect the eye blinks, which in turn reduce the level of accidents by detecting sleepy eyes based on digital image processing. The method used to detect both eyes is the Viola-Jones method. The detection of both eyes can also acquire the duration of closed eyes and the number of eye blinks. A person can be said to be sleepy by means of sleepiness parameters determined by a study. The research shows that detection of eye blinks using the Viola-Jones method has a fairly high accuracy of up to 84.72% if the face condition is upright and tilted no more than 45 degrees. Another conclusion is that eye detection and driver detection are more effective at certain light intensity values which are around 2-33 lux.

This article uses the activism of drag queen Panti Bliss during Ireland’s marriage equality campaign to revisit two of the foundational debates of performativity theory: namely, the contentious political and ontological status of drag and the function of the exemplary performative “I do.” It attempts to answer Judith Butler’s provocative question: “what happens to the performative when its purpose is precisely to undo the presumptive force of the heterosexual ceremonial” (1993a: 16). Taking account of concerns about LGBTQ assimilation, it argues that the gay “I do” creates new categories of inclusion and abjection, and, ultimately, new categories of the queer. It suggests, further, that the ontological slippage inherent to drag – often more than “just” performance, yet not quite constitutive of a performative identity – can help to maintain and reignite the political power of the queer in the face of hegemonic co-option.

The countermanding saccade task has been used in many studies to investigate the neural mechanisms that underlie the decision to execute or restrain rapid eye movements. In this task, the presentation of a saccade target is sometimes followed by the appearance of a stop cue that indicates that the subject should cancel the planned movement. Performance has been modeled as a race between motor preparation and cancellation processes. The signal that reaches its activation threshold first determines whether a saccade is generated or cancelled. In these studies, an important parameter is the time required to process the stop cue, referred to as the stop signal reaction time (SSRT). The SSRT is estimated using statistical approaches, the validity of which has not been unequivocally established. A more direct measure of this parameter might be obtainable if a method was available to “unmask” the developing motor command. This can be accomplished by air-puff-evoked blinks, which inhibit pontine omnipause neurons that serve as an inhibitory gate for the saccadic system. In the present study, brief puffs of air were used to elicit blinks at various times while rhesus monkeys performed a countermanding saccade task. If the developing motor command has not yet been cancelled, this should trigger a saccade. When blinks occurred between ∼50 and 200 ms after target onset, saccades were often evoked. Saccades were rarely evoked more than ∼70 ms after stop cue onset; this value represents a behavioral evaluation of SSRT and was comparable to the estimates obtained using standard statistical approaches. When saccades occurred near the SSRT on blink trials, they were often hypometric. Furthermore, Monte Carlo simulations were performed to model the effects of blink time on the race model. Overall, the study supports the validity of the statistical methods currently in use.

By focusing on the issue of rolling element bearing (REB) performance degradation assessment (PDA), a solution based on variational mode decomposition (VMD) and Gath-Geva clustering time series segmentation (GGCTSS) has been proposed. VMD is a new decomposition method. Since it is different from the recursive decomposition method, for example, empirical mode decomposition (EMD), local mean decomposition (LMD), and local characteristic-scale decomposition (LCD), VMD needs a priori parameters. In this paper, we will propose a method to optimize the parameters in VMD, namely, the number of decomposition modes and moderate bandwidth constraint, based on genetic algorithm. Executing VMD with the acquired parameters, the BLIMFs are obtained. By taking the envelope of the BLIMFs, the sensitive BLIMFs are selected. And then we take the amplitude of the defect frequency (ADF) as a degradative feature. To get the performance degradation assessment, we are going to use the method called Gath-Geva clustering time series segmentation. Afterwards, the method is carried out by two pieces of run-to-failure data. The results indicate that the extracted feature could depict the process of degradation precisely.

Systemic lupus erythematosus is the prototypic autoimmune disease with a broad range of clinical manifestations and a complex pathogenesis. B-cells hold a central role in its pathogenesis, not only as autoantibody producing cells, but also by producing other inflammatory mediators and by presenting autoantigens to autoreactive T cells. BlyS, a soluble ligand of the TNF cytokine family, is a key factor affecting B-cell homeostasis and survival and its blockade ameliorated the disease in animal models and preclinical studies of SLE. Following an unsuccessful phase II trial of belimumab, a monoclonal antibody targeting BlyS, two large phase III studies in patients with mild-to-moderate disease, BLISS-52 and BLISS-76, met their primary endpoints showing better efficacy of the drug over standard of care alone. To this end, development of a novel more sensitive responder index and improvements in study designs were crucial. As a result, belimumab became the first drug to get approval for the treatment of SLE after more than 50 years. In this paper we discuss the rationale, development, indications, lessons learned, pitfalls and challenges for this novel therapy and point-out to additional issues that need to be addressed in the future.http://dx.doi.org/10.7175/rhc.v3i3.206

Systemic lupus erythematosus is the prototypic autoimmune disease with a broad range of clinical manifestations and a complex pathogenesis. B-cells hold a central role in its pathogenesis, not only as autoantibody producing cells, but also by producing other inflammatory mediators and by presenting autoantigens to autoreactive T cells. BlyS, a soluble ligand of the TNF cytokine family, is a key factor affecting B-cell homeostasis and survival and its blockade ameliorated the disease in animal models and preclinical studies of SLE. Following an unsuccessful phase II trial of belimumab, a monoclonal antibody targeting BlyS, two large phase III studies in patients with mild-to-moderate disease, BLISS-52 and BLISS-76, met their primary endpoints showing better efficacy of the drug over standard of care alone. To this end, development of a novel more sensitive responder index and improvements in study designs were crucial. As a result, belimumab became the first drug to get approval for the treatment of SLE after more than 50 years. In this paper we discuss the rationale, development, indications, lessons learned, pitfalls and challenges for this novel therapy and point-out to additional issues that need to be addressed in the future.http://dx.doi.org/10.7175/rhc.v3i3.206

The Yiddish word shadchin is best translated as marriage broker. In the old days, in the small communities or shtetls where many Eastern European families lived, such an individual emerged, probably self-appointed, to help arrange marriages. One assumes that both parties were eager to get married, but either were unaware of the other's intentions or simply required the help of a third party to sort out some of the obstacles that lay in the path of eternal bliss. Academia today bears some semblance to the shtetl of the past. The communities of the Ivory Tower consist, more or less, of like-minded individuals with similar backgrounds, goals, and aspirations.

Nowadays the virtual reality systems get to be more common and widespread in the world. They need users to develop system of the integration systems of sensory and cognitive information, while them creating polymodal effects on man. Vestibular function is one of these systems, and its disruption can lead to simulator sickness. The aim of this study was to find how professional activity of different men with similar vestibular function’s degree of development can influence on simulator sickness appearance. Eye movements were chosen as objective measure of successful interaction with virtual reality. There were attended professional athletes: 30 figure skaters, 30 wushu athletes, 30-football players and also 20 students take part as a control group. The results showed the significant different (p=0,001) between figure skaters and others by such items as number of fixations, saccades and blinks, and also amplitudes of saccades. At the same time figure skaters get lower scores in simulator sickness questionnaire, which says about less intensity of simulator disorder.

This paper attempts to explore the essence of the principal Upanishads of the Hindu philosophy in T. S. Eliot’s selected seminal poems and plays. The principal Upanishads are the Ishavasya, Kena, Katha, Prashna, Mundaka, Mandukya, Taittiriya, Aitareya, Chhandogya, Brihadaranyaka and Shvetashvatara. The famous poems are “Ash-Wednesday” and Four Quartets, and the famous plays are Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party under scrutiny in this paper. The essence of the principal eleven Upanishads is that Brahman is source of all creations including the human beings, who get results according to their karma and are born again and again until they get moksha (liberation) through the self-realization of Brahman; therefore, our goal should be to attain moksha or Brahman, only through which we can experience perpetual peace and unbound bliss. Likewise, Eliot suggests that we should attempt to go back to our “Home” (Brahman, also a symbol of peace and bliss), for which we must attempt several times until we become qualified through the non-dual knowledge of “the still point” (Brahman) and its self-realization along with the spiritual practices of renunciation and asceticism. The practice of unattached action done without the hope of its fruit (nishkam karma) and unselfish devotion (Bhakti) are secondary paths to attain liberation. Since the path of spiritual knowledge can make us realize Brahman immediately, Eliot prefers this path of knowledge to the progressive or indirect paths of action and devotion. Thus, his texts reflect the essence of the Upanishads. The significance of this paper within the context of existing scholarship lies in its introduction to the new knowledge that Eliot’s poems and plays could be extensively interpreted by finding the essence of the Upanishads in his texts. Practically, the knowledge of the essence of the Upanishads can help us know the mystery of life and death, and Atman and Brahman, and get liberation from all kinds of suffering and misery, and the cycle of life and death as well before death.

Annual-fruiting cultivars of red raspberry (Rubus idaeus L.) complete its entire cycle of vegetative growth, flowering, and fruiting in one growing season, which has not been well studied in response to treatments of photoperiod and fertilization. In this study, micro-propagated plantlets of ‘Autumn Bliss’ were planted in a greenhouse at Dalian, Northeast China. Some were treated with fertilizers at the rate of 12 g per plant (N-P2O5-K2O, 14-14-14) under extended photoperiod of 17 h with PPFD of 240 μmol m-2 s-1 at dark-time (Pho.+Fert.), while others were treated with longer photoperiod (Pho.) or with the control. Compared to the control, both growth and biomass in shoot part of ‘Autumn Bliss’ were promoted by the Pho.+Fert. treatment, but foliar nutrients declined as the symptom of nutrient dilution. The Pho. treatment had no effect on either growth or nutrient uptake in leaves, resulting in the symptom of nutrient depletion compared to the Control. Soil P availability positively correlated with foliar P concentration but negatively correlated with root length. Only the Pho.+Fert. treatment resulted in the advance of fruiting by two months at July when fruits were measured to have acceptable fruit weight of about 3 g and contents of anthocyanin at ~26.4 mg cyaniding-3-glucoside equiv. 100 g-1 Fw and total phenolic content at ~17.5 mg GAE 100 g-1 Fw.

Numerous studies have investigated the relationship of attentional focus during running to performance and training variables, including, endurance, injuries, speed, and perception of pain. However, no research has investigated the relation between runners' cognitive strategies during running and their day-to-day dissociative experiences. We investigated the relation among attentional focus during running, motives for running, and absorption, imaginal processing, and dissociative experiences. Runners reported focusing more on external stimuli during training when compared to racing. Runners who endorsed psychological motives for running (e.g., to get away from it all, to solve problems, to distract self from daily worries) were more likely to endorse dissociative experiences on the Bliss dissociation scale. Attentional focus during running was not correlated with absorption, imaginal processing, and dissociative experiences.

Agriculture is traditionally a major form of entrepreneurship in rural Greece. However, this economic sector has been underachieving in the last decades. Nevertheless, there are always entrepreneurs who will find a way to get over various obstacles despite a likely difficult business environment. One of these ways is innovation, which is regarded as a path for economic bliss. But what affects innovation? Also innovation needs investment and investment requires risk. Therefore, it is interesting to study various farmer’s characteristics and risk willingness’s effect on innovation. In this context a research took place on almost all regions of Greece, collecting a sample of 1023 respondents via Google forms. Data were analyzed using the consistent PLS algorithm. The results confirmed most of the hypotheses and there is interesting output regarding risk willingness.

Present competitive environment has made it necessary for organizations today to measure and monitoring service quality, customer satisfaction and behavioural intentions. Research is required to provide input to practicing managers to make appropriate organizational strategies towards customer retention and organizational excellence. This paper aims to study the influence of the dimensions on the respective constructs in the retail banking industry to get insights for strategy formulation that can help optimize utilization of the limited resources available for deployment. A robust procedure was used to develop the scale for the three constructs which would be appropriate for the culture and the country context. The scale obtained consisted of 7 dimensions for service quality and customer satisfaction, and 3 dimensions for behavioural intentions. The analysis of the data obtained from 373 usable questionnaires revealed that security and the other 'outcome' dimensions are the most important regarding service quality and customer satisfaction. In behavioural intentions, Loyalty was found to be the most important.

Fiber optic gyroscope (FOG) is one of the important components of Inertial Navigation Systems (INS). In order to improve the accuracy of the INS, it is necessary to suppress the random error of the FOG signal. In this paper, a variational mode decomposition (VMD) denoising method based on beetle swarm antenna search (BSAS) algorithm is proposed to reduce the noise in FOG signal. Firstly, the BSAS algorithm is introduced in detail. Then, the permutation entropy of the band-limited intrinsic mode functions (BLIMFs) is taken as the optimization index, and two key parameters of VMD algorithm, including decomposition mode number K and quadratic penalty factor α , are optimized by using the BSAS algorithm. Next, a new method based on Hausdorff distance (HD) between the probability density function (PDF) of all BLIMFs and that of the original signal is proposed in this paper to determine the relevant modes. Finally, the selected BLIMF components are reconstructed to get the denoised signal. In addition, the simulation results show that the proposed scheme is better than the existing schemes in terms of noise reduction performance. Two experiments further demonstrate the priority of the proposed scheme in the FOG noise reduction compared with other schemes.

There is no expression Damai Sejahtera in Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia. In this dictionary we can find the meaning of damai and the meaning of sejahtera. That proves that DS is not a word but a phrase. In fact DS is not difference with damai dan sejahtera. The phrase that found in the Bible (John 14, verse 27) and commonly used among Indonesian Christians get its equivalent peace in English Bible and tentrem rahayu in Javanese Bible. Peace that commonly translated damai in Indonesian si not true in Indonesian Bible. Damai Sejahtera discussed in this article got its original concept from ancient Christian society not from English. That must be the reason. Budhism use the word bahagia meaning spiritual bliss with a special meaning which is not exactly the same with that that is used among Christian. So beside its common meaning used and known by all Indonesian people, speakers of bahasa Indonesia, DS also has specific meanings among Indonesian subculture like Budhis community, Muslim community, Christian community, etc.

There are some commonalities in the experiences of women, migrants and missionaries.In many cultures of the world marriage makes women leave home, father, mother,brothers, sisters and land “for the sake of the gospel (of love);” though with less assuranceof the manifold blessings and eternal bliss promised the missionary (Mark 10:29).Again like migrants, women leave their own family home and go and make anotherhome in another land. In a few cases, marriage and migration bring improved socialstatus for some though not for others. However, when things go wrong whether in thefamily or in the community women, like migrants, get the blame and the shame fromthe wider population. While always free in theory to go back to their original homes, inreality just as migrants and missionaries, women are not all that free to move at will.Intricate social, economic and psychological ties bind many and limit their options forescape. Against this background and from a gender perspective, this paper examinesthe missiological significance of women’s experiences in a given Nigerian immigrantChristian community in the United States of America.

Epileptic seizures occur due to brain abnormalities that can indirectly affect patient’s health. It occurs abruptly without any symptoms and thus increases the mortality rate of humans. Almost 1% of world’s population suffers from epileptic seizures. Prediction of seizures before the beginning of onset is beneficial for preventing seizures by medication. Nowadays, modern computational tools, machine learning, and deep learning methods have been used to predict seizures using EEG. However, EEG signals may get corrupted with background noise, and artifacts such as eye blinks and physical movements of muscles may lead to “pops” in the signal, resulting in electrical interference, which is cumbersome to detect through visual inspection for longer duration recordings. These limitations in automatic detection of interictal spikes and epileptic seizures are preferred, which is an essential tool for examining and scrutinizing the EEG recording more precisely. These restrictions bring our attention to present a review of automated schemes that will help neurologists categorize epileptic and nonepileptic signals. While preparing this review paper, it is observed that feature selection and classification are the main challenges in epilepsy prediction algorithms. This paper presents various techniques depending on various features and classifiers over the last few years. The methods presented will give a detailed understanding and ideas about seizure prediction and future research directions.

Potatoes have the potential to be developed as a source of carbohydrates in supporting food diversification programs. Reduced potatoes production has resulted from a decrease in the land area for potato cultivation. The effort that can be made to increase land productivity is through multiple cropping systems such as intercropping, intermittent intercropping, streak planting, annual intercropping, and agroforestry. It is necessary to use idle land under plantation stands that have not been optimized, in increasing productivity and efficiency of agricultural production systems. This study aims to get the varieties that have the best growth and yields planted under immature coffee stands. This research applies a Single Factorial Experiment in Completely Random Design, where the factor is four levels of potato varieties, Granola (V1), Bliss (V2), Kentang Merah (V3) and Batang Hitam (V4). Observations made include plant height, number of leaves, leaf length, leaf width, tuber length, tuber diameter, weight per tuber, number of tubers/plat, and total tuber by grade tubers (Small, Medium, Large, Very large). Based on the analysis variance of each observation variable shows, there is an effect of the variable observation except the width of the leaves. Granola provides the best response to the growth and yield of potato plants

Abstract: The self-conscious poet can also analyze himself, "When will man wake me up and I will become a god." He wants to dedicate himself to the Guru in every moment of his life. The sun and the moon are moving in this world. Everyone is following the rules. God is also bound by the devotion of the devotee. She can't get out of it either. The poet believes that he will always save the devotee. He himself is in search of this eternal God. He did not forget to mention Harry's name as he continued on that path. So life has come to an end, but in the world, man is so happy that he forgets God. When the cloud of sorrow comes, he remembers God again. After the clouds are gone, the days of laughter and are gone. The poet is on the same path. The poet lives in this world of happiness and sorrow. Still thinking or wondering - "Why did I come here?" The poet asks himself, why did he leave the sweet bliss of heaven and come to earth? Even if he is immersed in this world, it is Harry who will save him from it. Keyword: Self-conscious, Guru, laughter, wondering, immersed

The paper investigates the impacts and barriers posed by connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) for pedestrians with visual impairment. This study uses a customized web-based survey of visually impaired people from Canada and abroad. Collected data are used to estimate econometric models to identify the critical factors that affect the level of trust in CAVs and the preference for using CAVs from the visually impaired individuals’ perspective. Separate models are estimated for Canadian and non-Canadian samples, as Canadian and non-Canadian participants show some differences in perception and positive attitude towards CAVs. The models reveal that the majority of the respondents prefer to get feedback and alerts from CAVs. Congenitally blind Canadians are less likely to trust CAVs, but non-Canadian congenital blinds tend to trust CAVs. The models also indicate that the respondents who experienced being near an accident with an electric vehicle (EV) are less likely to choose CAVs. Respondents who rely on mobile applications and technology-based devices for navigating purposes tend to trust CAVs. Blind people who rely on conventional navigation tools (e.g., white cane, guide dog, etc.) are less likely to be the users of CAVs. Gender effect is visible, as the female participants tend not to trust CAVs. In relation to policy recommendations, subsidies should be provided to various advocacy groups to offer orientation and mobility (O&M) training services, which are pivotal to educate how to use technology-based navigational services. Also, automobile manufacturers should be enforced to add acoustic vehicle alert systems (AVAS) to both EVs and CAVs.

Abstract The uniformity of daylight in the classroom contributes to indoor visual comfort in the learning process. A Classroom that has non-uniform illuminance and is unsuitable with 350-3000 lux can affect visual discomfort. This study aims to design a classroom lighting system using daylight and artificial lighting according to Indonesian National Standard (SNI) 6197-2011 to get visual comfort. The results of this study are expected to increase the efficiency of electricity consumption and to solve the visual discomfort problem followed by SNI 6197-2011. This research using E11-210 and E11-112 classroom Universitas Negeri Semarang with the dimension about 12m x 9m x 3,5m. Based on observation, the classrooms had an illuminance of more than 20,000 lux with a uniformity less than 0,6 in the afternoon. Simulation in this study using Dialux Evo software with replacing the layouts of lamp, type of lamps and armature, modifying power of lamp, and implementing dynamics blinds. The result shows that the simulation can solve visual discomfort corresponding to SNI 6197-2011. This paper also presents that LED Tube power modification from 21 – 25 watts can save electricity costs by 37.3%.

Pedawa Village is one of Bali Aga Villages located in Banjar sub-district, Buleleng district which has a sacred ritual dance, name of this sacred dance is tari Jejumputan. This dance is usually performed once every five years when performing (sasih kaulu nemoning purnama) the ritual of Saba Nguja Benih. There are problems of study in this research, namely (a) How are the procredures of tari Jejumputan in the ritual of Saba Nguja Benih in Pedawa Village (b) Function of the performance of tari jejumputan in the ritual of Saba Nguja Benih. This research is purposed to describe the performance of tari jejumputan in the event of the ritual of Saba Nguja Benih, and to unveil the function of the performance of tari Jejumputan in the ritual of Saba Nguja Benih in Pedawa Village. The theories used in this research are the theory of manifest and latent proposed by Robert K Merton. Method used in this research is the qualitative research method. The techniques of collecting the data are observation, interview, and literature study. The technique of analysis used in this study is descriptive qualitative analysis. There are manifest and latent function in Jejumputan dance at Saba Nguja Benih ceremony. The manifest function contain important function namely to entertain Dewi Sri to get good seed, good harvest, deny the pest, and as a blessing for the bliss in agricultural sector. The latent function of Jejumputan dance is strength the solidarity among the society and as the identity of Pedawa Village.

Background: Visually impaired people is one of the most common disabilities in Indonesia. The number of visually impaired people in Semarang City based on the data of Central Bureau of statisic 2015 was 806 people. Sudden blindness can lead to depression, improper self-perception, decreased levels of motivation, and low self-esteem. The existence of Sosial support is one of the ways to help blind people spared from those impacts. Sosial support helps to deal the blind people with problems that relate to physically, psychologically, and sosially.Purpose: The purpose of this study is to analyze the relationship between sosial support and self-esteem in the former blind adult in Semarang.Method: The research uses non experiment quantity method with correlation method. The sampling technique use 50 correspondent of total sample. Data collection using a sosial support questionnaire and Coopersmith Self Esteem Inventory (CSEI). Results: The results showed that there was a correlation between sosial support and self-esteem of blind adults in Semarang with positive direction. Sosial support has an important role to increase self-esteem, the higher sosial support given the higher self-esteem of the blinds people get. The community is expected to be a provider of sosial support for fellow community members to increase self-esteem of the former visually impaired.

Smart grid is critical to the success of next generation of power grid, which is expected to be characterized by efficiency, cleanliness, security, and privacy. In this paper, aiming to tackle the security and privacy issues of power injection, we propose an efficient and privacy-aware power injection (EPPI) scheme suitable for advanced metering infrastructure and 5G smart grid network slice. In EPPI, each power storage unit first blinds its power injection bid and then gives the blinded bid together with a signature to the local gateway. The gateway removes a partial blind factor from each blinded bid and then sends to the utility company aggregated bid and signature by using a novel aggregation technique called hash-then-addition. The utility company can get the total amount of collected power at each time slot by removing a blind factor from the aggregated bid. Throughout the EPPI system, both the gateway and the utility company cannot know individual bids and hence user privacy is preserved. In particular, EPPI allows the utility company to check the integrity and authenticity of the collected data. Finally, extensive evaluations indicate that EPPI is secure and privacy-aware and it is efficient in terms of computation and communication cost.

A prominent pattern in the weave of Jane Eyre's station, attitudes, and narrative is her finances, skewed by lineage and wont. Jane's fortune and psyche are as warped when she becomes wealthy and a writer as when she was a young, anxious outcast whom poverty demeaned and challenged. Her memoirs critique religious hypocrisy, male chauvinism, and economic degradation, but also expose her pernicious outlook on matrimony and Mammon, in contrast to a proclaimed wedded bliss. “[T]he same catastrophe — marriage” (228; ch. 19) — that she wryly predicts for romances, real and fictional, is a stigma on her character. Jane Eyre records a twisted lesson about an heir straitened by serving too many masters. Jane, knowing she has mistaken wealth for a panacea, not a dangerous pharmakon, is no feminist paragon in a conventional rags-to-riches tale, but rather a disillusioned, haunted woman whose mendacity is a function and mainstay of her knotted, (under)privileged life. When she often wants “a facile word or plausible pretext… to get [herself] out of painful embarrassment” (277–78; ch. 23), candor shades into equivocation. Neither marriage nor writing makes an honest woman of her. Portraying herself as independent and principled, Jane at the end of her narrative rope seems to attain what her cousin, St. John Rivers, calls “the selfish calm and sensual comfort of civilized affluence” (417; ch. 34). However, Jane often feigns placidity, and Ferndean is “deep buried in a wood … [an] ineligible and insalubrious site … no opening anywhere” — which makes her think she “had taken a wrong direction and lost [her] way” (455; ch. 37).

I started my nursing career in Bristol as pupil nurse in 1979. On qualifying, I worked in an orthopaedic ward for a year, got hooked and went off to do the course. From there I moved to Poole, spent two happy years working on a trauma unit with great views of the bay and spent most of my spare time either lying on the beach or partying hard as you do when you are young and single. I met my other half and moved to London taking a five year break - what bliss. I decided to return to work in 1989, dabbling a little on the nursing bank before taking a permanent contract. There followed eight years at Farnborough in Kent. Six of these flew by working with an excellent team of nursing and medical staff on one of the few remaining, untouched ENT units that hasn't been swallowed into ‘general surgery’. Here I re entered the theatre world (Not visited since my training days) learned to do it properly and at the time gained a great deal of experience recovering patients with potential airway problems whilst keeping my fingers crossed that they did not actually develop any. I was also both supported and encouraged to undertake and complete the conversion course and decided I may as well get the ENB 998 over and done with soon after. Ward management skills come next - you know how it goes, the off duty, answering the phone, having your name called over and over again - that sort of thing. In 1997, we decided to move to the country for some fresh air and life out of the fast lane.

This Version of Bartleby is a film adaptation of Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’. How to adapt cinematically a character so closely related to writing? Bartleby works copying texts non-stop in order to face nothingness. He is, in the words of Spanish philosopher José Luis Pardo, a graphic sign, and Bartleby’s favourite expression, ‘I would prefer not to’ is close to what Deleuze called ‘agrammaticality’. It might be that the best film adaptation for Bartleby is one that deals with these issues while also questioning the nature of images. This Version of Bartleby has no images or sounds. It consists of an animated text that becomes an image in its own movement. The text, in conditional tense, describes how a hypothetical Bartleby’s movie would look and sound: ‘Here, this or that would be seen’; ‘Here this or that would be heard’. The result is a non-movie. Like Melville’s Bartleby character, the film’s power emerges from its own nothingness. In the film, the old battle between image and the word takes shape. However, we might get glimpses of a connection between both media through the spectator. Both viewer and reader, the spectator creates their own meaning. They could be Bartleby himself, looking at something beyond the blinds, while nobody around him really knows what it is that he sees. This way of seeing, is it not essentially cinematographic?

This Version of Bartleby is a film adaptation of Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’. How to adapt cinematically a character so closely related to writing? Bartleby works copying texts non-stop in order to face nothingness. He is, in the words of Spanish philosopher José Luis Pardo, a graphic sign, and Bartleby’s favourite expression, ‘I would prefer not to’ is close to what Deleuze called ‘agrammaticality’. It might be that the best film adaptation for Bartleby is one that deals with these issues while also questioning the nature of images. This Version of Bartleby has no images or sounds. It consists of an animated text that becomes an image in its own movement. The text, in conditional tense, describes how a hypothetical Bartleby’s movie would look and sound: ‘Here, this or that would be seen’; ‘Here this or that would be heard’. The result is a non-movie. Like Melville’s Bartleby character, the film’s power emerges from its own nothingness. In the film, the old battle between image and the word takes shape. However, we might get glimpses of a connection between both media through the spectator. Both viewer and reader, the spectator creates their own meaning. They could be Bartleby himself, looking at something beyond the blinds, while nobody around him really knows what it is that he sees. This way of seeing, is it not essentially cinematographic?

Heeft echtscheiding een impact op het aantal kinderen dat mensen krijgen? Als Vlamingen na de ontbinding van hun eerste huwelijk geen kinderen meer zouden krijgen, dan leveren gestrande huwelijken significant minder kinderen op dan huwelijken die standhouden, zo blijkt uit de gegevens van het onderzoek ‘Scheiding in Vlaanderen’. Op het moment van de echtscheiding heeft 20% nog geen kinderen. Na de echtscheiding krijgt 20% nog kinderen. Of er (nog) kinderen komen na de echtscheiding hangt samen met de leeftijd bij de scheiding, het relatieleven na de scheiding, het aantal eigen kinderen en kinderen van de nieuwe partner en het opleidingsniveau. Voor de gehuwden uit de jaren 1970 en 1980 geldt dat hun uiteindelijke kindertal niet wordt verhoogd of verlaagd door de ervaring van een echtscheiding. Abstract : Which impact does divorce have on family formation in Flanders? If no children were born after a divorce then dissolved marriages would end up with less children than stable marriages, results from the study “Divorce in Flanders” (DiF) show. At the time of separation 20% marriages are childless. After a divorce 20% divorcees get (more) children. Whether children are born after a divorce depend on the age at separation, the partnership history after separation, the own number of children and the children of the new partner, as well as on the level of educational attainment. For marriages from the 1970’s and 1980’s a divorce experience did not affect the average final number of children.

Intensitas pencahayaan pada tirai kaca gedung menghasilkan bagian yang dekat dengan dinding transparan akan mendapatkan intensitas cahaya yang berlebih sehingga akan menimbulkan silau, hal tersebut menyebabkan pengguna gedung cenderung menutup dinding dengan tirai. Terdapat beberapa strategi dalam mengoptimalkan cahaya alami pada bangunan melalui desain pasif. Peneliti melakukan penilaian kategori berdasarkan penelitian yang dilakukan Moreno sehingga didapatkan bahwa yang mendapatkan poin tertinggi adalah upper blinds. Pada penelitian ini, mengacu pada pendapat Szokolay maka akan dikembangkan rancangan upper blind yang mengoptimalkan masuknya cahaya matahari kedalam bangunan berdasarkan sudut jatuh cahaya matahari pada permukaan panel blind. Metode yang dipakai pada penelitian ini adalah metode eksperimental dengan menggunakan bantuan perangkat lunak Radiance. Bangunan studi kasus yang akan digunakan adalah Menara Kompas. Berdasarkan hasil eksperimen yang dilakukan, model dengan upper blind dapat mengoptimalkan tingkat pencahayaan alami sehingga ruang mendapatkan sinar matahari yang lebih mendekati dengan standar pencahayaan yang direkomendasikan SNI. Upper blind dapat menurunkan intensitas pencahayaan alami pada gedung dengan fasad curtain wall sebesar 28%. Namun, untuk kualitas pencahayaan, mdoel tanpa upper blind lebih baik dari model dengan upper blind. Nilai keseragaman cahaya pada model tanpa upper blind lebih baik sebesar 8% dan nilai kontras cahaya pada model tanpa upper blind lebih baik sebesar 17%. Bila ditotal maka upper blind masih lebih unggul karena nilai kuantitas cahaya yang lebih baik. The lighting intensity through the curtain wall in high rise building is the part that is close to the curtain wall will get excessive light intensity which will cause glare, this causes building users to tend to cover the transparent wall with curtains. There are several strategies to optimize natural light in buildings through passive design. Researchers conducted a category assessment based on research conducted by Moreno so that it was found that those who got the highest points were the upper blinds. In this study, referring to Szokolay's opinion, an upper blind design will be developed that optimizes the entry of sunlight into the building based on the angle of sunlight falling on the blind panel surface. The method used in this study is an experimental method with the used of Radiance software. The case study building that will be used is the Kompas Tower. Based on the results of experiments conducted, the model with the upper blind can optimize the level of natural lighting so that the room gets daylight that is closer to the lighting standards recommended by SNI. Upper blind can reduce the intensity of natural lighting in buildings with curtain wall facades by 28%. However, for lighting quality, model without upper blind is better than model with upper blind. The light uniformity value in the model without the upper blind is better by 8% and the light contrast value in the model without the upper blind is better at 17%. When totaled, upper blind is still superior because of the better light quantity value.

The unforgotten 1942 Ewa Weinberg relates her story of the deportations of Polish citizens to the USSR in the summer of 1940 and their life in 1942. After the Sikorski-Majski Pact had been signed and Anders‘s Army established, the deportees tried to leave Siberia for Samarkand, Uzbekistan. In Samarkand, it turned out that the category of citizenship is no more valid for the deportees: anti-Semitic acts were very common, but the persecutions were also applied to non-Roman Catholic Christians. Such behaviour was legitimate from the point of view of the majority and their model of society. When trying to get onto the train to Tehran, Weinberg’s friends and relatives (members of the Polish intelligentsia) heard a question: “You’re a nation of merchants and you do not even have a golden ring?”. In consequence, some of the cars left empty, having left stranded some Polish citizens categorised as gudłaje i kacapy (contemptuously: Jews and Russians). Niezapomniany rok 1942Świadectwo Ewy Weinberg dotyczy wywózki obywateli polskich do ZSRR latem 1940 roku i przeżyć roku 1942. Po zawarciu paktu Sikorski-Majski 31 lipca 1941 roku, na wieść o tworzeniu armii gen. Władysława Andersa deportowani przedostają się z Syberii do Samarkandy w Uzbekistanie (ZSRR). Na miejscu okazuje się, że we wspólnocie uchodźców nie obowiązuje kategoria obywatelstwa. Autorka opisuje praktyki antysemickie, a także dyskryminację chrześcijan innych niż rzymscy katolicy, jako zjawisko systemowe i prawomocne z punktu widzenia większościowego modelu kultury polskiej. Bliscy i znajomi autorki, inteligencja polska, przy próbie zajęcia miejsca w pociągu do Teheranu słyszą pytanie: „Taki naród handlowy, a nie ma bodaj obrączek?”. W efekcie część wagonów odjeżdża pusta, pozostawiając na pastwę klimatu, głodu, chorób i terroru stalinowskiego obywateli polskich zakwalifikowanych jako „gudłaje i kacapy”.

Abstract Background The presence or absence of residual disease following neoadjuvant systemic anti-cancer therapy (neoSACT) for HER2-positive early breast cancer (HER2+ EBC) provides powerful prognostic information that may guide subsequent adjuvant treatment for the individual patient. Pathological complete response (pCR) following neoSACT identifies a population with excellent outcomes in whom the balance of toxicity associated with the current treatment pathway may be disproportionate to the absolute clinical benefit. Aims HER2-RADiCAL seeks to reduce the burden of toxicity and healthcare costs of treating HER2+ EBC by testing the hypothesis that pCR can be used as a functional response biomarker to select patients who can safely receive less intensive therapy, including avoiding anthracyclines, with minimal or no loss of efficacy in the population. Trial design and eligibility criteria HER2-RADiCAL is a response-directed interventional cohort (single-arm) study embedded within a real-world data driven clinical pathway model. Participants will be registered within 6 weeks of completion of breast cancer surgery. The main eligibility criteria include clinical stage T1N1 or T2N0-1 at diagnosis and locally-determined pCR (ypT0/Tis ypN0) after standard of care taxane-based (non-anthracycline) neoadjuvant chemotherapy, trastuzumab and pertuzumab. After registration participants will continue to receive trastuzumab to complete a total of 9 cycles including those (neo-)adjuvant cycles administered prior to study entry. Participants will receive no further pertuzumab nor any adjuvant chemotherapy. Statistical methods The primary clinical endpoint is relapse free interval. Recruitment of 720 participants over 3 years will provide 90% power to exclude an event rate >6.5% at 3 years. Secondary endpoints include relapse-free survival, invasive breast cancer-free survival, invasive disease-free survival, distant recurrence-free interval, breast cancer-free interval, treatment pathway adherence and cost-effectiveness. Real-world data driven clinical pathway model Health economic modelling will compare the protocol-driven study cohort with two comparator pathways: a non-response adapted maximum therapy pathway (the standard clinical pathway prior to the study) and a real-world representative pathway taken from 4-nation UK National Health Service data at the beginning and end of the study. Patient and public involvement Patient advocates have shaped the research by confirming that the main outcomes being evaluated are important to patients and that the interventional cohort design, with power to exclude an absolute risk of recurrence outwith a 2-3% margin of historical control data, is acceptable and preferable to a randomised controlled trial, which would take longer to get answers and need many more patients to be included. They have been involved in protocol design, including methodology, sample collection and patient follow-up, and their input has shaped the patient information materials and consent forms. Patient advocates will have an ongoing key role in overseeing the progress of the study as members of the Trial Management Group, and they will also have an important role in communicating the study results to patients and the public. Current status HER2-RADiCAL is planned to open at ~40 UK sites commencing in September 2021. Citation Format: Iain Macpherson, Stuart McIntosh, Lucy Kilburn, Holly Tovey, Sarah Kernaghan, Katie Goddard, Indrani Bhattacharya, Clinton Boyd, Charlotte Coles, Cliona Kirwan, Mairead Mackenzie, Ciara O’Brien, Alistair Ring, Claire Snowdon, Hilary Stobart, Duncan Wheatley, Andrew Wardley, Abeer Shaaban, Peter Hall, David Cameron, Judith Bliss. The HER2-RADiCAL study (Response ADaptive CAre pLan) - Tailoring treatment for HER2 positive early breast cancer [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2021 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium; 2021 Dec 7-10; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2022;82(4 Suppl):Abstract nr OT2-05-01.

The Australian endemic humicolous and hygropetric water beetle genus Tympanogaster Perkins, 1979, is revised, based on the study of 7,280 specimens. The genus is redescribed, and redescriptions are provided for T. cornuta (Janssens), T. costata (Deane), T. deanei Perkins, T. macrognatha (Lea), T. novicia (Blackburn), T. obcordata (Deane), T. schizolabra (Deane), and T. subcostata (Deane). Lectotypes are designated for Ochthebius labratus Deane, 1933, and Ochthebius macrognathus Lea, 1926. Ochthebius labratus Deane, 1933, is synonymized with Ochthebius novicius Blackburn, 1896. Three new subgenera are described: Hygrotympanogaster new subgenus (type species Tympanogaster (Hygrotympanogaster) maureenae new species; Topotympanogaster new subgenus (type species Tympanogaster (Topotympanogaster) crista new species; and Plesiotympanogaster new genus (type species Tympanogaster (Plesiotympanogaster) thayerae new species. Seventy-six new species are described, and keys to the subgenera, species groups, and species are given. High resolution digital images of all primary types are presented (online version in color), and geographic distributions are mapped. Male genitalia, representative spermathecae and representative mouthparts are illustrated. Scanning electron micrographs of external morphological characters of adults and larvae are presented. Selected morphological features of the other members of the subtribe Meropathina, Meropathus Enderlein and Tympallopatrum Perkins, are illustrated and compared with those of Tympanogaster. Species of Tympanogaster are typically found in the relict rainforest patches in eastern Australia. Most species have very limited distributions, and relict rainforest patches often have more than one endemic species. The only species currently known from the arid center of Australia, T. novicia, has the widest distribution pattern, ranging into eastern rainforest patches. There is a fairly close correspondence between subgenera and microhabitat preferences. Members of Tympanogaster (s. str.) live in the splash zone, usually on stream boulders, or on bedrock stream margins. The majority of T. (Hygrotympanogaster) species live in the hygropetric zone at the margins of waterfalls, or on steep rockfaces where water is continually trickling; a few rare species have been collected from moss in Nothofagus rainforests. Species of T. (Plesiotympanogaster) have been found in both hygropetric microhabitats and in streamside moss. The exact microhabitats of T. (Topotympanogaster) are unknown, but the morphology of most species suggests non-aquatic habits; most specimens have been collected in humicolous microhabitats, by sifting rainforest debris, or were taken in flight intercept traps. Larvae of hygropetric species are often collected with adults. These larvae have tube-like, dorsally positioned, mesothoracic spiracles that allow the larvae to breathe while under a thin film of water. The key morphological differences between larvae of Tympanogaster (s. str.) and those of Tympanogaster (Hygrotympanogaster) are illustrated. New species of Tympanogaster are: T. (s. str.) aldinga (New South Wales, Dorrigo National Park, Rosewood Creek), T. (s. str.) amaroo (New South Wales, Back Creek, downstream of Moffatt Falls), T. (s. str.) ambigua (Queensland, Cairns), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) arcuata (New South Wales, Kara Creek, 13 km NEbyE of Jindabyne), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) atroargenta (Victoria, Possum Hollow falls, West branch Tarwin River, 5.6 km SSW Allambee), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) barronensis (Queensland, Barron Falls, Kuranda), T. (s. str.) bluensis (New South Wales, Blue Mountains), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) bondi (New South Wales, Bondi Heights), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) bryosa (New South Wales, New England National Park), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) buffalo (Victoria, Mount Buffalo National Park), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) canobolas (New South Wales, Mount Canobolas Park), T. (s. str.) cardwellensis (Queensland, Cardwell Range, Goddard Creek), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) cascadensis (New South Wales, Cascades Campsite, on Tuross River), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) clandestina (Victoria, Grampians National Park, Golton Gorge, 7.0 km W Dadswells Bridge), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) clypeata (Victoria, Grampians National Park, Golton Gorge, 7.0 km W Dadswells Bridge), T. (s. str.) cooloogatta (New South Wales, New England National Park, Five Day Creek), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) coopacambra (Victoria, Beehive Falls, ~2 km E of Cann Valley Highway on 'WB Line'), T. (Topotympanogaster) crista (Queensland, Mount Cleveland summit), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) cudgee (New South Wales, New England National Park, 0.8 km S of Pk. Gate), T. (s. str.) cunninghamensis (Queensland, Main Range National Park, Cunningham's Gap, Gap Creek), T. (s. str.) darlingtoni (New South Wales, Barrington Tops), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) decepta (Victoria, Mount Buffalo National Park), T. (s. str.) dingabledinga (New South Wales, Dorrigo National Park, Rosewood Creek, upstream from Coachwood Falls), T. (s. str.) dorrigoensis (New South Wales, Dorrigo National Park, Rosewood Creek, upstream from Coachwood Falls), T. (Topotympanogaster) dorsa (Queensland, Windin Falls, NW Mount Bartle-Frere), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) duobifida (Victoria, 0.25 km E Binns, Hill Junction, adjacent to Jeeralang West Road, 4.0 km S Jeerelang), T. (s. str.) eungella (Queensland, Finch Hatton Gorge), T. (Topotympanogaster) finniganensis (Queensland, Mount Finnigan summit), T. (s. str.) foveova (New South Wales, Border Ranges National Park, Brindle Creek), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) grampians (Victoria, Grampians National Park, Epacris Falls, 2.5 km WNW Halls Gap), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) gushi (New South Wales, Mount Canobolas Park), T. (s. str.) hypipamee (Queensland, Mount Hypipamee National Park, Barron River headwaters below Dinner Falls), T. (s. str.) illawarra (New South Wales, Macquarie Rivulet Falls, near Wollongong), T. (Topotympanogaster) intricata (Queensland, Mossman Bluff Track, 5–10 km W Mossman), T. (s. str.) jaechi (Queensland, Running Creek, along road between Mount Chinghee National Park and Border Ranges National Park), T. (Topotympanogaster) juga (Queensland, Mount Lewis summit), T. kuranda (Queensland, Barron Falls, Kuranda), T. (s. str.) lamingtonensis (Queensland, Lamington National Park, Lightening Creek), T. (s. str.) magarra (New South Wales, Border Ranges National Park, Brindle Creek), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) maureenae (New South Wales, Back Creek, Moffatt Falls, ca. 5 km W New England National Park boundary), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) megamorpha (Victoria, Possum Hollow falls, W br. Tarwin River, 5.6 km SSW Allambee), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) merrijig (Victoria, Merrijig), T. (s. str.) millaamillaa (Queensland, Millaa Millaa), T. modulatrix (Victoria, Talbot Creek at Thomson Valley Road, 4.25 km WSW Beardmore), T. (Topotympanogaster) monteithi (Queensland, Mount Bartle Frere), T. moondarra (New South Wales, Border Ranges National Park, Brindle Creek), T. (s. str.) mysteriosa (Queensland), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) nargun (Victoria, Deadcock Den, on Den of Nargun Creek, Mitchell River National Park), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) newtoni (Victoria, Mount Buffalo National Park), T. (s. str.) ovipennis (New South Wales, Dorrigo National Park, Rosewood Creek, upstream from Coachwood Falls), T. (s. str.) pagetae (New South Wales, Back Creek, downstream of Moffatt Falls), T. (Topotympanogaster) parallela (Queensland, Mossman Bluff Track, 5–10 km W Mossman), T. (s. str.) perpendicula (Queensland, Mossman Bluff Track, 5–10 km W Mossman), T. plana (Queensland, Cape Tribulation), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) porchi (Victoria, Tarra-Bulga National Park, Tarra Valley Road, 1.5 km SE Tarra Falls), T. (s. str.) precariosa (New South Wales, Leycester Creek, 4 km. S of Border Ranges National Park), T. (s. str.) protecta (New South Wales, Leycester Creek, 4 km. S of Border Ranges National Park), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) punctata (Victoria, Mount Buffalo National Park, Eurobin Creek), T. (s. str.) ravenshoensis (Queensland, Ravenshoe State Forest, Charmillan Creek, 12 km SE Ravenshoe), T. (s. str.) robinae (New South Wales, Back Creek, downstream of Moffatt Falls), T. (s. str.) serrata (Queensland, Natural Bridge National Park, Cave Creek), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) spicerensis (Queensland, Spicer’s Peak summit), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) storeyi (Queensland, Windsor Tableland), T. (Topotympanogaster) summa (Queensland, Mount Elliott summit), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) tabula (New South Wales, Mount Canobolas Park), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) tallawarra (New South Wales, Dorrigo National Park, Rosewood Creek, Cedar Falls), T. (s. str.) tenax (New South Wales, Salisbury), T. (Plesiotympanogaster) thayerae (Tasmania, Liffey Forest Reserve at Liffey River), T. (s. str.) tora (Queensland, Palmerston National Park), T. trilineata (New South Wales, Sydney), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) truncata (Queensland, Tambourine Mountain), T. (s. str.) volata (Queensland, Palmerston National Park, Learmouth Creek, ca. 14 km SE Millaa Millaa), T. (Hygrotympanogaster) wahroonga (New South Wales, Wahroonga), T. (s. str.) wattsi (New South Wales, Blicks River near Dundurrabin), T. (s. str.) weiri (New South Wales, Allyn River, Chichester State Forest), T. (s. str.) wooloomgabba (New South Wales, New England National Park, Five Day Creek).

<p>Artykuł zawiera analizę porównawczą wybranego materiału językowego, zamieszczonego w polsko- i rosyjskojęzycznym słowniku asocjacyjnym. Szczegółowemu opisowi poddano jądro polsko- i rosyjskojęzycznej świadomości, czyli te jednostki sieci semantycznej (asocjacyjnowerbalnej), które posiadają największą liczbę związków z innymi jednostkami danej sieci asocjacyjnej, zaprezentowanej w formie odwróconego słownika asocjacyjnego (od reakcji do bodźca).</p><p>Przeprowadzona analiza pozwala stwierdzić, iż pozornie tożsame, ewentualnie bliskie w planie semantycznym pojęcia, funkcjonujące w języku polskim i rosyjskim, często wykazują istotne różnice znaczeniowe. Szczególnie wyraźnie ujawniły się one w sieciach skojarzeniowych nominatów uczuć, emocji, wartości, jak również działań podejmowanych przez człowieka. Okazuje się, że poddana badaniom młodzież polska i rosyjska znacznie różni się w ocenach, co i w jakim stopniu odbiera za dobre lub złe, duże lub małe, aktywne lub pasywne. Młodzi Polacy przejawiają silniejszą tendencję do patrzenia na świat i ocenę otaczającej ich rzeczywistości przez pryzmat kategorii hedonistycznych. Rzadziej w ich wypowiedziach ujawniają się charakterystyki odnoszące się do życia w zbiorowości (w tym kontekście eksponowaną pozycję zajmują jedynie najbliżsi). Inaczej natomiast wygląda językowo ukonstytuowany świat młodych Rosjan. 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Deca, kao najosetljiva i najzištećenija kategorija društva, krivično neodgovorna, se nažalost ipak javljaju u ulozi žrtvi krivičnih dela. Iako se njihova zaštita ogleda od strane čitavog društva, svih subjekata bezbednosti i pravne zaštite, statistički i realni podaci koji se pojavljuju ukazuju na činjenicu da je ova najosetljivija društvena kategorija ipak „na udaru“ mnogih krivičnih dela gde se pojavljuju kao njihove žrtve. Deca, zbog svoje starosne granice i još uvek nedovoljno razvijenih sposobnosti za adekvatnu preocenu su specificna kao žtve krivičnih dela u slučaju da se radi o punoletnim učiniocima, dok posebnu specificnost u izvršenju krivičnih dela nad decom imaju maloletnici u slučaju da se javljaju kao učinioci. U tome ide u prilog činjenica da su maloletnici i deca zbog bliske starosne strukture u većoj mogućnosti da medjusobno budu izvršioci i žrtve kriminala, posebno njihovo druženje, vannastavno okupljanje, pohadjanje skole itd. u odnosu na punoletne izvršioci i decu kao njihove potencijalne žrtve. U tom slučaju se najčešće radi o tzv „vršnjackom nasilju“ kao obliku kriminala između vrnjaka. Imajući u vidu da su deca krivično neodgovorna i da ne podležu krivičnoj odgovornosti, nezahvalno je ovu osetljivu kategoriju analizirati uopste sa aspekta žrtve. S obzirom da se u ovoj kategoriji nalaze, autor se u radu bavi upravo ovom problematikom, gde decu analizira u uloži žrtve kriminala, kao skupa krivičnih dela, nad kojim su izvršena od strane maloletnika, kao njihove bliske strarosne granice. Pored teorijskog obrazloženja pojma dece i maloletnika u krivičnom pravu, autor statističkim metodom analizira zastupljenost izvršenja krivičnih dela od strane maloletnika prema deci u vremenskom periodu od pet godina na teritoriji Republike Srbije prikazom konkretnih statističkih podataka iz skoro svih grupa krivčnih dela, na osnovu čega se izvodi zaključak koja su dela najzastuplenija u izvršenju,, kao i o njihovoj dinamici izvršenja, a sve u cilju buduceg sprečavanja vršenja dela nad ovom specifičnoj društvenoj kategoriji.

Abstract The demand for higher efficiency in aircraft propulsion engines leads to materials with increasing thermomechanical strengths and new designs inducing filigree geometries of blisks and disks. Because of new designs which induce tighter tolerances, the high mechanical process forces in conventional cutting processes like broaching cause inacceptable geometrical deviations and high tooling costs. Due to the electro-thermal material removal mechanism, electrical discharge machining (EDM) ensures a force free and thus precise machining. The manufacture of fir tree slots in nickel-based alloys by wire EDM has been investigated in the last few years and the process was verified as an alternative technology for broaching. To get a better competitive position, the productivity can be prospectively increased by using an additional indexing rotary axis which ensures a precise and automated production of rotationally symmetric components and reduce production times, e.g., for the manufacture of fir tree slots on a disk. Nevertheless, the application of these axes cause changed flushing conditions and can also affect the electrical contacting as well. Both influence the process performance and demand a technology development or adjustment of standard machining technologies. The influence of these changed machining conditions has not been investigated scientifically to date. In this paper, the surface integrity and process performance of fir tree slots machined by wire EDM on the machine table are compared with the manufacture by using an additional indexing rotary axis.

The performance of Flat plate Solar Water Heater deteriorates within five to twelve years of their installation due to factors related to manufacturing, operating conditions, lack of maintenance etc. Especially, problem due to scaling is significant as it is based on quality of water used. The remaining factors are system dependent and could be overcome by quality production. Software is developed by incorporating Hottel Whillier Bliss (H-W-B) equation to ascertain the effect of scaling on system efficiency in case of thermosiphon system. In case of clean thermosiphon system, the instantaneous efficiency calculated at 1000 W/m2 radiation is 72 % and it drops to 46 % for 3.7 mm scale thickness. The mass flow rate is reduced by 90 % for 3.7 mm scale thickness. Whereas, the average temperature drop of water in the tank is not critical due to considerable heat content in water under severe scaled condition. But practically in case of major scale growth, some of the risers are likely to get blocked completely which leads to negligible temperature rise in the tank. ABSTRAK: Prestasi plat rata pemanas air suria merosot selepas lima hingga dua belas tahun pemasangannya disebabkan faktor-faktor yang berkaitan dengan pembuatannya, cara kendaliannya, kurangnya penyelenggaraan dan sebagainya. Terutama sekali, masalah disebabkan scaling (tembunan endapan mineral) perlu diambil berat kerana ianya bergantung kepada kualiti air yang digunakan. Faktor-faktor selebihya bersandarkan sistem dan ia boleh diatasi dengan mempertingkatkan kualiti pembuatannya. Perisian komputer dihasilkan dengan menggunakan persamaan Hottel Whillier Bliss (H-W-B) untuk menentukan kesan scaling terhadap kecekapan sistem dalam termosifon. Dalam sistem termosifon bersih, kecekapan seketika dikira pada 1000 W/m2 , pada kadar radiasi 72 % dan ianya jatuh kepada 46 % untuk ketebalan skala 3.7 mm. Kadar aliran jisim berkurangan sebanyak 90 % untuk ketebalan skala 3.7 mm. Manakala, penurunan suhu purata air di dalam tangki tidaklah kritikal, disebabkan oleh kandungan haba yang tinggi di dalam air di bawah keadaan kerak yang teruk. Tetapi dalam kes tumbesaran kerak yang genting, sesetengah penaik akan tersumbat sepenuhnya, mengakibatkan peningkatan suhu di dalam tangki boleh diabaikan.

Abstract This paper deals with the cyclic-periodic structure with piezoelectric shunt circuits or a parallel piezoelectric network. The objective is to obtain the vibration suppression effect of them on the cylic-periodic structure. The background of the research is about vibration reduction of bladed disks in aero-engines, and the system is simulated by a lumped parameter model. The tuned and mistuned dynamic equations of the system are derived. The method of equivalent blisk model (EBM) is used to identify the lumped parameters of a finite element model, which is related to the experimental model. Then the Modified Modal Assurance Criterion (MMAC) is used to evaluate the vibration suppression ability of shunt circuits and the network. The numerical results show that both of these two systems can control vibration well, even the mechanical and electrical mistuning level are up to 10 %, and there is an optimal resistance which can be used to design the system to get a good performance of vibration suppression. An experiment is performed to validate the analytical results. The experimental results demonstrate that the ability of vibration suppression for both two systems are almost the same, but the piezo-network has an advantage in vibration delocalization of the mistuned system.

INTRODUCTION: In the midst of a fast-paced competitive lifestyle, everyone is affected by stress in some way. Stress plays an important role on the menstrual cycle which causes negative consequences on the menstrual cycle in females. Menstrual function is disrupted by stress that activates the hypothalamic–pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis; it leads to menstrual cycle alterations. As a result of this activation, menstruation becomes unpleasant, painful. Ayurveda aims at preservation & promotion of health and prevention & cure of diseases through the concepts of positive physical and mental health. Shirodhara is a procedure of gentle pouring of a stream of lukewarm medicated oil or other liquid continuously & steadily on the forehead specifically on the Agneya chakra. AIMS & OBJECTIVES: 1. To analyze the effects of stress on menstrual disorders. 2. To study the efficacy of Shirodhara in stress induced menstrual disorders. MATERIAL & METHODS: Relevant literature is referred from the Samhitas, Sangraha Granthas and contemporary literature along with personal experience. DISCUSSION: People are dealing with a variety of stress and are working hard to get rid of them. A person's mental well-being is essential for effective care of the body. CONCLUSION: Shirodhara is a therapy that rejuvenates the nervous system, releases emotions, opens the subtle channels, and brings bliss throughout the mind and body. This has a calming and relaxing effect on the brain. Shirodhara has a significant effect on a variety of stress-induced menstrual disorders.

Samenvatting De COVID-19-pandemie en de daarmee getroffen maatregelen zorgden in maart 2020 direct voor grote veranderingen. Er zijn signalen dat deze veranderingen een negatief effect hebben op het welbevinden. Sommige onderzoeken spreken dit echter tegen, met name die onder de werkende bevolking. Mogelijk pakt de pandemie voor sommige groepen juist gunstig uit en voor andere groepen minder, waardoor het totaalbeeld vertekend wordt. In dit onderzoek focussen we ons op drie beroepsgroepen waarvan bekend is dat de COVID-19-pandemie en bijbehorende maatregelen direct een effect hebben op hun werktaken en hoeveelheid werkzaamheden: zorgpersoneel, onderwijspersoneel en verkopers. Met behulp van GEE-analyses onderzoeken we of er sprake is van een significante afname in welbevinden en een verandering in werkfactoren en in hoeverre de werkfactoren gerelateerd zijn aan het welbevinden. Uit de resultaten blijkt dat er slechts op beperkte schaal sprake is van een afname in welbevinden. Er wordt alleen een verslechtering in burn-outklachten gezien bij zorgpersoneel en verkopers. Werkfactoren laten vooral een verandering in gunstige richting zien, met uitzondering van autonomie. Die is in al de onderzochte groepen gedaald. Hoewel we wel een relatie vonden tussen de onderzochte werkfactoren en burn-outklachten, kunnen we de ontwikkelingen in het welbevinden niet verklaren door de verandering in werkfactoren.

In India the philosophers, except the Madhyamika Buddhists and Jayarasi Bhatta, maintain that determination of an object depends on a pramana, a source of cognition. Similarly, pramana depends on prameya padhartha. In the present paper I will deal with the relationship between epistemology and metaphysics from the Advaita point of view. According to Advaita Vedanta, Brahman is the only highest reality. It does never get contradicted. Brahman is sat-cit-ananda i.e. Eternal Existence, Eternal Consciousness and Eternal Bliss. The three aspects -sot, cit and ananda- constitute the essence of Brahman. Brahman is unknown and unknowable. All sources of cognitions [pramana-s) fail to cognize Brahman. It is avanmanasagacara. The nature of Brahman can be explained through the methods of adhyaropa and apavoda. Advaita Vedanta does not admit any relationship between pramiti and Brahman from the higher standpoint. The teachers of Advaita Vedanta hold that the relationship between a pramana and a prameya is real from the lower standpoint. In Advaita epistemology prama'nacaitanya is called vrtticaitanya. According to Dharmaraja, vrtti means modification of mind in respect of the object of cognition [prameya kara). In visual perception of the jar mind goes out of the body through the eye, reaches the jar and takes the form of the jar. Dharmaraja gives an example of visual perception only. But other teachers of Advaita Vedanta admit two types of antahkaranavrtti - pratyaksavrtti and paroksavrtti. In Advaita Vedanta epistemology, the four factors, namely pramatr, prameya, pramana and pramiti- are conditioned consciousness, which are real in the lower level of existence. All forms of worldly and Vedic behaviors that are connected with valid means of cognition and objects of cognition are illusory (adhyasika). Notably, the teachers of Advaita Vedanta refuse to accept any relationship between pramiti and Brahman, but they admit the relationship, between pramana and Brahman. They deny brahmajnana, but they admit brahmakara antahkaranavrtti, which is secondarily called brahmajnana. After a careful analysis it comes to light that in Advaita scheme a knowable object (prameya) is related with both pramana and prameya from the lower standpoint whereas Brahman is exclusively related with pramana from higher standpoint.

If thinking about home necessitates thinking about “place, space, scale, identity and power,” as Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling (2) suggest, then thinking about home themes in popular music makes no less a conceptual demand. Song lyrics and titles most often invoke dominant readings such as intimacy, privacy, nurture, refuge, connectedness and shared belonging, all issues found within Blunt and Dowling’s analysis. The spatial imaginary to which these authors refer takes vivid shape through repertoires of songs dealing with houses and other specific sites, vast and distant homelands, communities or, less tangibly, geographical or cultural settings where particular relationships can be found, supporting Blunt and Dowling’s major claim that home is complex, multi-scalar and multi-layered. Shelley Mallett’s claim that the term home “functions as a repository for complex, inter-related and at times contradictory socio-cultural ideas about people’s relationships with one another…and with places, spaces and things” (84) is borne out heavily by popular music where, for almost every sentiment that the term home evokes, it seems an opposite sentiment is evoked elsewhere: familiarity versus alienation, acceptance versus rejection, love versus loneliness. Making use of conceptual groundwork by Blunt and Dowling and by Mallett and others, the following discussion canvasses a range of meanings that home has had for a variety of songwriters, singers and audiences over the years. Intended as merely partial and exploratory rather than exhaustive, it provides some insights into contrasts, ironies and relationships between home and gender, diaspora and loss. While it cannot cover all the themes, it gives prominence to the major recurring themes and a variety of important contexts that give rise to these home themes. Most prominent among those songs dealing with home has been a nostalgia and yearning, while issues of how women may have viewed the home within which they have often been restricted to a narrowly defined private sphere are almost entirely absent. This serves as a reminder that, while some themes can be conducive to the medium of popular music, others may be significantly less so. Songs may speak directly of experience but not necessarily of all experiences and certainly not of all experiences equally. B. Lee Cooper claims “most popular culture ventures rely upon formula-oriented settings and phrasings to attract interest, to spur mental or emotional involvement” (93). Notions of home have generally proved both formulaic and emotionally-charged. Commonly understood patterns of meaning and other hegemonic references generally operate more successfully than alternative reference points. Those notions with the strongest cultural currency can be conveyed succinctly and denote widely agreed upon meanings. Lyrics can seldom afford to be deeply analytical but generally must be concise and immediately evocative. Despite that, this discussion will point to diverse meanings carried by songs about home. Blunt and Dowling point out that “a house is not necessarily nor automatically a home” (3). The differences are strongly apparent in music, with only a few songs relating to houses compared with homes. When Malvina Reynolds wrote in 1962 of “little boxes, on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky,” she was certainly referring to houses, not homes, thus making it easier to bypass the relationships which might have vested the inhabitants with more warmth and individuality than their houses, in this song about conformity and homogeneity. The more complex though elusive concept of home, however, is more likely to feature in love songs and to emanate from diasporal songs. Certainly these two genres are not mutually exclusive. Irish songs are particularly noteworthy for adding to the array of music written by, or representational of, those who have been forced away from home by war, poverty, strife or other circumstances. They manifest identities of displacement rather than of placement, as studied by Bronwen Walter, looking back at rather than from within their spatial imaginary. Phil Eva claims that during the 19th Century Irish émigrés sang songs of exile in Manchester’s streets. Since many in England’s industrial towns had been uprooted from their homes, the songs found rapport with street audiences and entered popular culture. For example, the song Killarney, of hazy origins but thought to date back to as early as 1850, tells of Killarney’s lakes and fells, Emerald isles and winding bays; Mountain paths and woodland dells… ...her [nature’s] home is surely there. As well as anthropomorphising nature and giving it a home, the song suggests a specifically geographic sense of home. Galway Bay, written by A. Fahy, does likewise, as do many other Irish songs of exile which link geography with family, kin and sometimes culture to evoke a sense of home. The final verse of Cliffs of Doneen gives a sense of both people and place making up home: Fare thee well to Doneen, fare thee well for a while And to all the kind people I’m leaving behind To the streams and the meadows where late I have been And the high rocky slopes round the cliffs of Doneen. Earlier Irish songs intertwine home with political issues. For example, Tho’ the Last Glimpse of Erin vows to Erin that “In exile thy bosum shall still be my home.” Such exile resulted from a preference of fleeing Ireland rather than bowing to English oppression, which then included a prohibition on Irish having moustaches or certain hairstyles. Thomas Moore is said to have set the words of the song to the air Coulin which itself referred to an Irish woman’s preference for her “Coulin” (a long-haired Irish youth) to the English (Nelson-Burns). Diasporal songs have continued, as has their political edge, as evidenced by global recognition of songs such as Bayan Ko (My Country), written by José Corazon de Jesus in 1929, out of love and concern for the Philippines and sung among Filipinos worldwide. Robin Cohen outlines a set of criteria for diaspora that includes a shared belief in the possibility of return to home, evident in songs such as the 1943 Welsh song A Welcome in the Hillside, in which a Welsh word translating roughly as a yearning to return home, hiraeth, is used: We’ll kiss away each hour of hiraeth When you come home again to Wales. However, the immensely popular I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen, not of Irish origin but written by Thomas Westendorf of Illinois in 1875, suggests that such emotions can have a resonance beyond the diaspora. Anti-colonial sentiments about home can also be expressed by long-time inhabitants, as Harry Belafonte demonstrated in Island in the Sun: This is my island in the sun Where my people have toiled since time begun. Though I may sail on many a sea, Her shores will always be home to me. War brought a deluge of sentimental songs lamenting separation from home and loved ones, just as likely to be parents and siblings as sweethearts. Radios allowed wider audiences and greater popularity for these songs. If separation had brought a longing previously, the added horrors of war presented a stronger contrast between that which the young soldiers were missing and that which they were experiencing. Both the First and Second World Wars gave rise to songs long since sung which originated in such separations, but these also had a strong sense of home as defined by the nationalism that has for over a century given the contours of expectations of soldiers. Focusing on home, these songs seldom speak of the details of war. Rather they are specific about what the singers have left behind and what they hope to return to. Songs of home did not have to be written specifically for the war effort nor for overseas troops. Irving Berlin’s 1942 White Christmas, written for a film, became extremely popular with US troops during WWII, instilling a sense of home that related to familiarities and festivities. Expressing a sense of home could be specific and relate to regions or towns, as did I’m Goin’ Back Again to Yarrawonga, or it could refer to any home, anywhere where there were sons away fighting. Indeed the American Civil War song When Johnny Comes Marching Home, written by Patrick Sarsfield Gilmour, was sung by both Northerners and Southerners, so adaptable was it, with home remarkably unspecified and undescribed. The 1914 British song Keep the Home Fires Burning by Ivor Novello and Lena Ford was among those that evoked a connection between home and the military effort and helped establish a responsibility on those at home to remain optimistic: Keep the Homes fires burning While your hearts are yearning, Though your lads are far away They dream of home, There’s a silver lining Through the dark clouds shining, Turn the dark clouds inside out, Till the boys come Home. No space exists in this song for critique of the reasons for war, nor of a role for women other than that of homemaker and moral guardian. It was women’s duty to ensure men enlisted and home was rendered a private site for emotional enlistment for a presumed public good, though ironically also a point of personal hope where the light of love burned for the enlistees’ safe return. Later songs about home and war challenged these traditional notions. Two serve as examples. One is Pink Floyd’s brief musical piece of the 1970s, Bring the Boys Back Home, whose words of protest against the American war on Viet Nam present home, again, as a site of safety but within a less conservative context. Home becomes implicated in a challenge to the prevailing foreign policy and the interests that influence it, undermining the normal public sphere/private sphere distinction. The other more complex song is Judy Small’s Mothers, Daughters, Wives, from 1982, set against a backdrop of home. Small eloquently describes the dynamics of the domestic space and how women understood their roles in relation to the First and Second World Wars and the Viet Nam War. Reinforcing that “The materialities and imaginaries of home are closely connected” (Blunt and Dowling 188), Small sings of how the gold frames held the photographs that mothers kissed each night And the doorframe held the shocked and silent strangers from the fight. Small provides a rare musical insight into the disjuncture between the men who left the domestic space and those who return to it, and we sense that women may have borne much of the brunt of those awful changes. The idea of domestic bliss is also challenged, though from the returned soldier’s point of view, in Redgum’s 1983 song I Was Only Nineteen, written by group member John Schuman. It touches on the tragedy of young men thrust into war situations and the horrific after-affects for them, which cannot be shrugged off on return to home. The nurturing of home has limits but the privacy associated with the domestic sphere has often concealed the violence and mental anguish that happens away from public view. But by this time most of the songs referring to home were dominated once more by sentimental love, often borne of travel as mobility rose. Journeys help “establish the thresholds and boundaries of home” and can give rise to “an idealized, ideological and ethnocentric view of home” (Mallett 78). Where previously songsters had sung of leaving home in exile or for escape from poverty, lyrics from the 1960s onwards often suggested that work had removed people from loved ones. It could be work on a day-by-day basis, as in A Hard Day’s Night from the 1964 film of the same name, where the Beatles illuminate differences between the public sphere of work and the private sphere to which they return: When I’m home, everything seems to be alright, When I’m home feeling you holding me tight, tight, yeah and reiterated by Paul McCartney in Every Night: And every night that day is through But tonight I just want to stay in And be with you. Lyrics such as these and McCartney’s call to be taken “...home to the Mull of Kintyre,” singled him out for his home-and-hearth messages (Dempsey). But work might involve longer absences and thus more deepfelt loneliness. Simon and Garfunkel’s exemplary Homeward Bound starkly portrays a site of “away-ness”: I’m sittin’ in the railway station, got a ticket for my destination… Mundaneness, monotony and predictability contrast with the home to which the singer’s thoughts are constantly escaping. The routine is familiar but the faces are those of strangers. Home here is, again, not simply a domicile but the warmth of those we know and love. Written at a railway station, Homeward Bound echoes sentiments almost identical to those of (Leaving on a) Jet Plane, written by John Denver at an airport in 1967. Denver also co-wrote (Take Me Home) Country Roads, where, in another example of anthropomorphism as a tool of establishing a strong link, he asks to be taken home to the place I belong West Virginia, mountain momma, Take me home, Country Roads. The theme has recurred in numerous songs since, spawning examples such as Darin and Alquist’s When I Get Home, Chris Daughtry’s Home, Michael Bublé’s Home and Will Smith’s Ain’t No Place Like Home, where, in an opening reminiscent of Homeward Bound, the singer is Sitting in a hotel room A thousand miles away from nowhere Sloped over a chair as I stare… Furniture from home, on the other hand, can be used to evoke contentment and bliss, as demonstrated by George Weiss and Bob Thiele’s song The Home Fire, in which both kin and the objects of home become charged with meaning: All of the folks that I love are there I got a date with my favourite chair Of course, in regard to earlier songs especially, while the traveller associates home with love, security and tenderness, back at home the waiting one may have had feelings more of frustration and oppression. One is desperate to get back home, but for all we know the other may be desperate to get out of home or to develop a life more meaningful than that which was then offered to women. If the lot of homemakers was invisible to national economies (Waring), it seemed equally invisible to mainstream songwriters. This reflects the tradition that “Despite home being generally considered a feminine, nurturing space created by women themselves, they often lack both authority and a space of their own within this realm” (Mallett 75). Few songs have offered the perspective of the one at home awaiting the return of the traveller. One exception is the Seekers’ 1965 A World of Our Own but, written by Tom Springfield, the words trilled by Judith Durham may have been more of a projection of the traveller’s hopes and expectations than a true reflection of the full experiences of housebound women of the day. Certainly, the song reinforces connections between home and intimacy and privacy: Close the door, light the lights. We’re stayin’ home tonight, Far away from the bustle and the bright city lights. Let them all fade away, just leave us alone And we’ll live in a world of our own. This also strongly supports Gaston Bachelard’s claim that one’s house in the sense of a home is one’s “first universe, a real cosmos” (qtd. in Blunt and Dowling 12). But privacy can also be a loneliness when home is not inhabited by loved ones, as in the lyrics of Don Gibson’s 1958 Oh, Lonesome Me, where Everybody’s going out and having fun I’m a fool for staying home and having none. Similar sentiments emerge in Debbie Boone’s You Light up My Life: So many nights I’d sit by my window Waiting for someone to sing me his song. Home in these situations can be just as alienating as the “away” depicted as so unfriendly by Homeward Bound’s strangers’ faces and the “million people” who still leave Michael Bublé feeling alone. Yet there are other songs that depict “away” as a prison made of freedom, insinuating that the lack of a home and consequently of the stable love and commitment presumably found there is a sad situation indeed. This is suggested by the lilting tune, if not by the lyrics themselves, in songs such as Wandrin’ Star from the musical Paint Your Wagon and Ron Miller’s I’ve Never Been to Me, which has both a male and female version with different words, reinforcing gendered experiences. The somewhat conservative lyrics in the female version made it a perfect send-up song in the 1994 film Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. In some songs the absentee is not a traveller but has been in jail. In Tie a Yellow Ribbon round the Ole Oak Tree, an ex-inmate states “I’m comin’ home. I’ve done my time.” Home here is contingent upon the availability and forgivingness of his old girl friend. Another song juxtaposing home with prison is Tom Jones’ The Green, Green Grass of Home in which the singer dreams he is returning to his home, to his parents, girlfriend and, once again, an old oak tree. However, he awakes to find he was dreaming and is about to be executed. His body will be taken home and placed under the oak tree, suggesting some resigned sense of satisfaction that he will, after all, be going home, albeit in different circumstances. Death and home are thus sometimes linked, with home a euphemism for the former, as suggested in many spirituals, with heaven or an afterlife being considered “going home”. The reverse is the case in the haunting Bring Him Home of the musical Les Misérables. With Marius going off to the barricades and the danger involved, Jean Valjean prays for the young man’s safe return and that he might live. Home is connected here with life, safety and ongoing love. In a number of songs about home and absence there is a sense of home being a place where morality is gently enforced, presumably by women who keep men on the straight and narrow, in line with one of the women’s roles of colonial Australia, researched by Anne Summers. These songs imply that when men wander from home, their morals also go astray. Wild Rover bemoans Oh, I’ve been a wild rover for many a year, and I’ve spent all my money on whiskey and beer… There is the resolve in the chorus, however, that home will have a reforming influence. Gene Pitney’s Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa poses the dangers of distance from a wife’s influence, while displaying opposition to the sentimental yearning of so many other songs: Dearest darlin’, I have to write to say that I won’t be home anymore ‘cause something happened to me while I was drivin’ home And I’m not the same anymore Class as well as gender can be a debated issue in meanings attached to home, as evident in several songs that take a more jaundiced view of home, seeing it as a place from which to escape. The Animals’ powerful We Gotta Get Outta This Place clearly suggests a life of drudgery in a home town or region. Protectively, the lyrics insist “Girl, there’s a better life for me and you” but it has to be elsewhere. This runs against the grain of other British songs addressing poverty or a working class existence as something that comes with its own blessings, all to do with an area identified as home. These traits may be loyalty, familiarity or a refusal to judge and involve identities of placement rather than of displacement in, for instance, Gerry and the Pacemakers’ Ferry Cross the Mersey: People around every corner, they seem to smile and say “We don’t care what your name is, boy. We’ll never send you away.” This bears out Blunt and Dowling’s claim that “people’s senses of themselves are related to and produced through lived and metaphorical experiences of home” (252). It also resonates with some of the region-based identity and solidarity issues explored a short time later by Paul Willis in his study of working class youth in Britain, which help to inform how a sense of home can operate to constrict consciousness, ideas and aspirations. Identity features strongly in other songs about home. Several years after Neil Young recorded his 1970 song Southern Man about racism in the south of the USA, the group Lynyrd Skynyrd, responded with Sweet Home Alabama. While the meaning of its lyrics are still debated, there is no debate about the way in which the song has been embraced, as I recently discovered first-hand in Tennessee. A banjo-and-fiddle band performing the song during a gig virtually brought down the house as the predominantly southern audience clapped, whopped and stamped its feet. The real meanings of home were found not in the lyrics but in the audience’s response. Wally Johnson and Bob Brown’s 1975 Home Among the Gum Trees is a more straightforward ode to home, with lyrics that prescribe a set of non-commodified values. It is about simplicity and the right to embrace a lifestyle that includes companionship, leisure and an enjoyment of and appreciation of nature, all threatened seriously in the three decades since the song’s writing. The second verse in which large shopping complexes – and implicitly the consumerism they encourage – are eschewed (“I’d trade it all tomorrow for a little bush retreat where the kookaburras call”), is a challenge to notions of progress and reflects social movements of the day, The Green Bans Movement, for instance, took a broader and more socially conscientious attitude towards home and community, putting forward alternative sets of values and insisting people should have a say in the social and aesthetic construction of their neighbourhoods as well as the impacts of their labour (Mundey). Ironically, the song has gone on to become the theme song for a TV show about home gardens. With a strong yet more vague notion of home, Peter Allen’s I Still Call Australia Home, was more prone to commodification and has been adopted as a promotional song for Qantas. Nominating only the desire to travel and the love of freedom as Australian values, both politically and socially innocuous within the song’s context, this catchy and uplifting song, when not being used as an advertisement, paradoxically works for a “diaspora” of Australians who are not in exile but have mostly travelled for reasons of pleasure or professional or financial gain. Another paradox arises from the song Home on the Range, dating back to the 19th century at a time when the frontier was still a strong concept in the USA and people were simultaneously leaving homes and reminiscing about home (Mechem). Although it was written in Kansas, the lyrics – again vague and adaptable – were changed by other travellers so that versions such as Colorado Home and My Arizona Home soon abounded. In 1947 Kansas made Home on the Range its state song, despite there being very few buffalo left there, thus highlighting a disjuncture between the modern Kansas and “a home where the buffalo roam” as described in the song. These themes, paradoxes and oppositional understandings of home only scratch the surface of the wide range of claims that are made on home throughout popular music. It has been shown that home is a flexible concept, referring to homelands, regions, communities and private houses. While predominantly used to evoke positive feelings, mostly with traditional views of the relationships that lie within homes, songs also raise challenges to notions of domesticity, the rights of those inhabiting the private sphere and the demarcation between the private and public spheres. Songs about home reflect contexts and challenges of their respective eras and remind us that vigorous discussion takes place about and within homes. The challenges are changing. Where many women once felt restrictively tied to the home – and no doubt many continue to do so – many women and men are now struggling to rediscover spatial boundaries, with production and consumption increasingly impinging upon relationships that have so frequently given the term home its meaning. With evidence that we are working longer hours and that home life, in whatever form, is frequently suffering (Beder, Hochschild), the discussion should continue. In the words of Sam Cooke, Bring it on home to me! References Bacheland, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994. Beder, Sharon. Selling the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR. London: Zed Books, 2000. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: UCL Press, 1997. Cooper, B. Lee. “Good Timin’: Searching for Meaning in Clock Songs.” Popular Music and Society 30.1 (Feb. 2007): 93-106. Dempsey, J.M. “McCartney at 60: A Body of Work Celebrating Home and Hearth.” Popular Music and Society 27.1 (Feb. 2004): 27-40. Eva, Phil. “Home Sweet Home? The Culture of ‘Exile’ in Mid-Victorian Popular Song.” Popular Music 16.2 (May 1997): 131-150. Hochschild, Arlie. The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. New York: Metropolitan/Holt, 1997. Mallett, Sonia. “Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature.” The Sociological Review 52.1 (2004): 62-89. Mechem, Kirke, “The Story of ‘Home on the Range’.” Reprint from the Kansas Historical Quarterly (Nov. 1949). Topeka, Kansas: Kansas State Historical Society. 28 May 2007 http://www.emporia.edu/cgps/tales/nov2003.html>. Mundey, Jack. Green Bans and Beyond. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1981. Nelson-Burns, Lesley. Folk Music of England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and America. 29 May 2007 http://www.contemplator.com/ireland/thoerin.html>. Summers, Anne. Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonization of Women in Australia. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. Walter, Bronwen. Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women. London: Routledge, 2001. Waring, Marilyn. Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth. Wellington, NZ: Allen & Unwin, 1988. Willis, Paul. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. New York: Columbia UP, 1977. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Varney, Wendy. "Homeward Bound or Housebound?: Themes of Home in Popular Music." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/16-varney.php>. APA Style Varney, W. (Aug. 2007) "Homeward Bound or Housebound?: Themes of Home in Popular Music," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/16-varney.php>.

The release of the film Fight Club (Dir. David Fincher, 1999) was met with an outpouring of contradictory reviews. From David Ansen’s [Newsweek] claim that “Fight Club is the most incendiary movie to come out of Hollywood in a long time” (Fight Club DVD insert) to LA Times’s Kenneth Turan who proclaimed Fight Club to be “…a witless mishmash of whiny, infantile philosophising and bone-crushing violence that actually thinks it’s saying something of significance” (Fight Club DVD insert), everyone, it seemed, needed to weigh in with their views. Whether you think the film is a piece of witless and excessive trash, or believe, as Fight Club novelist Chuck Palahniuk hopes “it would offer more people the idea that they could create their own lives outside the existing blueprint for happiness offered by society,” this is a film that people react strongly to (Fight Club DVD insert). Whether or not the film is successful in the new ‘blueprint’ area is debatable and one focus of this essay. It isn’t difficult to spot the focus of the film Fight Club. The title and the graphic, edgy trailers for the film leave no doubt in the viewer’s mind that this film is about fighting. But fighting what and why are the questions that unveil the deeper edge to the film, an edge that skirts the abyss of deep psychological schism: man’s alienation from man, society and self, and the position of the late twentieth century male whose gendered potentialities have become muted thanks to corporate cookie-cutter culture and the loss of a ‘hunter-gatherer’ role for men. In a nutshell, the film explores the psychic rift of the main character, unnamed for the film, but conventionally referred to as “Jack” (played by Ed Norton). Jack leads a life many late twentieth century males can identify with, a life without real grounding, focus or passion. It is the kind of life that has become a by-product of the “me” generation and corporate/consumer culture. Aside from Jack’s inability to find real satisfaction in his love life, friendships, job, or sense of self, he also suffers from an identity disorder. While there are few people who are unaware of the mind-numbing (and in some cases, audience-alienating) “twist” offered near the end of the film, it bears repeating that the compelling character of Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt) who shapes and influences the changes in Jack’s life is actually revealed near the end of the film as a manifestation of Jack’s alter ego. Jack and Tyler are the same person. The two conspire to start ‘Fight Club’, where men hit other men. Hard. The Club becomes an underground sensation, expanding to other communities and cities and eventually spawns the offshoot Project Mayhem whose goal it is to ultimately erase individual debt so everyone (all consumers) can start at zero. In order to manage this affair, several large buildings are slated for destruction by the Mayhem team. Of course no people will be in the buildings at the time, but all the records will be destroyed. This is the core of the film, but there are several other interesting sidelights that will become important to this discussion, including the lone female character Marla who becomes the love interest of Jack/Tyler, and the friend Bob, whom Jack meets during his insomniac foray into the seedy underworld of the self help meeting. The film itself seems to cry out for a psychoanalytic reading. Its thinly veiled references to Freudian concepts and subliminal tricks aside, it also makes the inner world of the protagonist its landscape and backdrop. In a film dominated by a psychological and psychical problem, psychoanalysis seems an excellent tool for delving more deeply into the symbols and attitudes of the piece. I have chosen both Kleinian object relations and Julia Kristeva’s understanding of abjection to help illuminate some issues in the film. Object relations helps to make clear both the divergence of personality and the emergence of a ‘repaired’ protagonist at the end of the film as Jack first creates and then destroys his alter ego. Kristeva initially explored abjection theory via literature in Powers of Horror (1982), but Barbara Creed’s Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis (1993) opened wide the door for applications of the theory to film studies. Creed uses abjection to explore issues of gender in the horror film, focusing on the role and depiction of women as abject. Here, I have adapted some of her ideas and intend to explore the role of abjection in the male identification process. In this film fighting operates as both reality and metaphor, on both the physical and psychical levels, encompassing the internal and external fight within the mind and body of the protagonist. Jack’s main problem is a lack of concrete identity and self-realization. Numbed by his willing and eager participation in consumer culture and his tacit compliance with the gritty underworld of his job as an automotive ‘recall coordinator’, his life’s work is estimating the cost effectiveness of saving lives by calculating the cost of death. In Jack’s world, meaning is derived solely through the external—external products he consumes and collects. Jack’s consumer-based emasculation is expressed when he states, “Like so many others I had become a slave to the Ikea nesting instinct.” In this sentence he clarifies his disempowerment and feminisation in one swoop. Having few, if any, relationships with human beings, meaningful or otherwise, Jack never reaches a level of social maturity. His only solace comes from visiting anonymous help groups for the terminally ill. Although Jack is physically fine (aside from his insomnia) a part of him is clearly dying, as his sense of who he is in a postmodern culture is hopelessly mediated by advertisements that tell him what to be. In the absence of a father, Jack appears to have had no real role models. Made ‘soft’ by his mother, Jack exhibits a not so subtle misogyny that is illustrated through his relationship with fellow ‘tourist’ in the self-help circles, Marla Singer. Jack’s identity issues unfold via various conflicts, each of which is enmeshed in the club he starts that revolves around the physical pain of hand-to-hand, man-on-man combat. Jack’s conflicts with himself, others and society at large are all compressed within the theme and practice of fighting and the fight clubs he institutes. Fighting for Jack (and the others who join) seems the answer to life’s immediate problems. This essay looks deeply into Jack’s identity conflict, viewing it as a moment of psychic crisis in which Jack creates an alternate personality deeply steeped in and connected to the ‘abject’ in almost every way. Thus, Jack forces himself to confront the abject in himself and the world around him, dealing with abjection on several levels all with a view to expelling it to restore the ‘clean and proper’ boundaries necessary in the ‘whole’ self. Viewed though the lens of psychoanalysis, particularly Klein’s work on object relations and Kristeva’s work with abjection, allows a reading in which the film expresses the need for and accomplishment of a self-activated encounter with the abject in order to redraw ‘clean and proper’ boundaries of self. This film’s tag lines, ‘Mischief, Mayhem and Soap’—illustrate both the presence (Mischief, Mayhem) and function (Soap) of the abject—the interaction with the abject will lead to a ‘clean’ subject—a proper subject, a restored subject. Before continuing, a brief discussion of abjection and object relations and the ways in which they are utilized in this essay is essential here. One of Klein’s major propositions is that “the neonate brings into the world two main conflicting impulses: love and hate” (Mitchell 19). Each of these conflicting impulses must be dealt with, usually by either “bringing them together in order to modify the death drive along with the life drive or expelling the death drive into the outside world” (19). Along with this conflict arises the conflict of a primary relationship with the mother, which is seen as both satisfying and frustrating, and then later complicated with the addition of the father. The main conflicting love/hate binary is reflective of a number of ‘sets’ of dualities that surface when looking into the mother/child relationship. Besides love and hate, there is the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mother, the mother as symbolic of both life and death, the symbolic (paternal) and semiotic (maternal), total oneness and total autonomy. The curious ‘split’ nature of the infant’s perception of the maternal figure recalls a kind of doppelganger, a doubling of the maternal (in positive and negative incarnations), that can be seen as abject. In the film, this informs the relationship between both Jack and Marla and Jack and Tyler, as I argue Tyler and Marla serve as parental substitutes at one part in the film. This is clarified in Jack’s statements about his relationship with the two of them: “My parents pulled this exact same act for years” and “I am six years old again, passing messages between parents.” This imaginary relationship allows Jack to re-experience some of his early identification processes, while effectively trading out the gender responsibilities to the point where Tyler symbolically takes the place of the ‘mother’ and Marla the place of the ‘father’. The result of this action is an excess of male gendered experiences in which Jack in crisis (emasculated) is surrounded by phalluses. Kristeva’s work with abjection is also important here. I am especially interested in her understanding of the mother/child relationship as connected with abjection, particularly the threat the mother represents to the child as wanting to return to a state of oneness. The abject functions in Fight Club as a means for the protagonist to re-configure his own autonomy. For Kristeva, the abject is that which is cast out in order that “I” may exist. It exists at the borders of the self and continually draws the subject into it. As the subject revolts and pulls away, its resistance cues the process of defining itself as separate, proper and autonomous. When the narrative of Jack’s life refuses to make sense to him, and his experiences seem like “a copy of a copy of a copy,” Jack turns inward for help. Kristeva says that the abject is “experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within” (5). Thus Jack ‘finds’ Tyler. The abject, [represented by Bob, Tyler and Marla in the film] is that which disturbs “identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (Kristeva 4). As the abject is that which blurs boundaries borders and classification, the film itself is steeped in abject images and ideas. The discrete categories of inside/outside, asleep/awake, male/female, and self/other are continually troubled throughout the narrative. The two most confused binaries are male/female and self/other. As the film is about Jack’s own experience of emasculation it is not until the male/female gender issues are resolved that his self/other issues can be resolved. Through the re-ordering of gender he is able to take his place in society alongside Marla, finally viewed as not his mother or friend but lover. Jack Versus Himself: A Cult Of One Jack is able to re-vamp his personality through exposure to the abject and the replaying of certain key object relations moments in his childhood. He engages with this ‘inner child’ to reconnect with psychically difficult moments in which his ‘self’ emerged. Jack, however, twists the typical plot of maternal and paternal bonding in ways that speak to the underlying misogyny of the film and of late twentieth century society as well. While the story begins with both male and female characters in unnatural roles with unnatural and abject body parts, by the end of the film, these ‘abnormalities’ or abject objects are erased, ejected from the text so Jack is restored to the ‘safety’ of a compulsory heterosexuality. Bob, Tyler and Marla’s characters are three examples of gender twisting expressed in the film. In psychoanalytic literature, the child bonds first to the mother (via feeding from the breast and in-utero existence) and experiences a feeling of total oneness impossible to duplicate. Eventually the child seeks autonomy and breaks from the mother and her clinging ways with the help of the father and the phallus. So in basic terms, the female is abject, representing infantile regression and oneness, and the male represents taking the proper place in the symbolic order. When the female (mother) is denied, the male accepts his natural place in culture and society. However, in this film, Tyler (the male) is the abject presence in the text, that which threatens to consume and subsume the narrator’s personality. It is Marla, the phallic woman, who interposes herself in this dyad and becomes the correct choice for Jack, allowing him to proceed into ‘normal relations.’ Early in the film, Jack is unable to envision a female partner with whom he can open up and share, instead substituting Bob—and his doubly signified ‘bitch-tits’—as a locus of comfort. In Bob’s ample bosom, Jack finds the release he is looking for, though it is unnatural in more ways than one. The feminised Bob [testicular cancer patient] comforts and coddles Jack so much that he feels the same idyllic bliss experienced by the infant at the mother’s breast; Jack feels “lost in oblivion, dark and silent and complete.” That night he is able for the first time in months to sleep: “Babies don’t sleep this well.” This illustrates Jack’s longing for the safety and security of the mother, complicated by his inability to bond with a female, replaced with his deep need for identification with a male. Continuing the twist, it is Marla who foils Jack’s moment of infantile bliss: “She ruined everything” with her presence, Jack sneers. Jack’s regression to this infantile bliss with either man or woman would be perceived as abject, (disrupting system and order) but this particular regression is at least doubly abject because of Bob’s unnatural breasts and lack of testicles. Both Bob, and to some degree Tyler, offer abjection to Jack as a way of dealing with this complexities of autonomous living. While my argument is that Tyler takes the traditional ‘female’ role in the drama, as a figure (like Bob) who lures Jack into an unnatural oneness that must ultimately be rejected, it is true that even in his position as abject ‘female’ (mother), Tyler is overwhelmingly phallic. His ‘jobs’ consist of splicing shots of penises into films, urinating and masturbating into restaurant food and engaging in acrobatic sex with Marla. Since Marla, who occupies the position of father bringing Jack into society away from the influence of Tyler, is also coded phallic, Jack’s world is overwhelmingly symbolically male. This appears to be a response to the overwhelming physical presence of Jack’s mother of which Tyler comments, “We’re a generation of men raised by women. I am wondering if another woman is really the answer we need?” During this same scene, Jack clarifies his regressive dilemma: “I can’t get married, I am a thirty year old boy.” Thus while Tyler campaigns for a world without women, Jack must decide if this is the correct way to go. Immersion in the world of uber-maleness only seems to make his life worse. It is only after he ‘kills’ Tyler and accepts Marla as a partner that he can feel successful. In another help meeting, one of the guided meditations emphasizes his regression by asking him to go to his “cave” and locate his “power animal.” This early in the film, Jack can only envision his power animal as a rather silly penguin, which, although phallic to some extent, is undercut by the fact that it speaks with a child’s voice. In the next visualization of the ‘power animal’, the animal becomes Marla—clarifying her influence over Jack’s subconscious. The threat of Marla’s sexuality is on one level explored with Jack’s counterpart Tyler, the one who dares to go where Jack will not, but their encounters are not shown in a ‘natural’ or fully mature light. They are instead equated with childhood experimentation and regressive fantasies as Marla responds that she “hasn’t been fucked like that since grade school” and Tyler proclaims the relationship is mere “sportfucking.” It is Tyler who discovers Marla’s oversized dildo proudly displayed on a dresser, of which she states “Don’t worry its not a threat to you.” This phallicized Marla refers to herself as “infectious human waste,” clearly abject. Marla’s power must be muted before Jack can truly relate to her. This is illustrated in two separate ‘visions’ of sexual intercourse—one between Marla and Tyler early in the film in which Marla assumes the dominant position, and then later near the end of the film when the same encounter is replayed with Jack taking Tyler’s place, Marla now in the standard missionary position on her back: Proper. Jack’s struggle with self is played out via his relationship with Tyler (and Marla to some degree). Once Jack has been exposed to the various levels of abject behaviour offered by Tyler and Project Mayhem, he chooses to go it alone, no longer needing the double he himself created. After experiencing and rejecting the abject, Jack redraws his boundaries and cleanses his soul. Jack Versus Society—The Personal Is Political Jack’s personal struggle becomes political—and communal. Another attempt at forming identity, Fight Club is bound to fail because it offers not autonomy but a group identity substituted for an individual one. While Jack loathes his ‘single serving life’ before Fight Club, he must come to realize that a group identity brings more problems than solutions in an identity crisis. While the comfort of ‘oneness’ is alluring, it is also abject. As Jack is able to finally refuse the safely and oneness offered by Tyler’s existence, he must also deny the safety in numbers offered by Fight Club itself. The cult he creates swallows members whole, excreting them as the “all singing all dancing crap of the world.” They eat, drink and sleep Fight Club and eventually its ‘evolutionary’ offshoot, Project Mayhem. During his involvement with Fight Club and Project Mayhem, Jack is exposed to three levels of abjection including food loathing, bodily wastes, and the corpse, each of which threaten to draw him to the “place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva 2). Jack’s first experience involves Tyler’s (a)vocation as a waiter who urinates and probably masturbates into patrons’ food. This mingling of bodily wastes and nourishment represents the most elementary form of abjection: food loathing. While Jack appears amused at Tyler’s antics in the beginning, by the end of the film, he illustrates his movement closer to self-identification, by calling for “clean food, please” signalling his alliance with the clean and proper. Bodily wastes, the internal made visible, represent the most extended contact Jack has with the abject. These experiences, when what is properly outside ends up inside and vice versa, begin with bloody hand-to-hand combat, including Tyler’s vomiting of blood into the mouth of an unwilling Fight Club participant “Lou”, causing another witness to vomit as well. The physical aversion to abject images (blood, pus, excrement) is part of the redrawing of self—the abject is ejected –via nausea/vomiting. Kristeva explains: “I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit” (3). The images continue to pile up as Jack describes life in the Paper Street house: “What a shit hole.” The house slowly decomposes around them, leaking and mouldy, releasing its own special smell: the rot of a “warm stale refrigerator” mixed with the “fart smell of steam” from a nearby industrial plant. While at Paper Street, Tyler decides to make soap. Soap in itself is an agent of cleanliness, but in this context it is abject and defiled by being composed of human waste. In a deeply abject moment, Jack is accidentally covered in refuse that spills from a ripped bag full of human fat pilfered from a liposuction clinic. Even at this profoundly disturbing moment, Jack is unwilling to give up his associations with Tyler and Project Mayhem. It is only after his encounter with a corpse that he changes his tune. While Fight Club attempted to blur physical boundaries via hand-to-hand combat and exchange of blood and blows, Project Mayhem threatens the psychic boundaries of self, a deeper danger. While a loud speaker drones “we are all part of the same compost heap” and a fellow occupant reminds Jack “In project mayhem we have no names,” Jack realizes he is truly losing himself, not gaining strength. Mayhem’s goal of ‘oneness’, like the maternal and infant experience, is exposed via slogans like “you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.” Tyler finally puts his cards on the table and asks Jack to “stop trying to control everything and just let go.” For Kristeva, “If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything”(3). The corpse of Bob causes Jack to confront the boundaries of life and death, both spiritual and physical, as he opens his eyes to the damaging effects of the cult-like environment into which he has fallen. Jack’s momentary indecision morphs into action after Bob’s death becomes just one more mantra for the zombie-like Project Mayhemers to chant: “His name was Robert Paulson.” Jack’s internal and external struggles are compressed into one moment when he commits homo(sui)cide. Placing a gun in his mouth, he attempts to rid himself of Tyler forever, his final words to Tyler: “My eyes are open now”. At this point, Jack is psychically ready to take charge of his life and confidently eject the abject from the narrative of his life. He wants no more to do with Project Mayhem gang and is reunited with Marla with whom he finally appears ready to have a fully realized relationship. His masculinity and identity restoration are made blindingly apparent by the final splice in the film—the image of Marla and Jack hand in hand overlooking the new view out of the tower, spliced with the shot of a semi-erect penis—back to shot of Marla and Jack. The message is clear: Jack is a man, he has a woman, and he knows who he is because of it. While Fight Club novelist Palahniuk hopes the film offers options for life “outside the existing blueprint offered by society” (Fight Club DVD insert). On the other hand, it’s unclear how well the film pulls this off. On one hand, its lambasting of the numbing effects of blind and excessive consumerism seems well explored, it’s unclear what options really surface by the end of the film. Although many targeted buildings have been destroyed, through which the viewer can assume some or even most records of individual debt were erased, the building in which Marla and Jack stand (initially slated for destruction) remains. Perhaps this is meant to signify the impossibility of true financial equality in American society. But it seems to me that the more pressing issues are not the ones openly addressed in the film (that of money and consumerism) but rather the more internalised issues of self-actualisation, gender identity and contentment. In a postmodern space ripe for the redrawing and redefinition of gender stereotypes, this film carefully reinscribes not only compulsory heterosexuality but also the rigid boundaries of acceptable male and female behaviour. For this film, the safest route to repairing male identity and self-hood threatened by the emasculating practices of a consumer culture is a route back. Back to infantile and childhood fantasy. While it dances provocatively around the edges of accepting a man with ‘bitch tits’ and a woman with a dick, ultimately Bob is killed and Marla reclaimed by Jack in an ‘I’m ok you’re ok’ final scene: “Look at me Marla, I am really OK”. Jack’s immersion in an all male cult(ure) is eschewed for the comfort of real breasts. Works Cited Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1993. Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. 1999. Fight Club DVD edition. Dir. David Fincher. 2000. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay On Abjection. New York: Columbia Press: 1982. Mitchell, Juliet. The Selected Melanie Klein. New York: The Free Press, 1986. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Caldwell, Tracy M.. "Identity Making from Soap to Nuts" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6.1 (2003). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/10-identitymaking.php>. APA Style Caldwell, T. M., (2003, Feb 26). Identity Making from Soap to Nuts. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,(1). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/10-identitymaking.html

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.

"Love Will Tear Us Apart" When routine bites hard, And ambitions are low, And resentment rides high, But emotions won't grow, And we're changing our ways, taking different roads. Then love, love will tear us apart, again. Love, love will tear us apart again. Why is the bedroom so cold? You've turned away on your side. Is my timing that flawed? Our respect runs so dry. Yet there's still this appeal that we've kept through our lives But love, love will tear us apart, again. Love, love will tear us apart, again. You cry out in your sleep, All my failings exposed. And there's a taste in my mouth, As desperation takes hold. Just that something so good just can't function no more But love, love will tear us apart again. Love, love will tear us apart again. Love, love will tear us apart again. Love, love will tear us apart again. Ian Curtis (1980) [in Curtis 1995:170-71] Watching the film 24 Hour Party People (2002), I remembered how much I used to love the bleak and danceable music that came from Manchester, England in the 1970s and 1980s. The early part of the film focuses on the aftermath of the Sex Pistols’ first visit to Manchester in 1976 and depicts the creation of Factory Records by Tony Wilson and the formation of Joy Division, one of the label’s most promising bands. Most of the band members were part a small group of people who were present at the Sex Pistols’ concert. The film shows the rise of the band and the strange allure of singer Ian Curtis, who killed himself in 1980 days before the band was set to embark on its first tour of the United States. After his death, Curtis became a figure of cult adoration and fascination. He remains so today. One of Joy Division’s most popular songs is “Love Will Tear Us Apart” (1980), reputedly about the dissolution of Curtis’s marriage (for more on this relationship, see the memoir of Curtis’s wife [1995]). In his brief life, Curtis’s recorded vocals were more announced than sung. In a dark, distant baritone, his lyrics sounded almost android-like, hinting at melody without indulging in the maudlin excess of the pop song. His distance from love song sentimentality often moved to a near yell that revealed painful sadness instead of irony (as in the lyrics and style of Morrissey of The Smiths, for example). Unlike the angry manic vocals that had already become a cliché in punk following Sex Pistols Johnny Lydon’s nasal wailing, Curtis offered the disturbing chest voice of melancholia. The band’s sound, as it began to evolve from three-chord punk to a more complicated and innovative collaboration of elements, included syncopated drum beats, a prominent bass line that flirted with funk rhythm, and a dirge-like guitar. In some songs, such as “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” a synthesizer was included, repeating and harmonizing to the repeated chorus. Such an embellishment was unheard of in guitar-oriented rock music at the time. Thus “Love” succeeds on three levels: it is an anthem of the “doom element” in relationships; it is musically adventuresome, and at the same time it is a dance song, played ad infinitum in the new wave dance halls of the 1980s. (Later, New Order, a band created in the wake of Curtis’s death and also on Factory Records, had an even bigger dance hit with the song “Blue Monday,” depicting another kind of failed romance.) To suggest an interpretation of the song lyrics: the couple’s love is all but doomed. Set in a depressing Northern England, there is no way for love to succeed: there is no room for “something so good”. Curtis doesn’t blame the failure of the relationship on either himself or the beloved in the song; there are traditions at work that cause the closeness of the relationship to dissolve into distance. In the song, it is suggested that the protagonist is unable to satisfy his lover, and yet the couple are unable to speak about it and the beloved turns away. Thus, he and his lover inherit a scenario that sets a mechanism to work against them. They cannot conquer their silences. Romeo and Juliet had the visible force of warring clans to defeat their love. In Curtis’s song, however, there are invisible social forces and the inadequacy of communication itself working against the couple. That their love is doomed is not so new. What makes the song sad is not that love tears them apart; the sadness is that love tears them apart again. Even though they have been through this torment before, there is no way to avoid its return. Without knowing it, they have called upon Love to bring it back. Of course, romantic love is often – if not usually – the province of popular song, from the ballad to the contemporary dance song. Disco, for example, perpetuated two sides of this fixation on love. One was the declaration of the ecstasy and spirituality of sexual love heard in Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” (1977) or Sylvester’s “You Make Me Feel Mighty Real” (1979); the other was the manifesto of outliving the heartbreak caused by a deceitful lover (Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” [1978] or more recently, Whitney Houston’s “Its Not Right But Its Okay” [1999]). Love could be a savior to a lonely soul, providing the singer (and by extension, the dancing listener) with bodily pleasure. When disco singers, (usually female, usually black) sang of love’s demise, it was due to a lowly, no-good man revealing his true self. Yet in these tales, the failure of love sparked the ability of a smart, able woman to live an honorable life – even if she must do it on her own and find a divinity in herself. In disco, Love flirted with religion. Punk rock, at its inception, turned away from love as subject matter. For example, John Lydon, lead singer of the Sex Pistols (then known as Johnny Rotten) was quoted as saying that love was something felt for a cat or a dog. In a setting squeezed dry of spirituality and sexual bliss, for him love was illusionary and diversionary. Punk seemed to invest itself in other emotions, such as anger, and screamed about institutions, leaders, traditions—including the traditions of pop music itself. Yet love quickly returned as subject matter to punk music. The Buzzcocks, unlike the polemically political band The Clash, turned to romance and sex as subject matter. They debuted as the opening act at the Sex Pistols’ second visit to Manchester, and became known for bittersweet, uptempo love songs such as “What Do I Get?” (1978) and “Ever Fallen In Love With Someone (You Shouldn't've Fallen In Love With)?” (1978). Even “Orgasm Addict” (1977) tells the tale of a Casanova of sorts. The beloved in a Buzzcocks’ song was gender ambiguous, and the lyrics’ tone was ironic – if not sarcastic – about love’s misery. The band matched buzzsaw guitar with catchy melodies; the Buzzcocks wrote breakneck love songs you could dance to, even if the dancing was a bit of a flail. Singer Pete Shelley may seem to suffer from near-abject rejection, but he did so with abundant energy. Even John Lydon, in his later incarnation as the singer of Public Image Limited (PiL), penned the lyrics to the song “This is Not a Love Song (1983).” He screeched the words in the title over and over, and hence suggested that as much as the song was anti-romance, there was no way around Love. It returns endlessly, even if love was – as concept, as reality – to be rejected as part of a political conspiracy to turn one into a duped consumer of sounds, images, and stories. Love was inevitable. You are just going to end up feeling something for somebody. To rephrase a million pop songs (as done in the film Moulin Rouge (2001) in its medley of “silly love songs”): love is going to get you, it lifts you up where you belong, but it doesn’t live here anymore, although it may come back when you least expect it, you can’t hurry it… We, as listeners, let the song’s sentiment substitute for what we cannot say. Songs are emotional surrogates for the couple as well as the single in recovery. Regardless, we search the airwaves for our song. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was this song in 1980, perfect for the failed romantic who dressed in dark colors, drew up lists of things s/he hated, and was prone to mourn a relationship even as it was beginning. As such this song was perfect for me back then, especially since it had a good beat and I could dance to its timely and timeless sadness. The pop song, then, is a site of endless, popular philosophizing on the nature of Love. Many of these songs, when they don’t blame the world for not letting love last, depict Love as if were a force, or an entity out there in the universe. When it enters our atmosphere (via Cupid?), it wreaks havoc and produces harmony, however fleeting. This metaphysical story of love, however, is far from the psychoanalytic tale of the origins of love. For psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, love is no mystery. It’s a production process. The baby learns to love through its relationship with the mother and, in particular – at least at first – with the mother’s breast. The mother’s breast provides nourishment for the hungry infant as well as sensuality and security. Through this activity the infant learns to love, for love is made through these intimate connections. Also for Klein, the ability to hate is created when the mother does not provide for her child. The dynamics of this relationship enable fantasy on the part of the child. Melanie Klein writes in “Love, Guilt, and Reparation” that “the baby who feels a craving for his mother’s breast when it is not there may imagine it to be there, i.e. he may imagine the satisfaction which he derives from it” (60). Thus, even as an infant, one is given to flights of fantasy, imagining all sorts of sources of nourishment and sensuality. One can surmise that since every child has to grow up and lose the intensity of this first connection, one can see that love becomes affiliated with loss. All sorts of complaints toward parents, and later, lovers, are unavoidable – blame it on our psyches which are factories of fantasy and embedded remembrances. We have to grow up and move from a succession of psychic and real homes. No wonder everyone worries about the beloved leaving, for each of us has been left before. The story of love that Klein tells does, though, have a tentative happy ending, for we are not entirely prisoners of our experiences: “If we have become able, deep in our unconscious minds, to clear our feelings to some extent towards our parents of grievances, and have forgiven them for the frustrations we had to bear, then we can be at peace with ourselves and are able to love others in the true sense of the word” (119). But no doubt, it is a big “if” that begins her sentence. Importantly, in Klein’s view, love is not an external, or otherworldly force; it is made via the needs and interactions of the infantile and maternal body. Equally importantly, though, this process necessitates separation and hence the psychoanalytic love story is one in which the protagonist is taught to love and lose in rapid succession – and requires reparation. Love is both inescapable and impossible. With such a sad narrative lodged in our unconscious, one can understand the reasons why songwriters resort to the metaphysics and divinity of love. Even though love hurts in its endings, as Curtis suggests, we have a history of trying it all over again. No listener ever believed Dionne Warwick when she sang the Burt Bacharach/Hal David song “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again” (1969). Dionne probably picked up the pieces of her broken heart and found the next guy who she knew in the back of her mind was all wrong for her. As Freud insists, we are compelled to repeat behavior patterns that do not always result in pleasure. This is not because all humans are born masochists. Rather, as Freud argues in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1961), humans have “an instinct for mastery” that requires repetition. (10). Freud discovered this “instinct” through observing a child playing a game with a wooden reel and a piece of string when his mother leaves him alone. In the game, the child holds onto the string and throws the reel over the edge of the bed. He narrates his action by saying “fort” (gone) and then “da” (there). Freud reads this game as a kind of allegory for the loss he feels with his mother’s sporadic disappearances. The good doctor wonders why a child would replicate such a hurtful experience. He suggests that this game gives the child a compensatory sense of power over the inability to control the actions of his mother. Freud deems the child’s game “a cultural achievement” and an “instinctual renunciation” (of satisfaction). Contemporary readers may well be wary of Freud’s use of the word “instinct.” But I suggest that the will to continue to find love is not only due to a desire to find’s one soul-mate (or to put it more mundanely, “life partner”) although this desire is indeed a crucial impetus for the renewed search. We persevere in this almost futile endeavor to find the perfect romantic love in part due to a compulsion to repeat. The love song, even when it pontificates about remorse and pain in pseudo-abstract terms, is often a grown up version of the child’s “fort-da” game. The sad love song is a social device for coping with pain by restating it in a narrated and sung form. That’s why some of the best tunes are the most woeful ones. And “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is one of the best—it provokes many a listener to sing along with the song’s sorrow while dancing in brooding near-abandon. Works Cited Curtis, Deborah. Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division. London: Faber, 1995. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: Norton, 1961. Klein, Melanie. “Love, Guilt and Reparation.” Love, Hate and Reparation. Eds. Melanie Klein and Joan Riviere. New York: Norton, 1964. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Miller, Edward D.. "Why Does Love Tear Us Apart? " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/whydoeslovetearusapartagain.php>. APA Style Miller, E. D., (2002, Nov 20). Why Does Love Tear Us Apart? . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/whydoeslovetearusapartagain.html

Black women are treated as though we are a box of chocolates presented to individual white women for their eating pleasure, so they can decide for themselves and others which pieces are most tasty (hooks 80). Introduction bell hooks equates African-American women with chocolates, which are picked out and selected for someone else’s pleasure. In her writing about white women who have historically dominated the feminist movement, hooks challenges the ways that people conceptualise the “self” and “other”. She uses a feminist lens to question widespread assumptions about the place of Black women in American society. hooks’s work has been applied to the Australian context by Bronwyn Fredericks, to explore the ways that Aboriginal women and men are perceived and “selected” by the broader Australian society. In this paper, we extend previous work about the metaphor of chocolate to discuss the themes underpinning an art exhibition—Hot Chocolate—which was curated by Troy-Anthony Baylis and Frances Wyld. Baylis and Wyld are Aboriginal Australians who are based in Adelaide and whose academic and creative work is centred within South Australia. The exhibition was launched on 14 November 2012 as part of Adelaide’s Visual Arts Program Feast Festival 2012 (CroftWarcon and Fredericks). It was curated in Adelaide’s SASA Gallery (which is associated with the School of Art, Architecture and Design at the University of South Australia). This paper focuses on the development of Hot Chocolate and the work produced by Aboriginal artists contained within it, and it includes a conversation about the work of Pamela CroftWarcon. Moreover, it discusses these works produced by the artists and links them back to the issues of identity and race, and how some Aboriginal people are selected like chocolates over and above others. In this, we are interested in exploring some of the issues around politics, desire, skin, and the fetishisation of race and bodies. The Metaphor of Chocolate This work will focus on how Aboriginal Australians are positioned as “chocolates” and how people of colour are viewed by the wider society, and about whether people have a pliable “soft centre” or a brittle “hard centre.” It uses hooks’s work as a point of reference to the power of the metaphor of chocolate in considering questions about who is “tasty.” In the Australian context, some Aboriginal people are deemed to be more “tasty” than others, in terms of what they say, write, and do (or what they avoid saying, writing, or doing). That is, they are seen as being sweeter chocolates and nicer chocolates than others. We understand that some people find it offensive to align bodies and races of people with chocolate. As Aboriginal women we do not support the use of the term ‘chocolate’ or use it when we are referring to other Aboriginal people. However, we both know of other Aboriginal people who use the metaphor of chocolate to talk about themselves, and it is a metaphor that other people of colour throughout the world similarly might use or find offensive. Historically, chocolate and skin colour have been linked, and some people now see these connections as something that reminds them of a colonial and imperial past (Gill). Some Aboriginal people are chosen ahead of others, perhaps because of their “complementary sweetness,” like an after-dinner mint that will do what the government and decision makers want them to do. They might be the ones who are offered key jobs and positions on government boards, decision-making committees, or advisory groups, or given priority of access to the media outlets (Fredericks). Through these people, the government can say, “Aboriginal people agree with us” or “this Aboriginal person agrees with us.” Aileen Moreton-Robinson is important to draw upon here in terms of her research focused on white possession (2005). Her work explains how, at times, non-Indigenous Anglo-Australians may act in their own interests to further invest in their white possession rather than exercise power and control to make changes. In these situations, they may select Aboriginal people who are more likely to agree with them, ether knowingly or in ignorance. This recycles the colonial power gained through colonisation and maintains the difference between those with privilege and those without. Moreover, Aboriginal people are further objectified and reproduced within this context. The flip side of this is that some Aboriginal people are deemed to be the “hard centres” (who are not pliable about certain issues), the “less tasty” chocolates (who do not quite take the path that others expect), or the “brittle” types that stick in your teeth and make you question whether you made the right choice (who perhaps challenge others and question the status quo). These Aboriginal people may not be offered the same access to power, despite their qualifications and experience, or the depth of their on-the-ground, community support. They may be seen as stirrers, radicals, or trouble makers. These perceptions are relevant to many current issues in Australia, including notions of Aboriginality. Of course, some people do not think about the chocolate they choose. They just take one from the box and see what comes out. Perhaps they get surprised, perhaps they are disappointed, and perhaps their perceptions about chocolates are reinforced by their choice. In 2011, Cadbury was forced to apologise to Naomi Campbell after the supermodel claimed that an advertisement was racist in comparing her to a chocolate bar (Sweney). Cadbury was established in 1824 by John Cadbury in Birmingham, England. It is now a large international corporation, which sells chocolate throughout the world. The advertisement for Cadbury’s Bliss range of Dairy Milk chocolate bars used the strapline, “Move over Naomi, there's a new diva in town” (Moss). Campbell (quoted in Moss) said she was “shocked” by the ad, which was intended as a tongue-in-cheek play on Campbell's reputation for diva-style tantrums and behaviour. “It's upsetting to be described as chocolate, not just for me but for all black women and black people,” she said. “I do not find any humour in this. It is insulting and hurtful” (quoted in Moss). This is in opposition to the Aboriginal artists in the exhibition who, although as individuals might find it insulting and hurtful, are using the chocolate reference to push the boundaries and challenge the audience’s perceptions. We agree that the metaphor of chocolate can take us to the edge of acceptable discussion. But we also believe that being at the edge of acceptability allows us to explore issues that are uncomfortable. We are interested in using the metaphor of chocolate to explore the ways that non-Indigenous people view Aboriginal Australians, and especially, discussions around the politics of identity, desire, skin, and the fetishisation of race and bodies. Developing the Exhibition The Hot Chocolate exhibition connected chocolate (the food) and Hot Chocolate (the band) with chocolate-coloured people. It was developed by Troy-Anthony Baylis and Frances Wyld, who invited nine artists to participate in the exhibition. The invited artists were: Troy-Anthony Baylis, Bianca Beetson, Pamela CroftWarcon, Cary Leibowitz, Yves Netzhammer + Ralph Schraivogel, Nat Paton, Andrew Putter and Dieter Roth (CroftWarcon and Fredericks). The exhibition was built around questions of what hot chocolate is and what it means to individuals. For some people, hot chocolate is a desirable, tasty drink. For others, hot chocolate brings back memories of music from the British pop band popular during the 1970s and early 1980s. For people with “chocolate-coloured skin”, chocolate can be linked to a range of questions about desirability, place, and power. Hot Chocolate, the band, was based in Britain, and was an inter-racial group of British-born musicians and immigrants from Jamaica, the Bahamas, Trinidad and Grenada. The title and ethnic diversity of the group and some of their song lyrics connected with themes for curatorial exploration in the Hot Chocolate exhibition. For example: I believe in miracles. Where you from, you sexy thing? … Where did you come from baby? ... Touch me. Kiss me darling… — You Sexy Thing (1975). It started with a kiss. I didn’t know it would come to this… — It Started With A Kiss (1983). When you can't take anymore, when you feel your life is over, put down your tablets and pick up your pen and I'll put you together again… — I’ll Put You Together Again (1978). All nine artists agreed to use lyrics by Hot Chocolate to chart their journeys in creating artworks for the exhibition. They all started with the lyrics from It Started With A Kiss (1983) to explore ways to be tellers of their own love stories, juxtaposed with the possibility of not being chosen or not being memorable. Their early work explored themes of identity and desirability. As the artists collaborated they made many references to both Hot Chocolate song lyrics and to hooks’s discussion about different “types” of chocolate. For example, Troy-Anthony Baylis’s Emotional Landscape (1997-2010) series of paintings is constructed with multiple “x” marks that represent “a kiss” and function as markers for creating imaginings of Country. The works blow “air kisses” in the face of modernity toward histories of the colonial Australian landscape and art that wielded power and control over Aboriginal subjects. Each of the nine artists linked chocolate with categorisations and constructions of Aboriginality in Australia, and explored the ways in which they, as both Aboriginal peoples and artists, seemed to be “boxed” (packaged) for others to select. For some, the idea that they could be positioned as “hot chocolate”—as highly desirable—was novel and something that they never expected at the beginning of their art careers. Others felt that they would need a miracle to move from their early “box” into something more desirable, or that their art might be “boxed” into a category that would be difficult to escape. These metaphors helped the artists to explore the categories that are applied to them as artists and as Aboriginal people and, particularly, the categories that are applied by non-Indigenous people. The song lyrics provided unifying themes. I’ll Put You Together Again (1978) is used to name the solidarity between creative people who are often described as “other”; the lyrics point the way to find the joy in life and “do some tastin'.” You Sexy Thing (1975) is an anthem for those who have found the tastiness of life and the believing in miracles. In You Sexy Thing, Hot Chocolate ask “Where you from?”, which is a question that many Aboriginal people use to identify each others’ mobs and whom they belong to; this question allows for a place of belonging and identity, and it is addressed right throughout the exhibition’s works. The final section of the exhibition uses the positive Everyone’s A Winner (1978) to describe a place that satisfies. This exhibition is a winner, and “that’s no lie.” Pamela CroftWarcon’s Works In a conversation between this paper’s authors on 25 November 2013, Dr Pamela CroftWarcon reflected on her contributions to the Hot Chocolate exhibition. In this summary of the conversation, CroftWarcon tells the story of her artwork, her concepts and ideas, and her contribution to the exhibition. Dr Pamela CroftWarcon (PC): I am of the Kooma clan, of the Uralarai people, from south-west Queensland. I now live at Keppel Sands, Central Queensland. I have practised as a visual artist since the mid-1980s and have worked as an artist and academic regionally, nationally, and internationally. Bronwyn Fredericks (BF): How did you get involved in the development of Hot Chocolate? PC: I was attending a writing workshop in Brisbane, and I reconnected with you, Bronwyn, and with Francis Wyld. We began to yarn about how our lives had been, both personally and professionally, since the last time we linked up. Francis began to talk about an idea for an exhibition that she and Troy wanted to bring together, which was all about Hot Chocolate. As we talked about the idea for a Hot Chocolate exhibition, I recalled a past discussion about the writing of bell hooks. For me, hooks’s work was like an awakening of the sense and spirit, and I have shared hooks’s work with many others. I love her comment about Black women being “like a box of chocolates”. I can understand what she is saying. Her work speaks to me; I can make sense of it and use it in my arts practice. I thus jumped at the chance to be involved. BF: How do you understand the concepts that frame the exhibition? PC: Many of the conversations I have had with other Aboriginal people over the years have included issues about the politics of living in mixed-race skin. My art, academic papers, and doctoral studies (Croft) have all focused on these issues and their associated politics. I call myself a “fair-skinned Murri”. Many non-Indigenous Australians still associate the colour of skin with authentic Aboriginal identity: you have to be dark skinned to be authentic. I think that humour is often used by Aboriginal people to hide or brush away the trauma that this kind of classification can cause and I wanted to address these issues in the exhibition. Many of the exhibition’s artworks also emphasise the politics of desire and difference, as this is something that we as Indigenous people continually face. BF: How does your work connect with the theme and concepts of the exhibition? PC: My art explores the conceptual themes of identity, place and Country. I have previously created a large body of work that used found boxes, so it was quite natural for me to think about “a box of chocolates”! My idea was to depict bell hooks’s ideas about people of colour and explore ways that we, as Aboriginal people in Australia, might be similar to a box of chocolates with soft centres and hard centres. BF: What mediums do you use in your works for the exhibition? PC: I love working with found boxes. For this work, I chose an antique “Winning Post” chocolate box from Nestlé. I was giving new life to the box of chocolates, just with a different kind of chocolate. The “Winning Post” name also fitted with the Hot Chocolate song, Everyone’s A Winner (1978). I kept the “Winning Post” branding and added “Dark Delicacies” as the text along the side (see Figure 1). Figure 1.Nestle’s “Winning Post” Chocolate Box. Photograph by Pamela CroftWarcon 2012. PC: I bought some chocolate jelly babies, chocolates and a plastic chocolate tray – the kind that are normally inserted into a chocolate box to hold the chocolates, or that you use to mould chocolates. I put chocolates in the bottom of the tray, and put chocolate jelly babies on the top. Then I placed them into casting resin. I had a whole tray of little chocolate people standing up in the tray that fitted into the “Winning Post” box (see Figures 2 and 3). Figure 2. Dark Delicacies by Pamela CroftWarcon, 2012. Photograph by Bronwyn Fredericks 2012. Figure 3. Dark Delicacies by Pamela CroftWarcon, 2012. Photograph by Pamela CroftWarcon 2012. PC: The chocolate jelly babies in the artwork depict Aboriginal people, who are symbolised as “dark delicacies”. The “centres” of the people are unknown and waiting to be picked: maybe they are sweet; maybe they are soft centres; maybe they are hard centres. The people are presented so that others can decide who is “tasty”─maybe politicians or government officers, or maybe “individual white women for their eating pleasure” (hooks) (see Figures 4 and 5). Figure 4. Dark Delicacies by Pamela CroftWarcon, 2012. Photograph by Pamela CroftWarcon 2012. Figure 5. Dark Delicacies by Pamela CroftWarcon, 2012. Photograph by Pamela CroftWarcon 2012. BF: What do you hope the viewers gained from your works in the exhibition? PC: I want viewers to think about the power relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. I want people to listen with their ears, heart, mind, and body, and accept the challenges and changes that Indigenous people identify as being necessary. Icould have put names on the chocolates to symbolise which Aboriginal people tend to be selected ahead of others, but that would have made it too easy, and maybe too provocative. I didn’t want to place the issue with Aboriginal people, because it is mostly non-Indigenous people who do the “picking”, and who hope they get a “soft centre” rather than a “peanut brittle.” I acknowledge that some Aboriginal people also doing the picking, but it is not within the same context. BF: How do you respond to claims that some people might find the work offensive? PC: I believe that we can all tag something as offensive and it seems to be an easy way out. What really matters is to reflect on the concepts behind an artist’s work and consider whether we should make changes to our own ways of thinking and doing. I know some people will think that I have gone too far, but I’m interested in whether it has made them think about the issues. I think that I am often perceived as a “hard-centred chocolate”. Some people see me as “trouble,” “problematic,” and “too hard,” because I question, challenge, and don’t let the dominant white culture just simply ride over me or others. I am actually quite proud of being thought of as a hard-centred chocolate, because I want to make people stop and think. And, where necessary, I want to encourage people to change the ways they react to and construct “self” and “other.” Conclusion The Hot Chocolate exhibition included representations that were desirable and “tasty”: a celebration of declaring the self as “hot chocolate.” Through the connections with the food chocolate and the band Hot Chocolate, the exhibition sought to raise questions about the human experience of art and the artist as a memorable, tasty, and chosen commodity. For the artists, the exhibition enabled the juxtaposition of being a tasty individual chocolate against the concern of being part of a “box” but not being selected from the collection or not being memorable enough. It also sought to challenge people’s thinking about Aboriginal identity, by encouraging visitors to ask questions about how Aboriginal people are represented, how they are chosen to participate in politics and decision making, and whether some Aboriginal people are seen as being more “soft” or more “acceptable” than others. Through the metaphor of chocolate, the Hot Chocolate exhibition provided both a tasty delight and a conceptual challenge. It delivered an eclectic assortment and delivered the message that we are always tasty, regardless of what anyone thinks of us. It links back to the work of bell hooks, who aligned African American women with chocolates, which are picked out and selected for someone else’s pleasure. We know that Aboriginal Australians are sometimes conceptualised and selected in the same way. We have explored this conceptualisation and seek to challenge the imaginations of others around the issues of politics, desire, skin, and fetishisation of race and bodies. References Croft, Pamela. ART Song: The Soul Beneath My Skin. Doctor of Visual Art (Unpublished thesis). Brisbane: Griffith U, 2003. CroftWarcon, Pamela and Bronwyn Fredericks. It Started With a KISS. Hot Chocolate. Exhibition catalogue. Adelaide: SASA Gallery, 24 Oct.-29 Nov. 2012. Fredericks, Bronwyn. “Getting a Job: Aboriginal Women’s Issues and Experiences in the Health Sector.” International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies 2.1 (2009): 24-35. Gill, Rosalind. Gender and the Media. Malden, MA: Polity, 2007. hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress Education as the Practice of Freedom. London: Routledge, 1994. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. “The House That Jack Built: Britishness and White Possession.” ACRAWSA Journal 1, (2005): 21-29. 1 Feb. 2014. ‹http://www.acrawsa.org.au/ejournal/?id=8› Moss, Hilary. “Naomi Campbell: Cadbury Ad “Insulting & Hurtful”. The Huntington Post 31 May (2011). 16 Dec. 2013. ‹http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/31/naomi-campbell-cadbury-ad_n_868909.html#› Sweney, Mark. “Cadbury Apologises to Naomi Campbell Over ‘Racist’ Ad.” The Guardian 3 Jun. (2011). 16 Dec. 2013. ‹http://www.theguardian.com/media/2011/jun/03/cadbury-naomi-campbell-ad›

IntroductionThis paper addresses two separate notions of embodiment – western maternal embodiment and art making as a form of embodied critical resistance. It takes as its subject breeder; my unpublished five minute video installation from 2012, which synthesises these two separate conceptual framings of embodiment as a means to visually and conceptually rupture dominant ideologies surrounding Australian motherhood. Emerging from a paradoxical landscape of fear, loathing and desire, breeder is my dark satirical take on ambivalent myths surrounding suburban Australian motherhood. Portraying my white, heavily pregnant body breeding, cooking and consuming pink, sugar-coated butterflies, breeder renders literal the Australian mother as both idealised nation-builder and vilified, self-indulgent abuser. A feminine reification of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Children, breeder attempts to make visible my own grapplings with maternal ambivalence, to complicate even further, the already strained position of motherhood within the Australian cultural imaginary. Employing the mediums of video and performance to visually manifest an ambivalent protagonist who displays both nurturing maternal ideals and murderous inclinations, breeder pushes contradictory maternal expectations to their breaking point and challengingly offers the following proposition: “This is what you want; but what you’ll get is so much more than you bargained for” (Grosz 136). Drawing upon critical, feminist theorising that challenges idealised views of motherhood; accounts of motherhood by mothers themselves; as well as my own personal grapplings with maternal expectations, this paper weaves reflexive writing with textual analysis to explore how an art-based methodology of embodied critical resistance can problematise representations of motherhood within Australia. By visualising the disjuncture between dominant representations of motherhood that have saturated Australian mainstream media since the late 1990s and the complex ambivalent reality of some women’s actual experiences of mothering, this paper discusses how breeder’s intimate portrayal of maternal domesticity at the limits of tolerability, critically resists socially acceptable mothering practices by satirising the cultural construct of motherhood as a means “to use it, deform it, and make it groan and protest” (Nietzsche qtd. in Gutting).Contradictory Maternal KnowledgeImages of motherhood are all around us; communicating ideals and stereotypes that tell us how mothers should feel, think and act. But these images and the concepts of motherhood that underpin them are full of contradictions. Cultural representations of the idealised and sometimes “yummy mummy” - middle class, attractive, healthy, sexy and heterosexual – (see Fraser; Johnson), contrast with depictions of “bad” mothers, leading to motherhood being simultaneously idealised and demonised within the popular press (Bullen et al.; McRobbie, Top Girls; McRobbie, In the Aftermath; McRobbie, Reflections on Feminism; Walkerdine et al.). Mothers own accounts of motherhood reflect these unsettling contradictions (Miller; Thomson et al.; Wilkinson). Claiming the maternal experience is both “heaven and hell” due to the daily experience of irreconcilable and contradictory feelings (Coward), mothers (myself included), silently struggle between feelings of extreme love and opposing feelings of failure, despair and hate as we get caught up in trying to achieve a set of ideals that promulgate standards of perfection that are beyond our reach. Surrounded by images of motherhood that do not resonate with the contradictory nature of the lived maternal experience, mothers are “torn in two” as we desperately try to reconcile or find absolution for maternal emotions that dominant cultural representations of motherhood render unacceptable. According to Roszika Parker, this complicated and contradictory experience where a mother has both loving and hating feelings for her child is that of maternal ambivalence; a form of exquisite suffering that oscillates between the overwhelming affect of blissful gratification and the raw edges of bitter resentment (Parker 1). As Parker states, maternal ambivalence refers to:Those fleeting (or not so fleeting) feelings of hatred for a child that can grip a mother, the moment of recoil from a much loved body, the desire to abandon, to smash the untouched plate of food in a toddler’s face, to yank a child’s arm while crossing the road, scrub too hard with a face cloth, change the lock on an adolescent or the fantasy of hurling a howling baby out of the window (5).However, it is not only feelings of hatred that stir up ambivalence in the mother, so too can the overwhelming intensity of love itself render the rush of ambivalence so surprising and so painful. Commenting on the extreme contradictory emotions that fill a mother and how not only excessive hatred, but excessive love can turn dangerously fatal, Parker turns to Simone De Beauvoir’s idea of “carnal plenitude”; that is, where the child elicits from the mother, the emotion of domination; where the child becomes the “other” who is both prey and double (30). For Parker, De Beauvoir’s “carnal plenitude” is imaged by mothers in a myriad of ways, from a desire to gobble up the child, to feelings of wanting to gather the child into a fatal smothering hug. Commenting on her own unsettling love/hate relationship with her child, Adrienne Rich describes her experiences of maternal ambivalences as “the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves and blissful gratification and tenderness” (363). Unable to come to terms with this paradox at the core of the unfolding process of motherhood, our culture defends itself against this illogical ambivalence in the mother by separating the good nurturing mother from the bad neglectful mother in an attempt to deny the fact that they are one and the same. Resulting in a culture that either denigrates or idealises mothers, we are constantly presented with images of the good perfect nurturing mother and her murderous alter ego; the bad fatal mother who neglects and smothers. This means that how a mother feels about mothering or the meaning it has for her, is heavily determined by cultural representations of motherhood. Arguing for a creative transformation of the maternal that breaches the mutual exclusivities that separate motherhood, I am called to action by Susan Rubin Suleiman, who writes (quoting psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch): “Mothers don’t write, they are written” (Suleiman 5). As a visual attempt to negotiate, translate and thus “write” my lived experience of Australian motherhood, breeder gives voice to the raw material of contradictory (and often taboo experiences) surrounding maternal embodiment and subjectivity. Hijacking and redeploying contradictory understandings and representations of Australian motherhood to push maternal ideals to their breaking point, breeder seeks to create a kind of “mother trouble” that challenges the disjuncture between dominant social constructions of motherhood designed to keep us assigned to our proper place. Viscerally embracing the reality that much of life with small children revolves around loss of control and disintegration of physical boundaries, breeder visually explores the complex and contradictory performances surrounding lived experiences of mothering within Australia to complicate even further the already strained position of western maternal embodiment.Situated Maternal KnowledgeOver the last decade and a half, women’s bodies and their capacity to reproduce have become centre stage in the unfolding drama of Australian economic policy. In 1999 fears surrounding dwindling birth-rates and less future tax revenue, led then Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett to address a number of exclusive private girls’ schools. Making Australia-wide headlines, Kennett urged these affluent young women to abandon their desire for a university degree and instead invited them to consider motherhood as the ultimate career choice (Dever). In 2004, John Howard’s Liberal government made headlines as they announced the new maternity allowance; a $3000 lump-sum financial incentive for women to leave work and have babies. Ending this announcement by urging the assembled gathering of mostly male reporters to go home and have “one for the Dad, one for the Mum and one for the Country” (Baird and Cutcher 103), Federal Treasurer Peter Costello made a last ditch effort to save Baby Boomers from their imminent pensionless doom. Failing to come to terms with the impending saturation of the retirement market without the appropriate tax payer support, the Liberal Government turned baby-making into the ultimate Patriotic act as they saw in women bodies, the key to prevent Australia’s looming economic crisis. However, not all women’s bodies were considered up to the job of producing the longed for “Good tax-paying Citizen” (Tyler). Kennett only visited exclusive private girls’ schools (Ferrier), headhunting only the highest calibre of affluent breeders. Blue-collar inter-mingling was to be adamantly discouraged. Costello’s 2004 “baby bonus” catch-cry not only caused international ire, but also implicitly relegated the duty of child-bearing patriotism to a normalised heterosexual, nuclear family milieu. Unwed or lesbian mothers need not apply. Finally, as government spokespeople repeatedly proclaimed that the new maternity allowance was not income tested, this suggested that the target nation-builder breeder demographic was the higher than average income earner. Let’s get it straight people – only highly skilled, high IQ’s, heterosexual, wedded, young, white women were required in this exclusive breeding program (see Allen and Osgood; Skeggs; Tyler). And if the point hadn’t already been made perfectly clear, newspaper tabloids, talkback radio and current affairs programs all over the country were recruited to make sure the public knew exactly what type of mother Australia was looking for. Out of control young, jobless single mothers hit the headlines as fears abounded that they were breeding into oblivion. An inherently selfish and narcissistic lot, you could be forgiven for thinking that Australia was running rampant with so-called bogan single mothers, who left their babies trapped in hot airless cars in casino carparks all over the country as they spent their multiple “baby bonus’” on booze, ciggies, LCD’s and gambling (see Milne; O’Connor; Simpson and Dowling). Sucking the economy dry as they leeched good tax-payer dollars from Centrelink, these undesirables were the mothers Australia neither needed nor wanted. Producing offspring relegated to the category of bludgerhood before they could even crawl, these mothers became the punching bag for the Australian cultural imaginary as newspaper headlines screamed “Thou Shalt Not Breed” (Gordon). Seen as the embodiment of horror regarding the ever out-of-control nature of women’s bodies, these undesirable mothers materialised out of a socio-political landscape that although idealised women’s bodies as Australia’s economic saviour, also feared their inability to be managed and contained. Hoarding their capacity to reproduce for their own selfish narcissistic desires, these white trash mothers became the horror par excellence within the Australian cultural imaginary as they were publically regarded as the vilified evil alter-ego of the good, respectable white affluent young mother Australian policy makers were after. Forums all over the country were inundated. “Yes,” the dominant voices seemed to proclaim: “We want to build our population. We need more tax-paying citizens. But we only want white, self-less, nurturing, affluent mothers. We want women who can breed us moral upstanding subjects. We do not want lazy good for nothing moochers.” Emerging from this paradoxical maternal landscape of fear, loathing and desire, breeder is a visual and performative manifestation of my own inability to come to terms with the idealisation and denigration of motherhood within Australia. Involving a profound recognition that the personal is still the political, I not only attempt to visually trace the relationship between popular Australian cultural formations and individual experiences, but also to visually “write” my own embodied grapplings with maternal ambivalence. Following the premise that “critique without resistance is empty and resistance without critique is blind” (Hoy 6), I find art practice to be a critically situated and embodied act that can openly resist the power of dominant ideologies by highlighting maternal corporeal transgressions. A creative destablising action, I utilise the mediums of video and performance within breeder to explore personal, historical and culturally situated expectations of motherhood within Australia as a means to subvert dominant ideologies of motherhood within the Australian cultural imaginary. Performing Maternal KnowledgeReworking Goya’s Romantic Gothic vision of fatherhood in Saturn Devouring His Children, breeder is a five minute two-screen video performance that puts an ironic twist to the “good” and “bad” myths of Australian motherhood. Depicting myself as the young white heavily pregnant protagonist breeding monarch butterflies in my suburban backyard, sugar-coating, cooking and then eating them, breeder uses an exaggerated kitsch aesthetic to render literal the Australian mother as both idealistic nation-builder and self-indulgent abuser. Selfishly hoarding my breeding potential for myself, luxuriating and devouring my “offspring” for my own pleasure and delight rather than for the common good, breeder simultaneously defies and is complicit with motherhood expectations within the suburban Australian imaginary. Filmed in my backyard in the southern suburbs of Perth, Western Australia, breeder manifests my own maternal ambivalence and deliberately complicates the dichotomous and strained position motherhood holds in western society. Breeder is presented as a two screen video installation. The left screen is a fast-paced, brightly coloured, jump-cut narrative with a pregnant protagonist (myself). It has three main scenes or settings: garden, kitchen and terrace. The right screen is a slow-moving flow of images that shows the entire monarch butterfly breeding cycle in detail; close ups of eggs slowly turning into caterpillars, caterpillars creating cocoons and the gradual opening of wings as butterflies emerge from cocoons. All the while, the metamorphic cycle is aided by the pregnant protagonist, who cares for them until she sets them free of their breeding cage. In the left screen, apricot roses, orange trees, yellow hibiscus bushes, lush green lawns, a swimming pool and an Aussie backyard garden shed are glimpsed as the pregnant protagonist runs, jumps and sneaks up on butterflies while brandishing a red-handled butterfly net; dressed in red high heels and a white lace frock. Bunnies with pink bows jump, dogs in pink collars bark and a very young boy dressed in a navy-blue sailor suit all make cameo appearances as large monarch butterflies are collected and placed inside a child’s cherry red insect container. In a jump-cut transition, the female protagonist appears in a stark white kitchen; now dressed in a bright pink and apricot floral apron and baby-pink hair ribbon tied in a bow in her blonde ponytail. Standing behind the kitchen bench, she carefully measures sugar into a bowl. She then adds pink food colouring into the crystal white sugar, turning it into a bright pink concoction. Cracking eggs and separating them, she whisks the egg whites to form soft marshmallow peaks. Dipping a paint brush into the egg whites, she paints the fluffy mixture onto the butterflies (now dead), which are laid out on a well-used metal biscuit tray. Using her fingers to sprinkle the bright pink sugar concoction onto the butterflies, she then places them into the oven to bake and stands back with a smile. In the third and final scene, the female protagonist sits down at a table in a garden terrace in front of French-styled doors. Set for high tea with an antique floral tea pot and cup, lace table cloth and petit fours, she pours herself a cup of tea. Adding a teaspoon of sugar, she stirs and then selects a strawberry tart from a three-tiered high-tea stand that holds brightly iced cupcakes, cherry friands, tiny lemon meringue pies, sweet little strawberry tarts and pink sugar coated butterflies. Munching her way through tarts, pies, friands and cupcakes, she finally licks her lips and fuchsia tipped fingers and then carefully chooses a pink sugar coated butterfly. Close ups of her crimson coated mouth show her licking the pink sugar-crumbs from lips and fingers as she silently devours the butterfly. Leaning back in chair, she smiles, then picks up a pink leather bound book and relaxes as she begins to read herself into the afternoon. Screen fades to black. ConclusionAs a mother I am all fragmented, contradictory; full of ambivalence, love, guilt and shame. After seventeen years and five children, you would think that I would be used to this space. Instead, it is a space that I battle to come to terms with each and every day. So how to strategically negotiate engrained codes of maternity and embrace the complexities of embodied maternal knowledge? Indeed, how to speak of the difficulties and incomparable beauties of the maternal without having those variously inflected and complex experiences turn into clichés of what enduring motherhood is supposed to be? Visually and performatively grappling with my own fallout from mothering ideals and expectations where sometimes all I feel I am left with is “a monster of selfishness and intolerance” (Rich 363), breeder materialises my own experiences with maternal ambivalence and my inability to reconcile or negotiate multiple contradictory identities into a single maternal position. Ashamed of my self, my body, my obsessions, my anger, my hatred, my rage, my laughter, my sorrow and most of all my oscillation between a complete and utter desire to kill each and every one of my children and an overwhelming desire to gobble them all up, I make art work that is embedded in the grime and grittiness of my everyday life as a young mother living in the southern suburbs of Western Australia. A life that is most often mundane, sometimes sad, embarrassing, rude and occasionally heartbreaking. A life filled with such simple joy and such complicated sorrow. A life that in reality, is anything but manageable and contained. Although this is my experience, I know that I am not the only one. As an artist I engage in the embodied and critically resistant practice of sampling from my “mother” identities in order to bring out multiple, conflictive responses that provocatively encourage new ways of thinking and acknowledging embodied maternal knowledge. Although claims abound that this results in a practice that is “too personal” or “too specific” (Liss xv), I do not believe that this in fact risks reifying essentialism. Despite much feminist debate over the years regarding essentialist/social constructivist positions, I would still rather use my body as a site of embodied knowledge then rhetorically give it up. Acting as a disruption and challenge to the concepts of idealised or denigrated maternal embodiment, the images and performances of motherhood in breeder then, are more than simple acknowledgements of the reality of the good and bad mother, or acts reclaiming an identity that they taught me to despise (Cliff) or rebelling against having to be a "woman" at all. Instead, breeder is a lucid and explicit declaration of intent that politely refuses to keep every maternal body in its place.References Allen, Kim, and Jane Osgood. “Young Women Negotiating Maternal Subjectivities: The Significance of Social Class.” Studies in the Maternal. 1.2 (2009). 30 July 2012 ‹www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk›.Almond, Barbara. The Monster Within. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.Baird, Marian, and Leanne Cutcher. “’One for the Father, One for the Mother and One for the Country': An Examination of the Construction of Motherhood through the Prism of Paid Maternity Leave.” Hecate 31.2 (2005): 103-113. Bullen, Elizabeth, Jane Kenway, and Valerie Hey. “New Labour, Social Exclusion and Educational Risk Management: The Case of ‘Gymslip Mums’.” British Educational Research Journal. 26.4 (2000): 441-456.Cliff, Michelle. Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise. Michigan: Persephone Press, 1980.Coward, Ross. “The Heaven and Hell of Mothering: Mothering and Ambivalence in the Mass Media.” In Wendy Hollway and Brid Featherston, eds. Mothering and Ambivalence. London: Routledge, 1997.Dever, Maryanne. “Baby Talk: The Howard Government, Families and the Politics of Difference.” Hecate 31.2 (2005): 45-61Ferrier, Carole. “So, What Is to Be Done about the Family?” Australian Humanities Review (2006): 39-40.Fraser, Liz. The Yummy Mummy Survival Guide. New York: Harper Collins, 2007.Gutting, Gary. Foucault: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.Gordon, Josh. “Thou Shalt Not Breed.” The Age, 9 May 2010.Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1986.Hoy, David C. Critical Resistance. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005.Johnson, Anna. The Yummy Mummy Manifesto: Baby, Beauty, Body and Bliss. New York: Ballantine, 2009.Liss, Andrea. Feminist Art and the Maternal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.McRobbie, Angela. “Top Girls: Young Women and the Post-Feminist Sexual Contract.” Cultural Studies. 21. 4. (2007): 718-737.---. In the Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: Sage. 2008.---. “Reflections on Feminism, Immaterial Labour and the Post-Fordist Regime.” New Formations 70 (Winter 2011): 60-76. 30 July 2012 ‹http://dx.doi.org.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/10.3898/NEWF.70.04.2010›.Miller, Tina. Making Sense of Motherhood: A Narrative Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2005.Milne, Glenn. “Baby Bonus Rethink.” The Courier Mail 11 Nov. 2006. 30 Sep. 2011 ‹http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/national-old/baby-bonus-rethink/story-e6freooo-1111112507517›.O’Connor, Mike. “Baby Bonus Budget Handouts a Luxury We Can Ill Afford.” The Courier Mai. 5 Dec. 2011. 30 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/handouts-luxury-we-can-ill-afford/story-e6frerdf-1226213654447›.Parker, Roszika. Mother Love/Mother Hate, London: Virago Press, 1995.Rich, Adrienne. “Anger and Tenderness.” In M. Davey, ed. Mother Reader. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001.Simpson, Kirsty, and Jason Dowling. “Gambling Soars in Child Bonus Week”. The Sunday Age Aug. 2004. 28 Apr. 2012 ‹http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/handouts-luxury-we-can-ill-afford/story-e6frerdf-1226213654447›.Skeggs, Beverly. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage, 1997.Suleiman, Susan. “Writing and Motherhood,” Mother Reader Ed. Moyra Davey. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001. 113-138Thomson, Rachel, Mary Jane Kehily, Lucy Hadfield, and Sue Sharpe. Making Modern Mothers. Bristol: Policy Press, 2011. 30 July 2012 ‹http://www.policypress.co.uk/display.asp?K=9781847426055&sf1=keyword&st1=motherhood&m=1&dc=16›.Tyler, Imogen. “’Chav Mum, Chav Scum’: Class Disgust in Contemporary Britain.” Feminist Media Studies 8.2. (2008): 17-34. 31 July 2012 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680770701824779›.Walkerdine, Valerie, Helen Lucey, and Melody June. Growing Up Girl: Psychosocial Explorations of Gender and Class. London: Palgrave. 2001. Wilkinson, Tony. Uncertain Surrenders: The Coexistence of Beauty and Menace in the Maternal Bond and Photography. PhD thesis. Perth: Edith Cowan University, 2012. 31 July 2012 ‹http://ro.ecu.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1458&context=theses›.

Introduction There are many competing explanations for why people are drawn to conspiracy theories. Increasingly, conspiracy theories are mainstream sites of cultural engagement (Barkun). Conspiracy theorising, then, is part of, or at least brushes up against, people’s daily sense-making practices. However, many still think of conspiracy theorising and the communities that form around them as deviant, pathological or deficient (Swami et al.). In this article, we argue that we need to shift from a model of a deficient and deviant understanding of conspiracy theorising to understand these practices as part of our everyday behavioural and social repertoires. We argue that part of this shift means attending to the sensory and felt experience of conspiracy thinking, as a bodily and affective experience, as a site of pleasure. Centring pleasure as an explanatory framework for conspiracy theorising does not foreclose other explanations. Rather we argue that pleasure operates as a broader explanatory framework within which these competing explanations can also offer insight. We do not aim to provide an empirical account of the #FreeBritney movement in this article, but instead use it as an example through which we can begin to develop pleasure as a potential explanatory framework for understanding conspiracy theorising. To argue for the centrality of ‘pleasure’ in conspiracy theories, we draw on scholarship from fandom studies to ask, “What can the ‘Free Britney’ movement tell us about the pleasures of conspiracy?” We pay particular attention to how conspiracy theorising can be understood as a site of pleasure and, at times, hope, which in turn transform conspiracy theories into ‘sticky’ cultural sites (Ahmed). The centring of pleasure as a driver of conspiracy theorising also points to possible alternative approaches to countering the affective pull of conspiracy theories. Why #FreeBritney? This article focusses on the #FreeBritney community as an example for several reasons. #FreeBritney sits outside many of the political concerns that often characterise conspiracy theories; that is, it is neither left nor right in its orientation. Additionally, #FreeBritney was initially written off as nonsense by mainstream media outlets and commentators. For example, in the first version of TikToker Abbie Richards’s viral chart that categorises conspiracy theories, #FreeBritney is in the same category as UFOs and not something that ‘actually happened’ (Richards), meaning Richards did not believe the central claim of the #FreeBritney movement, that Britney wished to end an abusive conservatorship, was real. Similar coverage was evident in other press, including by Maria Sherman for Jezebel, which describes the #FreeBritney theory as “dubiously sourced” and as “mak[ing] gargantuan assumptions about mental health without much concrete evidence” (Sherman). Despite the derision, #FreeBritney persisted, and the claims made in the initial, instigating episode of Britney’s Gram (a fan-created podcast) have been borne in court, affirmed by Spears herself, and in numerous pieces of investigative reporting (Stark and Day). The #FreeBritney Context So, how did we get to #FreeBritney? In early 2008, after a string of increasingly erratic public appearances, Britney Spears was placed into a conservatorship arrangement. Conservatorships are typically reserved for the elderly and mentally ill, or those without the capacity to care for them themselves. Spears’s conservatorship meant that she could not make any personal or financial decisions for herself. Spears’s conservatorship was overseen by her father and court-appointed lawyers who benefited financially by allegedly exploiting the arrangement (Day and Abrams). Until 2021, Spears remained under the conservatorship, while continuing to work. These working arrangements included world tours, TV appearances and a long-running Las Vegas residency where she performed a 90-100 minute show several times per week (Jacobs). Rumours marked the beginning of Spears’s conservatorship that it was an attempt to exploit Spears financially while keeping her under parental control (Jacobs). This is evidenced by her thwarted attempt to acquire legal representation, where the court ultimately ruled that she was too unwell to retain her own counsel (Coscarelli et al.). Rumours of a broader conspiracy designed to entrap Spears in the conservatorship only gained widespread traction in 2019, resulting in the birth of the #FreeBritney movement. The growth of #FreeBritney discourse can be traced to an April 2019 episode of the podcast Britney’s Gram (Barker and Babs). Britney’s Gram was initially a ‘close reading’ of Spears’s Instagram focussed on parsing her captions, images, and emoticon use. In the podcast's special ‘emergency’ episode, episode 75, titled “#FreeBritney”, the nature of the conspiracy regarding Spears’s conservatorship took shape. The ‘emergency’ episode of the podcast responded to a tip called into the Britney’s Gram hotline. The anonymous source claims to be a paralegal who worked on legal documents related to the conservatorship throughout their employment. The paralegal claims that the conservatorship is “disturbing to say the least”. The show goes on to lay out a timeline of key events that support their assertion that Spears is being kept in the conservative against her will. Their claims are supported by a ‘close reading’ of Spears’s output, including her Instagram account and her public appearances, both official and unofficial. The hosts assemble their theory from a diverse range of sources, but their iterative theory building is underscored by the hosts’ empathetic reading, “what if it were me?” Fandom and the Collective Feelings of Conspiracy The #FreeBritney movement offers an opportunity to reflect on the parallels and intersections between fandom culture and conspiracy. It also allows us to consider what contemporary fan practices might tell us about the appeal of engaging in conspiracy. While #FreeBritney as a movement has extended far beyond the reach of the Britney Spears fandom, its roots began in the everyday fan practices that are not unique to the singer's supporters. Identifying as a ‘fan’ of a celebrity, a band, television show, film franchise, or other popular cultural texts has become a mainstream activity in recent decades, moving from a more subcultural or fringe practice (Gray et al.). Fan practices often include developing a repertoire of knowledge of their chosen fandom. This repertoire allows them to conduct close readings of these ‘texts’, which include relevant images and social media content (Hills), and look for patterns, consistencies and inconsistencies — what Jason Mittell (52) calls ‘forensic fandom’. Fans also create their own paratexts drawing on their fandom-specific knowledge to create work such as fanfiction, fan videos (fanvids), blogs, dedicated social media accounts, podcasts (such as Britney’s Gram) and other texts that fans may also analyse (Geraghty). Much like engaging in conspiracy, participating in fandom is also a broad continuum in terms of commitment, and depth of engagement. Some fans are more peripheral to the fandom, casually engaged, and only broadly aware of close reading practices that may be normalised for those within the more engaged inner circle of the fandom. However, these more casual fans may also draw on and consume paratext created by more avid fans. Creators of popular and well-made paratexts can even become renowned in social media spaces within fan communities for their creations (Hills). This mirrors conspiracy thinking, where believers range from curious about the conspiracy to committed and embedded in the conspiracy community. Like fandoms, the more active participants in the conspiracy can become established and well-known in the community for disseminating information and knowledge. For example, many followers of the QAnon conspiracy receive most of their information through secondary QAnon social media influencers who interpret ‘Qdrops’ rather than interpret the cryptic message board posts themselves (Conner and MacMurray). Scholarship examining fandom and fan experiences has emphasised the key role of pleasure for fans in developing this fan expertise (McCann and Southerton). In particular, the practices of close textual reading and familiarity with the fandom's texts, symbols, and key players offer a sense of community and collective feeling. As McCann and Southerton report in their study on queer shipping among One Direction fans (when fans invest emotional energy in the relationship, the ‘ship’, between two characters or celebrities), pleasure is collective rather than individual and emerges from a sense of belonging and shared investment. While, as we have discussed, the differing levels of involvement and investment can create hierarchy, and therefore potential conflict within fandom, scholarship on fandom has argued that fans primarily take pleasure in the feeling of community, support and belonging (McCann and Southerton; Geraghty; Pearson). Fan spaces are spaces in which collective feelings can be heightened, as participants take pleasure in experiencing something that thousands of others are feeling simultaneously — whether it be in person at a concert or, increasingly, in social media communities. The pleasures of fandom also go beyond momentous occasions like a singer's album launch or a celebrity scandal. Fans can cultivate pleasure in the mundane practices of fandom by building a sense of building and momentum, by using their close reading to predict imminent events (e.g. attempting to discern what Instagram posts might be hinting that a popstar is going to put out a new album) or undertaking rereading of old material to reinterpret meanings in new contemporary light. The pleasures of anticipation are central to these fan practices, with close reading offering endless rewards. Conspiracy theorists operate similarly, even when an anticipated event does not come to fruition. When the predictions of the mysterious Q that tell of mass arrests of prominent enemies of the movement fail to eventuate, rather than lose belief in Q’s prophetic power, the believers find explanation and new events to anticipate (Butler and Martin). Is #FreeBritney a Conspiracy? While it is tempting to situate #FreeBritney firmly within the domain of fan studies, we argue that while later borne out by facts, it can also be understood as a conspiracy theory. Conspiracy theories are united by a focus on and fear of a larger malevolent actor, who uses the power vested in institutions to control the narrative about the conspiracy, and indeed the conspiracy itself (Melley). In #FreeBritney, the stakes are a little lower, with the clearest villains being Spears’s immediate family, who appear to have financially benefited from her conservatorship. Nevertheless, the conspiracy involves elements of control, not only over Spears herself but the media, the criminal justice system, and the medical professionals diagnosing and treating Spears, as well as any close friends and staff. As with other conspiracies, power is exercised through social institutions to ‘cover up’ the conspiracy itself and any damage it is causing (Barkun; Melley). If conspiracies are secret, how then are they detected? Key to conspiracy theorising is the ‘close reading’ or ‘forensic’ examination (Mittell) of various texts to spot inconsistencies and gaps in authenticity that disrupt the dominant narrative. This is a hallmark of conspiracy theorising, which relies on “the interpretation of half-hidden cIues, tell-tale signs, and secret messages” (Melley 16). Within #FreeBritney, close reading is most obviously applied to her Instagram account and extends to various court courts, interviews, and media reporting. This analysis allows for these inconsistencies to build an alternative explanation while using a corpus of evidence available to everyone. Where Is the Pleasure? Where can we locate the sources of pleasure in #FreeBritney? To be clear, we are arguing for an understanding of pleasure that is not eroticised but rather found in the arguably mundane practises of conspiracy. The close, detailed sifting through evidence required to build a conspiracy theory is pleasurable in a number of ways. These practices are pleasurable in and of themselves — developing deep knowledge assembling the threads in the conspiracy theory holds the individual in a continual site of possibility and potential. The space of ‘what if’ where nothing is certain and outcomes can be constantly refigured allows conspiracy theorists to exist in expectation, in ‘looking forward to’ as one would a long-awaited holiday. The pleasure is in anticipating the event, but not necessarily in the resolution of the conspiracy itself. The momentum and anticipation in fan communities are remarkably similar to those of conspiracy theory communities, creating a pleasurable affective atmosphere (Anderson) that circulates in and through digital practices. The ‘close reading’ practice we describe is also pleasurable through proximity and intimacy. Close reading allows for a point of entry and connection to the broader #Free Britney community, where close readings are contributed, the readings of others are affirmed, and these individual contributions are incorporated into the fabric of the community. Close reading also provides proximity and a sense of intimate familiarity with Spears herself. Close reading is only made possible through deep knowledge, through being able to understand Spears’s self-presentation, mediated through digital platforms like Instagram, as authentic or forced. The Internet also makes close reading more accessible and immediate. Instagram posts can be saved for later perusal, comments screenshotted, and deleted comments captured before they vanish. This work of understanding, interpreting, and building happens both in real time (as soon as content is posted) and retrospectively, using what is now known or agreed upon to go back and reinterpret old material, hunting for clues and signs previously missed. This is evident in a number of TikToks where fans closely interpret Britney’s movement to confirm their theories. In one video, Spears discusses the LGBTQIA+ community. The video is not particularly coherent, and in the comments, a fan writes, “If you need help, wear yellow and blink twice”, and “If you need help do two spins” (ABC News). In her next video, Spears appears wearing a yellow top and holding flowers; she blinks twice, then does two spins for the camera. Given what we now know about Spears’s situation at the time, it seems likely she was in dialogue with her fans, counting on their close reading, attention to detail, and emotional investment. While Spears’s abusive conservatorship was obviously of concern to fans, there is also pleasure in the moments of reading, knowing, and dialoguing with Spears, creating a parasocial intimacy (ABC News). These compounding pleasures are overlapping and mutually reinforcing and create what Ahmed would call a ‘sticky’ site of affective engagement. Ahmed’s conceptualisation of ‘stickiness’ often refers to negative affects, but we argue can apply to positive or pleasurable affectivities. Conclusion #FreeBritney began as a fringe fan concern. It was mocked, derided and dismissed, before being ultimately vindicated through legal action and the removal of the conservatorship. Legal action addressing the financial exploitation of Spears is underway (Day). In a video after the end of her conservatorship, Spears speaks to her fans through an Instagram video detailing her next steps (Sky News). She also thanks the #FreeBritney movement, saying, the Free Britney Movement, you guys rock! Honestly, my voice was muted and threatened for so long, and um I wasn’t able to speak up or say anything, and um because of you guys’ awareness and kind of knowing what was going on and delivering that news to the public for so long ... because of you, I honestly think you guys saved my life. Examining the #FreeBritney movement allows us to consider the role of pleasure in conspiracy theorising. Through this reading, we can also begin to understand conspiracy theorists in a more nuanced way. Those who believe in conspiracy theories are often characterised as fearful, anxious, and paranoid. However, there are pleasurable affectivities also associated with conspiracy theorising. While conspiracy theories most often circulate through and coalesce in online spaces, #FreeBritney demonstrates that theories also drive practice with fans protesting outside of Spears’s court hearings and taking steps to dismantle the conservatorship system more generally (Rolling Stone). Focussing on pleasure can also explain the derision directed towards conspiracy theories and their subscribers. Anti-fan communities provide a language to discuss the gleeful debunking and mocking of conspiracy theories. Pleasure is also a core part of anti-fandom, that is groups mobilised around their hate of something or someone (usually a celebrity with a fan following), and this anti-fandom mirrors many core fan practices (Pinkowitz). The anti-fan is smarter and more discerning than the fan and has the ‘right’ way of thinking, reasoning, and appreciating. The rational anti-fan understands that any clue in Spears’s videos is coincidental and that fans are over-involved, overreacting and out of touch. However, the pleasure of anti-fandom, and debunking more generally, cannot exist without the fan and the conspiracy theory. Thus, the pleasure of the anti-fan only exists in dialogue with the fan, or in this case, the perceived conspiracy theorist. Attending to conspiracy theories as a site of pleasure allows us to construct a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the seemingly magnetic pull of conspiracy theories. References ABC News. “Britney Spears’s Fans Claim She Is Pleading for Help through Her Social Media Videos.” 24 July 2020. <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-24/britney-spears-fans-claim-she-is-pleading-for-help/12488754>. Ahmed, Sara. Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh UP, 2014. Anderson, Ben. “Affective Atmospheres.” Emotion, Space and Society 2.2 (2009): 77–81. Barker, Tess, and Grey Babs. “75 #FREEBRITNEY.” Britney’s Gram, podcast, 75 (16 Apr. 2019). <https://soundcloud.com/user-405122914-411166228/74-freebritney>. Barkun, Michael. “Conspiracy Theories as Stigmatized Knowledge.” Diogenes 62.3-4 (2015): 114–20. Butler, Josh, and Sarah Martin. “Australian Online Anti-Vaccine Groups Switch to Putin Praise and Ukraine Conspiracies.” The Guardian 1 Mar. 2022. <https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/mar/02/australias-anti-vaccine-groups-switch-focus-to-putin-praise-and-ukraine-conspiracies>. Conner, Christopher T., and Nicholas MacMurray. “The Perfect Storm: A Subcultural Analysis of the QAnon Movement.” Critical Sociology (Nov. 2021). <http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/08969205211055863>. Coscarelli, Joe, et al. “Britney Spears Can Hire a New Lawyer of Her Choice, Judge Rules.” The New York Times 14 July 2021. <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/arts/music/britney-spears-conservatorship-lawyer.html>. Day, Liz. “Britney Spears Fights Father’s Fee Claim, Alleging Financial Misconduct.” The New York Times 19 Jan. 2022. <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/18/business/britney-spears-father-fees.html>. Day, Liz, and Rachel Abrams. “Investigation into Britney Spears Conservatorship Will Look into Her Finances.” The New York Times 2 Nov. 2021. <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/02/us/britney-spears-father-deposition.html>. Geraghty, Lincoln. “Introduction: Fans and Paratexts.” Popular Media Cultures: Fans, Audiences and Paratexts, ed. Lincoln Geraghty. Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015. 1–14. Gray, Jonathan, et al. “Why Still Study Fans?” Fandom, Second Edition: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, ed. Jonathan Gray et al. NYU P, 2017. 1–27. Hills, Matt. “Fiske’s ‘Textual Productivity’ and Digital Fandom: Web 2.0 Democratization versus Fan Distinction.” Participations 10.1 (2013): 130–53. Jacobs, Julia. “What Is Actually Happening with Britney Spears?” The New York Times 17 May 2019. <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/arts/music/britney-spears-conservatorship-mental-health.html>. McCann, Hannah, and Clare Southerton. “Repetitions of Desire: Queering the One Direction Fangirl.” Girlhood Studies 12.1 (2019): 49–65. Melley, Timothy. Empire of Conspiracy. Cornell UP, 2016. Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. NYU P, 2015. Pearson, Roberta. “Fandom in the Digital Era.” Popular Communication 8.1 (2010): 84–95. Pinkowitz, Jacqueline M. “‘The Rabid Fans That Take [Twilight] Much Too Seriously’: The Construction and Rejection of Excess in Twilight Antifandom.” Transformative Works and Cultures 7 (2011): 1–17. Richards, Abbie. “The Conspiracy Chart.” Twitter 3 Oct. 2020. <https://twitter.com/abbieasr/status/1312512066071060480>. Rolling Stone. “#FreeBritney Rallies around the World.” 14 July 2021. <https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-pictures/freebritney-rallies-britney-spears-conservatorship-photos-1197458/buk_1491/>. Sherman, Maria. “A Guide to the #FreeBritney Theory That Britney Spears Is Being Held against Her Will.” Jezebel 23 Apr. 2019. <https://jezebel.com/a-guide-to-the-freebritney-theory-that-britney-spears-1834216480>. Sky News. “Britney Spears Thanks Fans in Instagram Video after Conservatorship Ends.” 17 Nov. 2021. <https://news.sky.com/video/video-im-not-here-to-be-a-victim-britney-spears-speaks-after-end-of-conservatorship-12470545>. Stark, Samatha, and Liz Day. “‘Controlling Britney Spears’ Reveals Details of Her Life under Conservatorship.” The New York Times 2 Nov. 2021. <https://www.nytimes.com/article/controlling-britney-spears.html>. 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I remember the first time I saw a dead body. I spawned just before dawn; around me engines were clattering into life, the dim silhouettes of tanks beginning to move out in a steady grinding rumble. I could dimly make out a few other people, the anonymity of their shadowy outlines belied by the names hanging over their heads in a comforting blue. Suddenly, a stream of tracers arced across the sky; explosions sounded nearby, then closer still; a tank ahead of me stopped, turned sluggishly, and fired off a couple of rounds, rocking slightly against the recoil. The radio was filled with talk of Germans in the town, but I couldn’t even see the town. I ran toward what looked like the shattered hulk of a building and dived into what I hoped was a doorway. It was already occupied by another Tommy and together we waited for it to get lighter, listening to the rattle of machine guns, the sharp ping as shells ricocheted off steel, the sickening, indescribable, but immediately recognisable sound when they didn’t. Eventually, the other soldier moved out, but I waited for the sun to peek over the nearby hills. Once I was able to see where I was going, I made straight for the command post on the edge of town, and came across a group of allied soldiers standing in a circle. In the centre of the circle lay a dead German soldier, face up. “Well I’ll be damned,” I said aloud; no one else said anything, and the body abruptly faded. I remember the first time I killed someone. I had barely got the Spit V up to 4000 feet when out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of something below me. I dropped the left wing and saw a Stuka making a bee-line for the base. I made a hash of the turn, almost stalling, but he obviously had no idea I was there. I saddled-up on his six, dropping down low to avoid fire from his gunner, and opened up on him. I must have hit him at perfect convergence because he disintegrated, pieces of dismembered airframe raining down on the field below. I circled the field, putting all my concentration into making the landing that would make the kill count, then switched off the engine and sat in the cockpit for a moment, heart pounding. As you can tell, I’ve been in the wars lately. The first example is drawn from the launch of Cornered Rat Software’s WWII Online: Blitzkrieg (2001) while the second is based on a short stint playing Warbirds 3 (2002). Both games are examples of one of the most interesting recent developments in computer and video gaming: the increasing popularity and range of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs); other notable examples of historical combat simulation MMOGs include HiTech Creations Aces High (2002) and Jaleco Entertainment’s Fighter Ace 3.5 (2002). For a variety of technical reasons, most popular multiplayer games—particularly first-person shooter (FPS) games such as Doom, Quake, and more recently Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2002) and Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001)—are played on player-organised servers that are usually limited to 32 or fewer players; terrain maps are small and rotated every couple of hours on average. MMOGs, by contrast, feature anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of players hosted on a handful of company-run servers. The shared virtual geography of these worlds is huge, extending across tens of thousands of square miles; these worlds are also persistent in that they respond dynamically to the actions of players and continue to do so while individual players are offline. As my opening anecdotes demonstrate, the experience of dealing and receiving virtual death is central to massively multiplayer simulations as it is to so many forms of computer games. Yet for an experience is that is so ubiquitous in computer games (and, some would say, even constitutes their experiential core) death is under-theorised. Mainstream culture tends to see computer and console game mayhem according to a rigid desensitisation argument: the experience of repeatedly killing other players online leads to a gradual erosion of the individual moral sense which makes players more likely to countenance killing people in the real world. Nowhere was this argument more in evidence that in the wake of the murder of fifteen students by Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999. The discovery that the two boys were enthusiastic players of Id Software’s Doom and Quake resulted in an avalanche of hysterical news stories that charged computer games with a number of evils: eroding kids’ ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, encouraging them to imitate the actions represented in the games, and immuring them to the real-world consequences of violence. These claims were hardly new, and had in fact been directed at any number of violent popular entertainment genres over the years. What was new was the claim that the interactive nature of FPS games rendered them a form of simulated weapons training. What was also striking about the discourse surrounding the Littleton shooting was just how little the journalists covering the story knew about computer, console and arcade games. Nevertheless, their approach to the issue encouraged readers to see games as having real life analogs. Media discussion of the event also reinforced the notion of a connection with military training techniques, making extensive use of Lt. Col. (ret) David Grossman, a former Army ranger and psychologist who led the charge in claiming that games were “mass-murder simulators” (Gittrich, AA06). This controversy over the role of violent computer games in the Columbine murders is part of a larger cultural discourse that adopts the logical fallacy characteristic of moral panics: coincidence equals causation. Yet the impoverished discussion of online death and destruction is also due in no small measure to an entrenched hostility toward popular entertainment as a whole, a hostility that is evident even in the work of some academic critics who study popular culture. Andrew Darley, for example, argues that, never has the flattening of meaning or depth in the traditional aesthetic sense of these words been so pronounced as in the action-simulation genres of the computer game: here, aesthetic experience is tied directly to the purely sensational and allied to tests of physical dexterity (143). In this view, the repeated experience of death is merely a part of the overall texture of a form characterised not so much by narrative as by compulsive repetition. More generally, computer games are seen by many critics as the pernicious, paradigmatic instance of the colonisation of individual consciousness by cultural spectacle. According to this Frankfurt school-influenced critique (most frequently associated with the work of Guy Debord), spectacle serves both to mystify and pacify its audience: The more the technology opens up narrative possibilities, the less there is for the audience to do. [. . .]. When the spectacle conceals the practice of the artists who create it, it [announces]…itself as an expression of a universe beyond human volition and effort (Filewood 24). In supposedly sapping its audience’s critical faculties by bombarding them with a technological assault whose only purpose is to instantiate a deterministic worldview, spectacle is seen by its critics as exemplifying the work of capitalist ideology which teaches people not to question the world around them by establishing, in Althusser’s famous phrase, an “imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of their existence” (162). The desensitisation thesis is thus part of a larger discourse that considers computer games paradoxically to be both escapist and as having real-world effects. With regard to online death, neo-Marxism meets neo-Freudianism: players are seen as hooked on the thrill not only of destroying others but also of self-destruction. Death is thus considered the terminus of all narrative possibility, and the participation of individuals in fantasy-death and mayhem is seen to lead inevitably to several kinds of cultural death: the death of “family values,” the death of community, the death of individual responsibility, and—given the characterisation of FPS games in particular as lacking in plot and characterisation—the death of storytelling. However, it is less productive to approach computer, arcade and console games as vehicles for force-feeding content with pre-determined cultural effects than it is to understand them as venues within and around which players stage a variety of theatrical performances. Thus even the bêtes noire of the mainstream media, first-person shooters, serve as vehicles for a variety of interactions ranging from the design of new sounds, graphics and levels, new “skins” for player characters, the formation of “tribes” or “clans” that fight and socialise together, and the creation of elaborate fan fictions. This idea that narrative does not simply “happen” within the immediate experience of playing the game, but is in fact produced by a dynamic interplay of interactions for which the game serves as a focus, also suggests a very different way of looking at the role of death online. Far from being the logical endpoint, the inevitable terminus of all narrative possibility, death becomes the indispensable starting point for narrative. In single-player games, for example, the existence of the simple “save game” function—differing from simply putting the game board to one side in that the save function allows the preservation of the game world in multiple temporal states—generates much of the narrative and dramatic range of computer games. Generally a player saves the game because he or she is facing an obstacle that may result in death; saving the game at that point allows the player to investigate alternatives. Thus, the ever-present possibility of death in the game world becomes the origin of all narratives based on forward investigation. In multiplayer and MMOG environments, where the players have no control over the save game state, it is nevertheless the possibility of a mode of forward projection that gives the experience its dramatic intensity. Flight simulation games in particular are notoriously difficult to master; the experience of serial death, therefore, becomes the necessary condition for honing your flying skills, trying out different tactics in a variety of combat situations, trying similar tactics in different aircraft, and so on. The experience of online death creates a powerful narrative impulse, and not only in those situations where death is serialised and guaranteed. A sizable proportion of the flight sim communities of both Warbirds and Aces High participate in specially designed scenario events that replicate a specific historical air combat event (the Battle of Britain, the Coral Sea, USAAF bomber operations in Europe, etc.) as closely as possible. What makes these scenarios so compelling for many players is that they are generally “one life” events: once the player is dead, they are out for the rest of the event and this creates an intense experience that is completely unlike flying in the everyday free-for-all arenas. The desensitisation thesis notwithstanding, there is little evidence that this narrative investment in death produces a more casual attitude toward real-life death amongst MMOG players. For example, when real-world death intrudes, simulation players often reach for the same rituals of comfort and acknowledgement that are employed offline. Recently, when an Aces High player died unexpectedly of heart failure at the age of 35, his squadron held an elaborate memorial event in his honor. Over a hundred players bailed out over an aerodrome—bailing out is the only way that a player in Aces High can acquire a virtual human body—and lined the edges of the runway as members of the dead player’s squad flew the missing man formation overhead (GrimmCAF). The insistence upon bodily presence in the context of a classic military ceremony marking irrecoverable absence suggests the way in which the connections between real and virtual worlds are experienced by players: as tensions, but also as points where identities are negotiated. This example does not seem to indicate that everyday familiarity with virtual death has dulled the players’ sensibilities to the sorrow and loss accompanying death in the real world. I began this article talking about death in simulation MMOGs for a number of reasons. In the first place, MMOGs are more commonly identified with their role-playing examples (MMORPGs) such as Ultima Online and Everquest, games that focus on virtual community-building and exploration in addition to violence and conquest. By contrast, simulation games tend to be seen as having more in common with first-person shooters like Quake, in the way in which they foreground the experience of serial death. Secondly, it is precisely the connection between simulation and death that makes games in general (as I demonstrated in relation to the media coverage of the Columbine murders) so problematic. In response, I would argue that one of the most interesting aspects of computer games recently has been the degree to which generic distinctions have been breaking down. MMORPGs, which had their roots in the Dungeons and Dragons gaming world, and the text-based world of MUDs and MOOs have since developed sophisticated third-person and even first-person representational styles to facilitate both peaceful character interactions and combat. Likewise, first-person shooters have begun to add role-playing elements (see, for example, Looking Glass Studios’ superb System Shock 2 (1999) or Lucasarts' Jedi Knight series). This trend has also been incorporated into simulation MMOGs: World War II Online includes a rudimentary set of character-tracking features, and Aces High has just announced a more ambitious expansion whose major focus will be the incorporation of role-playing elements. I feel that MMOGs in particular are all evolving towards a state that I would describe as “simulance:” simulations that, while they may be associated with a nominal representational reality, are increasingly about exploring the narrative possibilities, the mechanisms of theatrical engagement for self and community of simulation itself. Increasingly, none of the terms "simulation,” "role-playing" or indeed “game” quite captures the texture of these evolving experiences. In their complex engagement with both scripted and extemporaneous narrative, the players have more in common with period re-enactors; the immersive power of a well-designed flight simulator scenario produces a feeling in players akin to the “period rush” experienced by battlefield re-enactors, the frisson between awareness of playing a role and surrendering completely to the momentary power of its illusory reality. What troubles critics about simulations (and what also blinds them to the narrative complexity in other forms of computer games) is that they are indeed not simply examples of re-enactment —a re-staging of supposedly real events—but a generative form of narrative enactment. Computer games, particularly large-scale online games, provide a powerful set of theatrical tools with which players and player communities can help shape narratives and deepen their own narrative investment. Obviously, they are not isolated from real-world cultural factors that shape and constrain narrative possibility. However, we are starting to see the way in which the games use the idea of virtual death as the generative force for new storytelling frameworks based, in Filewood’s terms, on forward investigation. As games begin to move out of their incunabular state, they may contribute to the re-shaping of culture and consciousness, as other narrative platforms have done. Far from causing the downfall of civilisation, game-based narratives may bring with them a greater cultural awareness of simultaneous narrative possibility, of the past as sets of contingent phenomena, and a greater attention to practical, hands-on experimental problem-solving. It would be ironic, but no great surprise, if a form built around the creative possibilities inherent in serial death in fact made us more attentive to the rich alternative possibilities of living. Works Cited Aces High. HiTech Creations, 2002. http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. By Louis Althusser, trans. Ben Brewster. New York, 1971. 127-86. Barry, Ellen. “Games Feared as Youths’ Basic Training; Industry, Valued as Aid to Soldiers, on Defensive.” The Boston Globe 29 Apr 1999: A1. LexisNexis. Feb. 7, 2003. Cornered Rat Software. World War II Online: Blitzkrieg. 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Links http://www.wwiionline.com/ http://www.idsoftware.com/games/doom/ http://www.hitechcreations.com/ http://www.totalsims.com/index.php?url=wbiii/content_home.php http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;threadid=77265 http://www.senate.gov/member/ct/lieberman/releases/r110697c.html http://www.idsoftware.com/games/wolfenstein http://www.idsoftware.com/games/quake/ http://www.ea.com/eagames/official/moh_alliedassault/home.jsp http://www.jaleco.com/fighterace/index.html http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html http://www.hitechcreations.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;threadid=72560 Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Mullen, Mark. "It Was Not Death for I Stood Up…and Fragged the Dumb-Ass MoFo Who'd Wasted Me" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6.1 (2003). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/03-itwasnotdeath.php>. APA Style Mullen, M., (2003, Feb 26). It Was Not Death for I Stood Up…and Fragged the Dumb-Ass MoFo Who'd Wasted Me. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,(1). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/03-itwasnotdeath.html