Journal articles on the topic 'Body-positive feminism'

The daily life of Indonesian people have been affected a lot by social media. Communication is more often done through social media than in person, especially during the pandemic. This makes social media have a big influence on people's perceptions. Social media that has a big influence on Indonesian society because of the large number of enthusiasts is Instagram. Instagram @FEMINIST is an account that discusses feminism issues. One of the worrying issues of feminism is about women's beauty standards. The purpose of this study is to determine the effect of Instagram @FEMINIST on changes in the views of Indonesian women's beauty standards. Quantitative methods is the method this study uses. The population in this study are followers of the @FEMINIST Instagram account. The sample taken is 100 respondents. Data was obtained by distributing questionnaires using a Likert scale with the indicators of Media Exposure and Body Image theory. The results of the Hypothesis Testing obtained using IBM SPSS version 22.0 For Windows obtained a significance value of 0.000 <0.05 with a t-count of 6.461 > 1.984 so it can be concluded that the hypothesis test or t-test is acceptable. So H0 is rejected and H1 is accepted, which shows that Instagram @FEMINIST exposure has a positive effect on the view of Indonesian women's beauty standards. Kehidupan sehari-hari masyarakat Indonesia telah banyak dipengaruhi media sosial. Komunikasi lebih sering dilakukan melalui media sosial dibandingkan secara langsung, terutama saat masa pandemi. Hal ini membuat media sosial memiliki pengaruh besar terhadap persepsi masyarakat. Media sosial yang berpengaruh besar pada masyarakat Indonesia karena banyaknya peminat adalah Instagram. Instagram @FEMINIST merupakan akun yang membahas mengenai isu-isu feminisme. Salah satu isu feminisme yang mengkhawatirkan adalah tentang standar kecantikan wanita. Tujuan penelitian adalah untuk mengetahui pengaruh instagram @FEMINIST terhadap perubahan pandangan standar kecantikan wanita indonesia. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode kuantitatif. Populasi dalam penelitian ini adalah followers dari akun instagram @FEMINIST. Sampel yang diambil berjumlah 100 responden. Data diperoleh dengan menyebarkan kuesioner yang menggunakan skala likert dengan indikator teori Terpaan Media dan Body Image. Hasil Uji Hipotesis yang didapat menggunakan IBM SPSS versi 22.0 For Windows diperoleh nilai signifikansi sebesar 0,000 < 0,05 dengan t hitung 6,461 > 1,984 kesimpulannya adalah uji t uji hipotesis atau uji hipotesis dapat diterima. Hasilnya H0 ditolak dan H1 diterima, yang bermaksud Terpaan Instagram @FEMINIST berpengaruh positif terhadap pandangan standar kecantikan wanita Indonesia.

The phenomenon of motherhood is a challenging focus for research in the feminist literary theory/critique. The motherhood continent as a controversial point of contention in the society has become (or remains) a polemicized field between the traditionalism, critical, essentialist feminism and epistemology. Advocating for the deconstruction of social postulates of patriarchy starts with a revision of the positive connotations of motherhood, demonization of abortion/birth control, and the right to birth self-determination. In the struggle for power and control at the waning of matriarchy, the androcentric order established the purpose, model and objectives of motherhood. The examination in this work destabilizes elements of motherhood in A Women's Book, The Mermaids, Matrimonium, and Nefertiti Was Here. The objective of this work is to deconstruct the concept of motherhood that is present in our paternal/patriarchal traditions by denouncing the harmful and deeply rooted stereotypes. Simultaneously the work exposes and highlights the need for affirmation of authentic feminine legacy, elucidates aspects of the mother daughter relationship, and promotes the accomplishments of regional literature. In this scientific approach to the phenomenon of motherhood, the work makes use of such theoretical concepts as: ideology of intensive motherhood, creation of body language and women's writing, motherly instinct, maternal ideology, matriarchy and mythology, the black continent, identification with the mother, as well as the mother-daughter relationship, the child's belonging, motherhood and non-motherhood and abortion-birth sterility. The inclusion of these themes in the narratives is an indicative question of the subjective affirmative experience of motherhood, where we find transcendental impulses for generating women's language and creation, which juxtapose ideological norms, intensity of motherhood and achieve autonomy in literary creation.

This paper analyzes the texts written on Kupang City public transport Lane 2. The abundant texts in the corners of the city in various forms and messages represent the language dynamics varied from polite to harsh. This paper aims at explaining the form of such texts, analyzing the production, distribution, and consumption of such text and analyzing their socio-cultural practices using critical discourse analysis method of Norman Fairclough’s. The results showed that only 19.15 % of the texts contains positive meanings and 80.85% of them contains negative ones. The textswere made by the drivers, the owners of the transport, and the drivers’ assistants by writing it on the body of the vehicle. The texts are distributed directly through the city transportation media. The texts are about social rules of the community both positive and negative behavior. Texts have power relations and ideology. Ideologies that participate in the practice of such discourse are liberalism, feminism, religion, and capitalism.AbstrakKajian ini menganalisis tulisan di angkutan kota Jalur 2 Kota Kupang. Maraknya tulisan-tulisan di sudut-sudut kota dengan berbagai bentuk dan pesan merupakan contoh nyata dinamika bahasa mulai dari yang santun sampai dengan yang keras. Tujuan kajian adalah untuk menjelaskan bentuk teks pada angkutan kota Jalur 2 di Kota Kupang, menganalisis produksi, penyebaran, dan konsumsi teks, serta menganalisis praktik sosio-budaya dari teks itu menggunakan teori analisis wacana kritis Norman Fairclough. Metode yang digunakan untuk menganalisis teks adalah metode analisis wacana kritis. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa hanya 19,15% teks mengandung pesan positif dan 80,85% mengandung pesan negatif. Teks diproduksi oleh sopir, pemilik angkutan, dan kondektur dengan cara menulis di badan angkutan kota. Teks disebarkan secara langsung melalui media angkutan kota. Teks pada angkutan kota di Kota Kupang tersebut merujuk pada perilaku sosial masyarakat, baik perilaku positif maupun negatif. Teks memiliki relasi kekuasaan dan ideologi. Ideologi yang turut serta di dalam praktik wacana ialah liberalisme,feminisme, agama, dan kapitalisme.

The article takes up the biblical category of “headship,” one of the “third rails” for Christians in a context dominated by the limited conceptions of equality, especially those assumed by “second wave” and “difference” feminism, viz., that of interchangeable sameness and unbridgeable difference. Headship is easily dismissed as an instance of (bad) cultural influence that spoiled Christianity’s egalitarian beginnings. Less radically, headship is simply avoided, or glossed over with apologetic caveats. Headship is an embarrassment, because it suggests not only exclusive differences—the “head” is not the “body”—but an order between them. Head and body are “subject to each other” in distinct and coordinated ways. In what follows, the author claims that headship is not only not an affront to equality, but its very condition between subjects who belong to each other in a generous relation of reciprocal and fruitful unity and distinction. Moreover, it is the expression of the novelty of Christianity, regarding first of all the nature of God in whom there is an original Head, and a “positive other,” without any hint of subordinationism (inequality). On the contrary, the Father is never absolute, but always already determined by the Son. This original headship then informs the Christian conception of the world, its positivity, even to the point that it can give something to God. Finally, it informs the this-worldly headships (Christ–Church and husband–wife). There, headship counters the status quo, by countering the “body’s” default immanentistic “certainty” about her exclusive life-giving power, enjoining her to acknowledge a transcendent source. It restores equality to the head. For the “head,” it counters the false absolutist image of God, while enjoining him to “radiate” something of which he is first “subject,” to “be involved with,” and determined by, the woman, as a positive other. It restores equality to the body. In sum, the article urges us to turn towards the deepest resources of Christianity, to find therein a more fruitful equality.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to problematise the notion of woman-as-monster and draws together a conceptual analysis of the monstrous-feminine and its relation to maternal and monstrous bodies including its implications for equality and inclusion in the workplace. Design/methodology/approach – Whilst exploring how female monsters are inextricably tied to their sexual difference, the author draws on social and psychoanalytic perspectives to suggest how such monstrosity is expressed through ambivalence to the maternal. The author analyses two “faces” of the monstrous-feminine in particular: the archaic mother and the monstrous womb (Creed, 1993) and develop this discussion in relation to the potential for a feminist monstrous politics of organisation. Findings – First, the author exposes the basis on which the monstrous-feminine articulates and disarticulates femininity, that is to say, how a feminist analysis of monsters may enable but also foreclose a positive articulation of disruption, disorder and disorganisation central to the conceptualisation of monsters. This is done through a reading of the maternal-feminine and literature on motherhood in organisation studies. Second, the author locates the monstrous-feminine in the body and explores how maternal bodies are constructed and experienced as monstrous as they disrupt the self/other relationship. This analysis suggests that embodying the monster comes with risks and that different configurations of the monstrous maternal are necessary for equality and inclusion in the workplace. Originality/value – The paper identifies and contributes to growing research on the ambivalence of monsters and expands a neglected area of the feminine and maternal aspects of these relationships and what this means for workplace relations.

Abstract This paper engages with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of the sexed body in the Phenomenology of Perception. I focus on his notion of the sexual schema to show that, contrary to a number of feminist critiques, it does not (1) posit a neutral body overcoded by culturally-contingent sexual determinations or (2) erase the feminine body, but is informed by Merleau-Ponty particular version of the phenomenological reduction whereby factic determinations are “bracketed” to permit the object under study to reveal itself as it is rather than as we wish it to be or have been conditioned to think it. I subsequently defend Merleau-Ponty against the long-standing claim that entwining sexuality with existence prevents an analytic and by extension positive conception of sexuality by arguing that he rejects the monadic logic that this charge is premised on to instead challenge us to think of sexuality in terms of its integration with an individual’s entire embodied, embedded existence. The result is an analysis that emphasizes the ambiguity, afoundationalism, individuality, and open-ended immanent expressivity of sexuality.

Since 2012 there has been a heightened presence of the body positive movement on Instagram. Women who occupy non-normative bodies use the platform to post selfies to challenge dominant ideals of feminine beauty, including the demands to produce smooth skin, adhere to body size norms, and avoid bodily fluids. This has been accompanied by a barrage of media outlets advising their readers on the top body positive accounts they need in their life to boost their body confidence, and how to be body positive on Instagram for more self-love (Irish Examiner, 2016; Burke 2015; Vino, 2015; O'Reilly, 2016). News media circulated articles across social media platforms with stories heralding women who, through the use of selfies, open up about their experiences with eating disorders, shut body shamers down, challenge "bikini body" myths, and confront expectations directed at women's post-pregnancy bodies. Women who share the same experiences of and frustration with dominant ideals of femininity have identified with and participated in this movement through the use of body-positive hash tags, captions, and subject matter. However, as the popularity of the body positive movement and the influence of advocates grew, corporations began commoditizing the body positive advocates and using their influence to push products, capitalizing off of the movement. During the commodification process, the body positive advocates lose sight of their purpose and reproduce dominant capitalist ideologies, objectify their own bodies, and accept beauty modification practices.

When I became aware of the emergent body of legal scholarship on menstruation related topics on which this Symposium builds, I thought that the authors of these articles were very brave.1 I’m an imperfect but life-long feminist and accepted the emotional challenge that writing this Essay posed for me out of gratitude to those authors. Because my principal scholarly focus is intellectual property law, I approached the topic through the lens of trademark law. Part One of this article positions this Essay firmly within the contours of the author’s life and personal experiences with menstruation. Part Two maps common trademark and branding practices related to tampons and sanitary napkins. Part Three explains that the Lanham Act does not offer legal mechanisms by which to challenge the federal registration of sexist trademarks. As with racist trademarks, amplified criticism and persistent public pressure are the main mechanisms available to foment positive change in the marketplace for feminine hygiene products.

AbstractIn “History of Sexuality” (Vol I.) Foucault argued that repression is the wrong model of power, understanding it in exclusively negative terms, as external to the body it constrains and inhibits. Power may also be positive, productive, and constitutive of the body and its possibilities. Thus, an adequate account of the relation between cultural forces and the body, Foucault argues, must challenge the “repressive hypothesis” (RH). Contemporary feminist accounts of the body are structured by this same oppositional view of power Foucault assumed: to call on Rosi Braidotti’s distinction, discursive (cultural) forces are either negative or repressive (potestas) or positive and empowering (potentia). In this paper I argue that this opposition forecloses several possibilities for thinking the morphogenetic role of culture. In particular, it assumes wrongly that repressive relations cannot be productive.

This article interrogates how body positive and fat activist blogs offer alternative ways of feeling one’s body, using the Finnish More to Love ( MTL, 2009–2013) and its successor PlusMimmi ( PM, 2013–) and the American Queer Fat Femme Guide to Life ( QFF, 2008–) as its examples. We investigate how these blogs, despite their differences, invite their publics not only to feel positive about their own and others’ norm-exceeding bodies, but to feel in their bodies. While previous studies have criticized body positive discourses for employing a simplistic language of choice and relying on heteronormative logics of feminine attractiveness, they have not paid specific attention to how exactly body positive media attract and engage people affectively. In this article, MTL, PM, and QFF’s strategies of inviting their followers to feel in their bodies are analyzed in the context of three key themes: exercise, fashion, and sex. We argue that when explored through the framework of affect, fat activist blogs do not present body positivity simply as a matter of choice but offer a space to feel through the affective contradictions of inhabiting a fat feminine body in a sizeist society. At their best, body positive blogs open up spaces of comfort which can be radical for bodies accustomed to discomfort.

Discourses on old age and ageing are framed in narrow and binary ways, either as a decline narrative or through discourses of positive and successful ageing. The decline narrative, on the one hand, is highly centred on the decline of the ageing body as frail, leaky and unbounded, and on how old age is characterised by non-productivity, increasing passivity and dependency. Discourses on successful ageing, on the other hand, rely heavily on neo-liberal imperatives of activity, autonomy and responsibility. In successful ageing, the specificities of ageing bodies are largely overlooked while the capacity of the old person to retain a youthful body, for example, with the aid of sexuopharmaceuticals, is celebrated. This article argues for the need of a theorising of old age that goes beyond the binaries of decline and success. Drawing on the work of feminist corpomaterialists Rosi Braidotti and Elisabeth Grosz, the article proposes affirmative old age as an alternative conceptualisation of old age. As a theoretical project, affirmative old age aims to acknowledge the material specificities of the ageing body and is an attempt to theorise the ageing body in terms of difference but without understanding it as a body marked by decline, lack or negation.

The study of the social construction of the body has become crucial to contemporary academic discourses in education and physical education. Employing feminist poststructuralist theory and a qualitative ethnographic design, this study investigated how high school students identified themselves with images of bodies drawn from fitness and sports magazines, and how their body narratives were linked to their participation in physical education. Students’ body narratives reflected notions of comfortable, bad, and borderland bodies that influenced students’ physical activity choices and engagement in physical education. Girls’ narratives of their physicality were found to be significantly less comfortable than boys’. Critical pedagogy to destabilize gendered dominant discourses of mass media body culture and to develop positive, meaningful, and empowering student physicality is discussed.

Makerspaces and hacklabs are believed to encourage a positive attitude towards gaining computer skills. Within these communities for peer production, citizens can apply cutting-edge technologies in DIY projects. In recent decades, mushrooming makerspaces and hacklabs were embraced by the tech industry and governments alike. Feminist makerspaces and hacklabs, however, as they are centred around a queer feminist agenda, have raised eyebrows. In order to foster diversity in tech development, they create safer spaces for self-expression. Here, feminist lay(wo)men* (To emphasise that the category ‘Woman’ is constructed and that more people than only those who identify as women are being included, one uses the sign * after the term ‘women’ ), makers, designers, artists and tinkerers experiment with open-source hardware and software. Art and design projects emerging from feminist hacklabs focus on issues of representation and democratic participation in digital media, as well as on ways of reclaiming one’s own body. This article tries to unpack how, after an exhibition on sexual health norms, a feminist hacklab was attacked by local right-wing and conservative politicians. The attack resulted in the defunding of the feminist hacklab. But it also started a transformation process within the collective, as members became aware of critical interferences of diffracting marginalisations. The crisis triggered a discussion on how each member was threatened to very different degrees; for example, there was more at stake for members depending on their legal status in the country. The right-wing and conservative campaign against the feminist hacklab damaged the initiative, but at the same time it pushed the collective to generate increased vehemence and resilience.

Far from being a mere thematic device, the body plays a crucial role in poetry, especially for modern women poets. The inward turn to an intimate autobiographical dimension, which is commonly seen as characteristic of female writing, usually complies with the requests of feminist theorists, urging writers to reconquer their identity through the assertion of their bodies. However, inscribing the body in verse is often problematic, since it frequently emerges from a complicated interaction between positive self-redefinition, life writing, and the confession of trauma. This is especially true for authors writing under the influence of the American confessional trend, whose biographies were often scarred by mental illness and self-destructive inclinations. This paper assesses the role of the body in the representation of the self in a selection of texts by American women poets—namely Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Louise Glück—where the body and its disclosure act as vehicles for a heterogeneous redefinition of the female identity.

Abstract This paper explores the cultural context and ecological implications of two menstrual festivals in northeastern India: Rajaparba in Orissa and Ambuvaci in Kamakhya, Assam. We argue that these festivals are extremely fruitful sites to explore questions of women and power in religious communities where the Goddess is a central focus as well as their ecological implications for an integral worldview. These festivals, usually held at the beginning of the monsoon when the Hindu Goddess menstruates, are times when the earth is regenerated, when the body of the Goddess is regenerated, and when women and communities are regenerated in various ways. Participants report that pilgrimages to these festivals are indeed transformative and have positive impacts on their lives. As a result, we critique feminist arguments that claim that Hinduism is the basis for women’s social disempowerment, and as a result, the only meaningful social change must occur on a secular basis. We also use these festivals to critique contemporary feminist developmentalist ideologies.

Background: The loss of breast is a major concern for women with breast cancer volunteer for mastectomy, because they feel that their feminine identity is at risk of damage. The present study aims to investigate the mediating role of Cognitive Emotion Regulation (CER) in the relationship between anxiety and body image in women with breast cancer volunteered for mastectomy. Methods: The is a correlational study. The study population consists of all women with breast cancer volunteered for mastectomy referred to Imam Khomeini and Imam Hossein hospitals in Tehran, Iran. Of these, 350 volunteers were selected by a convenience sampling method. The instruments were Beck Anxiety Inventorry, Body Image and Relationship Scale of Hormes et al., and Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire of Garnefski et al. Structural equation modeling were used to analyze the research hypotheses. Results: Anxiety had a positive effect on maladaptive CER strategies (β=0.654) and a negative effect on body image (β=-0.574) (P<0.001). The direct effect of maladaptive CER strategies on body image was positive and significant (β=0.271, P<0.05). The direct effects of anxiety on adaptive CER strategies (β=-0.836) and body image (β=-0.849) were negative and significant (P<0.001). The direct effect of adaptive CER strategies on body image was negative and significant (β=-0.266, P<0.001). Conclusion: Women undergoing mastectomy will experience more anxiety and negative body image if they use maladaptive CER strategies, while those who use adaptive CER strategies will experience less anxiety and negative body image.

Sex toys are widely marketed on the Internet. Browsing for, buying, and reviewing sex toys online are popular cybersexual activities. The aim of this study was to investigate consumers’ experiences with different types of realistic sex toys via online product reviews on Amazon.com. Toys were categorized in a 2 × 2 design regarding their representation of the human body (genitalia sex toys representing reproductive organs only versus torso toys representing larger parts of the human body) and their depiction of gender (toys representing female versus male body parts). Informed by feminist discourses on sex toys as well as sexual script theory and consumer research, the study explored the overall evaluations (RQ1), most frequently addressed characteristics (RQ2), usage patterns (RQ3), and perceived effects (RQ4) of the four groups of sex toys. A quantitative manual content analysis of N = 778 online sex toy reviews showed that 79% of consumers gave popular realistic sex toys positive ratings (RQ1). The most frequently mentioned characteristics were quality, material, and shape (RQ2). Most reviewers were men and used sex toys for solo sexual activities (RQ3). An additional qualitative analysis of n = 69 reviews addressing the perceived effects of sex toy use revealed that consumers predominantly mentioned positive effects (RQ4). Genitalia sex toys received better evaluations than torso sex toys and were perceived to be complementary tools to enhance sexual arousal, whereas the use of torso toys entailed anthropomorphization and symbolic social interactions. Implications for future research and design of different types of sex toys are discussed.

SummaryStudies have found positive correlations between prenatal exposure to testosterone and masculinization of offspring traits, particularly among females. The present study sought to determine if physical or sexual activity by the mother during pregnancy was related to masculinized/defeminized offspring traits in adulthood. Data were obtained from a large sample of North American college students (offspring) and their mothers. Information about maternal activity levels during pregnancy were reported retrospectively by each mother. The offspring provided self-ratings of various sexually dimorphic traits. Several significant correlations were found. By and large, as maternal physical activity increased, feminine mannerisms decreased and masculine mannerisms increased in the offspring, particularly for females. Maternal physical activity was also associated with increased upper- and lower-body strength and especially with adult height among offspring. Sexual activity by the mother was only associated with upper-body strength and adult height, particularly of the female offspring. Several sexually dimorphic physical traits in offspring are associated with maternal activity levels during pregnancy. Prenatal testosterone is almost certainly involved. The associations could either reflect genetic influences (given that prenatal testosterone is highly heritable) or an effect of maternal testosterone being transferred to the developing fetus. More research is needed to assess the relative merit of these two possibilities.

Problem setting. Trends in the introduction of new spelling rules in justice are related to a number of issues. One of the main problems is the professional training of lawyers, their language competence, readiness to accept new prescriptions. The legal literature has not yet formed a single view on the use of language norms in justice, so it is necessary to introduce into legal practice precisely those verbal constructions that are specifically Ukrainian, would be common to all speakers. Analysis of scientific research. Problems of formation and development of Ukrainian spelling, terminology of gender linguistics, introduction of norms of modern literary language, aspects of feminine innovations were studied by V. Nimchuk, O. Chueshkova, V. Danilchuk, A. Arkhangelska and others. Target of research. Research of the problem of introduction of new orthographic norms into the justice system, sphere of interpersonal communication, determination of tendencies of introduction of feminists into oral and written speech, regularities of use of these words, characteristic of the conducted interrogation on realization of orthographic innovations in legal practice. Article’s main body. The spelling rules are a system of generally accepted rules of the Ukrainian language, which determine the ways of transmitting speech in writing were found. The perfection of spelling at all its levels reflects the current state of Ukrainian legislation, allows you to accurately reflect changes in public life. Language as a way of expressing a person’s worldview is able to change his consciousness, to adapt to their forms and patterns. The more accurate and rich the language, the more complete, as close as possible to reality, the language of justice will be. It is important to introduce new spelling rules in the legal sphere, the use of femininities (the use of words in the feminine gender) to restore gender and linguistic equality. The survey showed that men are more inclined to use femininities (25% answered “yes” and 43.7% – sometimes), while women are less interested in it (only 8.7% answered “yes” and 67.4% – sometimes). Regarding the negative attitude, men and women were in the range of 30% with a slight positive shift in the perception of women. The level of use of femininities by both men and women, as well as in all age groups, is low, in the largest group of people aged 30 to 50 the share of responses to the use of femininities “sometimes” is almost 70%, indicating the lack of interest of lawyers to use this language norm. Conclusions and prospects for development. Linguistic innovations make it possible to respond correctly to changes in modern linguistic and written practice, to determine the rules of writing new borrowed words and proper names, to unify spelling rules. This significantly improves the linguistic perfection of the judiciary.

Researchers have noted several barriers that may exist in relation to women’s pursuit toward and participation in consistent physical activity. These barriers include, but are not limited to, unrealistic social expectations, body image, physique anxiety, evaluation concerns, and lack of a positive support network (Focht & Hausenblas, 2003; Lloyd & Little, 2005; Salvatore & Marecek, 2010; Vrazel, Saunders & Wilcox, 2008). Other researchers have indicated that physical activity pursued in outdoor environments may alleviate some of these barriers (McDermott, 2004). Therefore, the purpose of this study was to use a feminist framework to qualitatively describe the experiences of participants in an all-female outdoor recreation program in relation to confidence building, motivation to pursue physical activity, and social support. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 10 participants who had been active in the group for two or more years. The results of this study suggest that through participation in this women’s only group, they gained confidence in their physical and leadership abilities, were motivated through both environmental and social means, and experienced social bonding and networking among others. The authors provide applications and recommendations for future research.

This essay considers how environmentalism can be interwoven with discourses of sexuality and the ways in which sexuality can participate in environmental justice movements. By thinking with provocative, erotic media that highlight environmental degradation, it marries investigations of ecological crisis at the hands of deforestation and porn studies with two aims. First, it highlights the fraught relationship a pornographic video aggregator like Pornhub might share with feminist and queer epistemologies. Second, it emphasizes the ecosexual nature of environmental justice by way of Pornhub’s Give America Wood initiative (2014) and the documentary Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (2014). While Goodbye Gauley Mountain and Pornhub are incommensurate in many ways, together they demonstrate how masturbatory ecologies enable a relationship with the environment that can be both active, as in the film’s offering, and passive, as with Pornhub’s, and thus constitute a “perverted” environmental justice through the experience and demonstration of sexuality. A perverted environmental justice envisions a broader framework that recognizes the potential to actively and passively participate in environmental social justice while also enfolding the environment into sexual arrangements. “Masturbatory ecologies” thus signifies a self-gratifying mode of environmentalism that harnesses the self, the body, and the erotic to foster positive environmental world building in apocalyptic times.

The article explores the role of formal and informal institutions in influencing the representation of women in the two major political parties in Ghana – NDC (National Democratic Congress) and NPP (New Patriotic Party) – as well as the small party CPP (Convention People’s Party). Paradoxically, with its first president, Kwame Nkrumah (CPP), Ghana was one of the first countries in Africa to introduce a quota in 1959, reserving ten seats for women in Parliament. With a representation of 11% women after the election in 2012 and 13% after the election in 2016, however, Ghana has not been part of the positive development on the continent. Drawing on the body of literature on feminist institutionalism, the article explores the dynamics of power and change relating to the low representation of women in politics in Ghana. It further investigates responses to initiatives to promote more female candidates in Parliament – the reduction of filing fees and the introduction of women’s seats. The article argues that the formal institutions in the form of party structures work both as an obstacle and an opportunity to promote more women in politics, and that the informal structures in the form of the gender culture in Parliament and verbal abuse work against more women in politics.

An under-researched aspect of transgender sex workers in China pertains to their desires and expressions of femininity. Male-to-Female (MTF) transgender sex workers are a high-risk population prone to depression and stress regarding body image, intimate relationships marked by violence, and social stigma, rendering them vulnerable to hate crimes and discrimination. Ethnographic data from in-depth interviews with 49 MTF transgender sex workers indicate that sex, gender and feminine desire are mutable in the construction of self and subjectivity. This study uses the conceptual framework of gender performativity, that is, gender is performative and distinct from physical bodies and binary classifications. It is not only an individual’s normative gender expressions which are based on the sex assigned at birth, but it also reinforces the normative gender performances of the gender binary. This article argues that the 49 MTF transgender sex workers are embodiments of gendered performances, displaying femininity to ameliorate hate crimes and discrimination as well as reinforce the masculinity and sexuality of their clients and intimate sex partners. Embracing their femininity constitutes a self-help program, enabling them to build self-confidence and develop a positive self-image in the face of overwhelming social disapproval.

Background/Aim. Pelvic floor dysfunction is a frequent problem affecting more than 50% of women in peri- and postmenopause. Considering that ageing and menopause befall in the significant factors causing this issue, as well as the expected longevity of women in the world and in our country, pelvic floor dysfunction prevelence is foreseen to be even higher. The aim of the study was to evaluate impact of the symptoms of pelvic dysfunction on quality of life and examine body image satisfaction in adult women with pelvic organ prolapse presenting to tertiary care clinic for surgical treatment. Methods. This prospective case-control study included 50 patients who presented to tertiary care gynecology clinic for surgical treatment and 50 controls with normal pelvic floor support and without urinary incontinence who presented tertiary care gynecology clinic for other reasons. Both, patients and controls, completed two quastionnaires recommended for the evaluation of symptoms (Pelvic floor distress inventory - short forms) and quality of life impact (Pelvic floor impact questionnaire - short form) of pelvic organ prolapse, and Body Image Scale. Results. The patients scored significantly worse on the prolapse, urinary, colorectal scales and overall score of Pelvic floor distress inventory - 20 than controls subjects (134.91 vs 78.08; p < 0.01). The patients also measured significant decrease in condition- specific quality of life (89.23 vs 3.1; p < 0.01). They were more likely to feel self-conscious (78% vs 42%; p < 0.01), less likely to feel physically attractive (78% vs 22%; p < 0.01), more likely to have difficulty looking at themselves naked (70% vs 42%; p < 0.01), less likely to feel sexually attractive (64% vs 32%; p < 0.01), and less likely to feel feminine (56% vs 16%; p < 0.05), than controls. There were no differencies in their feeling of dissatisfaction with appearance when dressed, avoiding people because of appereance and overall dissatisfaction with their body. There was a positive correlation between decreased quality of life and body image in women with pelvic dysfunction. Conclusion. Women with pelvic floor dysfunction have decreased quality of life and body image.

Study Objective. The objective of this study was to evaluate whether body weight status and clinical hyperandrogenism may influence social competencies and psychological gender features in adolescent girls. Design and Participants. In 104 adolescent girls, psychological gender inventory (PGI) and social competencies questionnaire (SCQ) (assessing social abilities in three aspects: intimacy (I), social exposure (SE), and assertiveness (AS)) were performed. Subjects were divided into four subgroups: G1—24 nonobese girls without hyperandrogenism, G2—18 obese girls without hyperandrogenism, G3—30 nonobese hyperandrogenic girls, and G4—32 obese girls with hyperandrogenism. Results. There were no significant differences in all parts of SCQ and PGI between the study and control groups. The feminine woman type dominated in all groups; in G3 and G4, masculine woman type appeared more often than in G1 and G2 (13.3% and 12.5% versus 4.0% and 0.0%, resp.). In G4, positive relationship between BMI z-score and SCQ (r=0.4, p=0.03) was found. In G1, the relationship was opposite (r=−0.5, p=0.03). Hirsutism correlated negatively with SCQ (r=−0.5, p=0.02), I (r=−0.5, p=0.02), and AS (r=−0.5, p=0.02) only in G1; in other groups, this relationship was insignificant. In G4, higher testosterone level was associated with lower SCQ (r=−0.5, p=0.008) and AS (r=−0.5, p=0.003). In G2, testosterone concentration correlated positively with SCQ (r=0.6, p=0.01), SE (r=0.5, p=0.02), and AS (r=0.6, p=0.02). Conclusion. In adolescent girls, neither body weight nor clinical features of hyperandrogenism seem to be the source of evaluated disorders in psychological functioning.

Autonomy has been conceived as a masculine trait in literature. However, feminist literature and SDT theorists consider autonomy as a requisite need for all irrespective of gender, class and culture. The Self-Determination Theory perspective posits autonomy as a basic psychological need and an essential nutriment for well-being. The aim of the present paper was to study the effects of dispositional autonomy on subjective wellbeing among women in Kashmir. The aim was to see the existence of this attribute among women being in collectivistic culture. The relationship of the dimensions of dispositional autonomy i.e., authorship/self-congruence, susceptibility to control and interest-taking with subjective wellbeing was examined and their effects on subjective wellbeing was studied. The 15-item, 5-point Likert Scale namely Index of Autonomous Functioning (IAF) (Weinstein et al., 2012b) was used to assess dispositional autonomy. The 14-item, 5-point Likert Scale namely, Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS) (S Stewart-Brown & Janmohamed, 2008) was used to assess subjective wellbeing. The study was conducted on a sample of 183 Kashmiri women. The correlation and regression analysis was done to study the relationship and effects of dispositional autonomy on subjective wellbeing among women in collectivistic culture. The results showed a significant positive effect of dispositional autonomy on subjective wellbeing of women. The study has contributed in the existing body of knowledge by highlighting the importance of autonomy as a basic psychological need in the wellbeing of women.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to foreground non-conformity in organisational life as it relates to black female managers. My intervention here is to problematise organisational theory in relation to its limited ability to engage with affect and to point to a more generative framework. Through centering the body, the author also seeks to offer a counter narrative to the field of Positive Organisation Scholarship and its drive to primarily engage with happy feelings and harmony. Design/methodology/approach – The author gives a close reading of four black women's interview-based narratives to engage with the ways in which they refuse to conform to organisational scripts of happiness. The author makes a case for using both critical discourse-based and affective readings of everyday experience which social science readings cannot readily account for. Findings – Non-conformity has a number of local effects including negotiating the present from a position of alternative histories of struggle and cultural values, and holding different and conflicting realities and subject positions. Moreover, a reading of these women's accounts suggests that affect is both personal and social and can manifest in multiple, embodied, transformative, and potentially destructive ways. The author comes to new ways of understanding organisations and resistance when the author uses affect as an investigative lens. Research limitations/implications – By virtue of the close reading necessitated by the nature of the study, the sample of this research is small. While the intention is not generality, the findings of the research have to be understood in context and applied within different settings with caution. The implications of this research are that there remains an urgent need for critical-orientated research which centers affect in order to counter the growing positive psychologies which relegate asymmetries to the margins. Social implications – In South Africa where black women constitute the numerical majority, there is an urgent need to understand and reverse their status as a minority in management and social life. This research goes some way in explicating this process. Originality/value – While there is well-developed body of feminist research which seeks to study black women in South Africa, there is a dearth of research into black women in the workplace. This paper therefore presents an original look at black female managers by applying international theoretical tools to a context that is under theorised. This research presents new methodological and theoretical tools and analysis to the South African workplace.

Sport is still understood as a traditional bastion of masculinity that exalts physical qualities such as strength and speed, and psychological traits such as aggression and perseverance, deeming women’s participation undesirable and unnecessary. Nevertheless, women for decades, in strict separation from men or within so-called “women’s sports”, were achieving results worthy of the attention of even the fiercest sceptics. Because of its nature founded in physicality, sport is still relatively seldom the area of political struggle for gender equality, although female athletes have occasionally done more for positive outcomes of that struggle than is acknowledged. In this paper, I discuss the ambivalent nature of sport contributing, on the one hand, to the essentialisation of genders in their differences and the petrification of power relations between them, and containing, on the other, indications of destruction or at least of corruption of the traditional, hierarchically established gender norms. The paper consists of four parts. In the first introductory part, I explain the reasons for concentrating my discussion on formalised competitive sports and approaches I am using. While emphasising the biopolitical aspects of the subject, I start my analysis with the description of a proclaimed guiding principles of contemporary sports contained in the spirit of Olympism. In the second part, I discuss the ontology of sport contained in the ideas of the founder of the modern Olympic Games Baron Pierre de Coubertin and the consequential factors influencing women ‘s participation in sports. These range from the perception of women’s allegedly debilitating physical and psychological traits, through hypersexualisation of female athletes’ body, or the attitude that it is not feminine enough, to the accusations that female athletes harm their health jeopardising, for example, the basic feminine duty – that of motherhood. In the third part, I put de Coubertin’s arguments in the contemporary context emphasising the relevance the concept of hegemonic masculinity has on the contemporary understanding of masculinity and the role of sport in maintaining it. In the last, fourth part, I discuss emancipatory aspects of sports, concluding on their ability to disrupt both essentialised femininity and essentialised masculinity.

In my postgraduate formation during the last years of the 80’s, we had close to thirty hospital beds in a pavilion called “sépticas” (1). In Colombia, where abortion was completely penalized, the pavilion was mostly filled with women with insecure, complicated abortions. The focus we received was technical: management of intensive care; performance of hysterectomies, colostomies, bowel resection, etc. In those times, some nurses were nuns and limited themselves to interrogating the patients to get them to “confess” what they had done to themselves in order to abort. It always disturbed me that the women who left alive, left without any advice or contraceptive method. Having asked a professor of mine, he responded with disdain: “This is a third level hospital, those things are done by nurses of the first level”. Seeing so much pain and death, I decided to talk to patients, and I began to understand their decision. I still remember so many deaths with sadness, but one case in particular pains me: it was a woman close to being fifty who arrived with a uterine perforation in a state of advanced sepsis. Despite the surgery and the intensive care, she passed away. I had talked to her, and she told me she was a widow, had two adult kids and had aborted because of “embarrassment towards them” because they were going to find out that she had an active sexual life. A few days after her passing, the pathology professor called me, surprised, to tell me that the uterus we had sent for pathological examination showed no pregnancy. She was a woman in a perimenopausal state with a pregnancy exam that gave a false positive due to the high levels of FSH/LH typical of her age. SHE WAS NOT PREGNANT!!! She didn’t have menstruation because she was premenopausal and a false positive led her to an unsafe abortion. Of course, the injuries caused in the attempted abortion caused the fatal conclusion, but the real underlying cause was the social taboo in respect to sexuality. I had to watch many adolescents and young women leave the hospital alive, but without a uterus, sometime without ovaries and with colostomies, to be looked down on by a society that blamed them for deciding to not be mothers. I had to see situation of women that arrived with their intestines protruding from their vaginas because of unsafe abortions. I saw women, who in their despair, self-inflicted injuries attempting to abort with elements such as stick, branches, onion wedges, alum bars and clothing hooks among others. Among so many deaths, it was hard not having at least one woman per day in the morgue due to an unsafe abortion. During those time, healthcare was not handled from the biopsychosocial, but only from the technical (2); nonetheless, in the academic evaluations that were performed, when asked about the definition of health, we had to recite the text from the International Organization of Health that included these three aspects. How contradictory! To give response to the health need of women and guarantee their right when I was already a professor, I began an obstetric contraceptive service in that third level hospital. There was resistance from the directors, but fortunately I was able to acquire international donations for the institution, which facilitated its acceptance. I decided to undertake a teaching career with the hope of being able to sensitize health professionals towards an integral focus of health and illness. When the International Conference of Population and Development (ICPD) was held in Cairo in 1994, I had already spent various years in teaching, and when I read their Action Program, I found a name for what I was working on: Sexual and Reproductive Rights. I began to incorporate the tools given by this document into my professional and teaching life. I was able to sensitize people at my countries Health Ministry, and we worked together moving it to an approach of human rights in areas of sexual and reproductive health (SRH). This new viewpoint, in addition to being integral, sought to give answers to old problems like maternal mortality, adolescent pregnancy, low contraceptive prevalence, unplanned or unwanted pregnancy or violence against women. With other sensitized people, we began with these SRH issues to permeate the Colombian Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology, some universities, and university hospitals. We are still fighting in a country that despite many difficulties has improved its indicators of SRH. With the experience of having labored in all sphere of these topics, we manage to create, with a handful of colleagues and friend at the Universidad El Bosque, a Master’s Program in Sexual and Reproductive Health, open to all professions, in which we broke several paradigms. A program was initiated in which the qualitative and quantitative investigation had the same weight, and some alumni of the program are now in positions of leadership in governmental and international institutions, replicating integral models. In the Latin American Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecology (FLASOG, English acronym) and in the International Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecology (FIGO), I was able to apply my experience for many years in the SRH committees of these association to benefit women and girls in the regional and global environments. When I think of who has inspired me in these fights, I should highlight the great feminist who have taught me and been with me in so many fights. I cannot mention them all, but I have admired the story of the life of Margaret Sanger with her persistence and visionary outlook. She fought throughout her whole life to help the women of the 20th century to be able to obtain the right to decide when and whether or not they wanted to have children (3). Of current feminist, I have had the privilege of sharing experiences with Carmen Barroso, Giselle Carino, Debora Diniz and Alejandra Meglioli, leaders of the International Planned Parenthood Federation – Western Hemisphere Region (IPPF-RHO). From my country, I want to mention my countrywoman Florence Thomas, psychologist, columnist, writer and Colombo-French feminist. She is one of the most influential and important voices in the movement for women rights in Colombia and the region. She arrived from France in the 1960’s, in the years of counterculture, the Beatles, hippies, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre, a time in which capitalism and consumer culture began to be criticized (4). It was then when they began to talk about the female body, female sexuality and when the contraceptive pill arrived like a total revolution for women. Upon its arrival in 1967, she experimented a shock because she had just assisted in a revolution and only found a country of mothers, not women (5). That was the only destiny for a woman, to be quiet and submissive. Then she realized that this could not continue, speaking of “revolutionary vanguards” in such a patriarchal environment. In 1986 with the North American and European feminism waves and with her academic team, they created the group “Mujer y Sociedad de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia”, incubator of great initiatives and achievements for the country (6). She has led great changes with her courage, the strength of her arguments, and a simultaneously passionate and agreeable discourse. Among her multiple books, I highlight “Conversaciones con Violeta” (7), motivated by the disdain towards feminism of some young women. She writes it as a dialogue with an imaginary daughter in which, in an intimate manner, she reconstructs the history of women throughout the centuries and gives new light of the fundamental role of feminism in the life of modern women. Another book that shows her bravery is “Había que decirlo” (8), in which she narrates the experience of her own abortion at age twenty-two in sixty’s France. My work experience in the IPPF-RHO has allowed me to meet leaders of all ages in diverse countries of the region, who with great mysticism and dedication, voluntarily, work to achieve a more equal and just society. I have been particularly impressed by the appropriation of the concept of sexual and reproductive rights by young people, and this has given me great hope for the future of the planet. We continue to have an incomplete agenda of the action plan of the ICPD of Cairo but seeing how the youth bravely confront the challenges motivates me to continue ahead and give my years of experience in an intergenerational work. In their policies and programs, the IPPF-RHO evidences great commitment for the rights and the SRH of adolescent, that are consistent with what the organization promotes, for example, 20% of the places for decision making are in hands of the young. Member organizations, that base their labor on volunteers, are true incubators of youth that will make that unassailable and necessary change of generations. In contrast to what many of us experienced, working in this complicated agenda of sexual and reproductive health without theoretical bases, today we see committed people with a solid formation to replace us. In the college of medicine at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and the College of Nursing at the Universidad El Bosque, the new generations are more motivated and empowered, with great desire to change the strict underlying structures. Our great worry is the onslaught of the ultra-right, a lot of times better organized than us who do support rights, that supports anti-rights group and are truly pro-life (9). Faced with this scenario, we should organize ourselves better, giving battle to guarantee the rights of women in the local, regional, and global level, aggregating the efforts of all pro-right organizations. We are now committed to the Objectives of Sustainable Development (10), understood as those that satisfy the necessities of the current generation without jeopardizing the capacity of future generations to satisfy their own necessities. This new agenda is based on: - The unfinished work of the Millennium Development Goals - Pending commitments (international environmental conventions) - The emergent topics of the three dimensions of sustainable development: social, economic, and environmental. We now have 17 objectives of sustainable development and 169 goals (11). These goals mention “universal access to reproductive health” many times. In objective 3 of this list is included guaranteeing, before the year 2030, “universal access to sexual and reproductive health services, including those of family planning, information, and education.” Likewise, objective 5, “obtain gender equality and empower all women and girls”, establishes the goal of “assuring the universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights in conformity with the action program of the International Conference on Population and Development, the Action Platform of Beijing”. It cannot be forgotten that the term universal access to sexual and reproductive health includes universal access to abortion and contraception. Currently, 830 women die every day through preventable maternal causes; of these deaths, 99% occur in developing countries, more than half in fragile environments and in humanitarian contexts (12). 216 million women cannot access modern contraception methods and the majority live in the nine poorest countries in the world and in a cultural environment proper to the decades of the seventies (13). This number only includes women from 15 to 49 years in any marital state, that is to say, the number that takes all women into account is much greater. Achieving the proposed objectives would entail preventing 67 million unwanted pregnancies and reducing maternal deaths by two thirds. We currently have a high, unsatisfied demand for modern contraceptives, with extremely low use of reversible, long term methods (intrauterine devices and subdermal implants) which are the most effect ones with best adherence (14). There is not a single objective among the 17 Objectives of Sustainable Development where contraception does not have a prominent role: from the first one that refers to ending poverty, going through the fifth one about gender equality, the tenth of inequality reduction among countries and within the same country, until the sixteenth related with peace and justice. If we want to change the world, we should procure universal access to contraception without myths or barriers. We have the moral obligation of achieving the irradiation of extreme poverty and advancing the construction of more equal, just, and happy societies. In emergency contraception (EC), we are very far from reaching expectations. If in reversible, long-term methods we have low prevalence, in EC the situation gets worse. Not all faculties in the region look at this topic, and where it is looked at, there is no homogeneity in content, not even within the same country. There are still myths about their real action mechanisms. There are countries, like Honduras, where it is prohibited and there is no specific medicine, the same case as in Haiti. Where it is available, access is dismal, particularly among girls, adolescents, youth, migrants, afro-descendent, and indigenous. The multiple barriers for the effective use of emergency contraceptives must be knocked down, and to work toward that we have to destroy myths and erroneous perceptions, taboos and cultural norms; achieve changes in laws and restrictive rules within countries, achieve access without barriers to the EC; work in union with other sectors; train health personnel and the community. It is necessary to transform the attitude of health personal to a service above personal opinion. Reflecting on what has occurred after the ICPD in Cairo, their Action Program changed how we look at the dynamics of population from an emphasis on demographics to a focus on the people and human rights. The governments agreed that, in this new focus, success was the empowerment of women and the possibility of choice through expanded access to education, health, services, and employment among others. Nonetheless, there have been unequal advances and inequality persists in our region, all the goals were not met, the sexual and reproductive goals continue beyond the reach of many women (15). There is a long road ahead until women and girls of the world can claim their rights and liberty of deciding. Globally, maternal deaths have been reduced, there is more qualified assistance of births, more contraception prevalence, integral sexuality education, and access to SRH services for adolescents are now recognized rights with great advances, and additionally there have been concrete gains in terms of more favorable legal frameworks, particularly in our region; nonetheless, although it’s true that the access condition have improved, the restrictive laws of the region expose the most vulnerable women to insecure abortions. There are great challenges for governments to recognize SRH and the DSR as integral parts of health systems, there is an ample agenda against women. In that sense, access to SRH is threatened and oppressed, it requires multi-sector mobilization and litigation strategies, investigation and support for the support of women’s rights as a multi-sector agenda. Looking forward, we must make an effort to work more with youth to advance not only the Action Program of the ICPD, but also all social movements. They are one of the most vulnerable groups, and the biggest catalyzers for change. The young population still faces many challenges, especially women and girls; young girls are in particularly high risk due to lack of friendly and confidential services related with sexual and reproductive health, gender violence, and lack of access to services. In addition, access to abortion must be improved; it is the responsibility of states to guarantee the quality and security of this access. In our region there still exist countries with completely restrictive frameworks. New technologies facilitate self-care (16), which will allow expansion of universal access, but governments cannot detach themselves from their responsibility. Self-care is expanding in the world and can be strategic for reaching the most vulnerable populations. There are new challenges for the same problems, that require a re-interpretation of the measures necessary to guaranty the DSR of all people, in particular women, girls, and in general, marginalized and vulnerable populations. It is necessary to take into account migrations, climate change, the impact of digital media, the resurgence of hate discourse, oppression, violence, xenophobia, homo/transphobia, and other emergent problems, as SRH should be seen within a framework of justice, not isolated. We should demand accountability of the 179 governments that participate in the ICPD 25 years ago and the 193 countries that signed the Sustainable Development Objectives. They should reaffirm their commitments and expand their agenda to topics not considered at that time. Our region has given the world an example with the Agreement of Montevideo, that becomes a blueprint for achieving the action plan of the CIPD and we should not allow retreat. This agreement puts people at the center, especially women, and includes the topic of abortion, inviting the state to consider the possibility of legalizing it, which opens the doors for all governments of the world to recognize that women have the right to choose on maternity. This agreement is much more inclusive: Considering that the gaps in health continue to abound in the region and the average statistics hide the high levels of maternal mortality, of sexually transmitted diseases, of infection by HIV/AIDS, and the unsatisfied demand for contraception in the population that lives in poverty and rural areas, among indigenous communities, and afro-descendants and groups in conditions of vulnerability like women, adolescents and incapacitated people, it is agreed: 33- To promote, protect, and guarantee the health and the sexual and reproductive rights that contribute to the complete fulfillment of people and social justice in a society free of any form of discrimination and violence. 37- Guarantee universal access to quality sexual and reproductive health services, taking into consideration the specific needs of men and women, adolescents and young, LGBT people, older people and people with incapacity, paying particular attention to people in a condition of vulnerability and people who live in rural and remote zone, promoting citizen participation in the completing of these commitments. 42- To guarantee, in cases in which abortion is legal or decriminalized in the national legislation, the existence of safe and quality abortion for non-desired or non-accepted pregnancies and instigate the other States to consider the possibility of modifying public laws, norms, strategies, and public policy on the voluntary interruption of pregnancy to save the life and health of pregnant adolescent women, improving their quality of life and decreasing the number of abortions (17).

ABSTRACTThis artwork thesis depicts a multimedia performance, which combines several media such as photos, videos, sound recordings, installation, diagrams, charts, graphic design, and scientific journals, as well as digital cameras in performance-lecture. The creation practice borrowing the mode of a lecture combined with performance refers to "jek nebenne!" as the director's memory-recollection to start his work practice.The term "jek nebenne!" is not a standard language which means "don't mess with me!", it is used as the director's foothold in connecting a trauma in a family as a result of domestic violence which is reflected in the same experience of his mother, just like the experience of a female masseuse, brick miner, and farmworker for over thirty years in Bangkalan over the behavior of their respective husbands, as well as a shift of function from the feminine to the masculine. "Jek nebenne!" becomes some sort of creation reference which was often said by his mother, haunting him to this day and suspected to be the source of failure. Including the failure to integrate with the two performers who also experienced trauma (sexual and gender) until the show goes on. His position was leaked as a therapist to evacuate from the situation by sharing his sensitive emotion to the public; leaking of conflict concoction, exploration of body and ability, as well as performer's skill through medias mentioned above. The practice of performance-lecture focuses on psychodrama with a shift of dramaturgy from trauma to sensitive and intervening performer and the production team to show that domestic violence creates a prolonged scar. The director fears that the cruising range of his biography trauma will cause him to re-experience the vulnerability and leaving the audience with intricacy. The practice of such shift as a process of evacuation from acute trauma, as a continuation of "jek nebenne!" self-healing method for positive growth of the soul. Keywords: performance-lecture, "jek nebenne!", self-healing method

The aim of this study was to analyze the relationship between fitness, selective attention and the physical activity habit in high school students. The sample was configured by a total of 97 participants, 51 females (n = 51) and 46 males (n = 46) from Barcelona (Catalonia), aged between 13 and 15 years (13,7 ± 1,17). To analyze the selective attention capacity, it was used the Perception of Similarities and Differences Test (CARAS-R). Regarding physical fitness, linear velocity (30-meter dash test), lower body strength (board jump test), agility (10x5 meter test) and aerobic capacity (Luc-Léger test) were evaluated. Finally, the physical activity was calculated with the International Physical Activity Questionnaire adapted for adolescents (IPAQ-A). The results showed that the subjects with higher performance in the Luc-Léger test obtained better scores in the CARAS-R test. A high correlation was also obtained between the records of the Luc-Léger test and the CARAS-R test in both boys and girls and a high correlation between the IPAQ-A questionnaire and the CARAS-R test in boys. These findings highlight the relationship between selective attention and the fitness level in adolescents. In this sense, the importance of practicing physical activity at this age is reinforced, suggesting that the increase of physical condition may have positive implications on selective attention. El objetivo del presente estudio fue analizar la relación entre las capacidades físicas, el hábito de realizar actividad física y la capacidad de atención selectiva en una muestra de estudiantes de enseñanza secundaria. La muestra fue configurada por un total de 97 participantes, concretamente 51 estudiantes de género femenino (n = 51) y 46 de género masculino (n = 46) de Barcelona (Cataluña) con edades comprendidas entre los 13 y los 15 años (13,7 ± 1,17). Para analizar la capacidad de atención selectiva se utilizó el Test de Percepción de Semejanzas y Diferencias (CARAS-R). Referente a la condición física, se evaluó la velocidad lineal (30 metros lisos), la fuerza de tren inferior (test de salto horizontal), la agilidad (test de10x5 metros) y la resistencia aeróbica (test de Luc-Léger). Finalmente el hábito de realización de actividad física se calculó con el Cuestionario internacional de actividad física en su formato adaptado para adolescentes (IPAQ-A). Los resultados mostraron que los participantes con un mayor rendimiento en el test de Luc-Léger, obtuvieron mejores puntuaciones en el test CARAS-R. Asimismo se obtuvo una correlación alta entre los registros del test de Luc-Léger y el test CARAS-R tanto para el género masculino como el femenino y una correlación alta entre el cuestionario IPAQ-A y el test CARAS-R en el género masculino. Dichos hallazgos, ponen de manifiesto la relación entre la atención selectiva y el nivel de condición física en adolescentes. En este sentido, se refuerza la importancia de practicar actividad física a esta edad, sugiriendo que el incremento de la condición física puede tener implicaciones positiva sobre la atención selectiva. O objetivo do presente estudo foi analisar a relação entre habilidades físicas, atenção seletiva e o hábito de praticar atividade física numa amostra de estudantes do ensino médio. A amostra foi composta por um total de 97 sujeitos, especificamente 51 estudantes do sexo feminino (n = 51) e 46 do sexo masculino (n = 46) de Barcelona (Catalunha) com idades entre 13 e 15 anos (13,7 ± 1,17). Para analisar a capacidade de atenção seletiva, foi utilizado o Teste de Percepção de Diferenças e Diferenças (CARAS-R). A condição física foi avaliada através do teste de 30 metros de velocidade suave (velocidade linear), do teste de salto horizontal (força do corpo inferior), do teste de 10x5 metros (agilidade) e do teste de Luc-Léger (resistência). Por fim, o hábito de realizar atividade física foi calculado com o Questionário Internacional de Atividade Física, em formato adaptado para adolescentes (IPAQ-A). Os resultados mostraram que os sujeitos com maior desempenho no teste Luc-Léger obtiveram melhores pontuações no teste CARAS-R. Da mesma forma, foi obtida uma alta correlação entre os registros do teste Luc-Léger e o teste CARAS-R em meninos e meninas e uma alta correlação entre o questionário IPAQ-A e o teste CARAS-R em meninos. Os resultados revelam a relação entre a atenção seletiva e o nível de aptidão física em adolescentes. Nesse sentido, a importância da prática de atividade física nessa faixa etária é reforçada, sugerindo que o aumento da condição física pode ter implicações positivas na atenção seletiva.

Full TextThe Barn Owl The Barn Owl (Tyto alba) is a medium-sized, tawny coloured owl that, with the exception of Antarctica, has worldwide distribution. Like most owls the Barn Owl is considered to be nocturnal. Like all owls, it is predatory bird. In the Barn Owl’s case, members of the species are said to enjoy (or specialize, in the biological parlance) in small ground mammals—rodents, for example. In Eastern North America, the majority of their diet would include Meadow Voles (Microtus pennsylvanicus) and Deer Mice (Peromyscus maniculatus). Barn Owls strike a distinct-look with their lack of ear tufts (a misnomer of sorts as the tufts—the “horns” of a Great Horned Owl, Bubo virginianus—are not ears and not associated with hearing at all) and their distinct heart-shaped facial disc (which is associated with hearing, but that’s another story for another time). As their common name suggests they can be found living in barns, on a nest made from the regurgitated un-digestible remains of those Meadow Voles and Deer Mice they hunt. Of course Barn Owls are not just limited to barns, but nest in silos, abandoned buildings and tree cavities too. Arguably, this should make their name “Barn, Silo, Abandoned Building & Tree Cavity Owl” but that doesn’t really roll off the tongue in the same way. These attributes and distinguishing features are all things to keep in mind if you find yourself out birdwatching near a barn in Southern Ontario. During your explorations, while there are certain to be Rock Pigeons (Columba livia) fluttering about, if you happen to come across a Barn Owl in this setting, you should take notice. Seeing a Barn Owl in Southern Ontario (especially a living Barn Owl) is something to make special note of—it’s not a regular occurrence. Part of the significance of seeing a Barn Owl lies in its relative in-abundance. While individuals identified as Tyto alba enjoy a cosmopolitan reputation, Southern Ontario has been considered the northern range of the species (“Ontario Barn Own Recovery Project,” 2005) and it has been suggested that Barn Owls have always found, say, other places more to their liking. Because of this, the Barn Owl is a special bird in Canada: it is officially endangered, recognized by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) (“Ontario Barn Own Recovery Project,” 2005). It seems as though Barn Owls living in Ontario have had bad luck of late— of the “handful” (“Ontario Barn Own Recovery Project,” 2005 ¶ 4) that have been seen since 1999, two were roadkills (“Ontario Barn Own Recovery Project,” 2005) and no breeding pairs have been “confirmed.” The Barn Owl of February 27th 2006 If you are a serious birder in Ontario, with a computer and internet access, it is likely that you are aware of the electronic mailing list called Ontbirds. Ontbirds is presented by the self-proclaimed provincial birding association, the Ontario Field Ornithologists. The electronic mailing list (or listserv) is meant to be a clearing-house of bird sightings and directions for interested birders: you read about a bird you would like to see, get the directions and off you go on a (perhaps literal) wild goose chase. On average, four to seven sightings are posted daily. As might be expected, more posting occurs on the weekend, and more postings occur seasonally during spring and fall migration. Typical emails follow a standard form: the subject line contains the bird or birds seen and their location while the body of the email contains more specific information about the birds and precise directions to the location they might be found. While thorough, the information shared is, generally speaking, pretty uncontentious stuff. So, it was with interest that a seemingly normal post on February 28th, 2006 took on new dimensions: whispers of deception, accusation of fraud and, more interestingly for my work, questions of what is normal, known and natural all emerged. On February 28th, 2006, a simple posting appeared in mailboxes of subscribers outlining how a photograph had been taken of a Barn Owl and posted on a webbased photography site. A URL was given linking to the photograph. It was noted that the photographer had not reported seeing the bird on the Ontbirds listserv, but that there was a link to the location where the bird was seen. That same day, the moderator of the listserv posted reminding the subscribers that the Barn Owl was considered “endangered” on breeding territory and that there were rules about posting about endangered birds on the listserv; all of the requirements that needed to be met prior to posting were created in order to reduce the likelihood that an observed bird would abandon a nest or breeding attempt. The following day, March 1st, a conversation had begun via the listserv. Another respondent was interested in knowing more details about the sighting and if the bird had been seen again. The next email later that day was from the photographer himself. In the email, he explained that though he did not remember exactly where he saw the bird, he used Google maps to locate the general location and road names. According to his directions, the Barn Owl was seen in Eastern Ontario, in the Ottawa region. As well, he shared the story of finding the owl, taking the photograph and watching the bird fly away from him. The author also stated that his initial reason for going out birding that day was to find Snowy Owls to photograph and that he had no luck in finding those birds that day. On March 2nd, another email arrived from another Ontbirds subscriber. In it, the author began to question the authenticity of the photograph. This email suggested that the owl’s feet have been “doctored,” as though something was removed after the photograph had been taken. The author reminded those reading that the Barn Owl is rare for Ontario and especially so where the photograph was taken—the implication being that the bird is so rare that it most likely didn’t exist. A third email followed on March 2nd in which the author suggests that there is nothing in the photograph that appears unusual or doctored. The author offered another suggestion about the authenticity of the owl. He reminded us that there was a Barn Owl sighting in a different part of Ontario earlier in the winter and attributes the owl’s presence not to digital photographic magic, but to efforts undertaken on the part of humans to help the species recover. Yet, this claim to reality does not seem to be working. Later in the afternoon on March 2nd, a fourth email arrived that supports the initial hypothesis that the photograph has been doctored. The author shared that the bird looks like one he had seen at Parc Omega, a wildlife park in Québec, and provides a URL to a photograph of the Parc Omega Barn Owl. The pull of the network to make the photograph unauthentic, and in turn, the owl, continues to mount. In a fifth email, the author shared the contention that the fencepost the Barn Owl is pictured perching on was specially made for captive birds to land on. The author also suggested that given the lighting of the photograph and kind of weather that was observed on the day that the photograph was supposed to have been taken, the photograph could not be discounted as being genuine. This is where the conversation ends on Ontbirds. At 5:30 pm on March 2nd, the listserv co-ordinator posted a message that states that the current conversation on the photographed Barn Owl is inappropriate. The coordinator reminded readers that Ontbirds is not a discussion list and is for “reporting birds period.” The closing line in the email reminds readers that not following the guidelines could result in the restriction or loss of being able to post to the listerv. This does not mean, however, that the conversation ended. In following the network thread to a website that catalogues rare birds from the Ottawa area, the sighting details for the Barn Owl seen on February 27th is prefaced with the words “LIKELY HOAX.” The page author outlines a litany of evidence that supports his claim that the image has been manipulated. The webpage author concludes his outline with the statement “let the viewer beware.” Enacting birds: reflection on the Barn Owl of February 27th I have spent some time thinking about the birders and the Barn Owl. I have read and reflected on the emails and the allegations. From this, themes have emerged concerning the construction of what is natural as well as insights into the creation of what Donna Haraway (2003) calls "naturecultures." Most importantly, this event, be it framed as authentic bird sighting or elaborate hoax, helps enact and make visible a topology of inter-species ethical relations between those who watch birds and the birds they watch. Networks Ontbirds operates within an established network of relations. People post their sightings to share with other interested birders. The process through which experiences are transcribed from embodied encounters to textual references is seemingly an invisible one. In this case, there were visible deviations from the established network. Within the birding community that posts to Ontbirds, the claim to have "found" a bird is an important one. In posts where the author is reporting a first-sighting and they did not find the bird themselves, the name of the bird finder (skilled, lucky or otherwise, as it is never suggested the kind of effort it took to come across the bird) is included. In this example, the finder did not make a submission to Ontbirds to report a rare bird. Rather, it seems like in this case, the original post came via an on-line gallery created by the finder that had the photograph and birding information on it. While never overtly stated, I believe that the authenticity of the Barn Owl was partially called into question due to the fact that the finder of the bird did not post his sighting to the listserv. Additionally, I find interesting to note that in the finder's one email to the Ontbirds listserv, he did his best to fit into the established network. However, problematic for him, he was not familiar with the area where he took the photograph. Part of the established Ontbirds network is knowing where you observed a bird; the more detailed the description of location and directions, the better. In networks, effort is required to maintain the relationships of the actors. The listserv tends to operate with little of what I would call boundary policing on the part of the co-ordinator. What is particularly interesting about the Barn Owl postings was the need of the Ontbirds co-ordinator to make comments concerning the type and quality of postings over the three day period, all referencing the mail about the Barn Owl. In well-established networks, subtle deviations from the established routine lead to powerful reactions: networks tend to become visible when they are threatened. The questioning of the authenticity seems to be such a reaction. What this suggests for a birding network is the power that lies in the focus on names, dates and details. This hybridity that exists between birders and the electronic mailing list certainly has implications in shaping what is considered normal, known and natural for those who subscribe to the list. Birds are enacted through Ontbirds as realities "out there" to be discovered, recorded and reported. While this is not necessarily that surprising, it does, in turn have an impact on other enactments of birds, especially visible in the multiple objects created. Multiple objects In this case there was an exceeding focus by birders on the rarity of the bird, to the point where I believe that the Barn Owl became a multiple object. Emerging from the field of Science and Technology studies, the idea of multiple objects opens a different way to think about the taken-for-granted: objects are often thought of as rigid and immobile in their existence - a Barn Owl will always be a Barn Owl (for a detailed discussion of multiple objects, see Law, 2004; Mol, 2002). In response to this, a multiple version of the object counters this notion of singularity. In focusing on the fractal nature of "reality" and in attending to difference, I believe that this perspective requires attention be paid to the enactment of objects. Enactment, in this sense, is the claim that "relations, and so realities and representations of realities...are being endlessly or chronically brought into being in a continuing process of production and reproduction, and have no status, standing or reality outside those processes" (Law, 2004, p. 159). Enactment is different than constructivism as it does not "imply convergence to singularity," in opposition to the fixing of objects' identities, "but takes difference and multiplicity to be chronic conditions" (Law, 2004, p. 158). Difference suggests that multiple versions of the same object can exist simultaneouslythis occurs because while objects are enacted in practice, these practices can be different. If the practices are different, then so too must be the objects (Law, 2004). Yet these multiple versions-or multiple objectsare, more often than not, able to cohere together. So, if these coherences shape our reality, then reality: is not in principal fixed or singular, and truth is no longer the only ground for accepting or rejecting a representation. The implication is that there are various possible reasons, including the political, for enacting one kind of reality rather than another, and that these grounds can in some measure be debated. (Law, 2004, p. 162) As such, a focus on the enactment of objects is filled with attention to the many ways that actors, human and otherwise, engage to create a reality: a reality described through investigation, a reality that is not the only one "out there" and a reality that focuses on heterogeneity and difference. In the move to collapse multiple realities into one, a distinctly political move is made, where one reality, one particular enactment of an object gains primacy over the others. In this particular becoming of the Barn Owl, the enactment of rarity overshadowed the other ways the bird was known (see Figure 1). Rather than having to pass judgement on if I think the Barn Owl was properly enacted, I think it is more valuable to examine the ways the bird was enacted. Let me outline the different ways (that I can see): - as a rare bird species (through the Ontbirds coordinator, external web pages and some birders' previous knowledge) - as a biological reality (through the email that suggested the Owl was a result of species rebound and human conservation efforts) - as digital magic (many of the claims to digital alteration of the photograph enacted this Barn Owl) - as an Eastern Ontario Barn Owl (through the initial posting) - as an Québec Barn Owl (through the claims it came from Parc Omega) There have also been subtle and tacit ways that the authenticity has been enacted, framed through the network of discovery, recording and reporting previously described. Through these discourses, the Barn Owl has been enacted as a: - valuable, wild bird - feral bird of ambivalent worth - wildlife park captive and therefore does not count In this multiplicity, the Barn Owl lost value in the eyes of some birders as its authenticity was called into question. What is implicit in this questioning is the understanding that there is some kind of a continuum that reported birds are judged against. It seems that the gold standard of authenticity is one that is wild, rare and (relatively) easy to find. It goes without saying that this perspective is not entirely unproblematic. This, in part, helps explain why there are not any postings to Ontbirds describing a flock of Pigeons seen in a ubiquitous habitat, such as the urbanized core of Anytown, Ontario. A Pigeon simply does not match up to the gold standard of valuable birds. In deciding what gets to "count" in knowledge-making endeavours, and what counts as the gold standard, other birds disappear from what is noticed. In that disappearance, the bird moves to the hinterland. I turn to that next. The hinterland and otherness Hinterland's are an attempt to engage with the act of disappearing. Law puts forward three kinds of Hinterland's: the first, he suggest are "in-here objects" (Law, 2004, p. 55); the second are "visible or relevant out-there contexts" (Law, 2004, p. 55); and the third are "out-there processes, contexts, and all the rest, that are both necessary and necessarily disappear from visibility or relevance" (Law, 2004, p. 55). I would deploy an artistic metaphor of positive space and negative space here: that which is present is the positive space of an image and that which is absent is negative space of an image. It is often difficult to decide if it is the negative or positive space that bounds the image: each side depends on the other such that if one is not there, the known image would disappear. Perhaps, if I expand the metaphor, the hidden absent is that which is not within the frame of the image. Importantly, all that lies outside the frame, while unnecessary in the composition of the image, is only unnecessary because it has been selectively ignored in the composition of the image. Emerging from this perspective on the hinterland is the acknowledgement that a relationship with the unknown, or the other, is necessary; rather than simply ignoring the disappearance, it is an attempt to acknowledge that disappearance is integral to any kind of knowing. Thus, if birding, as an act, continues the "process [of] enacting necessary boundaries between presence, manifest absence and Otherness" (Law, 2004, p. 144), then the various activities taken up in the name of coming to know these organisms are each a distinctly political move, moves that shape and reaffirm (mostly conventional) ways of knowing the nonhuman. For example, the second post in this chain made explicit that the individual Barn Owl was, in fact, part of larger species, Tyto alba and that species was considered to be an endangered one. The term endangered species does just that: focus on species, at the expense of the individual. In this organism's identification as a member of a species, it loses any ability to be something else; what could be has been othered. This act of othering is at times common in birdwatching. It occurs more than once in the Barn Owl discussion: through the questioning about the validity of the sighting, the focus subtly shifts from the sighting to determining the authenticity of the photograph. Again, in this move the individual owl disappears. The Barn Owl was not the only member of the order Aves to be othered in this particular natureculture assemblage. It is also interesting to note that the Snowy Owls, the birds that were the original objective of the outing that produced the Barn Owl, have disappeared. Likely, there were other birds seen during that trip, but for whatever reason (perhaps not rare, not big, not charismatic), they were ignored. For my purposes, I consider this othering problematic, in part, because it does little to acknowledge the lived experiences of nonhuman individuals. The challenge here is that the act of othering, in and of itself, is not inherently wrong. Rather than focusing on what might be out there, I believe that it is important to be able to recognize enactments that are politically aligned with the kind of relationships that ought to exist. So, one needs to develop the skill of attending to what is observably cast to the hinterland and what is brought to the forefront. In a sense, this is what I've attempted to do with my analysis of the Barn Owl narrative and the creation of the enacted set of relations in Figure 1. In creating this particular map of relations, I attempt to move beyond the established frame and re-focus on those multiple enactments that have been cast aside. In so doing, political actions and entrenched positions are more easily visible, while others can re-emerge from obscurity. It is true that there might be other unknowable enactments that exist in the hinterland-but let me suggest that acknowledging that, at best, partial perspectives (Haraway, 1991) are our best version of reality (as a nod to multiplicity does) offers more space for other realities to emerge. Thinking more generally about our dominant cultural relationship with the nonhuman, the promise of attentiveness to the various enactments of animals offer the opportunity to intentionally enact a reality that is more in line with one's own ethics. In asking what practices of birding are good or which practices ought we to be enacting, attention can be turned to current enactments to ask: "Ought they be enacted in this way?" This simple question, paired with the knowledge that there are other enactments hidden, could be enough to continue to question some of our Western culture's taken-forgranted assumptions about what it is to be human and otherwise. References Haraway, D. (1991). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: the reinvention of nature (pp. 183-202). Routledge: New York. Haraway, D. (2003). The companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Law, J. (2004). After method: mess in social science research. London: Routledge. Mol, A. (2002). The body multiple: ontology in medical practice. Durham: Duke University Press. Ontario Barn Own Recovery Project. (2005, February 7). Retrieved March 4, 2006, from http://www.bsc-eoc.org/regional/barnowl.html

A literacia física (LF), construto multidimensional que inclui a motivação, confiança e competência motora, a criação de oportunidades para a prática, conhecimento e imagem corporal, tem sido apontada como uma das chaves para uma população mais ativa. Este estudo exploratório, observacional, visa analisar a associação entre as várias dimensões da LF e explorar a associação destas dimensões com o nível de atividade física (AF) atual e com a experiência anterior. Participaram 326 estudantes universitários (55,8% do sexo feminino) com idades entre 18 e 54 anos (M=21.80, DP=3.59). Foram usados indicadores psicométricos para as dimensões da LF, o IPAQ para avaliar o nível atual de AF e indicadores de experiência anterior com a Educação Física (EF), como a nota, participação e percepção de importância. Resultados da análise correlacional bivariada indicam uma associação positiva, de magnitude média a elevada, entre todas as dimensões da LF (p’s<0.01), exceto do conhecimento. A maioria das dimensões da LF, bem como o score total associaram-se à AF total (p<0.01) e à AF vigorosa, com magnitude média ou baixa. Apenas a dimensão de oportunidades se associou à prática de caminhada (p<0.01), ainda que com baixa magnitude. A perceção de importância das aulas de EF esteve associada a todas as dimensões da LF (p<0.05), com exceção do conhecimento, com magnitudes variáveis. As associações não revelaram alteração relevante com o ajuste estatístico para sexo, idade e área do curso. Conclusões: a LF é um construto fundamental de ser investigado numa perspetiva populacional, dada a sua relação com a AF. Este estudo apresentou um primeiro contributo ao explorar o potencial de indicadores da LF, adaptados para estudos epidemiológicos. Pesquisas futuras são necessárias para construir e validar um questionário e avaliar o potencial papel da dimensão conhecimento (que neste estudo não foi significativa). Resumen. La literacia física (LF), un constructo multidimensional que incluye la motivación, la confianza y la competencia motora, la creación de oportunidades para la práctica, el conocimiento y la imagen corporal, ha sido identificada como una de las claves para una población más activa. Este estudio observacional exploratorio tiene como objetivo analizar la asociación entre las varias dimensiones de la LF y explorar la asociación de estas dimensiones con el nivel de actividad física (AF) actual y con la experiencia previa. Un total de 326 estudiantes universitarios (55,8% mujeres) con edades entre los 18 y los 54 años (M= 21,80, DP= 3,59) participaron en el estudio. Se utilizaron indicadores psicométricos para las dimensiones de LF, el IPAQ para evaluar el nivel actual de AF e indicadores de experiencia previa com Educación Física (EF), como grado, participación y percepción de importancia. Los resultados del análisis correlacional bivariado indican una asociación positiva, de mediana a alta magnitud, entre todas las dimensiones de la LF (p's<0,01), excepto el conocimiento. La mayoría de las dimensiones de la LF y el score total se asociaron con la AF total (p<0,01) y la AF vigorosa con mediana o baja magnitud. Únicamente la dimensión de oportunidades se asoció con la caminata (p<0,01), a pesar de su baja magnitud. La percepción de la importancia de las clases de EF se asoció con todas las dimensiones (p<0,05, siendo la mayoría <0,001), con excepción del conocimiento, con fuerzas de magnitud variadas. Las asociaciones no revelaron ningún cambio relevante con el ajuste estadístico por sexo, edad y área del curso. Conclusiones: La LF es un constructo fundamental a investigar desde una perspectiva poblacional, dada su relación con la AF. Este estudio hizo una primera contribución al explorar el potencial de los indicadores de LF adaptados para estudios epidemiológicos. Se necesita investigación futura para construir y validar un cuestionario y evaluar el papel potencial de la dimensión de conocimiento (que en este estudio no ha sido significativa). Abstract. Physical literacy (PL), a multidimensional construct including motivation, confidence and motor competence, creation of opportunities to practice, knowledge and body image, has been identified as a key-factor contributing to a more active population. This exploratory, observational study analyzes the association between the different dimensions of PL and explores the association of those dimensions with the current and past level of physical activity (PA). A total of 326 university students (55.8% female) aged between 18 and 54 years (M = 21.80, SD = 3.59) participated in this study. Psychometric indicators were used to measure PL dimensions, IPAQ to assess the current level of PA and previous experience in Physical Education (PE) was assessed through indicators such as grade, participation and perception of importance. Bivariate correlational analysis results indicate a positive association, from medium to high magnitude, between all PL dimensions (p's<0.01), except for knowledge. Most PL dimensions and total score were associated with total PA (p<0.01) and vigorous PA with medium or low magnitude. Only the dimension of opportunities was associated with walking (p<0.01), despite its low magnitude. The perception of importance of PE classes was associated with all PL dimensions (p<0.05), with the exception of knowledge, with varying magnitudes. Associations did not reveal any relevant change after statistical adjustment for gender, age and academic course area. Conclusions: PL is a fundamental construct to be investigated from a populational perspective, given its relationship with PA. This investigation made a first contribution by exploring the potential of PL indicators adapted for epidemiological studies. Future research is needed to validate the questionnaire and assess the potential role of the knowledge dimension (not significant in this study).

Introduction In a 1984 New York Times interview, Germaine Greer discussed the quite different views that have surrounded her supposed attitude towards sex. As she put it, “People seem to think I'm Hugh Hefner and that the reason women started having sex is because I told them to” (qtd. in De Lacy). This view had, however, shifted by the 1980s. As she told reporter Justine De Lacy, “Now they are saying that I'm against sex.” In this article, I tease out Greer’s remarks about the supposed transformation of her political persona. I do so with reference to her work on Suck Magazine, which was billed by its editors as “The First European Sex Paper,” and which was first published in 1969 (cited in Gleeson 86). The article has two key aims. The first is to demonstrate that Greer has not (as it might seem) transformed from a sexual revolutionary to an anti-sex ideologue. This view is too simplistic. The article’s second aim is to explore Greer’s significant but under-acknowledged contribution to feminist debates about pornography. Far from being strictly anti- or pro-porn, Greer’s work on Suck actually aligns with both of these positions, and it appeared before the feminist porn debates really gained traction. Germaine Greer as Sexual Revolutionary and/or Anti-Sex Ideologue? The apparent political transformation that Greer mentioned in 1984 has been particularly apparent since the 1990s. Since that decade, she has criticised pornography on several occasions. For example, in her book The Whole Woman (1999), Greer argued, “Pornography is the flight from woman, men’s denial of sex as a medium of communication . . .” (181). In an article published in The Guardian in 2000, Greer wrote, “Can [pornography] go too far? No, it can't. As far as male sexual fantasy is concerned there is no too far.” In a 2012 episode of the Australian current affairs program Q&A, Greer argued, “Pornography is the advertisement of prostitution.”Greer’s stance on pornography, and particularly her invocation of female sexual subordination, might seem to represent a radical shift from the political persona that she cultivated during the 1960s and 1970s. During that earlier period, Greer was arguing for female sexual empowerment. She posed nude for Suck. In 1971, the US magazine Life described Greer as a “saucy feminist that even men like” (qtd. in Wallace, unpaginated photograph). There is nothing “saucy” about her more recent anti-porn posture; this posture is not concerned with “empowerment” in any obvious way. Yet I would suggest that Greer at least anticipated this posture in her work on Suck. In that magazine, she did not frame sex as being entirely emancipatory. Rather, Greer argued for sexual liberation (particularly for women), but (in doing so) she also invoked the hierarchical gender roles that would later be invoked in anti-porn feminist arguments. Examining some of Greer’s contributions to Suck will make clear the important contribution that she has made to feminist debates about pornography. These are debates which she has not generally been associated with, or at least not to the extent that Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon (both US feminists who have very publicly remonstrated against porn) have (see Dworkin; MacKinnon and Dworkin). The feminist porn debates gained ascendance during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and seem to have been liveliest in North America (see Bronstein; Duggan and Hunter; MacKinnon and Dworkin). These debates are significant because of what they say about the truly complex and contentious relationship between sex, gender, power, and representation. The feminist porn debates have been broad-ranging (Sullivan and McKee 10), though they tend to have been framed as polarised conflicts between anti-pornography feminists and “sex-positive”/“anti-censorship” feminists. For anti-pornography feminists, pornography always symptomatises and perpetuates gender hierarchy. Andrea Dworkin famously defined “pornography” as the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women in pictures and/or words that also includes women presented dehumanized as sexual objects, things, or commodities; or women presented as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; or women presented as sexual objects who experience sexual pleasure in being raped; or women presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt; or women presented in postures or positions of sexual submission, servility, or display; or women’s body parts—including but not limited to vaginas, breasts, buttocks—exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts; or women presented as whores by nature . . . (xxxiii) Conversely, sex-positive/anti-censorship feminists tend to assess pornography “on a case by case basis”; porn can range from woman-hating to politically progressive (McKee, Albury, and Lumby 22). For these feminists, attempts to legislate against pornography (for example, via the anti-porn ordinance drawn up in the US during the 1980s by Dworkin and MacKinnon) amount to censorship, and are not in the interest of women, feminism, or sexual liberation (Duggan and Hunter 29–39; and see also MacKinnon and Dworkin). Among the most striking aspects of Greer’s work on Suck is that it actually mobilises aspects of both these (loosely-defined) feminist positions, and appeared almost a decade before pornography became an issue of contention amongst feminists. This work was published not in North America, but in Europe; the Australian-born Greer was living in the United Kingdom at the time of that magazine’s publication, and indeed she has been described as “Britain’s . . . most well-known feminist” (Taylor 759; and see also Gleeson). Does Porn Suck? Greer co-founded Suck in 1969, the year before The Female Eunuch was published. Greer had already established a minor public profile through her journalistic contributions to the London-based Oz Magazine. Several of those contributions were written under the guise of “Dr G—the only groupie with a Ph.D in captivity,” and featured references to “groupiedom” and “cunt power” (qtd. in Gleeson 86). Suck was published in Amsterdam to circumvent “British censorship laws” (Wallace 15). The magazine was very much a product of the then-current sexual revolution, as suggested by the following passage from a 1971 editorial: “Our cause is sexual liberation. Our tactic is the defiance of censorship” (University of Melbourne Archives). Suck comprised sexually-explicit imagery (for example, nudity and shots of (hetero)sexual penetration) and similarly explicit articles. These articles are furnished with the vivid, deliberately provocative prose for which Greer is renowned.In some articles, Greer argues that women’s acceptance of their bodies constitutes a rebellion against patriarchy. In a 1971 article, she writes, “Primitive man feared the vagina . . . as the most magical of magical orifices of the body” (University of Melbourne Archives). The title of this piece is “Lady Love Your Cunt,” and indicates Greer’s view that patriarchal fears—or, as she puts it, the fears of “primitive man”—have contributed to stigma that has surrounded the vagina. Greer concludes thus: “Why not send a photograph of your own cunt, with your names labelled on?” (Whether any readers responded to this invitation remains unclear.) In “Bounce Titty Bounce,” she describes a “Mafia that controls the shapes of [women’s] bodies” (University of Melbourne Archives). This control is particularly evident in the brassiere, which Greer calls “a muzzle, a mask, binding joys and desires with wire and rubber and nylon and clips and cotton.” In a 1970 article entitled “Ladies get on top for better orgasms,” Greer opens with the statement: “The prevalence of the missionary position of fucking in the Western World [sic] seems to mean a widespread unfairness in sex.” She elaborates: Even if women were not . . . slighter than men, the missionary position would have little to commend it. The hands of the man are not free to play with his lover’s breasts or clitoris . . . because he must support himself, at least partially by them . . . The male ismin [sic] full control. Greer concedes that the “female on top position is perhaps the least popular of the alternatives to the missionary position.” The “female on top” position does, however, have advantages for women, one being that a woman “can arrive at a position to accept the cock without having to take her weight on her hands.” Greer’s best-known contribution to Suck is a selection of nude photographs that were published in a 1971 edition. In one shot, Greer is lying on her back, her legs behind her ears, her anus directly in front of the camera. In another shot, she is positioned in the same manner, although her anus and vagina are more central within the frame. In both shots, Greer is gazing directly into the camera and smiling. On one level, the textual and photographic examples described above—and, in fact, the very publication of Suck—suggest a rebellion against sexual repression. This rebellion was characteristic of the sexual revolution (Gleeson 86). Yet, in advocating female sexual empowerment, Greer distanced herself from the masculine bias of that movement. In her 1984 New York Times interview, Greer was quoted as saying that “. . . the sexual revolution never happened. Permissiveness happened, and that’s no better than repressiveness, because women are still being manipulated by men” (qtd. in De Lacy). Here, she anticipates arguments (e.g. Jeffreys) that the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s actually sanctioned (heterosexual) male desire and men’s sexual access to women. In Suck, then, Greer argued that women need to liberate themselves sexually, and not only be seen as instruments for male sexual liberation. Greer did pose nude, but, in doing so, she stared back into the camera/at the spectator—thus returning the gaze, rather than being objectified by this gaze (Mulvey). Greer has described her shots thus: “Face, pubes and anus, nothing decorative about it. Nothing sexy about it either. Confrontation was the name of the game” (qtd. in Gleeson 86). In 2013, Greer wrote of that photo shoot: “Women’s bodies were merchandised. Each week we saw a little more: nipples, then pussy . . . drip-feeding the masturbation fantasies of a [male] generation. My gesture aimed to short-circuit that process.” She has also been quoted as saying that she envisioned Suck as an “antidote to the exploitative papers like Screw and Hustler,” by “developing a new kind of erotic art, away from the tits ‘n’ ass and the peep show syndrome” (qtd. in Gleeson 86). Thus, Greer’s Suck contributions seem to foreshadow the “sex-positive” feminism that would emerge later in the 1970s in North America (e.g. Duggan and Hunter). Her work would also anticipate feminist uses of porn to explore female sexuality from specifically female and feminist perspectives (see Taormino et al.). A closer examination of these contributions, however, suggests a more complex picture. Witness Greer’s reference to the popularity of “missionary sex” as a reason for “widespread unfairness in sex,” or her description of a (presumably) male-dominated “Mafia” who control women’s bodies (for example, via the bra). In a newspaper interview that was published around the time of The Female Eunuch’s 1970 publication, Greer argued that sex needs to be “rescued” from the patriarchy by feminists. This is because sex under patriarchy has been characterised by the dichotomised positions of “powerful and powerless, masterful and mastered.” In this scenario, women are the ones who are “powerless” and “mastered.” The title of that interview is “Author Attacks Dominating Male” (University of Melbourne Archives).The above statements suggest a sexual landscape characterised by “potentially violent, dominant men and subordinated, silenced women” (Duggan and Hunter 7). In this landscape, sex is a site of gender inequality; and even something as apparently innocuous as underwear is used by men to control women. The pervasive sense of patriarchy invoked here would (as scholars such as Duggan and Hunter have argued) be invoked in much anti-pornography feminist writing. And Greer would go on to concur with the anti-porn stance, as the three pronouncements cited at the beginning of this article attest. (In Suck, Greer does not attempt to define “pornography,” and nor does she classify her contributions as being “pornography” or “anti-pornography.”)ConclusionI have argued that it is useful to revisit some of Germaine Greer’s contributions to Suck Magazine in order to reassess her apparent transformation from sexual revolutionary to anti-sex ideologue. These contributions (which include articles and photographs) are celebrations of female sexual empowerment and critiques of what Greer sees as a pervasive gender hierarchy. I have argued that this work is also useful in that it anticipates the feminist debates about pornography that would gain ascendance in North America almost a decade after Suck’s publication. Greer articulates arguments that would come to be aligned with both “sex-positive” and “anti-pornography” feminist discourses. To this extent, she has made an important and thus far largely unacknowledged contribution to these highly polarised feminist debates. ReferencesBronstein, Carolyn. Battling Pornography: The American Feminist Anti-Pornography Movement, 1976–1986. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.De Lacy, Justine. “Germaine Greer’s New Book Stirs a Debate.” The New York Times. 5 Mar. 1984. 21 Oct. 2015 <https://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/greer-debate.html>.Duggan, Lisa, and Nan D. Hunter, eds. “Introduction.” Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture. 10th Anniversary Edition. London: Routledge, 2006. 1–13.Dworkin, Andrea. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. New York: Plume, 1989. Gleeson, Kate. “From Suck Magazine to Corporate Paedophilia: Feminism and Pornograph—Remembering the Australian Way.” Women’s Studies International Forum 38 (2013): 83–96.Greer, Germaine. The Whole Woman. London: Transworld Publishers, 1999. ———. “Gluttons for Porn.” The Guardian 24 Sep. 2000. 21 Oct. 2015 <http://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/sep/24/society>.———. “As Women Bare All in Feminist Protest, Germaine Greer Asks: Is This Feminism?” News.com.au 17 Mar. 2013. 30 July 2016 <http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/as-women-bare-all-in-feminist-protest-germaine-greer-asks-is-this-feminism/story-fneszs56-1226598414628>.Jeffreys, Sheila. Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution. London: The Women’s Press, 1990. MacKinnon, Catharine A., and Andrea Dworkin, eds. In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings. Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1997. McKee, Alan, Katherine Albury, and Catharine Lumby. The Porn Report. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2008. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6–18. Q&A. “Politics and Porn in a Post-Feminist World.” First screened 19 Mar. 2012. 20 May 2016 <http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s3451584.htm>.Suck Magazine. Copies held by Germaine Greer Archive, University of Melbourne. Sullivan, Rebecca, and Alan McKee. Pornography: Structures, Agency and Performance. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015.Taormino, Tristan, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, Constance Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young, eds. The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2013.Taylor, Anthea. “Germaine Greer’s Adaptable Celebrity: Feminism, Unruliness, and Humour on the British Small Screen.” Feminist Media Studies 14.5 (2014): 759–74.University of Melbourne Archives, Germaine Greer archive. Undated. 2014.0038, Unit 216. File name “(Drawer 158) Press clippings about Germaine Greer.” “Author Attacks Dominating Male.” Interview with Germaine Greer. Interviewer and place of publication unknown. Unpaginated. ———. Undated. 2014.0038, Unit 219. File name “Bounce Titty Bounce.” “Bounce Titty Bounce.” Originally published in Suck Magazine. Viewed in unpublished manuscript form. Unpaginated. ———. 1971. 2014.0038, Unit 219. File name “Suck Editorial 1971?” “Editorial.” Suck Magazine. Issue number not provided. Unpaginated. ———. 1971. 2014.0038, Unit 219. File name: “Lady Love Your Cunt Suck.” “Lady Love Your Cunt.” Originally published in Suck Magazine. Viewed in unpublished manuscript form. Unpaginated. ———. Undated. 2014.0038, Unit 219. File name: “Suck Correspondence 73.” Untitled photographs of Germaine Greer. Originally published in Suck Magazine. Unpaginated. Wallace, Christine. Germaine Greer, Untamed Shrew. Sydney: Pan MacMillan, 1997.

The Gothic is not always suited to women’s emancipation, but it is very well suited to women’s anger, and all other instances of what Barbara Creed (3) would refer to as ‘abject’ femininity: excessive, uncanny and uncontained instances that disturb patriarchal norms of womanhood. This article asserts that the conventions of the Gothic genre are well suited to expressions of women’s rage; invoking Sarah Ahmed’s work on the discomforting presence of the kill-joy in order to explore how the often-alienating processes of uncensored female anger coincide with contemporary notions of the Monstrous Feminine. This should not suggest that the Gothic is a wholly feminist genre - one need only look to Jane Eyre to observe the binarised construction of Gothic women as either ‘pure’ or ‘deviant’: virginal heroine or mad woman in the attic. However, what is significant about the Gothic genre is that it often permits far more in-depth, even sympathetic explorations of ‘deviant femininity’ that are out of place elsewhere.Indeed, the normative, rationalist demand for good health and accommodating cheerfulness is symptomatic of what Queer Crip scholar Katarina Kolářová (264) describes as ‘compulsory, curative positivity’ – wherein the Monstrousness of deviant femininity, Queerness and disability must be ‘fixed’ in order to produce blithe, comforting feminine docility. It seems almost too obvious to point to The Yellow Wallpaper as a perfect exemplar of this: the physician husband of Gillman’s protagonist literally prescribes indolence and passivity as ‘cures’ for what may well be post-partum depression – another instance of distinctly feminine irrationality that must be promptly contained. The short story is peppered through with references to the protagonist’s ‘illness’ as a source of consternation or discomfort for her husband, who declares, “I feel easier with you now” (134) as she becomes more and more passive.The notion of men’s comfort is important within discussions of women’s anger – not only within the Gothic, but within a broader context of gendered power and privileged experience. Sara Ahmed’s Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness asserts that we “describe as happy a situation that you wish to defend. Happiness translates its wish into a politics, a wishful politics, a politics that demands that others live according to a wish” (573) For Ahmed, happiness is not solely an individual experience, but rather is relational, and as much influenced by normative systems of power as any other interpersonal process.It has historically fallen upon women to sacrifice their own happiness to ensure that men are comfortable; being quiet and unargumentative, remaining both chase and sexually alluring, being maternal and nurturing, while scrupulously censoring any evidence of pregnancy, breastfeeding or menstrual cycles (Boyer 79). If a woman has ceased to be happy within these terms, then she has failed to be a good woman, and experiences what Ahmed refers to as a ‘negative affect’ – a feeling of being out of place. To be out of place is to be an ‘affect alien’: one must either continue feeling alienated or correct one’s feelings (Ahmed 582). Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild uses the analogy of a bride feeling miserable at her wedding, obliging herself to bring her feelings in-line with what is expected of her, “Sensing a gap between the ideal feeling and the actual feeling she tolerated, the bride prompts herself to be happy” (Hochschild 61).Ahmed uses to the term ‘Kill Joy’ to refer to feminists – particularly black feminists – whose actions or presence refuse this obligation, and in turn project their discomfort outwards, instead of inwards. The stereotype of the angry black woman, or the humourless feminist persist because these women are not complicit in social orders that hold the comfort of white men as paramount (583); their presence is discomforting.Contrary to its title, Killing Joy does not advocate for an end to happiness. Rather, one might understand the act of killing joy as a tactic of subjective honesty – an acknowledgement of dis-ease, of one’s alienation and displacement within the social contract of reciprocal happiness. Here I use the word dis-ease as a deliberate double entendre – implying both the experience of a negative affect, as well as the apparent social ‘illness’ of refusing acquiescent female joy. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the protagonist’s passive femininity is ironically both the antithesis and the cause of her Monstrous transformation, demonstrating an instance of feminine liminality that is the hallmark of the Gothic heroine.Here I introduce the example of Lily Frankenstein, a modern interpretation of the Bride of the Creature, portrayed by Billie Piper in the Showtime series Penny Dreadful. In Shelley’s novel the Bride is commissioned for the Creature’s contentment, a contract that Frankenstein acknowledges she could not possibly have consented to (Shelley 206). She is never given sentience or agency; her theoretical existence and pre-natal destruction being premised entirely on the comfort of men. Upon her destruction, the Creature cries, “Are you to be happy while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness?” (Shelley 209). Her first film portrayal by Elsa Lanchester in James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (1936) is iconic, but brief. She is granted no dialogue, other than a terrified scream, followed by a goose-like hiss of disgust at Boris Karloff’s lonely Creature. Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) merges the characters of Elizabeth and the Bride into the same doomed woman. After being murdered by the Creature, she is resurrected by Frankenstein – and consequently fought over by both. Her inevitable suicide is her one moment of tragic autonomy.Penny Dreadful is the first time that the Bride has been given an opportunity to speak for herself. Lily’s character arc is neither that of the idealised, innocent victim, nor is she entirely abject and wanton: she is – quite literally – two women in one. Before she is re-animated and conditioned by Victor Frankenstein to be the perfect bride, she was Brona, a predictably tragic, Irish street-walker with a taste for whisky and a consumptive cough. Diane Long Hoeveler describes the ambiguous duality of the Gothic feminine arising from the fantasies of middle-class woman writing gothic fiction during the 19th century (106). Drawing upon Harriet Guest’s examination of the development of femininity in early Gothic literature, Hoeveler asserts that women may explore the ‘deviant’ pleasures of wanton sexuality and individualistic, sadistic power while still retaining the chaste femininity demanded of them by their bourgeois upbringings. As both innocent victim of patriarchy and Monstrous Feminine, the construction of the gothic heroine simultaneously criminalises and deifies women.I assert that Penny Dreadful demonstrates the blurring of these boundaries in such a way that the fantasy of the sympathetic, yet Monstrous Gothic Feminine is launched out of the parlours of bored Victorian housewives into a contemporary feminist moment that is characterised by a split between respectable diplomacy and the visibility of female rage. Her transition from coerced docility and abject, sexualised anger manifests in the second season of the show. The Creature – having grown impatient and jealous – comes to collect his Bride and is met with a furious refusal.Lily’s rage is explosive. Her raw emotion is evidently startling to the Creature, who stands in astonishment and fear at something even more monstrous and alien than himself – a woman’s unrestrained anger. For all his wretched ‘Otherness’ and misery, he is yet a man - a bastard son of the Enlightenment, desperate to be allowed entrance into the hallowed halls of reason. In both Shelley’s original novel and the series, he tries (and fails) to establish himself as a worthy and rational citizen; settling upon the Bride as his coveted consolation prize for his Monstrous failure. If he cannot be a man as his creator was, then he shall have a companion that is ‘like’ him to soothe his pain.Consequently, Lily’s refusal of the Creature is more than a rejection – it is the manifestation of an alien affect that has been given form within the undead, angry woman: a trifecta of ‘Otherness’. “Shall we wonder the pastures and recite your fucking poetry to the fucking cows?” She mocks the Creature’s bucolic, romantic ideals, killing his joyful phantasy that she, as his companion, will love and comfort him despite his Monstrousness (“Memento Mori”).Lily’s confrontation of the Creature is an unrestrained litany of women’s pain – the humiliation of corsetry and high heels, the slavery of marriage, the brutality of sexual coercion: all which Ahmed would refer to as the “signs of labour under the sign of happiness” (573). These are the pains that women must hide in order to maintain men’s comfort, the sacrificial emotional labours which are obfuscated by the mandates of male-defined femininity. The Gothic’s nurturance of anger transforms Lily’s outburst from an act of cruelty and selfishness to a site of significant feminine abjection. Through this scene Hochschild’s comment takes on new meaning: Lily – being quite literally the Bride (or the intended Bride) of the Creature – has turned the tables and has altered the process of disaffection – and made herself happy at the expense of men.Lily forms a militia of ‘fallen’ women from whom she demands tribute: the bleeding, amputated hands of abusive men. The scene is a thrilling one, recalling the misogyny of witch trials, sexual violence and exploitation as an army of angry kill joys bang on the banquet table, baying for men’s blood (“Ebb Tide”). However, as seems almost inevitable, Lily’s campaign is short-lived. Her efforts are thwarted and her foot soldiers either murdered or fled. We last see her walking dejectedly through the London fog, her fate and future unknown.Lily’s story recalls an instance of the ‘bad feminism’ that nice, respectable, mainstream feminists seek to distance themselves from. In her discussion of the acquittal of infamous castatrix Lorena Bobbitt, poet Katha Pollitt (65-66) observes the scramble by “nice, liberal middle-class professional” feminists to distance themselves from the narratives of irrational rage that supposedly characterise ‘victim feminism’ – opting instead for the comforting ivory towers of self-control and diplomacy.Lily’s speech to her troops is seen partly through the perspective of an increasingly alarmed Dorian Gray, who has hitherto been enjoying the debauched potential of these liberated, ‘deviant’ women, recalling bell hooks’ observation that “ultimately many males revolted when we stated that our bodies were territories that they could not occupy at will. Men who were ready for female sexual liberation if it meant free pussy, no strings attached, were rarely ready for feminist female sexual agency” (41). This is no longer a coterie of wanton women that he may enjoy, but a sisterhood of angry, vengeful kill-joys that will not be respectable, or considerate of his feelings in their endeavours.Here, parallels arise between the absolutes drawn between women as agents or victims, and the positioning of women as positive, progressive ‘rational’ beings or melancholic kill-joys that Ahmed describes. We need only turn to the contemporary debate surrounding the MeToo movement (and its asinine, defensive response of ‘Not All Men’) to observe that the process of identifying oneself as a victim has – for many – become synonymous with weakness, even amongst other feminists. Notably, Germaine Greer referred to the movement as ‘whinging’, calling upon women to be more assertive, instead of wallowing in self-victimisation and misandry, as Lily supposedly does (Miller).While Greer may be a particularly easy strawman, her comments nonetheless recall Judith Halberstam’s observations of prescriptive paternalism (maternalism?) within Western feminist discourse. His chapter Shadow Feminisms uses the work of Gayatri Spivak to describe how triumphalist narratives of women’s liberation often function to restrict the terms of women’s agency and expression – particularly those of women of colour.Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? asserts that the colonial narratives inherent within white feminists’ attempts to ‘save’ non-Western women are premised upon the imagined heroicism of the individual, which in turn demands the rejection of ‘subaltern’ strategies like passiveness, anger and refusal. She asks, “does the category of resistance impose a teleology of progressive politics on the analytics of power?” (9). Put more simply, both Halberstam and Spivak beg the question of why it is necessary for women and other historically marginalised groups to adopt optimistic and respectable standards of agency? Especially when those terms are pre-emptively defined by feminists like Greer.Halberstam conceptualises Shadow Feminisms in the melancholic terms of refusal, undoing, failure and anger. Even in name, Shadow Feminism is well suited to the Gothic – it has no agenda of triumphant, linear progress, nor the saccharine coercion of individualistic optimism. Rather, it emphasises the repressed, quiet forms of subversion that skulk in the introspective, resentful gloom. This is a feminism that cannot and will not let go of its traumas or its pain, because it should not have to (Halberstam, Queer Art 128-129).Thus, the Monstrousness of female rage is given space to acknowledge, rather than downplay or dismiss the affective-alienation of patriarchy. To paraphrase scholars Andrew Smith and Diana Wallace, the Gothic allows women to explore the hidden or censured expressions of dissatisfaction and resentment within patriarchal societies, being a “coded expression of women’s fears of entrapment within the domestic and within the female body” (Smith & Wallace 2).It may be easy to dismiss the Gothic as eldritch assemblages of Opheliac madness and abject hyperbole, I argue that it is valuable precisely because it invites the opening of festering wounds and the exploration of mouldering sepulchres that are shunned by the squeamish mainstream; coaxing the skeletons from the closet so that they may finally air their musty grievances. As Halberstam states in Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, the Gothic represents the return of the repressed and thus encourages rather than censors the exploration of grief, madness and irrationality (Skin Shows 19). Accordingly, we may understand Lily’s rage as what Halberstam would refer to as a Monstrous Technology (21-22) – more specifically, a technology of the Monstrous Feminine: a significant site of disruption within Gothic narratives that not only ‘shows’ the source of its abjection, but angrily airs its dirty laundry for everyone to see.Here emerges the distinction between the ‘non-whinging’, respectable feminism advocated by the likes of Greer and Lily’s Monstrous, Gothic Feminism. Observing a demonstration by a group of suffragettes, Lily describes their efforts as unambitious – “their enemies are same, but they seek equality” (“Good and Evil Braided Be”). Lily has set her sights upon mastery. By allowing her rage to manifest freely, her movement has manifested as the violent misandry that anti-suffragists and contemporary anti-feminists alike believe is characteristic of women’s liberation, provoking an uncomfortable moment for ‘good’ feminists who desperately wish to avoid such pejorative stereotypes.What Lily offers is not ethical. It does not conform to any justifiable feminist ideology. She represents that which is repressed, a distinctly female rage that has no place within any rational system of belief. Nonetheless, Lily remains a sympathetic character, her “doomed, keening women” (“Ebb Tide”) evoking a quiet, subversive thrill of solidarity that must be immediately hushed. This, I assert, is indicative of the liminal ambiguity that makes the Monstrous Feminine so unsettling, and so significant.And Monsters are always significant. Their ‘Otherness’ functions like lighthouses of meaning. Further, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (6) reminds us, Monsters signify not only the fragile boundaries of human subjectivity and discourse, but also the origins of the alterity that defines them. Like the tragic creature of Shelley’s masterpiece, Monsters eventually follow their creators home to demand an explanation – their revenant terror demands accountability (Cohen 20). What Lily exemplifies does not have to make others comfortable, and it is under no obligation to remain within any standards of ethics. To return one last time to Halberstam, I argue that the Monstrosity manifested within female rage is valuable precisely because it because it obliges us “to be unsettled by the politically problematic connections history throws our way” (Halberstam, Queer Art 162). Therefore, to be angry, to dwell on traumatic pasts, and to revel in the ‘failure’ of negativity is to ensure that these genealogies are not ignored.When finally captured, Victor Frankenstein attempts to lobotomise her, promising to permanently take away the pain that is the cause of her Monstrous rage. To this, Lily responds: “there are some wounds that can never heal. There are scars that make us who we are, but without them, we don’t exist” (“Perpetual Night and the Blessed Dark”). Lily refuses to let go of her grief and her anger, and in so doing she fails to coalesce within the placid, docile femininity demanded by Victor Frankenstein. But her refusal is not premised in an obdurate reactionism. Rather, it is a tactic of survival. By her own words, without her trauma – and that of countless women before her – she does not exist. The violence of rape, abuse and the theft of her agency have defined her as both a woman and as a Monster. “I’m the sum part of one woman’s days. No more, no less”, she tells Frankenstein. To eschew her rage is to deny its origin.So, to finish I ask readers to take a moment, and dwell on that rage. On women’s rage. On yours. On the rage that may have been directed at you. Does that make you uncomfortable?Good.ReferencesAhmed, Sara. “Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 35.3 (2010): 571-593.Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1996. 3-25.Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1993.“Ebb Tide.”. Penny Dreadful. Showtime, 2016.“Good and Evil Braided Be.” Penny Dreadful. Showtime, 2016.Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. USA: Duke UP, 1995.———. The Queer Art of Failure. USA: Duke UP, 2011.Hoeveler, Diane. “The Female Gothic, Beating Fantasies and the Civilizing Process.” Comparative Romanticisms: Power, Gender, Subjectivity. Eds. Larry H. Peer and Diane Long Hoeveler. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1998. 101-132.hooks, bell. Communion: The Female Search for Love. USA: Harper Collins, 2003.Kolářová, Kristina. “The Inarticulate Post-Socialist Crip: On the Cruel Optimism of Neo-Liberal Transformation in the Czech Republic.” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 8.3 (2014): 257-274.“Memento Mori.” Penny Dreadful. Showtime, 2015.Miller, Nick. “Germaine Greer Challenges #MeToo Campaign.” Sydney Morning Herald, 21 Jan. 2018.“Perpetual Night/The Blessed Dark.” Penny Dreadful. Showtime, 2016.Pollitt, Katha. “Lorena’s Army.” “Bad Girls”/“Good Girls”: Women, Sex & Power in the Nineties. Eds. Nan Bauer Maglin and Donna Perry. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1996. 65-67.Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus. Australia: Penguin Books, 2009 [1818].Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1988.Smith, Andrew, and Diana Wallace. “The Female Gothic: Now and Then”. Gothic Studies 6.1 (2004): 1-7.

Jessica craned her head to take in the imposing, stone building, then lowered her gaze to the gold-plated sign at the base of the steps. “Institute of Methodology”, it read. Inside the heavy iron doors, a woman sat at a desk, her face devoid of expression. “Subject area?” asked the woman. “Uhmm, feminism ... and fiction, I think.” “Turn right.” “Do you have a map?” “No.” “How am I meant to find things?” “Each has their own method; it’s not up to us to prescribe that.” Jessica sighed, readjusted her handbag and turned right. A corridor stretched out before her. She set off, her stiletto boots echoing on the hard wooden floor. The first door she arrived at had the words “Deleuze and Guattari” positioned squarely in the middle. She hesitated, then turned the doorknob. The room was white and empty. A male voice issued from somewhere but she couldn’t tell the direction from which it came. It droned on, with some inflection, but there was no way of knowing where the sentences started and finished. She picked out a few words: a thousand plateaus, becoming, burrowing, but couldn’t piece them into anything meaningful. She backed out of the room, frowning, and asked me, How am I going to learn anything if they only have these voices? I can’t lipread them. And how can I produce something factual if I haven’t heard it all? I might make stuff up. You always make things up anyway. After the barrier of disembodied sound, the silence of the corridor was soothing. Jessica always had difficulty with hearing men’s voices, for their registers were lower. Sometimes, she wondered if this was the reason she’d become interested in feminism: women were simply easier to understand. The next door was labelled “Facets of Phenomenology.” After that was “Post-It Notes and Poststructuralism”, “Interpretation of Geometric Design”, “Knitting Class” and “Cyberspace and Geography.” None of these were very helpful. She wanted something on bodies and writing. She walked on. It was, she soon realised, so terribly easy to lose one’s way. The corridors continued. She turned right most of the time, and occasionally left. Her arches began to ache. After a while she came to the conclusion that she had no idea of where she was. Immediately, a bird appeared and dived down her throat. Trapped, it thudded against her ribs. Breathe, I told her. Breathe. She put a hand out to the wall. Outside another door she heard, a voice with a distinct Australian accent. She checked the label on the door. “Fictocriticism,” it read. The door opened. The bird climbed out of her chest and flew away. A young woman stood before her, wearing bright red lipstick. “We saw your shadow beneath the door.” She pointed to Jessica’s feet. “We don’t like barriers, so come in.” The room was airy and brilliantly lit, with a high ceiling patterned with pressed metal vines and flowers. A man and a handful of women sat at a table covered with papers, bottles of wine, brie, sundried tomatoes and crackers. “Wine?” asked the woman, a bottle in her hand. “It’s from Margaret River.” “Oh yes, please.” Jessica pulled out a chair from the table. The people’s faces looked friendly. “What brings you here?” The woman with red lipstick asked, handing her a glass. “I’m trying to find a writing style that’s comfortable for me to use. I just can’t relate to abstract texts, like those by Deleuze and Guattari.” Jessica eyed the cheese platter on the table. She was hungry. “Help yourself,” said the man. Jessica picked up the cheese knife and a cracker. “You’d like my essay, then, ‘Me and My Shadow.’” It was an older woman speaking, with soft grey hair and luminous eyes. “In it I assert that Guattari’s Molecular Revolution is distancing and, she pushed the pile of paper napkins towards Jessica, ‘totally abstract and impersonal. Though the author uses the first person (‘The distinction I am proposing’, ‘I want therefore to make it clear’), it quickly became clear to me that he had no interest whatsoever in the personal, or in concrete situations as I understand them – a specific person, a specific machine, somewhere in time and space, with something on his/her mind, real noises, smells, aches and pains” (131). Jessica thought about the first room, where Deleuze’s and Guattari’s voices had seemed to issue from nowhere. “Of course,” she said. “If my comprehension comes from reading faces and bodies, it follows that those writers who evince themselves in the text will be the ones that appeal to me.” The rest of the table was silent. “I’m deaf,” Jessica explained. “I’ve no hearing in my left ear and half in my right, but people don’t know until I tell them.” “I’d never have guessed,” said the woman with red lipstick. “I’m good at faking it,” Jessica replied wryly. “It seems to me that, if I only hear some things and make the rest up, then my writing should reflect that.” “We might be able to help you — we write about, and in the style of, fictocriticism.” Two women were talking at once. It was difficult to tell who was saying what. “But what is it?” Jessica asked. “That’s a problematic question. It resists definition, you see, for the form it takes varies according to the writer.” She glanced from one woman to the other. It was hard to keep up. They went on, “Fictocriticism might most usefully be defined as hybridised writing that moves between the poles of fiction (‘invention’/‘speculation’) and criticism (‘deduction’/‘explication’), of subjectivity (‘interiority’) and objectivity (‘exteriority’). It is writing that brings the ‘creative’ and the ‘critical’ together – not simply in the sense of placing them side by side, but in the sense of mutating both, of bringing a spotlight to bear upon the known forms in order to make them ‘say’ something else” (Kerr and Nettlebeck 3). “It began to incorporate narratives and styles that wrote against omniscience in favour of fragmentary, personal perspectives.” Concentrating on cutting and spreading her brie, Jessica couldn’t see who had said this. She looked up, trying to see who had spoken. “In addition,” said a young, slim woman, “The use of autobiographical elements in ficto-criticism that include the body and personal details … realises a subjectivity that is quite different from the controlling academic critical subject with their voice from on high” (Flavell 77). Jessica bit into her cracker. The brie was creamy, but rather too strong. She piled sundried tomatoes onto it. “It is of course, a capacious category,” the man added, “as it must be if it is inspired by the materials and situation at hand. One might urge the interested writer not to feel that their practice has to conform to one or another model, but to have the confidence that the problem characterising the situation before them will surprise them into changing their practices. Like all literature, fictocriticism experiments with ways of being in the world, with forms of subjectivity if you like” (Muecke 15). Jessica nodded, her mouth full of biscuit and brie. Oil dripped from the tomatoes down her fingers. “Yes,” it was the two women in their duet, “in fictocritical writings the ‘distance’ of the theorist/critic collides with the ‘interiority’ of the author. In other words, the identity of the author is very much at issue. This is not to say that an ‘identity’ declares itself strictly in terms of the lived experience of the individual, but it does declare itself as a politic to be viewed, reviewed, contested, and above all engaged with” (Kerr and Nettlebeck 3). “That makes sense,” Jessica thought aloud. “Everything I write is an amalgam of fact and fiction, because I hear some things and make the rest up. Deafness influences the way I process and write about the world, so it seems I can’t avoid my body when I write.” She lifted a napkin from the pile and wiped her oily fingers. “Yet, to use a language of the body, or écriture féminine, is also to run the risk of essentialism, of assuming that, for example when we write long, silky sentences, we are saying that this is how every woman would write. It’s also true that, when writing, we don’t have to be limited to our own bodies – we can go beyond them.” She paused, thinking. “It’s been said that sign language is a form of écriture féminine, for a person who signs literally writes with their hands. Where are my notes?” She ferreted through her handbag, pushing aside tubes of lip gloss and hand cream, a bus pass and mirror, and extracted some folded pieces of paper. “Here, H-Dirksen L. Bauman comments on the possibilites of écriture féminine for the disabled, writing that, The project of recognizing Deaf identity bears similarities to the feminist project of re-gaining a ‘body of one’s own’ through linguistic and literary practices. Sign, in a more graphic way, perhaps, than l’écriture féminine is a ‘writing of/on the body.’ The relation between Sign and l’écriture féminine raises questions that could have interesting implications for feminist performance. Does the antiphonocetric nature of Sign offer a means of averting these essentializing tendency of l’écriture féminine? Does the four-dimensional space of performance offer ways of deconstructing phallogocentric linear discourse? (359) “As Sign is a writing by the body, it could be argued that each body produces an original language. I think it’s this, rather than antiphonocentrism — that is, refusing to privilege speech over writing, as has been the tradition — that represents the destabilising effects of Sign.” “Here’s Jamming the Machinery.” The slim woman pushed a book towards Jessica. “It’s about contemporary Australian écriture féminine.” Jessica opened the covers and began reading: As a counter-strategy, écriture féminine, it is argued, is theoretically sourced in the bodies of women. Here, the body represents one aspect of what it ‘means’ to be a woman, but of course our bodies are infinitely variable as are our socio-historical relations and the way that we live through and make meaning of our particular bodies. Texts, however, are produced through the lived practices of being socially positioned as (among other things) women, so those effects will be inscribed in actively inventing ways for women to speak and write about ourselves as women, rather than through the narrative machinery of patriarchy (Bartlett 1-2). I agree with that, Jessica mused to herself. Even if, on paper, écriture féminine does run the risk of essentialism, it’s still a useful strategy, so long as one remains attentive to the specificity of each individual body. She looked up. The conversation was becoming loud, joyful and boisterous. It was turning into a party. Sadly, she stood. “I’d like to stay, but I have to keep thinking.” She pushed in her chair. “Thank you for your ideas.” “Goodbye and good luck!” they chorused, and replenished their wine glasses. Outside, it was getting dark. She trailed her fingers along the wall for balance. Her sight orientated her; without it, she was liable to fall over, particularly in stilettos. Seeing a movement near the ceiling, Jessica stopped and peered upwards. Dragons! she cried. Sitting in the rafters were three small, pearly white dragons, their scaly hides gleaming in the darkness. Here, she called, stretching out a hand. One dropped, swooping, and landed on her wrist, its talons gripping her arm. Ouch! It looked at her curiously with its small gold eyes, then stretched its wings proudly. Dark blue veins ran across the soft membrane. You’re not very cuddly, she told it, but you are exquisite. Tell me, are you real? For an answer, it leaned over and gently nipped her thumb, drawing blood. Its tail swished like a cat’s in a frisky mood. Stop making things up, I scolded her. This is supposed to be serious. Abruptly, the dragon sprang from her wrist, winging gracefully back to the ceiling. Jessica rubbed her arm and continued, feeling ripples of unevenly applied paint beneath her fingertips. Let me pose a question, I suggested: if a fairy godmother offered you your hearing, would you take it? Well, deafness has made me who I am— You mean, an opinionated, obnoxious, feminist thinker and writer? Yes, exactly. So perhaps I wouldn’t take it. And where would you be without silence, which has given you the space in which to think, and which has shaped you as a writer? Without silence, you wouldn’t have turned to words. Hmmm, yes. She slowed. It’s awfully dark in here now. And quiet. For deaf people, silence has often been yoked together with negative connotations – it’s a cave, a prison, a tomb. Sometimes it can feel like this, but, as you know, at other times it’s liberating. You don’t have to listen to someone yakking on their mobile phone on the bus, nor overhear your flatmate having loud sex in the room above; you can simply switch off your hearing aid and keep reading your book, or thinking your thoughts. In a somewhat similar situation, Stephen Hawking, the theoretical physicist, has said that ‘his disability has given him the advantage of having more time to think,’ although Susan Wendell points out that he is only able to do this ‘because of the help of his family, three nurses, a graduate student who travels with him to maintain his computer-communications systems’ – resources which are unavailable to many disabled people” (109). Thus although disability has been largely theorised as lack, it would seem that the contrary is the case: disability brings with it a wealth of possibility. Jessica slowed, feeling vibrations in the wall and beneath our feet. Her heartbeat quickened. Maybe it’s music. It’s not. It’s irregular. Then we heard the sound, like distant thunder. Get back against the wall, I ordered her. Seconds later a crowd of creatures ran past, rattling the floorboards. They were so black we couldn’t see them. What was that? she asked. They smelled like horses. Musky, but sharp too. Let’s get moving. And I told you to stop making things up. I didn’t make that up! she protested. Her pulse was still rapid, so I kept talking to distract her. The difficulty is to avoid referring to the disabled person as having lost something. Of course, you can lose your hearing, but you gain infinitely more in other ways – your senses of touch, taste, smell and sight are augmented. In the current climate of thinking, this is easier said than done. Lennard Davis indicates with distaste that discussions of disability stop theorists in their tracks. Disability, as it has been formulated, is a construct that is defined by lack. Rather than face this ragged imaged [of the disabled individual], the critic turns to the fluids of sexuality, the gloss of lubrication, the glossary of the body as text, the heteroglossia of the intertext, the glossolalia of the schizophrenic. But almost never the body of the differently abled (5). Theorists of disability consistently point out that, if more effort and energy were directed towards the philosophical implications of the disabled body, a wealth of new material and ideas would emerge that would shatter existing presumptions about the corporeal. For example, there are still immense possibilities thrown up by theorising a jouissance, or pleasure, in the disabled body. As Susan Wendell points out, “paraplegics and quadriplegics have revolutionary things to teach us about the possibilities of sexuality which contradict patriarchal culture’s obsessions with the genitals” (120). Thus if there were more of a focus on the positive aspects of disability and on promoting the understanding that disability is not about lack, people could see how it fosters creativity and imagination. Jessica saw with relief that there was a large bay window at the end of a corridor, looking out onto the Institute’s grounds. She collapsed onto the bench beneath it, which was layered with cushions. The last of the sun was fading and the grass refracted a golden sheen. She unzipped her boots and swung her legs onto the bench. Leaning her head back against the wall, she remembered a day at primary school when she was eleven. She sat on the blue seat beneath the Jacaranda tree, a book open in her lap. It was lunchtime, the sun was warm and purple Jacaranda blossoms lay scattered at her feet, some squidged wetly into the cement. She looked up from the book to watch her classmates playing soccer on the field, shouting and calling. She would have joined them, except that of late she had felt awkwardness, where before she had been blithe. She, who was so used to scrambling over the delightful hardness of wool bales in the shearing shed, who ran up and down the banks of creeks and crawled into ti trees, flakes of bark sticking to her jumper, had gradually, insidiously, learnt a consciousness of her body. She was not like them. We were silent. The electric lights on the walls of the building came on, illuminating sections of the stonework. At the time, she hated being isolated, but it forced to look at the world differently. Spending so much time on her own also taught her to listen to me, her imagination, and because of that her writing flourished. There was a flutter in the hallway. The tiny dragon had returned. It braked in the air, circled, and floated gently onto her skirt. Was this your doing? She asked me suspiciously. Maybe. She held out her palm. The dragon jumped into it, squeaking, its tail whipping lazily. Jessica smiled. References Bartlett, Alison. Jamming the Machinery: Contemporary Australian Women’s Writing. Toowoomba: Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 1998. Bauman, H-Dirksen L. “Toward a Poetics of Vision, Space and the Body.” The Disability Studies Reader. Ed. Lennard J. Davis. Hoboken: Routledge, 2006. 355-366. Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London: Verso, 1995. Flavell, Helen. Writing-Between: Australian and Canadian Ficto-Criticism. Ph.D. Thesis. Murdoch University, 2004. Gibbs, Anna. “Writing and the Flesh of Others.” Australian Feminist Studies 18 (2003): 309–319. Kerr, Heather, and Amanda Nettlebeck. “Notes Towards an Introduction.” The Space Between: Australian Women Writing Fictocriticism. Ed. Heather Kerr and Amanda Nettlebeck. Nedlands: U of Western Australia P, 1998. 1-18. Muecke, Stephen. Joe in the Andamans: And Other Fictocritical Stories. Erskineville: Local Consumption Publications, 2008. Tompkins, Jane. “Me and My Shadow.” Gender and Theory: Dialogues on Feminist Criticism. Ed. Linda Kauffman. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. 121-139. Wendell, Susan. “Towards a Feminist Theory of Disability.” Hypatia 4 (1989): 104–124.

Introduction Contrary to popular understandings of academia, the work of academics is intrinsically community driven, because scholarly inquiry is invariably about social life. Therefore, what occupies academic scholarship is in the interest of the broader populace, and we rely on the public to inform our work. The findings of academic work are simultaneously a reflection of the researcher, and the public. The research interests of contemporary cultural and social researchers inevitably, and often necessarily, reflect issues and activities that they encounter in their everyday lives. My own doctoral research into contemporary cultural discourses informing the expectations, and experiences of motherhood in regional Western Australia, reflects an academic, personal and community interest. The doctoral research drawn on in this paper, stresses the relevance of cultural research projects to the concerns and behaviours of the wider public. The enthusiasm with which participants responded to this project, and reported back about their feelings and actions following the interview was unexpected. The immediacy of the impact this project has had on assisting women to create and consider alternate discourses demonstrates the capacity of this work to inform and direct contemporary social, political and cultural debates surrounding the bodily expectations, and experiences of motherhood. The feminist inspired methodology adopted in this project facilitated my speaking to other women negotiating cultural ideals about what constitutes a "good mother" in contemporary regional Western Australia. It has the potential to open up conversations between women, and between women and men, as evidenced by subsequent responses from participants. By examining the impact of these cultural ideals with everyday women, this project provides a means for women, and men, to reflect, engage critically and ultimately re-shape these discourses to more accurately reveal the desires and aspirations of everyday Australian women. From my perspective, three discourses in particular, the Good Mother, the Superwoman, and the Yummy Mummy, inform the expectations and experiences of motherhood. The orthodox discourse of the 'Good Mother' understands motherhood as a natural feminine desire and it describes characteristics such as enduring love, care, patience and selflessness that are often presented as synonymous with motherhood. Women who can successfully juggle the expectations of being a 'good mother' and a dedicated professional worker, are 'superwomen'. Increasingly dominant is the expectation that following maternity, women should not look as if they have had a child at all; the discourse of the Yummy Mummy focused on in this paper. The relationships between these discourses are complex; "failure to perform" them adequately can result in women being labelled "bad mothers", either by themselves or others. Although these discourses are Western and globalising, they have a tangible effect locally. The cultural scripts they proscribe to are often contradictory; resulting in many women feeling conflicted. Despite some levels of critical engagement with these competing cultural agendas, the women in this study reflected, to differing degrees, their internalisation of the expectations that accompany these cultural scripts. The outcome of this work, and the process of producing it, has the capacity to influence the direction of current debates in Australia. Amongst others, the debate surrounding the contemporary cultural "presentation" of postnatal bodies, including what women should look like as mothers. The role of the media in shaping the current expectations surrounding the postnatal body, including the recently raised proposal that glossy magazines, and other forms of media, should have to declare incidences of Photoshopping, or other forms of photo enhancement, is one agenda that this project can influence. I explore the potential of this work to influence these debates through an examination of the impact of popularised fantasies on women's subjectivity, and feelings towards their postnatal bodies. An examination of the ways that some aspects of mothering are excluded from popular media sources highlights the capacity of this work to provide a practical means of sharing contemporary expectations and experiences of motherhood amongst women, those already mothering, and those intending to mother, and men. These debates have an impact on, and relevance for, the everyday lives of Australian women and men. Feminist Methodologies: Opportunities to Foster Mutual Understanding and Recognition of Shared Experience The motivating emphasis of feminist research is "women's lives and the questions they have about their own experiences" (Bloom 112). Consequently, a feminist methodology includes a concern with transformation and empowerment through the research practice (McRobbie, "Politics" 52). For Luff this reminds feminist researchers that their first duty is to "deal respectively with women's subjectivity, and indeed the inter-subjectivities of researcher and participants" (692). Olesen, in her account of feminist qualitative research, articulates that: the researcher too, has attributes, characteristics, a history, and gender, class, race and social attributes that enter the researcher interaction … in light of the multiple positions, selves, and identities at play in the research process, the subjectivity of the researcher, as much as that of the researched, became foregrounded. (226-7) This signifies for Olesen the indistinct boundary between researchers and researched (227), and for myself, signals the potential that feminist research praxis has for uniting the academic and broader, communities. According to Reinharz the interview has historically been the principle way in which feminists have pursued the active contribution of their participants in the construction of their research projects (Heyl 374). The research findings of this doctoral project are based on a series of interviews with nine intending to mother women, and twenty one already mothering women. The research questions were open-ended to allow participants to answer "in their own terms" (Jones 48). Participants were also encouraged to reflect on aspects of mothering, or plans to mother, that were most significant to them. Following Oakley (49) and others (Bloom 11) argument that there can be no intimacy between researcher and participant without reciprocity, while I chose not to express my personal disagreement to any statements made by participants, I self-consciously chose to answer any questions that participants directed to me. I did not attempt to hide my personal empathy with many of their accounts, and allowed for email follow up. By doing my upmost to position myself as a "validating listener" rather than a scrutinising judge, I allowed the women to reflect on the fact that their feelings were not necessarily unusual or "abnormal", and did not make them "bad mothers". In this way, both the process, and the final product of this work can provide a practical means for women to share some of their feelings, which are often excluded, or in some cases, vilified (Arendell 1196; O'Donohoe 14), in popular media outlets. The outcome of this work can contribute to an alternate space for everyday women to "be real" with both other mothers, and intending to mother women, and contribute to discourses of motherhood. Unreal Imagery and the Postnatal Body: Possibilities for Communication and Alteration Drawing on the principal example of the impact of unreal imagery, specifically images of airbrushed supermodels and celebrities, on the real experiences of motherhood by everyday Australian women, I propose that this project can foster further communications between intending to mother, and already mothering women, and their partners, about the realities, and misconceptions of motherhood; particularly, to share aspects of mothering that are excluded or marginalised in popular media representations. Through this process of validating the experiences of "real" everyday women, women, and men, can affect a break from, or at least critique, dominant discourses surrounding motherhood, and appreciate that there are a multiplicity of opinions, information, and ways of mothering. A dominant aspect of the "unreal" surrounding motherhood concerns the body and what women are led to believe their bodies can, and indeed, should, look like, postnatal. Unsurprisingly, the women in my study associated this "unreal" with Hollywood representations, and the increasing plethora of celebrity mums they encounter in the media. As McRobbie has suggested, a popular front page image for various celebrity chasing weekly magazines is the Yummy Mummy, "who can squeeze into size six jeans a couple of weeks after giving birth, with the help of a personal trainer", an image that has provided the perfect foundation for marketing companies to promote the arena of maternity as the next central cultural performance in terms of femininity, in which "high maintenance pampering techniques, as well as a designer wardrobe" ("Yummy") are essential. The majority of women in my study spoke about these images, and the messages they send. With few exceptions, the participants identified popular images surrounding mothering, and the expectations that accompany them, as unrealistic, and inaccurate. Several women reflected on the way that some aspects of their experience, which, in many cases, turned out to be shared experience, of mothering are excluded, or "hidden away", in popular media forms. For Rachel, popular media representations do not capture the "realness" of everyday experiences of motherhood: I was looking at all these not so real people … Miranda Kerr like breast feeding with her red stiletto's on and her red lipstick and I'm just like right you've got your slippers on and your pyjamas on and you're lucky to brush your teeth by lunchtime … I don't think they want to keep it real … It's not all giggles and smiles; there is uncontrollable crying in the middle of the night because you don't know what's wrong with them and you find out the next day that they've got an ear infection. You know where's all that, they miss out all that, it's all about the beautiful sleeping babies and you know the glam mums. (Rachel, aged 33, mother of one) The individual women involved in this study were personally implicated to differing degrees in these unreal images. For Penelope, these types of representations influenced her bodily expectations, and she identified this disjunction as the most significant in her mothering experience: I expected to pop straight back into my pre-maternity size, that for me was the hugest thing actually, like you see these ladies who six weeks after they've had their baby, look as good as before sort of thing, no stretch marks or anything like and then I thought if they can do it, I can do it sort of thing and it didn't work like that. (Penelope, aged 36, mother of four) Penelope's experience was not an unusual one, with the majority of women reporting similar feelings. The findings of this study concur with the outcomes reported by a recent United Kingdom survey of 2000 women, which found that 82 per cent were unhappy with their postnatal bodies, 77 per cent were "shocked by the changes to their body", and, more than nine out of ten agreed that "celebrity mothers' dramatic weight loss 'puts immense and unwelcome pressure on ordinary mums" (O'Donohoe 9). This suggests that celebrity images, and the expectations that accompany them, are having a widespread effect in the Western world, resulting in many women experiencing a sense of loss when it comes to their bodies. They must "get their bodies back", and may experience shame over the unattainability of this goal, which appears to be readily achievable for other women. To appreciate the implications of these images, and the power relations involved, these effects need to be examined on the local, everyday level. O'Donohoe discusses the role of magazines in funding this unreal imagery, and their fixation on high-profile Yummy Mummies, describing their coverage as "hyper-hypocritical" (9-10). On one hand, they play a leading role in the proliferation, promotion and reinforcement of the Yummy Mummy ideal, and the significant pressure this discourse places on women in the wider community. Whilst on the other hand they denigrate and vilify celebrity mums who are also increasingly pressured into this performance, labelling them as "weigh too thin" (cover of Famous magazine, Jan. 2011) and "too stressed to eat" (cover of OK magazine, June 2011). Gill and Arthurs observe how: the female celebrity body is under constant surveillance, policed for being too fat, too thin, having wrinkles or 'ugly hands' … 'ordinary' women's bodies are under similar scrutiny when they participate in the growing number of reality make-over shows in which … female participants are frequently humiliated and vilified. (444) An observation by one of my participants suggests the implications of these media trends on the lives of everyday women, and suggests that everyday women are inscrutably aware of the lack of alternative discourses: It's kind of like fashionable to talk about your body and what's wrong with it, it's not really, I don't know. You don't really say, check out, like god I've got good boobs and look at me, look how good I look. It's almost like, my boobs are sagging, or my bums too big, it's never anything really positive. (Daisy, aged 36, mother of two) The "fashionable" nature of body surveillance is further supported by the vast majority of women in this study who reported such behaviour. A preoccupation with the body as a source of identity that emphasises self-surveillance, self-monitoring, and self-discipline (Gill 155) is a central component to neoliberalism, and the Yummy Mummy phenomenon. As O'Donohoe surmises, maternity now requires high maintenance (3). O'Donohoe comments on the concern this generates amongst some women regarding their weight gain, leading to some cases of infant malnutrition as a consequence of dieting whilst pregnant (9). Whilst this is an extreme example, mothering women's anxiety over body image is a widespread concern as reflected in this study. This trend towards body surveillance suggests that the type of sexualisation Attwood describes as taking place in Western cultures, is present and influential amongst the women in this study. I concur with Attwood that this trend is supplementary to the intensification of neoliberalism, in which "the individual becomes a self-regulating unit in society" (xxiii). The body as a key site for identity construction, acts as a canvas, on which the cultural trend towards increasing sexualisation, is printed, and has implications for both feminine and maternal identities. The women in this study reported high incidences of body self-surveillance, with an emphasis on the monitoring of "weight". For many women, the disjuncture between the popularised "unreal", and the reality of their postnatal bodies resulted in feelings of shock and disappointment. For Teal, positive feelings and self-esteem were connected to her weight, and she discussed how she had to restrict weighing herself to once a week, at a particular time of day, to avoid distress: I'm trying to make it that I don't go on the scales, just once and week and like in the morning, because like I go at different times and like your weight does change a little bit during the day and your oh my goodness I've put on kilo! And feel awful and then next morning you weigh yourself and go good its back. (Teal, aged 25, mother of one) According to Foucault (Sawicki, Disciplining 68), the practice of self-surveillance teaches individuals to monitor themselves, and is one of the key normative operations of biopower, a process that attaches individuals to their identities. The habitual approach to weight monitoring by many of the women in this study suggests that the Yummy Mummy discourse is becoming incorporated into the identities of everyday mothering women, as a recognisable and dominant cultural script to perform, to differing degrees, and to varying grades of consciousness. A number of participants in this study worked in the fitness industry, and whilst I expected them to be more concerned about their bodies postnatal, because of the pressures they face in their workplaces to "look the part", the education they receive about their bodies gave them a realistic idea of what individual women can achieve, and they were among the most critical of weight monitoring practices. As several feminist and poststructuralist theorists suggest, disciplinary practices, such as self-surveillance, both underscore, and contribute to, contemporary cultural definitions of femininity. From a Foucauldian perspective, a woman in this context becomes "a self-policing subject, self-committed to a relentless self-surveillance" (Hekman 275). However, although for Foucault, total liberation is impossible, some parts of social life are more vulnerable to criticism than others, and we can change particular normalising practices (165). Creating alternate mothering discourses is one way to achieve this, and some women did reflect critically on these types of self-policing behaviours. A minority of women in this study recognised their body as "different" to before they had children. Rather than agonise over these changes, they accepted them as part of where they are in their lives right now: I'm not the same person that I was then, its different, I like I just sort of feel that change is good, it's okay to be different, it's okay for me look different, it's okay for my body to kind of wear my motherhood badges that's okay I feel happy about that. So I don't want it to look exactly the same, no I don't actually. (Corinne, aged 33, mother of four) As many of the women who have been in email contact with me since their interviews have expressed, the questions I asked have prompted them to reflect more consciously on many of these issues, and for some, to have conversations with loved ones. For me, this demonstrates that this project has assisted women, and the process of taking part has elicited conversations between more women, and importantly, between women and men, about these types of media representations, and the expectations they create. In response to a growing body of research into the effects of unrealistic imagery on women, particularly young women and the increasing rates of eating disorders amongst women (see for example Hudson et al.; Taylor et al.; Treasure) in Western communities, there has been debate in a number of Western countries, including the United Kingdom, France and Australia, over whether the practice of digitally altering photos in the media, should be legislated so that media outlets are required to declare when and how images have been altered. The media has not greeted this suggestion warmly. In response to calls for legislative action Jill Wanless, an associate editor at Look magazine, suggested that "sometimes readers want hyper-reality in a way—they want to be taken out of their own situation". The justification for "perfected" images, in this case, is the inferred distinction they create between the unreal and reality. However, the responses from the everyday women involved in this study suggest that their desire is not for "hyper reality", but rather for "realness" to be represented. As Corinne explains: Where's the mother on the front page of the magazine that says I took 11 months to lose my baby weight…I hate this fantasy world, where's the reality, where's our real mums, our real women who are out there going I agonise over dropping my kid in day care everyday when they cry, I hate it. That's real. Performativity, as an inextricable aspect of hyper reality, may be ignored by those with a vested interest in media production, but the roles that discourses such as the Yummy Mummy have in proliferating and creating the expectation of these performances, is of interest to both the community and cultural theorists. Conclusion The capacity to influence current cultural, political and social debates surrounding what women should look like as mothers in contemporary Western Australian society is important to explore. Using feminist methodologies in such work provides an opportunity to unite the academic and broader communities. By disassembling the boundary between researcher and researched, it is possible to encourage mutual understanding and the recognition of mutual experience amongst researcher, participants' and the wider community. Taking part in this research has elicited conversations between women, and men concerning their expectations, and experiences of parenthood. Most importantly, the outcome of this work has reflected a desire by local everyday women for the media to include their stories in the broader presentation of motherhood. In this sense, this project has, and can further, assist women in sharing aspects of their experiences that are frequently excluded from popular media representations, and present the multiplicity of mothering experiences, and what being a "good mother" can entail. Acknowledgements I would like to sincerely thank the following for their invaluable feedback on earlier drafts of this article: Dr Kathryn Trees, Yann Toussaint, Linda Warren and the anonymous M/C Journal reviewers. References Arendell, Terry. "Conceiving and Investigating Motherhood: The Decade's Scholarship." Journal of Marriage and the Family 62.4 (2000): 1192-207. Attwood, Feona. Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualisation of Western Culture. London: I.B. Tauris, 2009. Bloom, Leslie. "Reflections from the Field: Locked in Uneasy Sisterhood: Reflections on Feminist Methodology and Research Relations." Anthropology & Education Quarterly 28.1 (1997): 111-22. Wanless, Jill. "Curb Airbrushed Images, Keep Bodies Real." CBS News World UK, 2010. 20 Sep. 2010 ‹http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/09/20/world/main6884884.shtml›. Gill, Rosalind. Gender and the Media. Cambridge: Polity P, 2007. Gill, Rosalind, and Jane Arthurs. "Editors Introduction: New Femininities?" Feminist Media Studies 6.4 (2006): 443-51. Hekman, Susan. Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1996. Heyl, Barbara Sherman. "Ethnographic Interviewing." Handbook of Ethnography. Eds. Paul Atkinson, Amanda J. Coffey, Sara Delamont, John Lofland, and Lyn H. Lofland. London: Sage, 2001. 369-83. Hudson, James I., Eva Hiripi, Harrison G. Pope Jr., and Ronald C. Kessler. "The Prevalence and Correlates of Eating Disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication." Biological Psychiatry 61.3 (2007). 348-58. Jones, Sue. "Depth Interviewing." Applied Qualitative Research. Ed. Robert Walker. Ashgate, 1985. 45-56. Luff, Donna. "Dialogue across the Divides: 'Moments of Rapport' and Power in Feminist Research with Anti-Feminist Women." Sociology 33.4 (1999): 687-703. McRobbie, Angela. "The Politics of Feminist Research: Between Talk, Text and Action." Feminist Review 12 (1982): 46-57. ———. "Yummy Mummies Leave a Bad Taste for Young Women: The Cult of Celebrity Motherhood Is Deterring Couples from Having Children Early. We Need to Rethink the Nanny Culture." The Guardian 2 Mar. 2006. Oakley, Ann. "Interviewing Women: A Contradiction in Terms." Doing Feminist Research. Ed. Helen Roberts. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 30-61. O'Donohoe, Stephanie. "Yummy Mummies: The Clamour of Glamour in Advertising to Mothers." Advertising & Society Review 7.3 (2006): 1-18. Olesen, Virginia. "Feminisms and Qualitative Research at and into the Millennium." Handbook of Qualitative Research. Eds. Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln. London: Sage, 2000. 215-55. Sawicki, Jana. Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body. New York: Routledge, 1991. ———. "Feminism, Foucault, and 'Subjects' of Power and Freedom." Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault. Ed. Susan J. Hekman, University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1996. 159-210. Taylor, C. Barr, et al. "The Adverse Effect of Negative Comments about Weight and Shape for Family and Siblings on Women at High Risk for Eating Disorders." Paediatrics 118 (2006): 731-38. Treasure, Janet. "An Image Is Worth a Thousand Words of Public Health." Brazilian Journal of Psychiatry 56.1 (2007): 7-8.

Feminist activists and critical sport scholars in the global north have advocated for more inclusive representation of bodies and more accessible physical cultures. Body positivity, a contentious movement and concept, has been taken up in various ways by different groups. Some scholars believe it holds power to liberate individuals from patriarchal, neoliberal, capitalist, and colonial ideologies of what constitutes a “good” body. On the contrary, critics assert this movement has been gentrified by white-centered politics. Intersectionality has a similar genealogy as body positivity, with a rich history in Black feminist thought but now considered by many as coopted and whitened. In this article, we trace the rich and divergent legacies of both movements and explore at the structural level how body positivity is represented within physical cultures on Instagram. We use a social-justice oriented intersectionality framework exploring #BodyPositivity and #BodyPositive across a total of 141 posts using reflexive thematic analysis. We organize our findings into four themes: 1) Disclosure-Privilege of Body-Related Journeys; 2) The Absent-Present; 3) Consuming Positivity; and 4) Disrupting Normative Body Positivity Posts. Overall, we found that only certain bodies (and transformations) were visible within the data: those of (now) lean, white, cis-gendered individuals, many of whom were engaged in bodybuilding, and who were sharing their bodily transformation. We observe a remarkable absence of BIPOC, 2S LGBTQAI+, fat/thick/thicc/curvy, older, gender-nonconforming, and/or disabled representations. We also note the myriad ways that body positivity has been commodified and packaged into a product or service for consumption. Lastly, we outline and celebrate the exceptions to this norm where a minority of posts align more closely with the original intentions of the body positivity movement. We conclude with our position on how to do intersectionality research, and call on researchers to honor Black feminist origins and rich social justice history in these movements.

A internet tem se tornado um espaço não só de comunicação como, também, de aprendizado, pois constitui subjetividades, produz identidades e expõe novos modos de ser e existir no mundo. Além disso, a internet tem proporcionado certa autonomia, possibilitando a expressão de novas reivindicações. Isso faz com que movimentos sociais, como o feminismo, contestem questões relacionadas ao corpo de diferentes maneiras. Como consequência, novos movimentos têm surgido, como o body positive, cujo objetivo é promover a autoaceitação corporal independentemente de tamanho e forma. A partir destas considerações, o presente artigo analisa, a partir do campo teórico dos Estudos Culturais em Educação, quais são as lições sobre amor-próprio e autoaceitação ensinadas em vídeos de ativistas body positive no YouTube. Na pesquisa, foram empregados os conceitos de Pedagogia Cultural (ANDRADE, 2016; CAMOZZATO, 2012; SILVA, 2010), Representação (HALL, 2016) e, como metodologia, utilizou-se a Análise Cultural (MORAES, 2016). Foram identificadas duas lições, ambas ancoradas em discursos oriundos da autoajuda, resultando na produção de representações de corpo gordo como “saudáveis”, “belos” e “normais”.

This article explores how fat women protesting challenges norms of womanhood, the place of women in society, and who has the power to have their say in public spaces. We use the term fat as a political reclamation; Fat Studies scholars and fat activists prefer the term fat, over the normative term “overweight” and the pathologising term “obese/obesity” (Lee and Pausé para 3). Who is and who isn’t fat, we suggest, is best left to self-determination, although it is generally accepted by fat activists that the term is most appropriately adopted by individuals who are unable to buy clothes in any store they choose. Using a tweet from conservative commentator Ann Coulter as a leaping-off point, we examine the narratives around women in the public sphere and explore how fat bodies might transgress further the norms set by society. The public representations of women in politics and protest are then are set in the context of ‘activist wisdom’ (Maddison and Scalmer) from two sides of the globe. Activist wisdom gives preference to the lived knowledge and experience of activists as tools to understand social movements. It seeks to draw theoretical implications from the practical actions of those on the ground. In centring the experiences of ourselves and other activists, we hope to expand existing understandings of body politics, gender, and political power in this piece. It is important in researching social movements to look both at the representations of protest and protestors in all forms of media as this is the ‘public face’ of movements, but also to examine the reflections of the individuals who collectively put their weight behind bringing social change.A few days after the 45th President of the United States was elected, people around the world spilled into the streets and participated in protests; precursors to the Women’s March which would take place the following January. Pictures of such marches were shared via social media, demonstrating the worldwide protest against the racism, misogyny, and overall oppressiveness, of the newly elected leader. Not everyone was supportive of these protests though; one such conservative commentator, Ann Coulter, shared this tweet: Image1: A tweet from Ann Coulter; the tweet contains a picture of a group of protestors, holding signs protesting Trump, white supremacy, and for the rights of immigrants. In front of the group, holding a megaphone is a woman. Below the picture, the text reads, “Without fat girls, there would be no protests”.Coulter continued on with two more tweets, sharing pictures of other girls protesting and suggesting that the protestors needed a diet programme. Kivan Bay (“Without Fat Girls”) suggested that perhaps Coulter was implying that skinny girls do not have time to protest because they are too busy doing skinny girl things, like buying jackets or trying on sweaters. Or perhaps Coulter was arguing that fat girls are too visible, too loud, and too big, to be taken seriously in their protests. These tweets provide a point of illustration for how fat women protesting challenge norms of womanhood, the place of women in society, and who has the power to have their say in public spaces While Coulter’s tweet was most likely intended as a hostile personal attack on political grounds, we find it useful in its foregrounding of gender, bodies and protest which we consider in this article, beginning with a review of fat girls’ role in social justice movements.Across the world, we can point to fat women who engage in activism related to body politics and more. Australian fat filmmaker and activist Kelli Jean Drinkwater makes documentaries, such as Aquaporko! and Nothing to Lose, that queer fat embodiment and confronts body norms. Newly elected Ontario MPP Jill Andrew has been fighting for equal rights for queer people and fat people in Canada for decades. Nigerian Latasha Ngwube founded About That Curvy Life, Africa’s leading body positive and empowerment site, and has organised plus-size fashion show events at Heineken Lagos Fashion and Design Week in Nigeria in 2016 and the Glitz Africa Fashion Week in Ghana in 2017. Fat women have been putting their bodies on the line for the rights of others to live, work, and love. American Heather Heyer was protesting the hate that white nationalists represent and the danger they posed to her friends, family, and neighbours when she died at a rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina in late 2017 (Caron). When Heyer was killed by one of those white nationalists, they declared that she was fat, and therefore her body size was lauded loudly as justification for her death (Bay, “How Nazis Use”; Spangler).Fat women protesting is not new. For example, the Fat Underground was a group of “radical fat feminist women”, who split off from the more conservative NAAFA (National Association to Aid Fat Americans) in the 1970s (Simic 18). The group educated the public about weight science, harassed weight-loss companies, and disrupted academic seminars on obesity. The Fat Underground made their first public appearance at a Women’s Equality Day in Los Angeles, taking over the stage at the public event to accuse the medical profession of murdering Cass Elliot, the lead singer of the folk music group, The Mamas and the Papas (Dean and Buss). In 1973, the Fat Underground produced the Fat Liberation Manifesto. This Manifesto began by declaring that they believed “that fat people are full entitled to human respect and recognition” (Freespirit and Aldebaran 341).Women have long been disavowed, or discouraged, from participating in the public sphere (Ginzberg; van Acker) or seen as “intruders or outsiders to the tough world of politics” (van Acker 118). The feminist slogan the personal is political was intended to shed light on the role that women needed to play in the public spheres of education, employment, and government (Caha 22). Across the world, the acceptance of women within the public sphere has been varied due to cultural, political, and religious, preferences and restrictions (Agenda Feminist Media Collective). Limited acceptance of women in the public sphere has historically been granted by those ‘anointed’ by a male family member or patron (Fountaine 47).Anti-feminists are quick to disavow women being in public spaces, preferring to assign them the role as helpmeet to male political elite. As Schlafly (in Rowland 30) notes: “A Positive Woman cannot defeat a man in a wrestling or boxing match, but she can motivate him, inspire him, encourage him, teach him, restrain him, reward him, and have power over him that he can never achieve over her with all his muscle.” This idea of women working behind the scenes has been very strong in New Zealand where the ‘sternly worded’ letter is favoured over street protest. An acceptable route for women’s activism was working within existing political institutions (Grey), with activity being ‘hidden’ inside government offices such as the Ministry of Women’s Affairs (Schuster, 23). But women’s movement organisations that engage in even the mildest form of disruptive protest are decried (Grey; van Acker).One way women have been accepted into public space is as the moral guardians or change agents of the entire political realm (Bliss; Ginzberg; van Acker; Ledwith). From the early suffrage movements both political actors and media representations highlighted women were more principled and conciliatory than men, and in many cases had a moral compass based on restraint. Cartoons showed women in the suffrage movement ‘sweeping up’ and ‘cleaning house’ (Sheppard 123). Groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union were celebrated for protesting against the demon drink and anti-pornography campaigners like Patricia Bartlett were seen as acceptable voices of moral reason (Moynihan). And as Cunnison and Stageman (in Ledwith 193) note, women bring a “culture of femininity to trade unions … an alternative culture, derived from the particularity of their lives as women and experiences of caring and subordination”. This role of moral guardian often derived from women as ‘mothers’, responsible for the physical and moral well-being of the nation.The body itself has been a sight of protest for women including fights for bodily autonomy in their medical decisions, reproductive justice, and to live lives free from physical and sexual abuse, have long been met with criticisms of being unladylike or inappropriate. Early examples decried in NZ include the women’s clothing movement which formed part of the suffrage movement. In the second half of the 20th century it was the freedom trash can protests that started the myth of ‘women burning their bras’ which defied acceptable feminine norms (Sawer and Grey). Recent examples of women protesting for body rights include #MeToo and Time’s Up. Both movements protest the lack of bodily autonomy women can assert when men believe they are entitled to women’s bodies for their entertainment, enjoyment, and pleasure. And both movements have received considerable backlash by those who suggest it is a witch hunt that might ensnare otherwise innocent men, or those who are worried that the real victims are white men who are being left behind (see Garber; Haussegger). Women who advocate for bodily autonomy, including access to contraception and abortion, are often held up as morally irresponsible. As Archdeacon Bullock (cited in Smyth 55) asserted, “A woman should pay for her fun.”Many individuals believe that the stigma and discrimination fat people face are the consequences they sow from their own behaviours (Crandall 892); that fat people are fat because they have made poor decisions, being too indulgent with food and too lazy to exercise (Crandall 883). Therefore, fat people, like women, should have to pay for their fun. Fat women find themselves at this intersection, and are often judged more harshly for their weight than fat men (Tiggemann and Rothblum). Examining Coulter’s tweet with this perspective in mind, it can easily be read as an attempt to put fat girl protestors back into their place. It can also be read as a warning. Don’t go making too much noise or you may be labelled as fat. Presenting troublesome women as fat has a long history within political art and depictions. Marianne (the symbol of the French Republic) was depicted as fat and ugly; she also reinforced an anti-suffragist position (Chenut 441). These images are effective because of our societal views on fatness (Kyrölä). Fatness is undesirable, unworthy of love and attention, and a representation of poor character, lack of willpower, and an absence of discipline (Murray 14; Pausé, “Rebel Heart” para 1).Fat women who protest transgress rules around body size, gender norms, and the appropriate place for women in society. Take as an example the experiences of one of the authors of this piece, Sandra Grey, who was thrust in to political limelight nationally with the Campaign for MMP (Grey and Fitzsimmons) and when elected as the President of the New Zealand Tertiary Education Union in 2011. Sandra is a trade union activist who breaches too many norms set for the “good woman protestor,” as well as the norms for being a “good fat woman”. She looms large on a stage – literally – and holds enough power in public protest to make a crowd of 7,000 people “jump to left”, chant, sing, and march. In response, some perceive Sandra less as a tactical and strategic leader of the union movement, and more as the “jolly fat woman” who entertains, MCs, and leads public events. Though even in this role, she has been criticised for being too loud, too much, too big.These criticisms are loudest when Sandra is alongside other fat female bodies. When posting on social media photos with fellow trade union members the comments often note the need of the group to “go on a diet”. The collective fatness also brings comments about “not wanting to fuck any of that group of fat cows”. There is something politically and socially dangerous about fat women en masse. This was behind the responses to Sandra’s first public appearance as the President of TEU when one of the male union members remarked “Clearly you have to be a fat dyke to run this union.” The four top elected and appointed positions in the TEU have been women for eight years now and both their fatness and perceived sexuality present as a threat in a once male-dominated space. Even when not numerically dominant, unions are public spaces dominated by a “masculine culture … underpinned by the undervaluation of ‘women’s worth’ and notions of womanhood ‘defined in domesticity’” (Cockburn in Kirton 273-4). Sandra’s experiences in public space show that the derision and methods of putting fat girls back in their place varies dependent on whether the challenge to power is posed by a single fat body with positional power and a group of fat bodies with collective power.Fat Girls Are the FutureOn the other side of the world, Tara Vilhjálmsdóttir is protesting to change the law in Iceland. Tara believes that fat people should be protected against discrimination in public and private settings. Using social media such as Facebook and Instagram, Tara takes her message, and her activism, to her thousands of followers (Keller, 434; Pausé, “Rebel Heart”). And through mainstream media, she pushes back on fatphobia rhetoric and applies pressure on the government to classify weight as a protected status under the law.After a lifetime of living “under the oppression of diet culture,” Tara began her activism in 2010 (Vilhjálmsdóttir). She had suffered real harm from diet culture, developing an eating disorder as a teen and being told through her treatment for it that her fears as a fat woman – that she had no future, that fat people experienced discrimination and stigma – were unfounded. But Tara’s lived experiences demonstrated fat stigma and discrimination were real.In 2012, she co-founded the Icelandic Association for Body Respect, which promotes body positivity and fights weight stigma in Iceland. The group uses a mixture of real life and online tools; organising petitions, running campaigns against the Icelandic version of The Biggest Loser, and campaigning for weight to be a protected class in the Icelandic constitution. The Association has increased the visibility of the dangers of diet culture and the harm of fat stigma. They laid the groundwork that led to changing the human rights policy for the city of Reykjavík; fat people cannot be discriminated against in employment settings within government jobs. As the city is one of the largest employers in the country, this was a large step forward for fat rights.Tara does receive her fair share of hate messages; she’s shared that she’s amazed at the lengths people will go to misunderstand what she is saying (Vilhjálmsdóttir). “This isn’t about hurt feelings; I’m not insulted [by fat stigma]. It’s about [fat stigma] affecting the livelihood of fat people and the structural discrimination they face” (Vilhjálmsdóttir). She collects the hateful comments she receives online through screenshots and shares them in an album on her page. She believes it is important to keep a repository to demonstrate to others that the hatred towards fat people is real. But the hate she receives only fuels her work more. As does the encouragement she receives from people, both in Iceland and abroad. And she is not alone; fat activists across the world are using Web 2.0 tools to change the conversation around fatness and demand civil rights for fat people (Pausé, “Rebel Heart”; Pausé, “Live to Tell").Using Web 2.0 tools as a way to protest and engage in activism is an example of oppositional technologics; a “political praxis of resistance being woven into low-tech, amateur, hybrid, alternative subcultural feminist networks” (Garrison 151). Fat activists use social media to engage in anti-assimilationist activism and build communities of practice online in ways that would not be possible in real life (Pausé, “Express Yourself” 1). This is especially useful for those whose protests sit at the intersections of oppressions (Keller 435; Pausé, “Rebel Heart” para 19). Online protests have the ability to travel the globe quickly, providing opportunities for connections between protests and spreading protests across the globe, such as SlutWalks in 2011-2012 (Schuster 19). And online spaces open up unlimited venues for women to participate more freely in protest than other forms (Harris 479; Schuster 16; Garrison 162).Whether online or offline, women are represented as dangerous in the political sphere when they act without male champions breaching norms of femininity, when their involvement challenges the role of woman as moral guardians, and when they make the body the site of protest. Women must ‘do politics’ politely, with utmost control, and of course caringly; that is they must play their ‘designated roles’. Whether or not you fit the gendered norms of political life affects how your protest is perceived through the media (van Acker). Coulter’s tweet loudly proclaimed that the fat ‘girls’ protesting the election of the 45th President of the United States were unworthy, out of control, and not worthy of attention (ironic, then, as her tweet caused considerable conversation about protest, fatness, and the reasons not to like the President-Elect). 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What creative techniques of resistance are available to a female filmmaker when she is the victim of a violent event and filmed at her most vulnerable? This article uses an autoethnographic lens to discuss my experience of a serious car crash my family and I were inadvertently involved in due to police negligence and a criminal act. Employing Creative Analytical Practice (CAP) ethnography, a reflexive form of research which recognises that the creative process, producer and product are “deeply intertwined” (Richardson, “Writing: A Method” 930), I investigate how the crash’s violent affects crippled my agency, manifested in my creative praxis and catalysed my identification of latent forms of institutionalised violence in film culture, its discourse and pedagogy that also contributed to my inertia. The article maps my process of writing a feature length screenplay during the aftermath of the crash as I set out to articulate my story of survival and resistance. Using this narrative inquiry, in which we can “investigate how we construct the world, ourselves, and others, and how standard objectifying practices...unnecessarily limit us” (Richardson, “Writing: A Method” 924), I outline how I attempted to disrupt the entrenched power structures that exist in dominant narratives of violence in film and challenge my subjugated positioning as a woman within this canon. I describe my engagement with the deconstructionist practices of writing the body and militant feminist cinema, which suggest subversive opportunities for women’s self-determination by encouraging us to embrace our exiled positioning in dominant discourse through creative experimentation, and identify some of the possibilities and limitations of this for female agency. Drawing on CAP ethnography, existentialism, film feminism, and narrative reframing, I assert that these reconstructive practices are more effective for the creative enfranchisement of women by not relegating us to the periphery of social systems and cultural forms. Instead, they enable us to speak back to violent structures in a language that has greater social access, context and impact.My strong desire to tell screen stories lies in my belief that storytelling is a crucial evolutionary mechanism of resilience. Narratives do not simply represent the social world but also have the ability to change it by enabling us to “try to figure out how to live our lives meaningfully” (Ellis 760). This conviction has been directly influenced by my personal story of trauma and survival when myself, my siblings, and our respective life partners became involved in a major car crash. Two police officers attending to a drunken brawl in an inner city park had, in their haste, left the keys in the ignition of their vehicle. We were travelling across a major intersection when the police car, which had subsequently been stolen by a man involved in the brawl – a man who was wanted on parole, had a blood alcohol level three times over the legal limit, and was driving at speeds exceeding 110kms per hour - ran a red light and crossed our path, causing us to crash into his vehicle. From the impact, the small four-wheel drive we were travelling in was catapulted metres into the air, rolling numerous times before smashing head on into oncoming traffic. My heavily pregnant sister was driving our vehicle.The incident attracted national media attention and our story became a sensationalist spectacle. Each news station reported erroneous and conflicting information, one stating that my sister had lost her unborn daughter, another even going so far as to claim my sister had died in the crash. This tabloidised, ‘if it bleeds, it leads’, culture of journalism, along with new digital technologies, encourages and facilitates the normalisation of violent acts, often inflicted on women. Moreover, in their pursuit of high-rating stories, news bodies motivate dehumanising acts of citizen journalism that see witnesses often inspired to film, rather than assist, victims involved in a violent event. Through a connection with someone working for a major news station, we discovered that leading news broadcasters had bought a tape shot by a group of men who call themselves the ‘Paparazzi of Perth’. These men were some of the first on the scene and began filming us from only a few metres away while we were still trapped upside down and unconscious in our vehicle. In the recording, the men are heard laughing and celebrating our tragedy as they realise the lucrative possibilities of the shocking imagery they are capturing as witnesses pull us out of the back of the car, and my pregnant sister incredibly frees herself from the wreckage by kicking out the window.As a female filmmaker, I saw the bitter irony of this event as the camera was now turned on me and my loved ones at our most vulnerable. In her discussion of the male gaze, a culturally sanctioned form of narrational violence against women that is ubiquitous in most mainstream media, Mulvey proposes that women are generally the passive image, trapped by the physical limits of the frame in a permanent state of powerlessness as our identity is reduced to her “to-be-looked-at-ness” (40). For a long period of time, the experience of performing the role of this commodified woman of a weaponised male gaze, along with the threat of annihilation associated with our near-death experience, immobilised my spirit. I felt I belonged “more to the dead than to the living” (Herman 34). When I eventually returned to my creative praxis, I decided to use scriptwriting as both my “mode of reasoning and a mode of representation” (Richardson, Writing Strategies 21), test whether I could work through my feelings of alienation and violation and reclaim my agency. This was a complex and harrowing task because my memories “lack[ed] verbal narrative and context” (Herman 38) and were deeply rooted in my body. Cixous confirms that for women, “writing and voice...are woven together” and “spring from the deepest layers of her psyche” (Moi 112). For many months, I struggled to write. I attempted to block out this violent ordeal and censor my self. I soon learnt, however, that my body could not be silenced and was slow to forget. As I tried to write around this experience, the trauma worked itself deeper inside of me, and my physical symptoms worsened, as did the quality of my writing.In the early version of the screenplay I found myself writing a female-centred film about violence, identity and death, using the fictional narrative to express the numbness I experienced. I wrote the female protagonist with detachment as though she were an object devoid of agency. Sartre claims that we make objects of others and of ourselves in an attempt to control the uncertainty of life and the ever-changing nature of humanity (242). Making something into an object is to deprive it of life (and death); it is our attempt to keep ourselves ‘safe’. While I recognise that the car crash’s reminder of my mortality was no doubt part of the reason why I rendered myself, and the script’s female protagonist, lifeless as agentic beings, I sensed that there were subtler operations of power and control behind my self-objectification and self-censorship, which deeply concerned me. What had influenced this dea(r)th of female agency in my creative imaginings? Why did I write my female character with such a red pen? Why did I seem so compelled to ‘kill’ her? I wanted to investigate my gender construction, the complex relationship between my scriptwriting praxis, and the context within which it is produced to discover whether I could write a different future for myself, and my female characters. Kiesinger supports “contextualizing our stories within the framework of a larger picture” (108), so as to remain open to the possibility that there might not be anything ‘wrong’ with us, per se, “but rather something very wrong with the dynamics that dominate the communicative system” (109) within which we operate: in the case of my creative praxis, the oppressive structures present in the culture of film and its pedagogy.Pulling FocusWomen are supposed to be the view and when the view talks back, it is uncomfortable.— Jane Campion (Filming Desire)It is a terrible thing to see that no one has ever taught us how to develop our vision as women neither in the history of arts nor in film schools.— Marie Mandy (Filming Desire)The democratisation of today’s media landscape through new technologies, the recent rise in female-run production companies (Zemler) in Hollywood, along with the ground-breaking #MeToo and Time’s Up movements has elevated the global consciousness of gender-based violence, and has seen the screen industry seek to redress its history of gender imbalance. While it is too early to assess the impact these developments may have on women’s standing in film, today the ‘celluloid ceiling’ still operates on multiple levels of indoctrination and control through a systemic pattern of exclusion for women that upholds the “nearly seamless dialogue among men in cinema” (Lauzen, Thumbs Down 2). Female filmmakers occupy a tenuous position of influence in the mainstream industry and things are not any better on the other side of the camera (Lauzen, The Celluloid Ceiling). For the most part, Hollywood’s male gaze and penchant for sexualising and (physically or figuratively) killing female characters, which normalises violence against women and is “almost inversely proportional to the liberation of women in society” (Mandy), continues to limit women to performing as the image rather than the agent on screen.Film funding bodies and censorship boards, mostly comprised of men, remain exceptionally averse to independent female filmmakers who go against the odds to tell their stories, which often violate taboos about femininity and radically redefine female agency through the construction of the female gaze: a narrational technique of resistance that enables reel woman to govern the point of view, imagery and action of the film (Smelik 51-52). This generally sees their films unjustly ghettoised through incongruent classification or censorship, and forced into independent or underground distribution (Sexton-Finck 165-182). Not only does censorship propose the idea that female agency is abject and dangerous and needs to be restrained, it prevents access to this important cinema by women that aims to counter the male gaze and “shield us from this type of violence” (Gillain 210). This form of ideological and institutional gatekeeping is not only enforced in the film industry, it is also insidiously (re)constituted in the epistemological construction of film discourse and pedagogy, which in their design, are still largely intrinsically gendered institutions, encoded with phallocentric signification that rejects a woman’s specificity and approach to knowledge. Drawing on my mutually informative roles as a former film student and experienced screen educator, I assert that most screen curricula in Australia still uphold entrenched androcentric norms that assume the male gaze and advocate popular cinema’s didactic three-act structure, which conditions our value systems to favour masculinity and men’s worldview. This restorative storytelling approach is argued to be fatally limiting to reel women (Smith 136; Dancyger and Rush 25) as it propagates the Enlightenment notion of a universal subjectivity, based on free will and reason, which neutralises the power structures of society (and film) and repudiates the influence of social positioning on our opportunity for agency. Moreover, through its omniscient consciousness, which seeks to efface the presence of a specific narrator, the three-act method disavows this policing of female agency and absolves any specific individual of responsibility for its structural violence (Dyer 98).By pulling focus on some of these problematic mechanisms in the hostile climate of the film industry and its spaces of learning for women, I became acutely aware of the more latent forms of violence that had conditioned my scriptwriting praxis, the ambivalence I felt towards my female identity, and my consequent gagging of the female character in the screenplay.Changing Lenses How do the specific circumstances in which we write affect what we write? How does what we write affect who we become?— Laurel Richardson (Fields of Play 1)In the beginning, there is an end. Don’t be afraid: it’s your death that is dying. Then: all the beginnings.— Helene Cixous (Cixous and Jensen 41)The discoveries I made during my process of CAP ethnography saw a strong feeling of dissidence arrive inside me. I vehemently wanted to write my way out of my subjugated state and release some of the anguish that my traumatised body was carrying around. I was drawn to militant feminist cinema and the French poststructuralist approach of ‘writing the body’ (l’ecriture feminine) given these deconstructive practices “create images and ideas that have the power to inspire to revolt against oppression and exploitation” (Moi 120). Feminist cinema’s visual treatise of writing the body through its departure from androcentric codes - its unformulaic approach to structure, plot, character and narration (De Lauretis 106) - revealed to me ways in which I could use the scriptwriting process to validate my debilitating experience of physical and psychic violence, decensor my self and move towards rejoining the living. Cixous affirms that, “by writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into…the ailing or dead figure” (Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa 880). It became clear to me that the persistent themes of death that manifested in the first draft of the script were not, as I first suspected, me ‘rehearsing to die’, or wanting to kill off the woman inside me. I was in fact “not driven towards death but by death” (Homer 89), the close proximity to my mortality, acting as a limit, was calling for a strengthening of my life force, a rebirth of my agency (Bettelheim 36). Mansfield acknowledges that death “offers us a freedom outside of the repression and logic that dominate our daily practices of keeping ourselves in order, within the lines” (87).I challenged myself to write the uncomfortable, the unfamiliar, the unexplored and to allow myself to go to places in me that I had never before let speak by investigating my agency from a much more layered and critical perspective. This was both incredibly terrifying and liberating and enabled me to discard the agentic ‘corset’ I had previously worn in my creative praxis. Dancyger and Rush confirm that “one of the things that happens when we break out of the restorative three-act form is that the effaced narrator becomes increasingly visible and overt” (38). I experienced an invigorating feeling of empowerment through my appropriation of the female gaze in the screenplay which initially appeased some of the post-crash turmoil and general sense of injustice I was experiencing. However, I soon, found something toxic rising inside of me. Like the acrimonious feminist cinema I was immersed in – Raw (Ducournau), A Girl Walks Home at Night (Amirpour), Romance (Breillat), Trouble Every Day (Denis), Baise-Moi (Despentes and Thi), In My Skin (Van), Anatomy of Hell (Breillat) – the screenplay I had produced involved a female character turning the tables on men and using acts of revenge to satisfy her needs. Not only was I creating a highly dystopian world filled with explicit themes of suffering in the screenplay, I too existed in a displaced state of rage and ‘psychic nausea’ in my daily life (Baldick and Sartre). I became haunted by vivid flashbacks of the car crash as abject images, sounds and sensations played over and over in my mind and body like a horror movie on loop. I struggled to find the necessary clarity and counterbalance of stability required to successfully handle this type of experimentation.I do not wish to undermine the creative potential of deconstructive practices, such as writing the body and militant cinema, for female filmmakers. However, I believe my post-trauma sensitivity to visceral entrapment and spiritual violence magnifies some of the psychological and physiological risks involved. Deconstructive experimentation “happens much more easily in the realm of “texts” than in the world of human interaction” (hooks 22) and presents agentic limitations for women since it offers a “utopian vision of female creativity” (Moi 119) that is “devoid of reality...except in a poetic sense” (Moi 122). In jettisoning the restorative qualities of narrative film, new boundaries for women are inadvertently created through restricting us to “intellectual pleasure but rarely emotional pleasure” (Citron 51). Moreover, by reducing women’s agency to retaliation we are denied the opportunity for catharsis and transformation; something I desperately longed to experience in my injured state. Kaplan acknowledges this problem, arguing that female filmmakers need to move theoretically beyond deconstruction to reconstruction, “to manipulate the recognized, dominating discourses so as to begin to free ourselves through rather than beyond them (for what is there ‘beyond’?)” (Women and Film 141).A potent desire to regain a sense of connectedness and control pushed itself out from deep inside me. I yearned for a tonic to move myself and my female character to an active position, rather than a reactive one that merely repeats the victimising dynamic of mainstream film by appropriating a reversed (female) gaze and now makes women the violent victors (Kaplan, Feminism and Film 130). We have arrived at a point where we must destabilise the dominance-submission structure and “think about ways of transcending a polarity that has only brought us all pain” (Kaplan, Feminism and Film 135). I became determined to write a screen narrative that, while dealing with some of the harsh realities of humanity I had become exposed to, involved an existentialist movement towards catharsis and activity.ReframingWhen our stories break down or no longer serve us well, it is imperative that we examine the quality of the stories we are telling and actively reinvent our accounts in ways that permit us to live more fulfilling lives.— Christine Kiesinger (107)I’m frightened by life’s randomness, so I want to deal with it, make some sense of it by telling a film story. But it’s not without hope. I don’t believe in telling stories without some hope.— Susanne Bier (Thomas)Narrative reframing is underlined by the existentialist belief that our spiritual freedom is an artistic process of self-creation, dependent on our free will to organise the elements of our lives, many determined out of our control, into the subjective frame that is to be our experience of our selves and the world around us (107). As a filmmaker, I recognise the power of selective editing and composition. Narrative reframing’s demand for a rational assessment of “the degree to which we live our stories versus the degree to which our stories live us” (Kiesinger 109), helped me to understand how I could use these filmmaking skills to take a step back from my trauma so as to look at it objectively “as a text for study” (Ellis 108) and to exercise power over the creative-destructive forces it, and the deconstructive writing methods I had employed, produced. Richardson confirms the benefits of this practice, since narrative “is the universal way in which humans accommodate to finitude” (Writing Strategies 65).In the script’s development, I found my resilience lay in my capacity to imagine more positive alternatives for female agency. I focussed on writing a narrative that did not avoid life’s hardships and injustices, or require them to be “attenuated, veiled, sweetened, blunted, and falsified” (Nietzsche and Hollingdale 68), yet still involved a life-affirming sentiment. With this in mind, I reintroduced the three-act structure in the revised script as its affectivity and therapeutic denouement enabled me to experience a sense of agentic catharsis that turned “nauseous thoughts into imaginations with which it is possible to live” (Nietzsche 52). Nevertheless, I remained vigilant not to lapse into didacticism; to allow my female character to be free to transgress social conventions surrounding women’s agency. Indebted to Kaplan’s writing on the cinematic gaze, I chose to take up what she identifies as a ‘mutual gaze’; an ethical framework that enabled me to privilege the female character’s perspective and autonomy with a neutral subject-subject gaze rather than the “subject-object kind that reduces one of the parties to the place of submission” (Feminism and Film 135). I incorporated the filmic technique of the point of view (POV) shot for key narrative moments as it allows an audience to literally view the world through a character’s eyes, as well as direct address, which involves the character looking back down the lens at the viewer (us); establishing the highest level of identification between the spectator and the subject on screen.The most pertinent illustration of these significant scriptwriting changes through my engagement with narrative reframing and feminist film theory, is in the reworking of my family’s car crash which became a pivotal turning point in the final draft. In the scene, I use POV and direct address to turn the weaponised gaze back around onto the ‘paparazzi’ who are filming the spectacle. When the central (pregnant) character frees herself from the wreckage, she notices these men filming her and we see the moment from her point of view as she looks at these men laughing and revelling in the commercial potential of their mediatised act. Switching between POV and direct address, the men soon notice they have been exposed as the woman looks back down the lens at them (us) with disbelief, reproaching them (us) for daring to film her in this traumatic moment. She holds her determined gaze while they glance awkwardly back at her, until their laughter dissipates, they stop recording and appear to recognise the culpability of their actions. With these techniques of mutual gazing, I set out to humanise and empower the female victim and neutralise the power dynamic: the woman is now also a viewing agent, and the men equally perform the role of the viewed. In this creative reframing, I hope to provide an antidote to filmic violence against and/or by women as this female character reclaims her (my) experience of survival without adhering to the culture of female passivity or ressentiment.This article has examined how a serious car crash, being filmed against my will in its aftermath and the attendant damages that prevailed from this experience, catalysed a critical change of direction in my scriptwriting. The victimising event helped me recognise the manifest and latent forms of violence against women that are normalised through everyday ideological and institutional systems in film and prevent us from performing as active agents in our creative praxis. There is a critical need for more inclusive modes of practice – across the film industry, discourse and pedagogy – that are cognisant and respectful of women’s specificity and our difference to the androcentric landscape of mainstream film. We need to continue to exert pressure on changing violent mechanisms that marginalise us and ghettoise our stories. As this article has demonstrated, working outside dominant forms can enable important emancipatory opportunities for women, however, this type or deconstruction also presents risks that generally leave us powerless in everyday spaces. While I advocate that female filmmakers should look to techniques of feminist cinema for an alternative lens, we must also work within popular film to critique and subvert it, and not deny women the pleasures and political advantages of its restorative structure. By enabling female filmmakers to (re)humanise woman though encouraging empathy and compassion, this affective storytelling form has the potential to counter violence against women and mobilise female agency. Equally, CAP ethnography and narrative reframing are critical discourses for the retrieval and actualisation of female filmmakers’ agency as they allow us to contextualise our stories of resistance and survival within the framework of a larger picture of violence to gain perspective on our subjective experiences and render them as significant, informative and useful to the lives of others. This enables us to move from the isolated margins of subcultural film and discourse to reclaim our stories at the centre.ReferencesA Girl Walks Home at Night. Dir. Ana Lily Amirpour. Say Ahh Productions, 2014.Anatomy of Hell. Dir. Catherine Breillat. Tartan Films, 2004. Baise-Moi. Dirs. Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi. FilmFixx, 2000.Baldick, Robert, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Nausea. 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New York: Doubleday, 1956.Nietzsche, Friedrich W., and Richard Hollingdale. Beyond Good and Evil. London: Penguin Books, 1990.Raw. Dir. Julia Ducournau. Petit Film, 2016.Richardson, Laurel. Writing Strategies: Reaching Diverse Audiences. Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications, 1990.———. Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997.———. “Writing: A Method of Inquiry.” Handbook of Qualitative Research. Eds. Norman K Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000.Romance. Dir. Catherine Breillat. Trimark Pictures Inc., 2000.Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. London: Routledge, 1969.Sexton-Finck, Larissa. 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The purpose of this essay is to analyse from a Jungian perspective how heroic masculinity and Christianity, due to their negative attitude toward the feminine, problematize masculine individuation and cause tragedy in Romeo and Juliet. Although all male characters in Verona fall short of the mature masculinity that could come with developing a relation to the feminine, I focus on Romeo and Mercutio whose problematic development clarifies man’s difficulty with integrating the feminine without forgoing the masculine structure. Romeo, the puer, who represents the spirit, suffers from a positive mother complex. Mercutio, the trickster, the dark side of the puer, represents the body which is considered evil by Christianity, and has a disturbed relation to the feminine. Hence he compensates for, completes, and gives body to Romeo who is otherwise nothing but the spirit. Being the evil component, Mercutio is essential to the individuation process, and with his simultaneous resistance to and what seems to be an unconscious identification with the feminine, Mercutio serves as a medium through which Shakespeare presents what we may now call, following Eugene Monick’s model, bisexual androgyny as an alternative to heroic masculinity. But this potential as embodied in Mercutio is wasted tragically by the heroic masculinity in Verona.

Background: There are various circumstances where measurements are not actually possible, replacement parameters can be used to estimate body height. Many characteristics of body height measurement and how to measure it. These include anthropometric measurements that can be used for the identification of medicolegal-forensic processes. Body height in clinical medicine and in the field of scientific research can be easily estimated using various anthropometric parameters such as arm span, knee height, foot length and foot breadth, and others. The arm span and foot length has proved to be one of the most reliable predictors. This study was conducted to estimate of body height from arm span and foot length using the regression equation and to determine the correlation between the body height and arm span and foot length.Methods: This study was conducted at Universitas Muhammadiyah Surabaya with 182 Javanese female students. Stature, arm span and foot length measured directly using anthropometric technique and measuring tape. The data obtained were then analyzed with SPSS version 16. The regression equation was derived for the estimate of body height and the relationship between stature, arm span and foot length determined by the Pearson correlation. Results: We found that the mean body height of Javanese women was 1534,45 ± 47,623 mm, mean of arm span 1543,25 ± 60,468 mm and the mean of foot length 226,14 ± 9,586 mm. The correlation between stature and arm span was positive and significant (r = 0,715 , p <0,05). The correlation between stature and foot length was positive and significant (r = 0,726 , p <0,05). The correlation between stature and arm span and foot length was positive and significant (r = 0,798, p <0,05). Conclusion: Body height correlates well with the arm span and foot length so that it can be used as a reliable marker for high estimates using regression equations.

Abstract Background Due to increased risk of endometrial and ovarian cancer, women belonging to known Lynch Syndrome (LS) families are recommended to undergo germline testing. Current practice in Finland is to offer counselling to women with pathogenic variant and advocate risk-reducing surgery (RRS) after completion of childbirth. The present study aimed to clarify the impacts of positive germline testing on family planning and reproductive decisions of these women, which are relatively unknown. Methods Seventy-nine carriers of germline MMR gene pathogenic variant (path_MMR) were identified from the Finnish LS Registry as having genetic testing performed before the age of 45 years and not having undergone hysterectomy or oophorectomy. These women were sent a questionnaire concerning family planning, intimate relationships and psychosocial wellbeing. Results Thirty-five women (44.3%) responded. Parity of path_MMR carriers (2.1) was slightly higher than parity among Finnish women in general (1.8). No significant differences were found between parity, number of induced abortions or sterilizations before and after genetic testing. Only minority of subjects reported any influence on family planning (20%) or negative impact on feminine self and body image (14%). Conclusions The positive germline testing does not seem to have a major negative impact on family planning, intimate relationships or feminine self and body image. According to the open comments, counselling, supportive and empathic attitude of the professionals seem to have a significant impact on this. These results are a valuable addition to the counselling of LS women at reproductive age.

AbstractEnjoyment of sexualization (EoS) occurs when people find appearance-based sexual attention from others to be positive and rewarding. Scholars have not consistently established if enjoyment of being sexualized may be a form of sexual empowerment, promoting positive body acceptance, control, and self-care, or instead an endorsement of sexist ideologies, based on the idea that being sexually appealing to men is a component of the feminine gender role. In order to shed light on this, the present study aimed to analyze whether enjoyment of sexualization may foster adaptive or maladaptive coping strategies in case of threat to a positive body image. We also considered the role of ambivalent sexism in EoS processes, as well as that of self-esteem in body coping strategies. Considering the increasing sexualization of men in Western societies, the same relationships were tested in both men and women adults by means of a multigroup moderation analysis. Participants were 513 subjects (32.3% men, M = 25.97 years old) recruited from the Italian general population. Results showed that enjoyment of sexualization was positively related to both adaptive (i.e., positive rational acceptance) and maladaptive strategies (i.e., appearance fixing). Hostile sexism was positively linked to EoS in both men and women, whereas benevolent sexism was positively linked to EoS in the case of women and negatively in the case of men. Implications about the ambivalent nature of enjoyment of sexualization are discussed.

IntroductionTransformation, claims McCracken, is the expression of consumer agency and individual freedom in which consumers, as “co-creators of culture,” are empowered to creatively construct new improved selves (xvi). No longer an “extraordinary event for extraordinary creatures,” transformation today is routine and accessible (McCracken xxi). Contemporary consumer culture encourages individuals to enact these transformations by turning to the market to purchase the resources they require to achieve their desired identity (Ellis et al. 179). This market model of transformation embraces the concept of the marketplace exchange where the one party satisfies the needs of the other in a mutually beneficial exchange relationship. For consumers, the market enables transformation through the purchase and consumption of the desired products and services which support identity building.Critics, however, argue that markets have less positive effects. While it is too simplistic to claim that markets manipulate consumers, marketing exchanges constitute an enduring shaping force on individuals and society (Laczniak and Murphy). Markets shape consumer identities by homogenising them and suppressing their self-expressive capabilities (Kozinets 22). As producers become more powerful, “the market is transformed from a consumer-driven mechanism to a sphere where the producers assimilate consumers’ needs to their own through commercial activity” (Sassatelli 76) (my italics). Marketing and promotion have a persuasive influence and their role in the transformation process is a crucial element in understanding the consumer’s impetus to transform. Consumer identity is of course neither fully a “liberatory act” nor “wholly dictated by the market” (Ellis et al. 182), but there is a relationship between consumer autonomy and the dictates of the market which can be explored through focusing on the transformation of identity through the consumption of cosmetic surgery. Cosmetic surgery is an important site of enquiry as a social practice which “merges the attention given to the body by an individual person with the values and priorities of the consumer society” (Martinez Lirola and Chovanec 490). The body, as Kathy Davis highlighted, has long been seen as a commodity which can be endlessly transformed (Davis, Reshaping the Female Body), and the market for cosmetic surgery is at the forefront of this commodification process (Aizura 305). What is new, however, is the increasing marketisation and commercialisation of the cosmetic surgery industry combined with rising consumerism in which surgical transformation can be purchased simply as a “lifestyle choice alongside fashion, fitness and therapy” (Elliott 7). In the cosmetic surgery market, “patients” are consumers. Rather than choosing cosmetic surgery in order to feel whole or normal, contemporary consumers see surgery as a grooming practice which is part of a body maintenance routine (Jones).As the cosmetic surgery market becomes progressively more competitive, it relies more and more on marketing and promotion for its survival. The intense rivalry between providers drives them, in some cases, to aggressive and often unethical promotional practices. In the related field of pharmaceuticals for example, marketers have been charged with explicitly manipulating social understanding of disease in order to increase profits (Brennan, Eagle, and Rice 17). Unlike TV make-over shows whose primary purpose is to entertain, or celebrity culture which influences indirectly through example, cosmetic surgery promotion sets out with intent to persuade consumers to choose surgical transformation. Cosmetic surgery is presented to consumers “through the neoliberal prism of choice,” encouraging women (mostly) to choose surgery as a self-improvement practice in order to “feel good or pamper herself” (Gurrieri, Brace-Govan, and Previte 534). In a promotional culture which valorises external values and ‘the new’ (Fatah 1), the cost, risk, and pain of surgery are downplayed as an increasing array of self-transformative possibilities are presented as consumption choices. This scenario sees the impetus to transform as driven as much by marketing imperatives as by consumers’ free choice. Indeed in mobilising the rhetoric of choice, the “autonomous” consumer, it seems, plays into the hands of the cosmetic surgery industry.This paper explores consumer transformation through cosmetic surgery by focusing on the tension between the rhetoric of consumer autonomy, freedom, and choice and that of the industry’s marketing and promotional practices in the United Kingdom (UK). I argue that while the consumer is an active player, expressing their freedom and agency in choosing self-transformation through surgery, that autonomy is influenced and constrained by the marketing and promotional practices of the industry. I focus on the inherent paradox in the discourse of transformation in consumer culture which advocates individual consumer freedom and creativity yet limits these freedoms to “acceptable” bodily forms constructed as the norm by promotional images of the cosmetic surgery industry. To paraphrase Susan Bordo, those promotions which espouse consumer choice and self-determination simultaneously eradicate individual difference and circumscribe choice (Unbearable Weight 250). Here I explore how ideals of autonomy, freedom, and choice are utilised to support consumer surgical transformation. Drawing on market research, professional publications, blogs and industry webpages used by UK consumers as they search for information, I demonstrate how marketing and promotion adopt these ideals to provide a visual reference and a language for consumer transformation, which has the effect of shaping and limiting consumer freedom and creativity. Consumer Transformation as Expression of Freedom Contemporary consumers need not be content just to admire the appearance of celebrities and film stars, but can actively engage in the creative construction of new improved selves through surgical transformation (McCracken). This transformation is often expressed by consumers as a liberatory act, as is illustrated by the women surveyed for a UK Department of Health report. As one respondent explains, “I think it’s just the fact that they can . . . and I think over the years, women have a battle with their bodies, as they change, different ages, they do, they struggle with trying to accept it over different years and the fact that you can, it’s like ‘wow, so what, it’s a bit of money, let’s just change ourselves’” (UK Department of Health 32). Even young consumers see cosmetic surgery as an easily available transformative option, such as this 16-year-old female research respondent who describes surgery as “Things that you don’t really need but you just feel you want to have them” (UK Department of Health 33). As these women attest, cosmetic surgery is seen as an increasingly normal and everyday practice. By rhetorically constructing the possibility of transformation as an expression of individual consumer empowerment (“wow, so what, it’s a bit of money, let’s just change ourselves”), they distance the practice “from negative associations with vanity” and oppression (Tait 131). This postmodern consumer is no dupe or victim but a “conscious subject who modifies their body as a project of identity” (Gibson 51) and for whom cosmetic surgery transformation is “the route to happiness and personal empowerment” (Tait 119). Surgical transformation is not a way to strive narcissistically after “an elusive beauty ideal” (Heyes 93). Instead, it is expressed as something they choose to do just for themselves—which Bordo calls the “for me” argument (“Braveheart, Babe, and the Contemporary Body”). In an increasingly visual culture, the accessibility and affordability of cosmetic surgery enable consumers, who are already accustomed to digitally editing their photographical images, to “edit” their physical bodies. This is candidly expressed by Singaporean blogger Ang Chiew Ting who writes, "When I learnt how to use Photoshop, the things that I edited about myself, those have now all been done in real life through plastic surgery. Whatever I wanted to change about my face, I have done." Yet, as I illustrate later, the emphasis on transformation as empowerment through exercising choice (“Whatever I wanted to change about my face, I have done"), plays into the hands of the industry as it “reproduces the logic of surgical industries” (Tait 121). In the politics of consumption, driven by neo-liberal ideologies, consumer choice is sovereign (Sassatelli 184), and it is in the ability to exercise choice, choosing surgery and taking responsibility for that choice, that agency and empowerment are expressed (Leve, Rubin, and Pusic). Blogger Stella Lee explains her decision as “I don't want to say I encourage plastic surgery, this is just my personal choice. It is like saying if I dye my hair purple then I want everyone to have purple hair too. It is simply just for me only. If you wish to do so, go ahead. If you're satisfied with what you have, go ahead.” This consumer is a “discerning and knowledgeable consumer” who researches information about potential surgical procedures and practitioners (Gimlin, “Imagining” 58) and embraces the ideology of self-determinism (Heyes). Consumers considering surgery may visit recommended doctors, research doctors online, and peruse beauty magazines (Leve, Rubin, and Pusic). Tatler magazine, for example, publishes an annual Beauty and Cosmetic Surgery Guide which celebrates “the newest, niftiest ways to reclaim your face and your figure” (Tatler nd). In taking responsibility for themselves, the contemporary consumer reflects the neoliberal agenda “that promotes empowerment through consumer choice and responsibility for self-care” (Leve, Rubin, and Pusic 131). Yet, consumer information on the suitability of surgery and alternative providers is often partial. As one research respondent recalled, “I just typed it into Google and then worked through whatever came up; you're trying to go for the names of companies that are a bit more reputable” (UK Department of Health 28). Internet searches most frequently identify promotional information from the surgery providers themselves including customer stories and testimonials, which seem informative in nature but which have persuasive intent to influence choice. Therefore although seemingly exerting agency by undertaking a process of search in order to make an informed choice, that choice is made within a promotional context that the consumer may not be fully aware exists.Consumer Transformation as Marketing ImperativeThe aim of marketing and promotion, as medicine meets consumerism, is to secure clients for cosmetic surgery (Mirivel). As a consequence, the discourse of cosmetic surgery is highly persuasive and commercially motivated, promoting the need for surgery by mobilising the existing ideological link between identity and physical appearance for commercial ends (Martinez Lirola and Chovanec 489). Promotional strategies include drawing attention to possible deficiencies in appearance, creating opportunities for surgery by problematising normal bodily states, promising intangible benefits, and normalising surgery by positioning it within a consumerist vision of success. Consumer transformation can be driven by perceived lack, inadequacy, or deficit, where a part of the body or face does not stand up to scrutiny when compared to media images. Marketing and promotion draw attention to this lack and imply that any deficiency in appearance can be remedied by consumption practices such as the purchase of hair dye, make-up, or, more drastically, cosmetic surgery. As one research respondent considering surgery explains, “I think people want to look their best and media portrays ‘perfect’ looking people or they portray a certain image and then because it’s what you see all the time, it almost feels like if you don't look like that, then it’s wrong” (UK Department of Health 18). The influence of media on the impetus to transform is explored elsewhere (see Wegenstein), so is not addressed further here. However, the insecurity which results from such media images is further exploited by the marketing and promotional strategies adopted by cosmetic surgery providers in an increasingly competitive marketplace. This does not go unnoticed by consumers: as one research respondent noted, “They pick out your insecurities as a tactic for making you purchase stuff . . . it was supposed to be a free consultation but they definitely do pressure you into having stuff” (UK Department of Health 19). In this deficiency model of transformation, the cosmetic surgery consumer is insecure, lacking in power and volition, and convinced of her inadequacy. This is exacerbated by the promotional images of models featured on cosmetic surgery websites against which consumers evaluate their own looks in a process of social comparisons (Markey and Markey 210). This reflects Bernadette Wegenstein’s notion of the cosmetic gaze, a circular process whereby “the act of looking at our bodies and those of others is informed by the techniques, expectations, and strategies of bodily modification” (2). In comparing themselves with the transformed images on surgery websites, consumers are drawn into a process of comparison that tells them how they should look. At the same time as convincing consumers of their inadequacies, providers also tell consumers that they are in control and can act autonomously to transform themselves. For example, a TV advert for The Hospital Group which shows three smiling “transformed” customers claims “If you’re unhappy with your appearance you could change it. If it affects your confidence you could overcome it. If it makes you feel self-conscious, you could take control with cosmetic surgery or dentistry from The Hospital Group” (my italics). In this way marketers marshal the neo-liberal rhetoric of consumer empowerment to encourage the consumption of cosmetic surgery and normalise the practice through the emphasis on choice. Marketing and promotional messages contribute further to these perceived deficits by problematising “normal” bodily conditions resulting from “normal” life experiences such as ageing and pregnancy. Surgeon Ran Rubinstein, for example, draws attention in his blog to thinning lips as an opportunity for lip augmentation: “Lip augmentation might seem like a trend among the younger crowd, but it’s something that people of any age can benefit from getting. As you get older, some areas of your body thin out while some thicken. You might find that you’re gaining weight around your stomach, while your lips and face are getting thin.” Problematising frames a real or perceived physical state as “as a medical problem that requires a medical solution,” subtly implying that cosmetic surgery is “an unavoidable necessity” which is medically justified (Martinez Lirola and Chovanec 503). For example, Jules’s testimonial for facial fillers frames natural, and even positive, features such as smile lines as problematic: “I smile a lot and noticed some smile lines coming through.” Indeed as medicine has historically defined the female body as “deficient and in need of repair,” cosmetic surgery can be legitimately proposed as a solution for “women’s problems with their appearance” (Davis, “A Dubious Equality” 55). Promotional messages emphasise the intrinsic benefits of external transformation, encouraging consumers to opt for surgery in order to align their external appearance with how they feel inside. Much of this discourse calls on consumers’ perceptions of a disparity between how they feel inside and their external body image (Gibson 54). For example, a testimonial from “Carole Anne 69” claims that facial fillers “make me feel like I’m the best version of myself.” (Note that Carole Anne, like all the women providing testimonials for this website, including Carol 50, Jules 38, or Pamela 59, is defined by her looks and by her age.) Although Gimlin’s research suggests that the notions of the “body reflecting the ‘true’ self or re-creating one’s ‘genuine’ appearance” have become less important (“Too Good” 930), they continue to dominate in customer testimonials on surgery websites. For example, Transform breast enlargement client Rebecca exclaims, “I’m still me, but it has completely transformed how I feel about myself on the inside, how I hold and present myself on the outside.” A typical promotional strategy is to emphasise the intangible benefits of cosmetic surgery, such as happiness or confidence. This is encapsulated in a 2011 print advert for Transform Cosmetic Surgery Group which shows a smiling young girl in a bikini holding a placard which reads, “I’ve just had my breasts done, but the biggest change you’ll see is on my face.” In promising happiness or self-confidence, intangible effects which are impossible to measure, marketers avoid the reality of surgery—where a cut is made, what is added or removed, how many stitches are required. Consumers know the world through shopping (Elliott 43), and marketers draw on this behaviour to associate surgery with any other purchase in the life of a successful consumer. Consumers are encouraged to choose from a gallery of looks, to “Browse through our Before and After Gallery for inspiration,” and the purchase is rendered more accessible through the use of discounts, offers, and incentives, which consumers are accustomed to seeing in familiar shopping contexts. Sales intent can be blatant, such as this appeal to disposable income on Realself.com: “Now that your 2015 taxes are (hopefully) filed and behind you, were you fortunate enough to get a refund? If it just so happens that the government will be returning some of your hard-earned cash, what will you be using it for? Electronic gadgets, an island vacation, a shopping spree . . . or plastic surgery?” Providers reduce perceived risk by implying that interventions such as facial fillers are considered normal practice for others, claiming that “Millions of women choose facial fillers, so that they can age exactly the way they want to” and by providing online interactive tools which consumers can use to manipulate facial features to see the potential effect of surgery (This-is-me.com).ConclusionThe aim of this article was to explore the tension between two different views of transformation, one which emphasised consumer autonomy, freedom, and market choice and the other which claims a more restrictive and manipulative influence of the market and its promotional practices. I argue that McCracken’s explanation of transformation as “the expression of consumer agency and individual freedom” (xvi) offers an overly optimistic view of consumer transformation. In the cosmetic surgery market, the expression of consumer autonomy and freedom rests on the discourse of choice. This same discourse is adopted by surgery providers in their persuasive strategies to secure new clients so that the market’s promotional language (e.g. a whole new you) becomes part of the consumer’s understanding of and articulation of cosmetic surgery transformation. I argue that marketing and promotion work to progress consumers along the path to surgery, by giving them reasons to do so. This is achieved by reflecting existing consumer anxieties as deficiencies, by creating new reasons for surgery by problematising normal conditions, by promising intangible benefits, and by normalising the purchase. These promotional practices also regulate and restrict consumers by presenting visual images of transformation which influence how others understand “the perfect you.” The gallery of looks on surgery websites constrains choice by signifying which looks are desirable, and “before and after” rhetoric emphasises the pivotal role of cosmetic surgery in achieving this transformation. ReferencesAizura, Aren. “Where Health and Beauty Meet: Femininity and Racialisation in Thai Cosmetic Surgery Clinics.” Asian Studies Review 33.3 (2009): 303–17.Bordo, Susan. “Braveheart, Babe, and the Contemporary Body.” 3 June 2016 <www.public.iastate.edu/~jwcwolf/Papers/Bordo>.———. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.Brennan, Ross, Lynn Eagle, and David Rice. “Medicalization and Marketing.” Journal of Macromarketing 30.1 (2010): 8–22.Davis, Kathy. “‘A Dubious Equality’: Men, Women and Cosmetic Surgery.” Body & Society 8.1 (2002): 49–65.———. Reshaping the Female Body. New York: Routledge, 1995.Elliott, Anthony. Making the Cut: How Cosmetic Surgery is Transforming our Lives. London: Reaktion Books, 2008.Ellis, Nick, James Fitchett, Matthew Higgins, Gavin Jack, Ming Lim, Michael Saren, and Mark Tadajewski. Marketing: A Critical Textbook. London: Sage, 2011. Fatah, Fazel. “Should All Advertising of Cosmetic Surgery Be Banned? Yes.” British Medical Journal 345 (7 Nov. 2012).Gibson, Margaret. “Bodies without Histories: Cosmetic Surgery and the Undoing of Time.” Australian Feminist Studies 21.41 (2006): 51–63.Gimlin, Debra. “‘Too Good to Be Real’: The Obviously Augmented Breast in Women’s Narratives of Cosmetic Surgery.” Gender & Society 27.6 (2013): 913–34.———. “Imagining the Other in Cosmetic Surgery.” Body & Society 16.4 (2010): 57–76.Gurrieri, Lauren, Jan Brace-Govan, and Josephine Previte. “Neoliberalism and Managed Health: Fallacies, Facades and Inadvertent Effects.” Journal of Macromarketing 34.4 (2014): 532–38.Heyes, Cressida. Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.Jones, Meredith. “Clinics of Oblivion: Makeover Culture and Cosmetic Surgery Tourism.” PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 8.2 (2011).Kozinets, Robert. “Can Consumers Escape the Market? 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Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2008.Mirivel, Julien. “The Physical Examination in Cosmetic Surgery: Communication Strategies to Promote the Desirability of Surgery.” Health Communication 23.2 (2008): 153–70.Sassatelli, Roberta. Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Politics. London: Sage, 2007.Tait, Sue. “Television and the Domestication of Cosmetic Surgery.” Feminist Media Studies 7.2 (2007): 119–35. Tatler Magazine. “Beauty & Cosmetic Surgery Guide 2016.” Tatler 2016. 3 June 2016 <http://www.tatler.com/guides/beauty--cosmetic-surgery-guide/2016>.UK Department of Health Research. “Regulation of Cosmetic Interventions: Research among the General Public and Practitioners.” 28 Mar. 2013. Version 3. 22 Apr. 2016 <https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/192029/Regulation_of_Cosmetic_Interventions_Research_Report.pdf>.Wegenstein, Bernadette. The Cosmetic Gaze: Body Modification and the Construction of Beauty. 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Introduction: Shock WavesAs I carefully unfold the delicate piece of crisp white paper, three rogue words wildly jump up off the page before sinking deeply into my skin: “Cold and condescending.” A charge of anger surges up my spine, as these words begin to now expand and affectively resonate: “I found the instructor to be cold and condescending.” Somehow, these words impact me both emotionally and physiologically (Brennan 3): my heart beats faster, my body temperature rises, my stomach aches. Yet, despite how awful I feel, I keep on reading, as if compelled by some inexplicable force. It is not long before I devour the entire evaluation—or perhaps it devours me?—reading every last jarring word over and over and over again. And pretty soon, before I can even think about it, I begin to come undone ...How is it possible that an ordinary, everyday object can pull at us, unravel us even? And, how do such objects linger, register intensities, and contribute to our harm or good? In this paper, we draw upon our collective teaching experiences at college and high school level in order to explore how teacher evaluations actively work/ed to orient our bodies in molar and molecular ways (Deleuze and Guattari 3), thereby diminishing or enhancing our capacity to act. We argue that these textual objects are anything but dead and lifeless, and are vitally invested with “thing-power,” which is the “ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (Bennett 6).Rather than producing a linear critique that refuses “affective associations” (Felski para. 6) and the “bodily entanglements of language” (MacLure, Qualitative 1000), we offer up a mobile conversation that pulls readers into an assemblage of (shape)shifting moments they can connect with (Rajchman 4) and question. While we attend to our own affective experiences with teacher evaluations, we wish to disrupt the idea that the self is both autonomous and affectively contained (Brennan 2). Instead, we imagine a self that extends into other bodies, spaces, and things, and highlight how teacher evaluations, as a particular thing, curiously animate (Chen 30) and affect our social worlds—altering our life course for a minute, a day, or perhaps, indefinitely (Stewart 12).* * *“The autobiographical is not the personal. […] Publics presume intimacy” (Berlant, The Female vii). Following Berlant, we propose that our individual narratives are always tangled up in other social bodies and are, therefore, not quite our own. Although we do use the word “I” to recount our specific experiences of teacher evaluations, we by no means wish to suggest that we are self-contained subjects confessing some singular life history or detached truth. Rather, together we examine the tensions, commonalities, possibilities, and threats that encounters with teacher evaluations produce within and around collective bodies (Stewart). We consider the ways in which these material objects seep deeply into our skin, re/animate moving forces (e.g. neoliberalism, patriarchy), and even trigger us emotionally by transporting us back to different times and places (S. Jones 525). And, we write to experiment (Deleuze and Guattari 1; Stewart 1) with the kind of “unpredictable intimacy” that Berlant (Intimacy 281; Structures 191) speaks of. We resist (as best we can) telos-driven tales that do not account for messiness, disorientation, surprise, or wonder (MacLure, Classification 180), as we invite readers to move right along beside (Sedgwick 8) us in this journey to embrace the complexities and implications (Nelson 111; Talburt 93) of teacher evaluations as corporeal matters. The “self” is no match for such affective entanglements (Stewart 58).Getting Un/Stuck “Cold and condescending.” I cannot help but get caught up in these words—no matter how hard I try. A million thoughts begin to bubble up: Am I a good teacher? A bad person? Uncaring? Arrogant? And, just like that, the ordinary turns on me (Stewart 106), triggering intense sensations that refuse to stay buried. What began as my reaction to a teacher evaluation soon becomes something else, somewhere else. Childhood wounds unexpectedly well up—leaking into the present, spreading uncontrollably, causing my body to get stuck in long ago and far away.In a virtual flash (Deleuze and Guattari 94), I am somehow in my grandmother’s kitchen once more, which even now smells of avgolemono soup, warm bread rising, home. Something sparks, as distant memories come flooding back to change my course and set me straight (or so I think). When I was a little girl and could not let something go, my yiayia (grandmother) Vasiliki would tell me, quite simply, to get “unstuck” (ξεκολλά). The Greeks, it seems, know something about the stickiness of affective attachments. Even though it has been over twenty years since my grandmother’s passing, her words, still alive, affectively ring in my ear. Out of some kind of charged habit (Stewart 16), her words now escape my mouth: “ξεκολλά,” I command, “ξεκολλά!” I repeat this phrase so many times that it becomes a mantra, but its magic has sadly lost all effect. No matter what I say or what I do, my body, stuck in repetition, “closes in on itself, unable to transmit its intensities differently” (Grosz 171). In an act of desperation (or perhaps survival), I rip the evaluation to shreds and throw the tattered remains down the trash chute. Yet, my actions prove futile. The evaluation lives on in a kind of afterlife, with its haunting ability to affect where my thoughts will go and what my body can do. And so, my agency—my ability to act, think, become (Deleuze and Guattari 361)—is inextricably twisted up in this evaluation, with its affective capacity to connect many “bodies” at once (both material and semiotic, human and non-human, living and dead).A View from Nowhere?At both college and school-level, formal teacher evaluations promise anonymity. Why is it, though, that students get to be voices without bodies: a voice that does not emerge from a complex, contradictory, and messy body, but rather “from above, from nowhere” (Haraway 589)? Once disembodied, students become god-like (Haraway 589), able to “objectively” dissect, judge, and even criticise teachers, while they themselves receive “panoptic immunity” (MacLure, Classification 168).This immunity has its consequences. Within formal and informal evaluations, students write of and about bodies in ways that often feel violating. Teachers’ bodies become spectacle, and anything goes:“Professor is kinda hot—not bad to look at!”“She dresses like a bag lady. [...] Her hair and clothing need an update.”“There's absolutely nothing redeeming about her as a person [...] but she has nice shoes.”(PrawfsBlog)Amid these affective violations, voices without bodies re/assemble into “voices without organs” (Mazzei 732)—a voice that emanates from an assemblage of bodies, not a singular subject. In this process, patriarchal discourses, as bodies of thought, dangerously spring up and swirl about. The voyeuristic gaze of patriarchy (see de Beauvoir; Mulvey) becomes habitual, shaping our stories, encounters, and sense of self.Female teachers, in particular, cannot deny its pull. The potential to create and/or transmit knowledge turns us into “risky subjects” in need of constant surveillance (Falter 29). Teacher evaluations do their part. As a metaphoric panopticon (see Foucault), they transform female teachers into passive spectacles—objects of the gaze—and students into active spectators who have “all the power to determine our teaching success” (Falter 30). The effects linger, do real damage (Stewart), and cause our pedagogical performances to fail every now and then. After all, a “good” female teacher is also a “good female subject” who is called upon to impart knowledge in ways that do not betray her otherwise feminine or motherly “nature” (Falter 28). This pressure to be both knowledgeable and nurturing, while displaying a “visible fragility [...] a kind of conventional feminine vulnerability” (McRobbie 79), pervades the social and is intense. Although it is not easy to navigate, the fact that unrecognisable bodies are subject to punishment (Butler, Performative 528) helps keep power dynamics firmly in place. These forces permeate my body, as well, making me “cold” and “unfair” in one evaluation and “kind” and “sweet” in another—but rarely smart or intelligent. Like clockwork, this bodily visibility and regulation brings with it never-ending self-critique and self-discipline (Harris 9). Absorbing these swarming intensities, I begin to question my capacity to effectively teach and form relationships with my students. Days later, weeks later, years later, I continue to wonder: if even one student leaves my class feeling “bad,” do I have any business being a teacher? Ugh, the docile, good girl (Harris 19) rears her ugly (or is it pretty?) head once again. TranscorporealityEven though the summer sun invites me in, I spend the whole day at home, in bed, unable to move. At one point, a friend arrives, forcing me to get up and get out. We grab a bite to eat, and it is not long before I confess my deepest fear: that my students are right about me, that these evaluations somehow mark me as a horrible teacher and person. She seems surprised that I would let a few comments defeat me and asks me what this is really all about. I shrug my shoulders, unwilling to go there.Later that night, I find myself re-reading my spring evaluations online. The positive ones electrify the screen, filling me with joy, as the constructive ones get me brainstorming about ways I might do things differently. And while I treasure these comments, I do not focus too much on them. Instead, I spend most of the evening replaying a series of negative tapes over and over in my head. Somewhat defeated, I slip slowly back into my bed and find that it surprisingly offers me a kind of comfort that my friend does not. I wonder, “What body am I now in the arms of” (Chen 202)? The bed and I become “interporous” (Chen 203), intimate even. There is much solace in the darkness of those lively, billowy blue covers: a peculiar solace made possible by these evaluations—a thing which compels me to find comfort somewhere, anywhere, beyond the human body.The GhostAs a high school teacher, I was accustomed to being reviewed. Some reviews were posted onto the website ratemyteacher.com, a platform of anonymously submitted reviews of kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers on easiness, helpfulness, clarity, knowledge, textbook use, and exam difficulty. Others were less official; irate commentary posted on social media platforms or baldly concise characterisations of our teaching styles that circulated among students and bounded back to us as hearsay and whispered asides. In these reviews, our teacher-selves were constructed: One became the easy teacher, the mean teacher, the fun teacher, or the hard-but-good teacher. The teacher who could not control her class; the teacher who controlled her class excessively.Sometimes, we googled ourselves because it was tempting to do so (and near-impossible not to). One day, I searched various forms of my name followed by the name of the school. One of my students, a girl with hot pink streaks in her hair and pointy studs shooting out of her belt and necklaces, had written a complaint on Facebook about a submission of a final writing portfolio. The student wrote on the publicly visible wall of another student in my class, noting how much she still had left to do on the assignment. Dotting the observation with expletives, she bemoaned the portfolio as requiring too much work. Then, she observed that I had an oily complexion and wrote that I was a “dyke.” After I read the comment, I closed my laptop and an icy wave passed through me. That night, I went to dinner with friends. I ruminated aloud over the comments: How could this student—with whom I had thought I had a good relationship—write about me in such a derisive manner? And what, in particular, about my appearance conveyed that I was lesbian? My friends laughed; they found the student’s comments funny and indicative of the blunt astuteness of teenagers. As I thought about the comments, I realised the pain lay in the comments’ specificity. They demonstrated the ability of the student to perceive and observe a bodily attribute about which I was particularly insecure. It made me wonder about the countless other eyes and glances directed at me each day, taking in, noticing, and dissecting my bodily self (McRobbie 63).The next morning, before school, I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror and dabbed toner on my skin. Today, I thought, today will be a day in which both my skin texture and my lesson plans will be in good order. After this day, I could no longer bring myself to look this student directly in the eye. I was officious in our interactions. I read her poetry and essays with guarded ambivalence. I decided that I would no longer google myself. I would no longer click on links that were pointedly reviews of me as a teacher.The reviewed-self is a ghost-self. It is a shadow, an underbelly. The comments—perhaps posted in a moment of anger or frustration—linger. Years later, though I have left full-time classroom teaching, I still think about them. I have not recovered from the comments though I should, apparently, have already recuperated from their sharp effects. I wonder if the reviews will ceaselessly follow me, if they will shape the impressions of those who google me, if my reviewed-self will become the first and most formidable impression of those who might come to know me, if my reviewed-self will be the lasting and most formidable way I see myself.Trigger Happy In 2014, a teacher at a California public high school posts a comment on Twitter about wishing to pour coffee on her students. Some of her students this year, she writes, make her “trigger finger itchy” (see Oakley). She already “wants to stab” them a mere two weeks into the school year. “Is that bad?” she asks. One of her colleagues screen-captures her tweets and sends them to the school principal and to a local newspaper. They go viral, resulting in widespread condemnation on the Internet. She is named the “worst teacher ever” by one online media outlet (Parker). The media swarm the school. The reporters interview parents in minivans who are picking up their children from school. One parent, from behind the steering wheel, expresses her disapproval of the teacher. She says, “As a teacher, I think she should be held to a higher accountability than other people” (Louie). In the comments section of an article, a commenter declares that the “mutant should be fired” (Oakley). Others are more forgiving. They cite their boyfriends and sisters who are teachers and who also air grievances, though somewhat less violently and in the privacy of their homes (A. Jones). All teachers have these thoughts, some of the commenters argue, they just are not stupid enough to tweet them.In her own defence, the teacher tells a local paper that she “never expected anyone would take me seriously” (Oakley). As a teacher, she is often “forced to cultivate a ‘third-person consciousness,’ to be an ‘objectified subject’” (Chen 33) on display, so can we really blame her? If she had thought people would take her seriously, “you'd better believe I would have been much more careful with what I've said” (Oakley). The students are the least offended party because, as their teacher had hoped, they do not take her tweets seriously. In fact, they are “laughing it off,” according to a local news channel (Newark Teacher). In a news interview, one female student says she finds the teacher’s tweets humorous. They are fond of this teacher and believe she cares about her students. Seemingly, they do not mind that their teacher—jokingly, of course—harbours homicidal thoughts about them or that she wishes to splash hot coffee in their faces.There is a certain wisdom in the teacher’s observational, if foolhardy, tweeting. In a tweet tagged #secretlyhateyou, the teacher explains that while students may have their own negative feelings towards their teachers, teachers also have such feelings for their students. But, she tweets, “We are just not allowed to show it” (Oakley). At parties and social gatherings, we perform the cheerful educator by leaving our bodies at the door and giving into “the politics of emotion, the unwritten rules that feelings are to be ‘privatised’ and ‘pathologised’ rather than aired” (Thiel 39). At times, we are allowed a certain level of dissatisfaction, an eye roll or shrug of the shoulders, a whimsical, breathy sigh: “Oh you know! Kids today! Instagram! Sexting!” But we cannot express dislike for our own students.One evening, I was on the train with a friend who does not work as a teacher. We observed a pack of teenagers, screaming and grabbing at each other’s cell phones. The friend said, “Aren’t they so fascinating, teenagers?” Grumpily, I disagreed. On that day, no, I was not fascinated by teenagers. My friend responded, shocked, “But don’t you work as a teacher…?” It is an unspoken requirement of the job. We maintain relentless expressions of joy, an earnest wonderment towards those whom we teach. And we are, too, appalled by those who do not exhibit a constant stream of cheerfulness. The teachers’ lunchroom is the repository for “bad” feelings about students, a site of negative feelings that can somehow stick (Ahmed, Happy 29) to those who choose to eat their lunch within this space. Only the most jaded battle-axes would opt to eat in the lunchroom. Good teachers—happy and caring ones—would never choose to eat lunch in this room. Instead, they eat lunch in their classrooms, alone, prepare dutifully for the afternoon’s classes, and try to contain all of their murderous inclinations. But (as the media love to remind us), whether intended or not, our corporeal bodies with all their “unwanted affects” (Brennan 3, 11) have a funny way of “surfacing” (Ahmed, Communities 14).Conclusion: Surging BodiesAffects surge within everyday conversations of teacher evaluations. In fact, it is almost impossible to talk about evaluations without sparking some sort of heated response. Recent New York Times articles echo the more popular sentiments: from the idea that evaluations are gendered and raced (Pratt), to the prevailing notion that students are informed consumers entitled to “the best return out of their educational investments” (Stankiewicz). Evidently, education is big business. So, we take our cues from neoliberal ideologies, as we struggle to make sense of all the fissures and leaks. Teachers’ bodies now become commodified objects within a market model that promises customer satisfaction—and the customer is always right.“Develop a thicker skin,” they say, as if a thicker skin could contain my affects or prevent other affects from seeping in; “my body is and is not mine” (Butler, Precarious 26). Leaky bodies, with their permeable borders (Renold and Mellor 33), affectively flow into all kinds of “things.” Likewise, teacher evaluations, as objects, extend into human bodies, sending eruptive charges that both register within the body and transmit outward into the environment. These charges emerge as upset, judgment, wonder, sadness, confusion, annoyance, pleasure, and everything in between. They embody an intensity that animates our social worlds, working to enhance energies and/or diminish them. Affects, then, do not just come from, and stay within, bodies (Brennan 10). A body, as an assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 4), is neither self-contained nor disconnected from other bodies, spaces, and things.As a collection of sticky, “material, physiological things” (Brennan 6), teacher evaluations are very much alive: vibrantly shifting and transforming teachers’ affective capacities and life trajectories. Attending to them as such offers a way in which to push back against our own bodily erasure or “the screaming absence in [American] education of any attention to the inner life of teachers” (Taubman 3). While affect itself has become a recent hot-topic across American university campuses (e.g. see “trigger warnings” debates, Halberstam), conversations tend to exclude teachers’ bodies. So, for example, we can talk of creating “safe [classroom] spaces” in order to safeguard students’ feelings. We can even warn learners if material might offend, as well as watch what we say and do in an effort to protect students from any potential trauma. But we cannot, it would seem, matter, too. Instead, we must (if good and caring) be on affective autopilot, where we can only have “good” thoughts about students. We are not really allowed to feel what we feel, express raw emotion, have a body—unless, of course, that body transmits feel-good intensities.And, feeling bad about teacher evaluations ... well, for the most part, that needs to remain a dirty little secret, because, how can you possibly let yourself get so hot and bothered over a thing—a mere object? Yet, teacher evaluations can and do impact our lives, often in ways that are harmful: by inflicting pain, triggering trauma, encouraging sexism and objectification. But maybe, just maybe, they even offer up some good. After all, if teacher evaluations teach us anything, it is this: you are not simply a body, but rather, an “array of bodies” (Bennett 112, emphasis added)—and your body, my body, our bodies “must be heard” (Cixous 880).ReferencesAhmed, Sara. “Happy Objects.” The Affect Theory Reader. Eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth. 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The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger, and Trauma.” Bully Bloggers, 5 Jul. 2014. 26 Dec. 2015 <https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/you-are-triggering-me-the-neo-liberal-rhetoric-of-harm-danger-and-trauma/>.Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988): 575-99.Harris, Anita. Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge, 2004.Jones, Allie. “Racist Teacher Tweets ‘Wanna Stab Some Kids,’ Keeps Job.” Gawker, 28 Aug. 2014. 1 Jan. 2016 <http://gawker.com/racist-teacher-tweets-wanna-stab-some-kids-keeps-job-1627914242>.Jones, Stephanie. “Literacies in the Body.” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 56.7 (2013): 525-29.Louie, D. “High School Teacher Insults Students, Wishes Them Bodily Harm in Tweets.” ABC Action News 6. 28 Aug. 2014. 1 Jan. 2016 <http://6abc.com/education/teacher-insults-students-wishes-them-bodily-harm-in-tweets/285792/>.MacLure, Maggie. “Qualitative Inquiry: Where Are the Ruins?” Qualitative Inquiry 17.10 (2011): 997-1005.———. “Classification or Wonder? Coding as an Analytic Practice in Qualitative Research.” Deleuze and Research Methodologies. Eds. Rebecca Coleman and Jessica Ringrose. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh UP, 2013. 164-83. 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Oakley, Doug. “Newark Teacher Who Wrote Nasty, Threatening Tweets Given Reprimand.” San Jose Mercury News, 27 Aug. 2014. 1 Jan. 2016 <http://www.mercurynews.com/education/ci_26419917/newark-teacher-who-wrote-nasty-threatening-tweets-given>.“Offensive Student Evaluations.” PrawfsBlog, 19 Nov. 2010. 1 Jan 2016 <http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2010/11/offensive-student-evaluations.html>.Parker, Jameson. “Worst Teacher Ever Constantly Tweets about Killing Students, But Is Keeping Her Job.” Addicting Info, 28 Aug. 2014. 1 Jan. 2016 <http://www.addictinginfo.org/2014/08/28/worst-teacher-ever-constantly-tweets-about-killing-students-but-is-keeping-her-job/>.Pratt, Carol D. “Teacher Evaluations Could Be Hurting Faculty Diversity at Universities.” The New York Times, 16 Dec. 2015. 17 Dec. 2015 <http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/12/16/is-it-fair-to-rate-professors-online/teacher-evaluations-could-be-hurting-faculty-diversity-at-universities>.Rajchman, John. The Deleuze Connections. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2000.Rate My Teachers.com. 1 Jan. 2016 <http://www.ratemyteachers.com>. Renold, Emma, and David Mellor. “Deleuze and Guattari in the Nursery: Towards an Ethnographic Multisensory Mapping of Gendered Bodies and Becomings.” Deleuze and Research Methodologies. Eds. Rebecca Coleman and Jessica Ringrose. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh UP, 2013. 23-41.Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003.Stankiewicz, Kevin. “Ratings of Professors Help College Students Make Good Decisions.” The New York Times, 16 Dec. 2015. 7 Dec. 2015 <http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/12/16/is-it-fair-to-rate-professors-online/ratings-of-professors-help-college-students-make-good-decisions>.Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007.Talburt, Susan. “Ethnographic Responsibility without the ‘Real.’” The Journal of Higher Education 57.1 (2004): 80-103.Taubman, Peter. Teaching by Numbers: Deconstructing the Discourse of Standards and Accountability in Education. New York: Routledge, 2009.Thiel, Jaye Johnson. “Allowing Our Wounds to Breathe: Emotions and Critical Pedagogy.” Writing and Teaching to Change the World. Ed. Stephanie Jones. New York: Teachers College P, 2014. 36-48.

Digital Articulations of the Relational Self Identity continues to be one of the enduring topics in digital media research. This interdisciplinary take on the digital self extends the discussion in my dissertation (Harju) of contemporary articulations of the relational self in the digital context by focusing on potentiality of the evolving self. I adopt a relational approach to being (Gergen Relational) where the self is seen as always already a product of relations, borne out of them as well as dependent on them (Gergen Realities). The self as fluid and processual is reflective of our liquid times (Bauman), of globalisation and digitalisation where we are surrounded by global flows of images, taste and trends (Appadurai).The view of the self as a process underlies future-oriented action, emphasing the becoming of the self. The process of becoming implies the potential of the self that can be narrated into existence. The relational view of the self, perhaps indirectly, also posits the self as a temporal interface between the present and the future, as a site where change unfolds. It is therefore important to critically reflect on the kinds of potentialities we can discover and engage with and the kinds of futures (Berardi) we can construct.Extending Gergen’s conceptualisation of the kinds of relations to include non-human actors (e.g. media technologies) as well socio-cultural and economic forces allows me to explore the conflicting forces shaping the self, for example, the influence the market exerts on self-construction together with the media logics that guide digital self-production practices. Because of the market’s dominant position in today’s imagination, I seek to explore the relational processes of inclusion and exclusion that position individuals relative to as well as in terms of the market as more or less included or excluded subjects (Harju).The digital environment is a unique setting for identity projects as it provides spatial and temporal flexibility, the possibility for curation, consideration and reconstruction. At the same time, it lacks a certain historicity; as Smith and Watson note, the self constructed online lacks narrative beginning and end that in “analog life writing [are] distinguishable by birth or death” (90). While it is tempting therefore to assume that self-construction online is free from all constraints, this is not necessarily so as the self is nevertheless produced within the wider socio-cultural context in which it also needs to “make sense,” these conditions persisting across these modes of being. Self as a relational process inevitably connects what for analytical purposes may be called online and offline social spaces as there is a processual linkage, a relational flow, that connects any online entity to a form outside the digital realm.Media institutions and the process of mediation (Rak Boom!) shape the autobiographical practices (Poletti), and the notion of automedia was introduced as a way to incorporate images, text and technologies as constitutive in autobiographic accounts (Smith and Watson) and help see online life as life instead of mere representation (Rak "Life"). The automedial approach rejects essentialist accounts of the self, assuming rather that the self is called into being and constructed in and by the materiality of the medium, in the process of mediation. This furthermore entails a move beyond the literary in terms of autobiographies toward consideration of the enabling and restricting roles of media technologies in the kinds of selves that can be constructed (Maguire 74).Viewing the self as always already relationally emergent (Gergen Relational) and combining this view with the framework of automedial construction of the self allows us to bring into the examination of the digital self the socio-cultural and economic forces and the diverse discourses meeting at the site of the self. Importantly, the relational approach prioritises relations and therefore the self is constituted in a relational flow in a process of becoming, placing importance on the kinds of relational configurations where the becoming of the self takes place.This paper explores how the digital self is forged under the joint pressures of consumerist logic and media logics in the contemporary society where “being a consumer” is the predominant subjectivity (Firat; Bauman). I draw on sociology of consumption to examine the relational tensions shaping identity construction of marginalised individuals. To empirically illustrate the discussion I draw on a previous study (Harju and Huovinen) on plus-sized fashion blogging and examine fatshion blogging as a form of automedia (see also Rak "Digital" on blogs).Plus-Sized Fashion Bloggers and Market-Mediated IdentityPlus-sized fashion bloggers, “fatshionistas,” actively seek social and cultural inclusion by way of fashion. As a collective activity, plus-sized fashion blogging is more than diary writing (see also Rak Digital) but also more than fashion blogging: the blogs constitute “networked, collective and active consumer resistance,” illuminating “marginalised consumers’ identity work at the intersection of commercial culture and the counter-representations of traditional femininity” (Harju and Huovinen 1603). Blogging resistant or subversive identities into being is thus also a form of activism and political action (Connell). As a form of automedia and autobiographical production, fatshion blogging has as its agenda the construction of alternative subjectivities and carving out a legitimate social space in the “fatosphere,” “a loosely interconnected network of online resources aimed at creating a safe space where individuals can counter fat prejudice, resist misconceptions of fat, engage in communal experiences and promote positive understandings of fat” (Gurrieri and Cherrier 279). Fashion blogs are rich in self-images portraying “fat fashion”: thus, not only fashion as a physical medium and the images representative of such materiality, but also the body acts as a medium.Plus-sized fashion bloggers feel marginalised as women due to body size but they also face rejection in and by the market. Normalised discourses around fashion and the female body as one that is fashioned render fashion blogging an avenue to normativity (Berlant): the symbolic power of taste (Bourdieu) embedded in fashion is harnessed to construct the desired self and to mobilise discourses of acceptable subjectivity. However, it is these very discourses that also construct the “state of being fat” as deviant and stigmatise the larger body as something falling outside the definition of good taste (LeBesco).The description on the Fatshionista! Livejournal page summarizes the agenda that despite the focus on fashion carries political undertones:Welcome, fatshionistas! We are a diverse fat-positive, anti-racist, disabled-friendly, trans-inclusive, queer-flavored, non-gender-specific community, open to everyone. Here we will discuss the ins and outs of fat fashions, seriously and stupidly--but above all--standing tall, and with panache. We fatshionistas are self-accepting despite The Man's Saipan-made boot at our chubby, elegant throats. We are silly, and serious, and want shit to fit.In a previous study (Harju and Huovinen) on the conflicted identity construction of plus-sized fashion bloggers (see also Gurrieri and Cherrier; Limatius) we found the complex performative tactics used in constructing the plus-sized blogger identity both resisted the market as well as embraced it: the bloggers seek similarity via appeals to normativity (see also Coleman and Figueroa) yet underline difference by rejecting the demands of normative ideals.The bloggers’ similarity seeking tactics (Harju and Huovinen) emphasise shared commonalities with the feminine ideals (ultra-femininity, posing and girliness) and on the face of it contribute to reproducing not only the gendered self but also the market-compromised self that endorses a very specific type of femininity. The plus-sized blogger identity, although inherently subversive as it seeks to challenge and expand the repertoire and imagery available to women, nevertheless seeks inclusion by way of the market, the very same that rejected them as “consumers”. This relational tension is negotiated on the blogs, and resistance emerges through articulating difference.Thus, the bloggers’ diversity asserting tactics (Harju and Huovinen) add to the complexity of the identity project and constitute explicit resistance, giving rise to resistant consumer identity. Bodily differences are highlighted (e.g. the bigger body is embraced, skin and body revealed rather than concealed) as the bloggers take control of how they are represented, using media to challenge the market that defines acceptable femininity in ways that ostracises fat women. The contradictory processes at the site of the self give rise to relational tension (Gergen Relational) and blogging offers a site for collective negotiation. For the plus-sized bloggers, to be included means no longer occupying the margins: self-images displaying the fat body contribute to corporeal empowerment (Harju and Huovinen) where flaunting the fat body helps construct the identity of a “fatshionista” blogger liberated from shame and stigma attached to the bigger body:I decided to start this blog after being a regular poster on the Fatshionista LiveJournal community. Finding that community changed my whole outlook on life, I was fat (still am) & unhappy with myself (not so much now). I was amazed to find a place where fat people celebrated their bodies, instead of being ashamed. (Harju and Huovinen 1614).The fatshion blog as a form of automedia is driven by the desire for change in the social circumstances where self-construction can take place, toward the future potential of the self, by diversifying acceptable subject positions and constructing novel identification points for fat women. The means are limited, however, and despite the explicit agenda of promoting body positivity, the collective aspirations are rooted in consumption and realised in the realm of fashion and the market.The question, therefore, is whether resistance outside the market is possible when so much of our social existence is bound up with the market and consumerist logic, or whether the desire for inclusion, manifest in aspirational normativity (Berlant) with the promise of social acceptance linked to normative way of life, necessitates market participation and the adoption of consumer subjectivity? Consumer subjectivity offers normative intelligibility in the various expressions of identity, providing tools for the becoming of an included subject. However, it raises the question of whether resistant identity can occur outside the market and outside the logic of consumption when it seeks social inclusion.Market-compromised identity is a double-edged sword; while participation via the market may help construct a self that is intelligible, market participation also disciplines the subject to take part in a certain way, of becoming a certain type of consuming subject, all the time harnessing the self for the benefit of the market. With no beginning or an end, the digital self is in constant processual flux, responding to conflicting relational input. The market adds to this complexity as “the neoliberal subject is compelled to participate in society as both an enthusiastic consumer and as a self-controlled subject” (Guthman 193).Social Imaginaries as Horizons of Constrained Possibility Identity possibilities are inscribed in the popular imagination, and the concept of social imaginary (Castoriadis; Taylor) provides a useful lens through which to examine articulations of the digital self. Social imaginaries are not unitary constructions and different imaginaries are evoked in different contexts. Likewise, although often shared, they are nevertheless unique to the individual, presenting as a terrain of conceivable action befitting of the individual engaged in the act of imagining.In our socially saturated times relational input is greater than ever (Gergen Relational). Imagining now draws on a wider range of identity possibilities, the ways of imagining the self being reflective of the values of any given time. Both consumption and media infiltrate the social imagination which today is not only compromised by market logic but has become constitutive of a terrain where the parameters for inclusion, change and resistance are limited. Practices of performing desirable femininity normalise a certain way of being and strike a constitutive boundary between what is desirable and what is not. The plus-sized fashion blogging makes visible the lack of diversity in the popular imagination (Harju and Huovinen) while fatshion blogging also reveals what possibilities there are for inclusion (i.e. via consumption and by mobilising normative femininity) and where the boundaries of identity work lie (see also Connell).The fat body is subjected to discipline (Giovanelli and Ostertag; LeBesco) and “becoming fat” is regularly viewed as a lack of control. Not limited to fat subjects, the prevalent discourses of the self emphasise control and responsibility for the self (rather than community), often masquerading as self-approval. The same discourses, however, highlight work on the self (McRobbie) and cultivating the self by various means of self-management or self-tracking (Rettberg). Such self-disciplining carries the implication of the self as somewhat lacking (Skeggs Imagining, Exchange), of being in some way unintelligible (Butler).In plus-sized blogging, the fat body needs to be subjected to fashioning to become intelligible within the dominant discourses in the public sphere. The fatshionista community is a politically oriented movement that rejects the normative demands governing the body, yet regimes of ‘self-improvement’ are evident on the individual blogs displaying the fashioned body, which is befitting of the normative understandings of the female subject as sexualised, as something to be consumed (see also Maguire). Contrary to the discourses of fat female subjects where the dimension of sexuality is largely absent, this is also linked to the problematics related to the visibility of female subjects. The negotiation of relational tension is manifest as negotiation of competing discourses where bloggers adopt the hegemonic visual discourses to subvert the stigmatising discourses that construct the fat female subject as lacking. Utilising media logics (e.g. micro-celebrity) to gain visibility as fat subjects is an important aspect of the fatshionistas’ automedial self-construction.I argue that social imaginaries that feed into identity construction and offer pathways to normalcy cannot be seen simply and only as enabling, but instead they construct horizons of constrained possibility (Harju), thereby imposing limitations to the kind of acceptable identity positions marginalised individuals can seek. Digital productions form chains of symbolic entities and acquire their meaning by being interconnected as well as by being connected to popular social imaginaries. Thus, the narrative construction of the self in the digital production, and the recognition of the self in the becoming, is the very utility of the digital object. This is because through the digital artefact the individual becomes relationally linked to chains of significations (Harju). Through such linkages and subverted discourses, the disenfranchised may become enfranchised.Toward Horizons of Potentiality and PossibilityThe relational self is a process under continual change and thus always becoming. This approach opens up new avenues for exploring the complexities of the digital self that is never ‘just’ a reproduction. Automedia entails both the media about the maker (the subject) and the process of mediating the self (Rak "Life" 161) The relational approach helps overcome the binary distinction in modes of being (online versus offline), instead bringing into focus the relational flow between various articulations of the self in different relational scenarios. Then perhaps the question is not “what kinds of selves become or are borne digital” (Rak Life 177), but what kinds of selves are possible in the first place under the current conditions that include the digital as one mode of being, mediating the becoming, with the digital as one relational space of articulation of the self among many.Where in On Being Online I discussed the constraining effects of market ideology embedded in social imaginaries on how the self can be articulated, Berardi in his book Futurability offers a more optimistic take, noting how the different paths we take result in different possibilities becoming realised, resulting in different social realities in the future. Future is not a linear development from the present; rather, the present harbours the potential for multiple futures. Berardi notes how the “[f]uture is not prescribed but inscribed, so it must be selected and extracted through interpretation” (236). Despite the dominant code - which in our times is consumption (Baudrillard) - hindering the process of interpretation, there is hope in Berardi’s notion of inscribed possibilities for resistance and change, for different ways of being and becoming.This is the space the plus-sized fashion bloggers occupy as they grasp the potentialities in the present and construct new ways of being that unfold as different social realities in the future. In blogging, platform affordances together with other media technologies are intertwined with future-oriented life narration in the construction of the fatshionista identity which involves retrospective interpretation of life experiences as a fat woman as well as self-liberation in the form of conscious rejection of the dominant discourses around fat female subjects.The digital self is able to negotiate such diverse, even conflicting forces in the active shaping of the social reality of its existence. Blogging as automedia can constitute an act of carving out alternative futures not limited to the digital realm. Perhaps when freed from aspirational normativity (Berlant) we are able to recover hope in the inscribed possibilities that might also hide the potential for a transition from a subjectivity enslaved to the market logic (see Firat Violence) to a self actively engaged in changing the social circumstances and the conditions in which subjectivity is construed (see Firat and Dholakia). In the becoming, the digital self occupies a place between the present and the future, enmeshed in various discourses of aspiration, mediated by material practices of consumption and articulated within the limits of current media practices (Harju). A self in the making, it is variably responsive to the multitude of relational forces continually flowing at the site of it.Although the plus-sized bloggers’ identity work can be seen as an attempt to transform or discipline the self into something more intelligible that better fits the existing narratives of the self, they are also adding new narratives to the repertoire. If we adopt the view of self-conception as discourse about the self, that is, “the performance of languages available in the public sphere” (Gergen, Realities 185) whereby the self is made culturally intelligible by way of narration within ongoing relationships, we can see how the existing cultural discourses of the self are not only inclusive, but also alienating and othering. There is a need for identity politics that encourage the production of alternative discourses of the self for more inclusive practices of imagining. 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Jeanette Winterson’s 2019 novel Frankissstein is a contemporary re-reading of Mary Shelley’s classic Gothic text Frankenstein that profoundly challenges ideas of what it means to be human in the present day, by drawing on posthuman ideas about the constitution of the self. In this novel, Winterson portrays various forms of ‘monsters’ such as AI, lifelike sex dolls and transgender embodiment. Drawing on both Frankenstein as a text and the infamous creation story of the novel, Winterson creates a deeply intertextual cast of characters that blurs the following: Ry (Mary Shelley), a transgender doctor, Ron Lord (Lord Byron), the creator of a line of sex bots, and Professor Stein (Frankenstein), a scientist interested in AI and cryopreservation. Framed by vignettes of Shelley’s composition of Frankenstein, these characters draw together a set of highly contemporary desires and anxieties about the relationship between the social and science, the ways in which matter is always articulated through both the discursive and the material, and how, to quote Karen Barad, “what often appears as separate entities (and separate sets of concerns) with sharp edges does not actually entail a relation of absolute exteriority at all” (“Posthumanist Performativity” 803). Winterson implicitly and explicitly explores ideas of the posthuman—for instance, in the novel Stein gives a lecture titled “The Future of Humans in a Post-Human World” (74)—and suggests that the future is one in which “binaries belong to our carbon-based past” (72), in ways both liberating and disturbing. While Stein talks about our posthuman future of overcoming even death with the zeal of an evangelist, Winterson undercuts this celebratory rhetoric by situating these emerging forms of self-making in a lineage of the monstrous—”Frankenstein was a vision of how life might be created—the first non-human intelligence” (27)—that suggests the posthuman itself to be a kind of monstrosity. For Winterson, the contemporary monster is one bound up in technologies of self-making, an ambivalent process of both promise and danger that entangles us with monstrosity: “Frankenstein in the monster ... the monster in Frankenstein” (130). Drawing on posthuman theory, I propose that we can read Winterson’s novel as suggesting that modern subjectivity in itself has become defined by hybridity, a mixing between human and non-human elements that problematises many of the boundaries of selfhood that Enlightenment humanism valourised for so long. As Donna Haraway famously said in her “Cyborg Manifesto”: late Twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert. (11) Against this historical backdrop, Winterson suggests that new forms of being human—or becoming posthuman—are emerging, in which sex, gender and sexuality have become profoundly entangled with various forms of biological and informational technology. “We’re still biology but we’re better biology” says Stein (113), suggesting that the future holds new forms of modifications of the body, including smart implants and the uploading of consciousness to computing systems. In situating transgender treatments, AI and sex-bots in a lineage of the monstrous that begins with Frankenstein, Winterson (as much as posthuman theorists), is interested in the way that new forms of technologies mean that all subjectivity has become monstrous itself. But what might it mean to be posthuman? Feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti has suggested that our post-Enlightenment, posthuman era is one in which the category of the human has become problematised. She says, “not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that” (1). For Braidotti, women, people of colour and LGBT people have never been accorded fully human status, and as such the rapid technological change that has challenged humanity as a category is to be embraced, if not precisely uncritically. She argues that posthuman subjectivity is notable for the way that it collapses the boundary between nature and culture, and for the interweaving between human and non-human elements in contemporary life. I want to suggest that one name for those subjects that Braidotti describes that ‘have never have been quite’ human is monster. The figure of the monster deployed by Winterson is one that haunts contemporary ideas of sex, gender, and sexuality. Nikita Mazurov has called the monster a “continuous, unstable project of both disassembly or ex-figuration and of unsanctioned coupling” (262), a posthuman praxis of “hybridity of form” that challenges state-sanctioned productions of the self. The monster challenges ideas of fixity, the metaphysics of presence and essence that created the humanist project. It is, in this sense, abject in the sense that Julia Kristeva famously described, as that which “disturbs identity, system, order [and] does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (4). The composition of the monster collapses such foundational binaries as male/female, gay/straight, dead/alive, human/machine, human/animal, black/white, and inside/outside. “The monster is one who lives in transition”, as Paul Preciado says (“Can the Monster Speak” 20). Monsters have therefore historically done profound cultural work, for as Jack Halberstam has said, “monsters have to be everything the human is not and, in producing the negative of human, these novels make way for the invention of human as white, male, middle class, and heterosexual” (22). As Frankissstein suggests, monstrous others continue to haunt contemporary subjectivity. Winterson suggests the human to be an embattled category—and here we must remember that one of the ways in which humanisation emerges is the easy identification of binary gender, as Judith Butler noted long ago in Bodies That Matter (xiii). Haraway anticipated the mainstreaming of the monster in her metaphor of the cyborg, which was, after all, “monstrous and illegitimate” (15), a post-gender, post-Oedipal figure built from the interaction between flesh and machine, nature and culture. The invention of the human, therefore, has become ever more a precarious thing in a posthuman world. Given her interest in gender and sexuality, one of the chief lenses through which Winterson has been read through is queer theory (Moore; Haslett; McAvan). With its portrayal of new forms of gendered and sexual subjectivity, Frankissstein can be productively read against more recent queer and trans theory that take a more posthuman approach to embodiment, rather than that of the linguistically-constructed, Butler-inflected queer theory, which has largely formed the critical context for Winterson’s work on sex and gender. While queer and posthuman theory are not completely coterminous with one another, both arguably take as their starting point a deconstruction of an image of the human which has historically been normatively considered white, male, heterosexual, and cissexual. Taking queer and trans theory into a material turn, Preciado has notably talked about what he calls a “pharmacopornographic” (Testo Junkie, 33) regime, in which globalised post-industrial capitalism runs on the “biomolecular” and “semiotic-technical” (33) industries that produce gendered and sexual subjectivity. Preciado polemically argues that contemporary capitalism is notable for its pervasive regime of pharmaceuticals that modify the body, and pornography that stimulates sexual desire (and here we might add the semiotic regime of sexuality on smartphones, through chat, photos, and dating apps like Tinder and Grindr). Capital, in this regime, has become “sexual capital” (40). As a result, what is a commonsense cis-normative understanding of transgender subjectivity, which relies upon an economy of medicalised body modification, can be said in Preciado’s analysis to constitute the truth of all subjectivity in the present given the ubiquity of pharmaceutical interventions like the contraceptive pill, Viagra, Prozac, and Ritalin. He says, “you think that you’re cis-females, but you take the Pill; or you think that you’re cis-males, but you take Viagra ... . You, you as well, you are the monster that testosterone is waking up in me” (393). The figure of the monster has been a trope of transgender studies since at least Susan Stryker’s “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix”, which explicitly draws upon Shelley’s Frankenstein as an antecedent for trans subjectivity, suggesting that we see trans bodies as profoundly unnatural, and that as a result, “like the monster, [trans people are] too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of [their] embodiment” (245). Preciado suggests that the monstrosity popularly imagined to be the unique property of transgender bodies, their partiality and hybridity, is in fact more properly a universal condition of the biopolitical regimes that constitute contemporary life. Almost all of us take pills that modify our bodies and minds, almost all of us construct our sexualities through the semiotic—these non-human elements profoundly interweave with the human in new forms of universal monstrosity. It is perhaps therefore unsurprising that Winterson would also take up the figure of Frankenstein’s monster in her examination of contemporary forms of posthuman subjectivity. The character of Ry, a transgender doctor, is characterised in the novel as an exemplar of a broader cultural interest in self-making, stating that “it really is my body. I had it made for me” (122). This is a self-making that calls into question the construction of other selves, for as Ry says, “I am part of a small group of transgender medical professionals. Some of us are transhuman enthusiasts too. This isn’t surprising; we feel or have felt that we’re in the wrong body. We can understand the feeling that any-body is the wrong body” (114). As strongly as Preciado, the novel suggests that biomolecular and semiotic-technical regimes constitute all contemporary subjectivity, conditioning what is possible, materially and discursively. Far from being uniquely transgender, the desire to transform the body has become universal. Halberstam notes that “the monster always represents the disruption of categories, the destruction of boundaries, and the presence of impurities” (27). “I live with doubleness” says Ry (88), who is depicted as both a transgender man and non-binary. Winterson’s rendering of trans subjectivity suggests transgender to be a kind of both/and state, in between or troubling the sex/gender binary. This occurs in broad and occasionally problematic ways, as when Ry describes himself as “fully female [and] also partly male” (97), an idea that has not been universally appreciated by trans readers for whom misgendering has been a critical concern since at least Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl. Winterson’s take on trans identity as being fluid but grounded in assigned sex seems in many ways ill at ease with a contemporary trans politics grounded in a post-transition authenticity. But what is at stake in Winterson’s depiction of monstrosity is the impurity of the very category of human, the way that it has become interwoven with the bio-medical and semiotic forms of capitalism. It is not simply that Ry disrupts boundaries—though he does do that—, it is that by troubling the sex/gender binary he calls into questions the construction of identity of those around him, too (Stein dubiously says that he is “not gay” despite his desire for Ry). Where Stein’s posthuman rhetoric describes a future in which “we will be able to choose our bodies” (119), this customisation of the self is suggested to already be here for transgender people; “think of yourself as future-early” (119). Ry’s transness is described by Stein as “interven[ing] in your own evolution [being both] the here and now, and a harbinger of the future” (154). The monstrosity of trans corporeality is thus figured as indicative of a general societal movement, confirming Preciado’s ideas of a generalised bio-medical-semiotic posthumanity. We can see this in another way in Winterson’s depiction of sex bots, which render the landscape of contemporary sexuality in characteristically grotesque ways. The character Ron Lord creates a range of female sex bots from 60s hippy to a bra-less 70s feminist. “All of these girls come in different skin tones: black, brown or white. Plus, you can have a muff on the Vintage model if that’s what you want” (47). Lord suggests that sex bots entail a form of sexuality that is endlessly customisable, that allows people to have sex without baggage or complication: ”a lot of people will be happy to not have any more crap relationships with crap humans” (312). The commodification of sex and becoming-semiotic that Preciado has discussed becomes a way of overcoming the limitations—and indeed ethical responsibility—of human relationships. As Lord puts it, “what we offer is fantasy life, not real life” (46). That there is something monstrous about this sexuality is clear in the novel. We might think of Lord’s sex bots as monstrous in a number of ways—firstly, as problematising the boundaries between the sexes, secondly, the confluence between machinic and organic, and thirdly, the inability to distinguish between public and private. All of the bots are female, only made for a presumed heterosexual male audience. The bot’s proportions are exaggerated, with a “20-inch waist and 40-inch boobs” (91) while her legs are “slightly longer than they would be if she was human. This is fantasy, not nature, so you can have what you want” (37). Here it is normative heterosexual male desire, not queer or trans embodiment, that troubles the very boundaries of the human. The sex bot’s body exposes, in Judith Butler’s terms, the performativity of sex and gender disconnected from the limits of the corporeal, the intensification of normative expectations of heterosexual femininity in the sex industry beyond the boundaries of human possibility. “Will women be the first casualties of obsolescence in your brave new world?” asks one character (74), in a pointed critique of the very idea of “female” sex bots. As Preciado notes, in pornography, “sex is performance, which is to say that it is composed of public representations and processes of repetition that are socially and politically regulated” (268). And yet, there is something irreducibly virtual in this regime of “tele-techno-masturbation” (Preciado 266)—for how can a machine be any kind of sex, precisely? How can it have sex? The sex/gender of the “girls in action” is one fraught with the logic of the supplement (recall Derrida, after all, used the term to describe masturbation in Of Grammatology), an addition and replacement, in which the gender and sexuality of the bots is produced through their repetition of norms that are always exceeded and complicated by their performance by a non-human machine. This becomes apparent in a grotesque scene in which one of the sex bots malfunctions and starts saying things while folded up in a cloakroom like “OPEN MY LEGS, DADDY! WIDER!” (90), for which Lord apologises, and states that the bot is “sexually explicit when she is in Bedroom Mode” (91). Preciado has defined pornography as “sexuality transformed into public representation” (266), when the private becomes public. Lord’s sex bots mark the point in which sexuality has become semiotic, technologised, masturbatory. Preciado talks about “the capture of sex and sexuality by economy, the process by which sex becomes work” (274), a work primarily done by women. While Preciado celebrates this becoming-semiotic of sexuality in an accelerationist fashion, it is clear that Winterson has serious ambivalences about this posthuman turn of sexuality (indeed, her earlier book The Stone Gods (2007) is much more positive about the possibilities of cyborg sexuality). Though the posthuman offers possibilities for new forms of sexuality in Frankissstein just as it has for sex and gender, this brings with it the ever-present spectre of monstrosity, the abject disruption of humanist binaries. For Winterson, the power of new technologies that re-shape bodies, minds and desires is one that is profoundly fraught. While there is the pleasure of self-determination (as for Ry), and the potential to transcend human limits, there is also the possibility of new forms of de-humanisation. While Winterson’s early work like 1989’s Sexing the Cherry embraced the pleasures of monstrosity (McAvan), Frankissstein is ultimately more ambivalent about it, if resigned to its future. “I feel the like agony of mind of Victor Frankenstein; having created his monster, he cannot uncreate him. Time has no pity. Time cannot unhappen. What is done is done” (128). New forms of biological modification of the body, new forms of virtualised minds and sexuality, Winterson seems to suggest, are likely to proliferate whether we like it or not. “Nothing we do to the body is without consequences”, reflects Ry (310), suggesting that his body will always be at war with his mind. Just as Mary Shelley imagined Victor Frankenstein as a modern Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods, the posthuman attempts to overcome the limits of the human in a monstrous confluence of human and the bio-technical-semiotic. Though she stages this movement in interesting ways, Winterson is ultimately mostly pessimistic about the possible social consequences of the posthuman turn, if understanding of the desires that animate human attempts to reshape the self. But we need not conclude that posthuman monstrosity is entirely so problematic. Drawing on her work on quantum physics, Karen Barad has written that “matter is not the given, the unchangeable, the bare facts of nature. It is not inanimate, lifeless, eternal. Matter is an imaginative material exploration of non/being, creatively regenerative, an ongoing trans*/formation” (“TransMaterialities,” 411). Perhaps we might find new possibilities in the refiguration of matter, of hybrid forms, of unsanctioned coupling. Winterson has Mary Shelley ponder that “in childbirth there is no me/not me” (12)—a productive challenging of binaries that suggests monstrosity to be the very pre-condition of human life in itself. Perhaps what posthuman monsters expose is that the blurring of binaries happens on every level of matter, that the virtual and material are not as distinct from one another as we would like to think, and that the making and remaking of the self is an inherent part of being human. And that the monsters are not just the ones with bolts in their necks or sex bots or hormone injections in their veins—they are, now and always have been, all of us. References Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28.3 (2003): 801-831. Barad, Karen. “TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings.” GLQ 2.2–3 (2015): 387-421. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Routledge, 1993. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge and Malden, Polity, 2013. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Johns Hopkins Press, 1974. Halberstam, Judith (Jack). Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke UP, 1995. Haraway, Donna. “The Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Manifestly Haraway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 5-90. Haslett, Jane. “Winterson’s Fabulous Bodies.” Jeanette Winterson: A Contemporary Critical Guide. Ed. Sonya Andermahr. Continuum, 2007. 41-54. Mazurov, Nikita. “Monster/The Unhuman.” Posthuman Glossary. Eds. Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajora. Bloomsbury, 2018. 261-264. McAvan, Emily. Jeanette Winterson and Religion. Bloomsbury, 2020. Moore, Lisa. “Teledildonics: Virtual Lesbians in Fiction of Jeanette Winterson.” Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism. Eds. Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn. Routledge, 1995. 104-127. Preciado, Beatriz (Paul). Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Trans. Bruce Benderson. The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2013. Preciado, Paul. Can the Monster Speak? A Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts. Trans. Frank Wynne. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021. Serano, Julia. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Seal, 2007. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: Or, Modern Prometheus. Oxford UP, 1969. Stryker, Susan. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” The Transgender Studies Reader. Eds. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle. Routledge, 2006. 244-256. Winterson, Jeanette. Sexing the Cherry. Grove, 1989. ———. The Stone Gods. Penguin, 2007. ———. Frankissstein. Jonathan Cape, 2019.