Journal articles on the topic 'Creed, barbara'

El objetivo de este texto es analizar el monstruo femenino en el film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Una chica vuelve a casa sola de noche, 2014), de Ana Lily Amirpour, exponiendo el giro del arquetipo de la mujer vampiro, para tratar el tema de la violencia patriarcal y, mediante una serie de referencias críticas de la teoría del cine feminista, con figuras como Barbara Creed, Pilar Pedraza y Laura Mulvey, entre otras, entender las nuevas manifestaciones de lo femenino y lo monstruoso. The aim of this paper is to analyze the female monster in Ana Lily Amirpour’s film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014), exposing the reversal of the female vampire archetype to address the violence of patriarchy, and through a series of critical references from feminist cinema theory with figures such as Barbara Creed, Pilar Pedraza, and Laura Mulvey, among others, to understand the new trends of the feminine and monstrosity.

In this paper, I attempt to analyze the 2014 film Under the Skin through its formal and generic elements and relate these to philosophical thought regarding objectivity and gender from theorists including Kant, de Beauvoir, and Irigaray, as well as media scholars Barbara Creed and Laura Mulvey. I argue that throughout the course of the film, by its presentation of horror, science-fiction, and film noir elements, as well as its cinematography, structure, sound, and mise-en-scène a commentary on the societal objectification of women is constructed, all stemming from its presentation of the female experience as something which is inherently alien.

Recent portrayals of ancient Egypt in popular culture have renewed attention concerning the historical accuracy of how race and racism appear in representations of antiquity. Historians of the antiquity have robustly dismissed racist claims of whitewashing or blackwashing historical and cultural material in both scholarship and in popular culture. The 2017 video game Assassin’s Creed: Origins is a noteworthy site to examine this debate, as the game was designed with the assistance of historians and cultural experts, presenting players with an “historically accurate” ancient Egypt. Yet, if race is a fantasy, as Karen Fields and Barbara Fields’ “racecraft” articulates, then what historians have speculated in their study of race and racism are presentations of a proto-racecraft, borrowing from historian Benjamin Isaac. This essay argues that Assassin’s Creed: Origins racecrafts through the paradigm of historical speculation. As historians have speculated on meanings and operations of “race” and racism in ancient Egypt, Origins has made those speculations visible through its depiction of a racially diverse Ptolemaic Egypt. Yet, this racecraft is paradoxically good, as the game does so to push back against the hegemony of whiteness and whitewashing in contemporary popular culture.

This paper aimed to examine the depiction of the monstrous feminine in two horror flms, 2009’s Jennifer’s Bodyand 2015’s The Witch, by investigating how horror flms confront transgression through the construction of woman as a monstrous fgure in the story. The theory of abjection proposed by Julia Kristeva and of the monstrous feminine by Barbara Creed were used in the analysis. The main data were taken from these two flms, focusing on the characterization and narrative aspects. It was found that the depiction of the monstrous feminine in both flms was through the use of monstrous acts and images. The way in which these flms constructed monstrosity indicates female transgression of patriarchal boundaries, specifcally on the issue of gender identity and religiosity. The transgression emphasizes that there is no absolute identity, and thus boundaries are disrupted due to this fluid identity

This paper aimed to examine the depiction of the monstrous feminine in two horror flms, 2009’s Jennifer’s Bodyand 2015’s The Witch, by investigating how horror flms confront transgression through the construction of woman as a monstrous fgure in the story. The theory of abjection proposed by Julia Kristeva and of the monstrous feminine by Barbara Creed were used in the analysis. The main data were taken from these two flms, focusing on the characterization and narrative aspects. It was found that the depiction of the monstrous feminine in both flms was through the use of monstrous acts and images. The way in which these flms constructed monstrosity indicates female transgression of patriarchal boundaries, specifcally on the issue of gender identity and religiosity. The transgression emphasizes that there is no absolute identity, and thus boundaries are disrupted due to this fluid identity

This article presents an analysis of how the male hegemony in the “Global North” has conceptualized the witch as an image of female alterity. My approach is informed by studies by Julia Kristeva, Teresa de Lauretis, Hélène Cixous, and Barbara Creed. Drawing on these works, I explore how the witch actively desires and uses the power of her desire to draw the male subject toward the “place where meaning collapses” (Agamben 2007). The study is supported by a prior analysis of the concepts of witchcraft, perversion, and abjection. After establishing the conceptual framework, the study sample is divided into three filmic categories: the witch in society; the witch in the socialization process; and the witch as perverse resistance. My argument is that the witch, as a female figure inherently associated with sexuality, crosses the thresholds of eroticism and perversion, and possesses the power to challenge binary structures from within.

<p>Este trabalho se propõe a analisar a relação de intertextualidade entre os filmes <em>Senhor Babadook</em>, de Jennifer Kent<em> </em>(<em>The Babadook</em>, Austrália, 2014) e <em>Vincent</em>, de Tim Burton (EUA, 1982). Tal relação será examinada a partir da ideia de uma reconstrução da narrativa do filme de Burton pelo de Kent por um procedimento de inversão do ponto de vista. Tal procedimento permite a <em>Senhor Babadook</em> explorar um tema caro às histórias de horror que está apenas sugerido em <em>Vincent</em>: o horror materno (“<em>maternal horror</em>”, ARNOLD, 2013), conceito inspirado nas ideias de Julia Kristeva (1982) e Barbara Creed (1993).</p>

Deadgirl (2008) is a horror film that gained notoriety on the film festival circuit for its disturbing premise: when a group of teenage social outcasts discover a naked female zombie strapped to a gurney in the basement of an abandoned asylum, they decide “to keep her” as a sex slave. Accordingly, two sites of monstrosity are staged—one with the monstrous-feminine and the other with monstrous masculinities. Insofar as the film explicitly exploits images of abjection to engender its perverse pleasures, it would seem to invite “abject criticism” in the tradition of Barbara Creed, Carol Clover, and colleagues. However, in light of recent critical appraisals about the limitations of “abjection criticism,” this article reads Deadgirl as a cultural artifact that demands we reassess how abjection is critically referenced, arguing that—instead of reading abjection in terms of tropes and themes—we should read it in diachronic, allegorical ways, which do not reify into cultural representation.

In video games, female characters have traditionally been meant to be seen and not heard, mirroring the history of women under patriarchy. Those female characters who reject their secondary and primarily visual role often become monstrous, and like Barbara Creed argues, this monstrosity is itself profoundly gendered. This paper focuses on two such female characters whose monstrosity, and also revolt, are indisputably feminine, as well as musical. Both the 2007 classic Portal and the 2017 cult hit Doki Doki Literature Club! feature central antagonists who are sentient artificial female monsters who both start off as the players’ guides through their respective games, their roles similar to those of gendered digital assistants in everyday life. While GLaDOS is voiced throughout Portal, Monika remains silent until the final credits of DDLC!, but the comparison between the two is never as evident as when they sing. Both games end with songs performed by these antagonists, after they have technically been defeated. This paper draws on feminist literary and film theory, as well as musicology and ludomusicology, to deliver both a comparative analysis of the two songs, and a broader formulation of the sonic representation of the monstrous-feminine in video games.

Abstract Neither Jane Austen’s writing, nor film adaptations of her novels made in the heritage film tradition seem particularly uncanny. Linked in the viewers’ minds with the representation of the English countryside stability, the films promote traditional values and take the spectators away from the problems and anxieties of the contemporary status quo. However, Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park (1999) uses Austen’s plot to question the colonial past by creating uncanny effects. Understood in this paper as an eerie resurfacing of the hidden (following Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Sigmund Freud, John Hodgkins, Barbara Creed), the uncanny becomes a tool for inquiring into how contemporary filmmakers and their audiences revisit old stories. Rozema creates two subplots for the main narrative: a story about an artist’s growth (Fanny Price becomes a writer) and a colonial narrative, which foregrounds the Bertrams’ dependence on their property in Antigua and their use of slave labour. Both plot lines enrich the film with uncanny effects linked to the inherent intermediality of film adaptations. Grotesquely frightening verbal images from Fanny’s writing (extracts from Austen’s Juvenilia) and the uncanny visuality of Tom Bertram’s drawings frame the viewer’s revisitation of Mansfield Park while reminding him/her of a subversive potential – of the uncanny and film adaptations.

In this article, I explore, through the novels of Elena Ferrante, the role played by the ‘abject’ in mediating ageing in women, focusing on its role in the movement from a disempowered to a more powerful subject position. The article has three sections. The first describes the role of the abject in constituting the feminine, focusing on the place of temporality and ageing in this process. Represented by the symbolic figure of the hag, the old woman is a source of primal fear which forms the foundation of a violently misogynistic gendered (self-)formation. However, following Barbara Creed, there are two representational forms of the hag, that of victim (hag) and that of monster (Hag), which I argue also suggest alternative subjectivities associated with ageing femininity. In the second section, I explore the movement from one form to the other by means of conceptual models drawn from Simone de Beauvoir and Margaret Morganroth Gullette, in which process a battle over the symbolic meaning of abjection is central. Moreover, ageing itself is significant in mediating the shift from an oppressed/fragmented to a powerful/integrated subject position. Whilst the structures of feeling involved in this subjectivity are emergent, fiction and imaginative literature may provide helpful early depictions and in the last section I illustrate the psychosocial domain with material drawn from two early novels by Elena Ferrante.

Issues of domestication, minority, and discrimination have frequently put women in inferior position in society. When women seek equality, they are often framed as embracing monstrous attitudes. This study focuses on François Mauriac’s novel titled Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927) with the intention of exploring the meanings and the significations in its construction of women as monsters. It has been observed that women are depicted as monsters because their struggle for freedom is seen as a challenge to the patriarchal system. The aims of this study are to find out and to describe the influential aspects in the construction of women as monsters and how such construction creates meanings. The study relies on content analysis method and follows three steps of analysis: collecting data relevant to monstrosity, classifying data based on the themes and problems related to the topic, and analyzing the data using Barbara Creed’s theory of the monstrous feminine (2007). The study results in the finding that the construction of women as monsters is strongly correlated with the deep institutionalization of patriarchy in French culture. Penempatan perempuan pada posisi inferior dalam banyak narasi disebabkan oleh faktor-faktor domestifikasi, minoritas, dan diskriminasi. Ketika perempuan memperjuangkan kesetaraan, mereka dianggap membangkang dan disimbolkan sebagai monster. Konstruksi monster terhadap perempuan ini terlihat pada novel François Mauriac berjudul Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927). Tulisan ini mencoba memahami makna dan pemaknaan konstruksi perempuan sebagai monster dalam novel tersebut. Studi ini menemukan bahwa perempuan digambarkan sebagai monster karena perjuangan mereka untuk mencapai kebebasan dianggap menentang struktur patriarki. Tujuan dari studi ini adalah menemukan dan mendeskripsikan aspek-aspek yang berkaitan dengan proses pemonsteran perempuan dan bagaimana proses tersebut dimaknai. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode analisis isi cerita dan dilakukan dalam beberapa tahap. Tahap pertama adalah pengambilan data yang relevan dengan pemonsteran. Tahap kedua adalah pengklasifikasian data sesuai dengan tema dan permasalahan tentang pemonsteran perempuan. Tahap terakhir adalah analisis data temuan dengan teori Barbara Creed (2007) tentang the monstrous feminine. Studi ini menyimpulkan bahwa konstruksi perempuan sebagai monster berhubungan erat dengan kultur patriarki yang sudah terinstitusionalisasi di dalam budaya Prancis pada masa ketika novel tersebut ditulis.

The article presents an attempt to theorize the modes of body transformation in body horror films, as well as their impact on the viewer's body experiences and, in a more complex perspective, on the understanding and conceptualization of the body. In doing so, the author includes the concepts of “horror body” and “non-human” in her research, considering new body horror films in a post-human and non-human perspective. In addition, the author turns to the concept of the “new flesh” by David Cronenberg to identify technological or specific mutations in body horror films. According to the author, body horror films have an impact on the viewers' body, forcing them to experience their body as deformed, going beyond its own boundaries. Therefore, the horror of the transformed body in these films is marked by a “shock identity”. The power of horror allows transcending the boundaries of human entity and, in this sense, horror unsettles the belief that this world is only created for human beings and their bodies. In the article, the author applies the concepts of “abjection” by Julia Kristeva, “grotesque body” by Barbara Creed and “unhuman” by Dylan Trigg to show that the holistic state of the human body is becoming more problematic, and the dominance and exclusivity of man is being questioned. The author makes the assumption that body horror films allow us to enter the context of a new posthuman era in which people and non-people form the “new flesh” (technological or specific). Thus, body horror visualizes the becoming of a new body connected to a new recombined or recomposed human flesh which may have to come in the future.

Defects like dislocations and grain boundaries usually serve as preferred sites for nucleation of both coherent and incoherent precipitates. The catalytical effect of these defects are different for different kinds of precipitates. The purpose of this paper is to present a TEM observation of heterogeneous nucleation of Ti2AlC (α) precipitates at some special grain boundaries in γ-TiAl.A Ti-52A1-3C alloy fabricated at the University of California, Santa Barbara was annealed for 100 h at 1528 K and then creep tested for about 20 h at 1255 K. Thin foils were cut from the crept sample using a diamond saw and 3 mm discs were cut using an ultrasonic cutting machine. The discs were ground to 200 μm thickness from both sides. Final thinning was done by jetpolishing in a 10% HC104 and 90% CH3OH solution at 250 K and 40 V. The specimens were examined with a Philips EM400T microscope operating at 120 kV.

This article examines examples of the monstrous-feminine in the form of abject maternal monsters in a selection of commercially successful and critically acclaimed mainstream video games using conceptual frameworks and textual analysis methods established in the work of Julia Kristeva and Barbara Creed. The Broodmother from Dragon Age: Origins (2009) and the Mother from Dragon Age: Origins—Awakening (2010) are considered as problematic examples of the abject monstrous-feminine which fall into a long tradition in horror media of framing the female body and the birthing process as something horrific and repulsive. Kerrigan from the StarCraft series (1998–2017) is examined as a possible counter-example, demonstrating that the monstrous-feminine can exist in a playable and potentially empowered form, though she is problematically empowered within a violent, militant framework. Overall, this article critically analyses the ways in which video games remediate tropes of gendered monstrosity and reinforce the misogynist norms and values of hegemonic heteropatriarchal ideology by forcing players to enact symbolic violence against transgressive female bodies.

The creek is a threatening site for women in Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies (1902). The female characters in her stories are routinely represented as vulnerable, drowning, or murdered at the creek, and the slippery banks and murky waters have been established by Baynton as an Australian gothic space where women (and their bodies) are denied agency. Gillian Mears and Jessie Cole are two contemporary writers who challenge Baynton’s representation of the gothic creek. The female protagonists in their most recent Australian gothic novels, Noah in Mears’ Foal’s Bread (2011) and Mema in Cole’s Deeper Water (2014), understand the creek as a subversive site that accommodates alternative female corporeal experiences. While Noah in Foal’s Bread finds body autonomy in her use of the creek as a birthing space for her firstborn child, Mema in Deeper Water experiences body empowerment in her use of the creek as a space of sexual awakening. Though the gothic creek is a fearful site for women in Baynton’s establishing Australian gothic text, Bush Studies, both Foal’s Bread and Deeper Water demonstrate that the contemporary gothic creek is able to (re)negotiated as a site of female body autonomy and empowerment.

Images of anal flesh have been flashed on Australian television in the popular animated American 'kidult' cartoon series, Ren and Stimpy (1991-95) and South Park (1997-). Ren and Stimpy relates the tales of two male human-voiced animals: Ren, a skinny hyperactive chihuahua, and Stimpy, his stupid fat cat friend. The "Son of Stimpy" and "Blazing Entrails" episodes of the series contain landmark references to the anus which have informed the broader range of representations of the orifice in the South Park series. South Park explores the lives of four pre-pubescent Colorado schoolboys -- Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny. Commentary about the excessive depictions of violence and viscera in these masculinist comedy cartoons has avoided analysis of their representations of anal flesh. How have ani been represented in these popular cultural productions? "Son Of Stimpy" pioneered with a narrative of male anal birth. At Christmas, Stimpy passes his first fart. His bare buttocks gurgle and a fart cloud rises and disappears. Stimpy's anus is not visually (re)presented. His attempts to produce another fart fail. Stimpy and "Stinky" search desperately for each other. Stinky, the personified fart, resembles a wrinkled hybrid of Casper The Friendly Ghost and Tweety Bird. Appearing outside the closed window of Ren and Stimpy's bedroom, Stinky ogles the sleeping Stimpy's unreachable buttocks. "Oh why did I leave home? I'll never find a home as warm and snuggly as the one I left", he reflects on Stimpy's anus. Father and son eventually meet, the adult Stinky marries a rotting dead codfish, and the newly-weds then live in Ren's nostrils. As probably the most conspicuously homoerotic televised cartoon, "Son of Stimpy" also shows Ren flirtatiously snuggling up to Stimpy under some mistletoe, the pair sharing a bed, and reminiscences about their nuptials. Thus, the unavoidable thrust of this play is that Stinky-the-fart (the son) was farted (born) through the anus of Stimpy (the male mother) after sodomitical penetration by Ren (Stinky's father). Moreover, Stimpy's search for his fart-child and Ren's relishing of Stinky's smell provide a clear metaphor for Ren and Stimpy's continuing desire for more fun, fart-producing, "gay", an(im)al sex. Although Stimpy's anus and Ren's penis are not depicted, the fleshy intercourse between them (that produced the cherished Stinky) can hardly be ignored in the imagination of the viewer. "Blazing Entrails" includes a groundbreaking image of inner male anal flesh. The title refers to Blazing Saddles with its famous comedy scene involving bean-eating, farting cowboys. The plot loosely reworks that of Fantastic Voyage, with Ren taking a crazed Stimpy to see a scientist who inflates him into a giant. Ren then travels through Stimpy's (unseen) anal sphincter (in a significant departure from the plot of Voyage). Ren is shown reading The Bowel Daily News on a speeding subway train that travels along the giant Stimpy's rectum. After this close-up depiction of Ren's (total body) penetration of Stimpy's anal canal, Ren travels via various vital organs to Stimpy's brain, which he shatters. Stimpy soon recovers. The fundamental thrust is that Ren 'fucks Stimpy brainless' through his anus for another mutually happy ending. The South Park series (Parker and Stone) also contains spectacular depictions of anal birth, a personified anal product, and anal sex between male animals. However, none lead to consensual homoerotic ecstasy. In "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe", which spoofs Communion, Cartman is raped in his sleep by male space aliens who penetrate his anus with a probe. Thus 'impregnated', he experiences immense pain (and ridicule), until his blazing anus delivers an enormous satellite dish. Instead of Stinky-the-fart, South Park features the more 'fleshy' Mr Hankey, a non-denominational talking Christmas turd that resembles Mr Potato Head. "Big Gay Al's Gay Boat Ride" contains the only reference to 'gay' male sex in the series. Sparky, a stray "gay homosexual" dog mounts another male canine before anally raping yet another. The anus is not depicted in these scenes. Anything but eroticised, the unexposed human male anus is valorised in South Park as an arsenal of multiple farts which are either deployed as weapons against male enemies, or shared between male friends as penultimate acts of affection and sacrifice. In "Not without My Anus", Terrance and Phillip organise a stadium full of Canadians to don gasmasks and fart on cue, thus generating an enormous cloud of gas that kills Saddam Hussein. In "Chicken Pox", Phillip worries that he "won't be able to fart anymore", due to his anal cancer. After he and Terrance appear in surgery with their buttocks and heads (but not ani) exposed, the two men literally 'bond' through an (unseen) "anal transplant". Terrance donates half his anus to Phillip, who happily farts again after the successful operation. The "Cow Days" episode of South Park includes close-up images depicting the outside and inside of an anus. The Chamber of Farts sideshow ride first appears from the outside as a giant pair of pink body-less buttocks, decorated with a vampire bat, spider and cobwebs. After buying tickets, the schoolboys take the traincar ride into the Chamber through the front door -- a giant asterisk which designates the anal sphincter. Inside, the boys pass clothed male dummies (one with a bare front bottom) and a farting black oval anus. They exit through a back door between the spread legs of a farting clothed female dummy. This arrangement codes the anal chamber as female (or feminised), with the rear door configured as a 'pussy-farting' vagina, or (to borrow a gay term for the male anus), as 'backpussy'. Therein, the confusing boys-in-the-train-in-the-haunted-Chamber-of-Farts scenario seemingly expresses heterosexual male anxieties about engaging in (paid group) penetration of a female anus, because the act too readily evokes visions of the beastly queer male things gay men and Sparky do with (their or other) male ani. Eve Sedgwick has stressed that "there has been no important and sustained [modern] Western discourse in which women's anal eroticism means anything" (129). In the form of the Chamber of Farts, the eroticised female anus has been conflated by hysterical heterosexual males to mean something horrific. There are few other farting females in these cartoons. In the "Powdered Toast Man with Vitamin 'F'" segment of Ren and Stimpy, a girl and boy fart after eating Powdered Toast. An empowering image of an exploding atomic bomb is superimposed only over the fart-inflated pants of the girl. In South Park's "Not Without My Anus", Terrance's baby daughter farts once, but only to establish her resemblance to her father. Women contribute only in long shot to the fart cloud that kills Saddam Hussein. While the female anus is demeaned in South Park, other female flesh is overwhelmingly cast as terrifying. Barbara Creed has demonstrated that classic horror films feature seven female archetypes (archaic mother, monstrous womb, vampire, witch, possessed body, monstrous mother and castrator) that express male fears of the mythical vagina dentata. Versions of these 'monstrous-feminine' figures in South Park include the Conjoined Fetus Lady; Frieda (the herpes-spreading prostitute); Cartman's highly-sexed hermaphrodite-born mother; Aunt Flo (the red-haired "monthly visitor" who personifies menstruation and gives away a serial killer fish), Barbra Streisand's "spooky" face; Wendy and Ms Crabtree (with their gnashing teeth); and Stan's mother with her herpes-infected genitalia. While male genitals are celebrated in South Park, the anus is configured as the most grotesque zone of male flesh, sometimes through misogynist references. The penis and "chocolate salty balls" of the black man, Chef, are praised through descriptive (heterosexual) innuendo. One father's insult to another, "I wasn't born with a silver enema up my ass", exploits the experiences of birthing women who have received enemas. In Ren and Stimpy, on the other hand, horrific (hairy, muscled, excretive, male) flesh belongs to hyper-masculine bodies, and sex organs other than male genitalia are celebrated. The joyous anal birth of Stinky mimics, yet edifies, non-vaginal birth. Stinky-the-fart and his female codfish wife celebrate the joining of the odours of anal and vaginal flesh, which they respectively incarnate. Key episodes of Ren and Stimpy provided the seminal subversive representations of ani in the history of televised animated cartoons. In "Son of Stimpy" and "Blazing Entrails", the meta(eu)phoric valorisation of the creativity of gay anal eroticism, orgasmic farting, and gay fatherhood (through metadiegetic narratives of inter-male conception and anal birth) challenges the dominant homophobic culture which demonises the (anal) sexuality of gay men and denies them access to reproductive technologies and families. Ren and Stimpy also pioneered with a skit celebrating the farting power of the female anus. In South Park, these subversive themes have been twisted into misogynist and homophobic contexts. Perhaps the anal transplant innovatively satirises the seriousness of rectal (bowel, colon, and prostate) cancers. However, this scenario is overshadowed by the show's gynophobic grotesquerie of female flesh, exemplified by the disturbing graphic imag(in)ing of the sexualised farting female anus as a chamber of horrors. The representation of collective killer ani and inter-male (human and animal) anal rape as comedy, is also disturbing. There are no references to fleshy practices -- such as anal masturbation, pleasurable inter-male or inter-female human anal eroticism, or female penetrations of male ani -- which could upset the hetero-masculinist homosocial phallologocentric order. How sad. References Blazing Entrails." Dir. Bob Camp. Ren and Stimpy 4.43 (1994).Nickelodeon. The Ren and Stimpy Prime Time Show. TVQ10, Brisbane. 9 April 1995. Blazing Saddles. Dir. Mel Brooks. Warner Bros., 1974. Communion. Dir. Philippe Mora. Allied Vision, 1989. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous~Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1993. Fantastic Voyage. Dir. Richard Fleischer. 20th Century Fox, 1966. "Powdered Toast man with Vitamin 'F'." Dir. John Kricfalusi. Ren and Stimpy 3.27 (1993). Nickelodeon. Big Breakfast. TVQ10, Brisbane. 14 May 1994. "Son of Stimpy." Dir. John Kricfalusi. Ren and Stimpy 2.19 (1992). Nickelodeon. The Ren and Stimpy Prime Time Show. TVQ10, Brisbane. 1995. Parker, Trey, and Matt Stone, dirs. "Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride." South Park 1.4 (1997). Comedy Partners/Celluloid Studios, U.S.A. SBS, Brisbane. 19 Oct. 1998. ---, dirs. "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe." South Park 1.1 (1997). SBS, Brisbane. 28 Sept. 1998. ---, dirs. "Chicken Pox." South Park 2.10 (1998). SBS, Brisbane. 12 Oct. 1998. ---, dirs. "Cowdays." South Park 2.13 (1998). SBS, Brisbane. 23 Nov. 1998. ---, dirs. "Mr Hankey." South Park 1.10 (1997). SBS, Brisbane. 5 Oct. 1998. ---, dirs. "Not Without My Anus." South Park 2.01 (1998). SBS, Brisbane. 31 Aug. 1998. Sedgwick, Eve K. "A Poem Is Being Written." Representations 17 (1987): 110-143. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Simon-Astley Scholfield. "How Funny?: Spectacular Ani in Animated Television Cartoons." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.3 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/funny.php>. Chicago style: Simon-Astley Scholfield, "How Funny?: Spectacular Ani in Animated Television Cartoons," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 3 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/funny.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Simon-Astley Scholfield. (1999) How funny?: spectacular ani in animated television cartoons. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(3). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/funny.php> ([your date of access]).

The Walking Dead is an American post-apocalyptic horror drama television series based on the comic book series of the same name. In the opening episode, Sheriff’s Deputy Rick Grimes awakens after months in a coma in an abandoned hospital to find a post-apocalyptic world dominated by flesh eating zombies. The cause of the apocalypse is unknown, and Grimes does not know what has happened to his family. The start of the programme is situated around his quest to find his family, and the encounters he has with the many other survivors along the way. The plot of The Walking Dead centres on the survivors of the apocalypse as they search for safe haven away from the “walkers”, or “biters”; the first series focuses on how they cope with the immediate realities of life in the post-apocalyptic world. From the outset, the programme finds its way through the upheaval and destruction of everyday American life. Decay is persistent and inevitable in the threat of death from the “walkers”; this familiar Gothic trope is ever-present throughout the series.This paper uses a Gothic focus to examine The Walking Dead and considers the disintegration of society and family after the zombie Apocalypse. It focuses primarily on the first series of The Walking Dead, and examines Gothic tropes through a discussion of the decay of the walkers, the decay of the family, and the decay of society.Zombie Gothic It is important to examine the zombie narrative within a Gothic framework. Kyle Bishop argues that “zombies and the narratives that surround them function as part of the larger Gothic literary tradition, even as they change that tradition as well” (31). In contrast to other Gothic traditions that began in literature, the zombie is unique as it began in folklore, cinema and drama. Similarities to other Gothic traditions exist, such as ghosts and vampires, and the zombie narrative serves as a vehicle to examine cultural anxieties and prevailing attitudes. In fact, Bishop suggests that the zombie narrative has now proven itself to be as interesting and complex as more established Gothic traditions (31). Just as earlier Gothic traditions allowed people to explore themselves in the mirror that Frankenstein (1818) or Dracula (1897) provided, the zombie allows for a more modern examination: a world that is increasingly complex with its technological and cybernetic advances yet a world where humanity has still not resolved the great differences that exist. Bishop argues that “during the latter half of the twentieth century, for example, zombie movies repeatedly reacted to social and political unrest, graphically representing the inescapable realities of an untimely death…” (11). The zombie narrative’s ability to adapt to cultural anxieties make it part of the Gothic tradition. Bishop also argues that, in a post–9/11 climate, the zombie film works as an important example of:the contemporary Gothic, readdressing “the central concerns of the classical Gothic,” such as “the dynamics of family, the limits of rationality and passion, the definition of statehood and citizenship, the cultural effects of technology.” In addition to exposing such repressed cultural anxieties, Fred Botting emphasizes how Gothic narratives “retain a double function in simultaneously assuaging and intensifying the anxieties with which they engage.” (26) The Gothic situates itself from the 18th century as writing of excess and this tendency permeates much of the genre’s narratives, characters and settings. The mutability in Gothic texts provides a platform for many social issues and anxieties to be addressed; its ability to shift and adapt in order to reflect contemporaneous social trends is partly what has enabled it to remain popular (Botting Gothic). The zombie forces a confrontation with the fears of life and death, freedom and enslavement, and the destruction of modern society. These include “the exploitation of the masses in capitalist society, the soullessness of modern-day life, our fear of global apocalypse, our revulsion at the reality of war, and the inevitability of death” (Graves 9). The rise of the zombie narrative plays on humanity’s fear for the future: that modern civilisation has many fundamental weaknesses that may ultimately collapse through one form of global disaster or another. The Gothic situates itself from the 18th century as writing of excess and this tendency permeates much of the genre’s narratives, characters and settings. The mutability in Gothic texts provides a platform for many social issues and anxieties to be addressed; its ability to shift and adapt in order to reflect contemporaneous social trends is partly what has enabled it to remain popular (Botting Gothic). The zombie forces a confrontation with the fears of life and death, freedom and enslavement, and the destruction of modern society. These include “the exploitation of the masses in capitalist society, the soullessness of modern-day life, our fear of global apocalypse, our revulsion at the reality of war, and the inevitability of death” (Graves 9). The rise of the zombie narrative plays on humanity’s fear for the future: that modern civilisation has many fundamental weaknesses that may ultimately collapse through one form of global disaster or another. I argue that the zombie is part of a new kind of Gothic with a new monster for a new age. This new monster facilitates the Gothic’s ability to remain relevant in a post-industrial, cyberspace era. Unnatural death is now more horrific, pervasive, and far-reaching than Walpole ever could have imagined when he wrote the now canonical Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), and the zombie works as a dramatic manifestation of this ever-present anxiety. The Gothic narratives of the zombie now represent a more modern reaction to the threats posed in the 21st-century, post-9/11 world which is potentially more traumatic than the threats posed in earlier Gothic novels of the 19th and 20th century. Global pandemics may manifest as a zombie apocalypse or disease that threaten complete annihilation of civilisation. Teresa Goddu emphasises how “the Gothic is not a trans-historical, static category but a dynamic mode that undergoes historical changes when specific agents adopt and transform its conventions” (32). Zombie narratives have updated Gothic conventions to then reflect modern day anxieties and fears. As Botting argues, “Gothic figures” represent anxieties associated with turning points in cultural historical progress (2002). Zombie narratives, then, serve to allow a confrontation with more modern terrors and threats that exist; the zombie narrative, it can be argued, confronts Gothic tropes and places them in a contemporary context. Cultural anxieties have been nurtured about the rise in terrorist activity around the world, witnessed with the collapse of the World Trade Centre towers, and the threats of pandemics that might eviscerate the human race in the form of SARS. The zombie narrative then represents a logical growth in Gothic monsters that have been used to explore modern day cultural anxieties. Post-Apocalyptic America and Gothic Zombies Apocalypse and zombie narratives represent the worst case scenario for both the people of USA and the world. Zombies, vampires and other apocalyptic monsters are used as faceless creatures to present either an unknown threat or pose them as social critique (Bo). The first signs of the Gothic are present from the start of The Walking Dead, where the familiar American suburban scene has altered into a mutilated disintegrating version of society. In the series, threat comes not just from the “walkers” but also from the fellow survivors who no longer obey the pre-apocalypse laws and way of life. Pre-apocalypse, Rick Grimes was a sheriff, and an upholder of the law. The series starts with Grimes in a police car having lunch with his best friend Shane Walsh while they discuss the differences between men and women. In a police shoot-out, Grimes is shot and awakens to find society as he knew it destroyed. After waking from his coma, he returns to his family home and meets two other survivors, Morgan Jones and his son Duane, who explain the implications of the zombie apocalypse to him. Grimes searches for his family and returns to the police station. He puts on his uniform which appears as a symbol of the normality he thinks he can return to. However, as he goes to get petrol, Grimes looks under a car and sees a young girl’s pink slippers. He calls to her saying “don’t worry little girl”, as the girl drags a pink rabbit. She turns around to face Grimes and runs at him: it is revealed she is a zombie. She is a grotesque parody of a little girl with her distorted and mutilated face; as Grimes draws out his gun and shoots her in the face, she is an uncanny reminder that humanity has permanently altered. The narrative of adults and police officers protecting innocent children is quickly subverted from the start of the series. From this moment, Rick Grimes is permanently fighting his own loss of morality and humanity in a society that has become a distortion of what it once was. The term “liminality” is employed by critics and theorists of the Gothic to refer to spaces or bodies situated:either on or at the recognized borders or boundaries of subjective existence. In eighteenth-century Gothic writing, these thresholds were mainly encountered through liminal spaces. These were often mountain ranges, secret rooms, and hidden passages. From the nineteenth century onward, the human body has increasingly become a liminal site where normative boundaries are challenged; the monster, vampire, and werewolf, are all liminal beings. (Hughes, Punter and Smith)The zombies continues the Gothic tradition of liminality and is perhaps more frightening as they represent the dissolution of death, yet are still in some form “alive”. In The Walking Dead, the survivors are also neither completely alive nor dead, as they are on the edge of losing life as they know it and becoming consumed by the undead. The “walkers” operate as terrifying prompts that what was once considered an incontrovertible fact—the difference between life and death—is not as final in the post-apocalyptic world of the series. The “walkers”, therefore, are walking manifestations of decay and liminality, a reminder that the fear of death has been transmuted into the fear if an even more dangerous entity, neither living nor dead. Gothic, Misha Kavka argues, is often about fear, localised in the shape of something monstrous that electrifies the collective mind (Kavka). In this case, the zombies are tangible displays of how a pandemic or global outbreak could alter humanity forever. Gothic is also about the paranoia around body manipulation, defined as a projection of the self on to the outside world where the boundaries blur between self and other (Kavka). In the zombie narrative of The Walking Dead, the boundaries between the living and dead collapse when decay reanimates into the liminal form of the “walkers”. Decay of the Family The death of the family unit as a recurring trope is raised early on in the series, and the initial problem for Rick Grimes is locating his missing family. Grimes teams up with Morgan Jones and his son Duane. Morgan has his own dilemma when faced with the thought of killing his wife who has turned into a “walker”. She returns to their family house, and seems caught between life and death as if she has some memory of the life she had before. Rick Grimes’s family dilemma is further exacerbated when he finds his wife and son with other survivors who have formed a group. Thinking that her husband Rick was dead, Lori Grimes has started a relationship with Grimes’ best friend, fellow police officer Shane Walsh; a growing tension grows between the two men as the series continues. Ultimately this leads to a fight between the two men as the jealousy grows and each have different ideas on how to best keep the survivors safe. Where the men were once allies and friends, the apocalypse has turned them into enemies. Though the zombies are the most manifest threat to the survivors, there are other threats that come to the fore in The Walking Dead. These threats are in the form of the changes that occur between the characters (Bo). What were once everyday events turns into dangerous events: getting water, petrol and food, for example, become life-threatening activities, and the survivors must trust people who they meet up with on their travels. Rick Grimes’ pre-apocalypse ethics and humanity are tested by the new society. For example, he allows his son Carl Grimes to carry a handgun which Carl later uses to save Rick’s life. In contrast to the Grimes family that is at the centre of the narrative, another group of survivors live at a farm and are led by Hershel Greene, a farmer and religious leader. Their treatment of the “walkers” represents a different approach to the zombie apocalypse. Hershel keeps zombies in a barn and sees them as sick people, while Rick sees them as monsters. Many in the barn are Hershel’s family members; it is only later in the series that Hershel comes to see the zombie family as monsters intent on killing all human survivors. With the connections to family and love, the zombies act as a mirror to the human survivors of what they may potentially become. Societal Decay From the start The Walking Dead Rick Grimes needs to grapple with a world profoundly altered by the zombie apocalypse. The hospital is abandoned except for stray zombie corpses, and it is clear that the once secure place of the hospital is no longer a haven for the sick. One of the most obvious signs of decay is the streets littered with abandoned vehicles, and there are outward markers of chaos and apocalypse. There is much that is Gothic and uncanny in The Walking Dead, where cognitive dissonance is opened up when the familiar becomes strange. The world ostensibly looks the same but will never be normal again for Rick Grimes and the survivors. Here the “true horror lies in that which is most immediately at hand that the most proximal bears the capacity to contain the utterly unfamiliar” (Chopra). The decay of society is made both manifest and melancholic as it evokes the anxiety of being simultaneously normal and abnormal. The once known, or normal, world has become strange and unfamiliar. For example, in the first series of The Walking Dead there is a reference to the classic zombie horror film Dawn of the Dead (1978), where the survivors find themselves trapped in a department store, a famous scene commented upon by Bishop:This instinctual “drive to shop,” as it were, is repeatedly emphasized by Romero, who shows the mindless creatures pressed up against glass doors and windows, clamouring to get inside the shops, in a gross parody of early-morning-sale shoppers, to resume their earthly activities of gluttonous consumption—indeed, as Kim Paffenroth points out, their addiction for the place exists beyond death. (Bishop 41) As the maniacal governor in The Walking Dead later observes about the zombies: “The thing you have to realize is that they’re just us—they’re no different. They want what they want, they take what they want and after they get what they want—they’re only content for the briefest span of time. Then they want more” (Bishop 140). The zombies then serve as a mirror for the worst of humanity. Zombies further mirror other aspects of humanity that are hidden and ignored. Barbara Creed suggests that the popular horror film brings about a confrontation with the abject (the corpse, bodily wastes, and the monstrous-feminine), and by doing so re-draws the boundaries between the human and non-human (Creed). She argues:Firstly, the horror film abounds in images of abjection, foremost of which is the corpse, whole and mutilated, followed by an array of bodily wastes such as blood, vomit, saliva, tears and putrefying flesh. (Creed 253)The zombies/”walkers” in The Walking Dead are abject, mutilated walking corpses. Creed argues that the blurred boundaries between life and death, and the antinomies that humans like to ignore or pretend do not exist, are seen in creatures like zombies. Abjection is usually represented by bodily fluids such as pus or blood or a kind of in-betweenness, such as the zombies’ state between life and death. Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint argue that apocalyptic fiction uses the scenario of the end of the world as a way to rebuild and reorganise society (23). The very question of possible futures and society in a post-apocalyptic world is raised and questioned in The Walking Dead when everyday survival is at stake. This alters, however, when Rick Grimes has to focus on the long-term survival of the group and his family when his wife becomes pregnant. Lori Grimes argues that the world they find themselves in is no place to raise a child and to establish new lives. Rick does not agree with Lori and her pessimistic view of society as it stands. In an uncanny twist, the survivors do not know what has caused the apocalypse, but they later learn that everyone is infected and will re-animate when dead: they are the “walking dead”.Conclusion The Walking Dead is a modern Gothic text that uses many of the tropes of the Gothic to explore cultural anxieties present today. One such area is that of decay, chaos and lawlessness in the post-apocalyptic world of the zombie. This is a key area of the Gothic tradition played out in the modern afflicted world. At the start of The Walking Dead, society is seen as “normal”, two police officers are eating lunch in their vehicle and talking about life. After Rick Grimes awakens after his coma what was once “normal” has transformed into a site of uncanny horror, suspense and terror. Much of the first series is spent with Grimes and his survivors trying to contain and combat the zombie threat. Botting argues that early Gothic fiction articulated a shift from a feudal economy to a capitalistic one (2008). In similar vein, in The Walking Dead the future is one where capitalist society has totally collapsed. This could be a critique of the 2008 financial crash, or a fear of what could happen if a pandemic were to occur that ended consumer life and society as it is known (Bishop 41). It also demonstrates that what is seen as established norms quickly disintegrate in the new post-apocalyptic society. Social structures in the post-apocalyptic world no longer function as they once did. The normality of a pregnancy which should, under “normal” circumstances, herald hope for the future, sets off ambivalence in the Grimes family about the life circumstances the survivors find themselves in, and the future that is available to them or their offspring. Core institutions and structures have fallen; the hospital at the start of the series no longer functions and the police are no longer upholders of the law. Chaos and anarchy are now the everyday life that confronts the survivors. The survivors are frequently left with questions about what is the point is of their lives. At the centre of the chaos is the change in family and society. The structures of modern society are seen as flimsy and easily disturbed in the post-apocalyptic zombie future. As Botting says, “uncertainties about the nature of power, law, society, family and sexuality dominate Gothic fiction” (Gothic 3). The modern day Gothic then questions these key areas of society. The death in the Gothic post-apocalyptic zombie future is that of society as well as individuals. References Bishop, Kyle William. American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture. Jefferson: McFarland Company, 2010. Bo, Kristian. Surviving the End. Thesis. University of Tromso, 2013. Botting, Fred. “Aftergothic: Consumption,Machines, and Black Holes.” In Hogle, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. ———. The Gothic. London: Routledge. 1995. ———. Limits of Horror: Technology, Bodies, Gothic. New York: Manchester University Press, 2008. ———. “Science Fiction and Film in Gothic.” London: Routledge. 2005. Bould, Mark, and Sherryl Vint. The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2011. Creed, Barbara. “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Chopra, Samir. “American Horror Story, The Walking Dead, and the American Gothic”. samirchopra.com, 2014. Goddu, Teresa A. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Hughes, William, David Punter and Andrew Smith. The Encyclopaedia of the Gothic. London: Wiley, 2014. Kavka, M. “The Gothic on Screen.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. C. Jerold Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Overbey, Erin. “The Walking Dead Returns”. The New Yorker, 2012. The Walking Dead, Frank Darabont. AMC, 2010. DVD.

There is a humorously disturbing cartoon by Mary Leunig of a mother as a suffering Jesus figure crucified on the cross of motherhood. The image simultaneously evokes and countersigns the idealised portrait of mothers as serene and self-sacrificing Madonna figures. In Leunig’s cartoon the mother wears a crown of nappy pins; her children, inconsolable, bereft of the mother as a site of selfless love and nurture, look up at her on the cross. Over twenty years old, this cartoon haunts the viewer with its ironic/iconic motifs of motherhood, because it signifies the presence of an absence – the absence of the mother as a desiring subject, and a “space where the mother can be seen as woman” (Irigaray in Grosz 1989, 119). Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film AI (Artificial Intelligence) is, I think, an interesting attempt to speak/visualise that space, but it ultimately taps into our Western phallocentric society’s ongoing love affair with the woman as mother, and its denial of the mother as woman. Crucial to this denial is an erasure of the female body and love of self, both of which are sacrificed on the altar of the child’s needs and desires. Luce Irigaray’s concern for the absence of the mother’s subjectivity in Western discourses tempts her to claim that men are intent on giving birth to themselves, thus not only refuting the mother as woman, but disavowing even that limited, metonymic, signifying space allotted to the mother – the mother as the site of origin. She writes: in order to become men, they continue to consume … [the mother], draw on her resources and, at the same time, they deny her or disclaim her in their identification with and their belonging to the masculine world. They owed their existence, their body, their life and they forget or misrecognise this debt in order to set themselves up as powerful men, adults busying themselves with public affairs (Irigaray in Grosz 1989, 121) Developments in reproductive technology over the past twenty years have enabled the concept of the self-made man who disavows the maternal debt to become more of a reality. Mary Ann Doane, citing Andreas Huyssen, (in Wolmark, 1999) claims that the ultimate (male) fantasy of reproductive technology is the production of life without the mother (24). Doane also points out, however, that the technology/human reproduction interface in these processes “puts into crisis the very possibility of the question of origins, the Oedipal dilemma and the relation between subjectivity and knowledge that it supports” (26). Spielberg’s film AI (which screened to mixed reception world-wide) problematises the consequences of life without the biological mother due to male technological intervention, resolving this by reaffirming the importance of the woman as mother and celebrating the mother-child bond. In effect, one of the ‘messages’ in this film is that you cannot take the mother out of the woman, and I would suggest that part of the reviewers’ antipathy to the film is fed by an aversion to Spielberg’s focus on maternal space (Shepard, 2001). The film invites the viewer to be critical of the ways in which males use technology to tamper with nature, and suggests that such intrusions will have disastrous consequences. By revealing the robots as more moral and humane than their human counterparts, AI highlights a fundamental anxiety about the human “self”. However, in attempting to resolve these issues, AI reifies the woman as mother, aligning her with “nature” and positioning the mother and child as the precious casualties of technological intervention. Thus AI confirms that well rehearsed binarism that links women with nature/nurture and men with technology/culture, in the process endorsing a reductionist view of women’s bodies as essentially maternal (Grosz, 1987, 5-6) and subsuming the mother beneath a concern for the child (Walker, 1998). AI is set in a future society topographically ravaged by the effects of greenhouse gases. Major cities have been flooded and there are legal sanctions to strictly limit pregnancies. Robots called ‘mechas’ have been invented to serve the human race and to help conserve the limited resources. David is the perfect ‘mecha’ child who can be programmed to love – the realisation of the male scientist’s dreams. He is adopted by human parents, Monica and Martin, after it seems that Henry, their biological child, will never recover from a coma. The father Martin brings David home, a gesture that echoes the male scientist’s fantasy of the reproduction of life without a mother. Monica, the mother, falls in love with David, and it is Monica, not Martin, who programs David to love her in return. Thus it is suggested that motherhood is instinctive in women. The father retains an aloof detachment from the child: “You’re a toy,” he tells David, “I’m real”. This statement clearly distinguishes the technological from the human, culture from nature, and the gendered power hierarchy that these divisions uphold. Once David is programmed to love Monica, he calls her “Mommy”. David’s desire to be a ‘real live boy’ is fuelled by his potent love for the mother, which drives the drama and the narrative shape of his quest for reunion with her. The mother-as-woman disappears under the weight of nostalgia for the certainty of origins which mandates the woman-as-mother. Elizabeth Grosz, paraphrasing Luce Irigaray argues that, “with no access to social value in her own right, she becomes the mother who has only food (that is love) to give the child, a nurture that, in our culture, is deemed either excessive or inadequate”(1989, 119). Constructed by others, the mother here is both the phallic mother who satisfies all needs and desires, and the castrated mother who denies the self, both Freudian conceptualisations. AI further portrays motherhood without the mess, by transforming the female body into the ‘good and proper’ maternal body. It thus removes the potential for the abjectification of corporeal maternal space that occurs in many horror films dealing with the mother figure (see Creed’s work). The maternal body in AI is a sanitised space that is represented by the clean, bounded rooms of the family home, and the closed, groomed, feminine body of Monica. The film confirms the home as a traditional site of nurture and motherly love, a spatial marker of women’s identity as well as place. At the end of the film, David’s twofold wish of becoming a real live boy and being with his mother is finally granted, but not until after some 2000 years. In conferring human status on David, the narrative resolves any apprehension about loss of boundaries and the blurring of the distinctions between self and other, which is generated by the human/technology interface (Creed 1995, 147). When Monica is re-born by a male scientist figure in this future society, an event that echoes the immaculate conception birth of David, she is the woman-as-mother. Reunited in the family home with David, she comments that she feels strange and doesn’t quite know why she is there; but David’s presence and love reassures her, giving her access to her only identity, that of mother. The film closes on an idyllic scene in which David and the idealised mother are falling asleep together on the parental bed in the sanctuary of the home. Spielberg’s mother is not Mary Leunig’s suffering mother, but the film’s focus on the mother/child bond bears an interesting resemblance to feminist theories of the pre-oedipal as a space of potential disruption to the Oedipal narrative (Kristeva). In its demotion of the masculine and its criticism of technology, AI could be read as a celebration of the pre-oedipal, that phase of psycho-sexual identity formation in which the mother is privileged and which is usually devalued once the father intervenes in the mother-child dyad (as Martin does when he separates David from Monica, insisting he leaves after the real son Henry recovers). The phallic domain of the father, the symbolic, is spurned in this film, while the domain of the mother, the imaginary, and the pre-Oedipal, is valorised. This is visually enhanced in the film through the use of water imagery, the invigoration of the maternal figure (Monica/ Madonna), and the primacy given to the mother-child bond. Secure in the maternal space at the end of the film, David eschews the masculine: “No Henry, no Martin, no grief”. However such a reading still prioritises the woman-as-mother, not the mother-as-woman. The problem with singing the song of the pre-oedipal sublime (Helene Cixous’s ‘white ink’ and Julia Kristeva’s ‘semiotic’), is that it threatens to buy into the same idealisation of the mother as the phallocentric discourses that it attacks (Walker, 1998). I have argued here that the mother, mothering, motherhood and the maternal body continue to be represented in our culture as idealised experiences and states of being. Such textual representation allocates homogeneity and naturalness to motherhood, and a fixed conceptualisation, even obliteration, of women’s bodies and desires. Despite appearing to undermine the masculine and valorise the maternal, AI provides a metaphorical inscription of motherly love and love for the mother that fails to recognise the flesh behind the words. Works Cited Creed, Barbara. “Horror and the Carnivalesque.” Fields of Vision. Eds. Leslie Deveraux and Roger Hillman. Berkley: University of California Press, 1995. Doane, Mary Ann. “Technophilia: Technology, Representation, and the Feminine.” Cybersexualities: A reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace. Ed. Jenny Wolmark. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Notes Towards a Corporeal Feminism.” Australian Feminist Studies, 5 (1987): 1-9. Grosz, Elizabeth. Sexual Subversions: three French feminists. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989. Spielberg, Steven. AI. Warner Bros. and Dreamworks Pictures, 2001. Shepard, Lucius. “AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE.” Fantasy & Science Fiction Vol 101 (Dec 2001): 112-117. Walker, Michelle. Philosophy and the maternal body: reading silence.London; New York: Routledge, 1998. Links http://www.benway.com/mary-leunig.shtml http://www.envf.port.ac.uk/illustration/images/vlsh/psycholo/irigaray.htm http://web.ukonline.co.uk/n.paradoxa/barnett.htm Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Muller, Vivienne. "Motherly Love" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/motherlylove.php>. APA Style Muller, V., (2002, Nov 20). Motherly Love. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/motherlylove.html

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.

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

Introduction The term monster might have its roots in the Latin word monere (to warn), but it has since evolved to have various symbolic meanings, from a terrifying mythical creature to a person of extreme cruelty. No matter the flexibility in use, the term is mostly meant to be derogatory (Asma). As Gilmore puts it, monsters “embody all that is dangerous and horrible in the human imagination” (1). However, it may be argued that monsters sometimes perform the much-needed work of defining and policing our norms (Mittman and Hensel). Since their archetype is predisposed to transgressing boundaries of human integrity (Gilmore), they help establish deviation between human and in-human. Their cognition and action are considered ‘other’ (Kearney) and a means with which people can understand what is right and wrong, and what is divergent from appropriate ways of being. The term monster need not even refer to the werewolves, ogres, vampires, zombies and the like that strike fear in audiences through their ‘immoral, heinous or unjust’ appearance or behaviours. Rather, the term monster can be, and has been, readily applied as a metaphor to describe the unthinkable, unethical, and brutal actions of human beings (Beville 5). Inadvertently, “through their bodies, words, and deeds, monsters show us ourselves” (Mittman and Hensel 2), or what we consider monstrous about ourselves. Therefore, humans acting in ways that deviate from societal norms and standards can be viewed as monstrous. This is evident in the representations of public relations practitioners in media offerings. In the practice of public relations, ethical standards are advocated as the norm, and deviating from them considered unprofessional (Fawkes), and as we contend: monstrous. However, the practice has long suffered a negative stereotypical perception of being deceptive, and with public relations roles receiving less screen time than shows and films about lawyers, accountants, teachers and the like, these few derogatory depictions can distort how audiences view the occupation (Johnston). Depictions of professions (lawyers, cops, journalists, etc.) tend to be cliché, but our contention is that fewer depictions of public relations practitioners on screen further limit the possibility for diverse depictions. The media can have a socialising impact and can influence audiences to view the content they consume as a reflection of the real world around them (Chandler). Television, in particular, with its capacity to prompt heuristic processing in audiences (Shurm), has messages that can be easily decoded by people of various literacies as they become immersed in the viewing experiences (Gerbner and Gross). These messages gain potency because, despite being set in fictional worlds, they can be understood as reflective of the world and audiences’ experiences of it (Gerbner and Gross). Tsetsura, Bentley, and Newcomb add that popular stories recounted in the media have authoritative power and can offer patterns of meaning that shape individual perceptions. Admittedly, as Stuart Hall suggests, media offerings can be encoded with ideologies and representations that are considered appropriate according to the dominant elite, but these may not necessarily be decoded as preferred meanings. In other words, those exposed to stories of monstrous public relations practitioners can agree with such a position, oppose this viewpoint, or remain neutral, but this is dependent on individual experiences. Without other frames of reference, it could be that viewers of negative portrayals of public relations accept the encoded representation that inevitably does a disservice to the profession. When the representations of the field of public relations suggest, inaccurately, that the industry is dominated by men (Johnston), and women practitioners are shown as slick dressers who control and care little about ethics (Dennison), the distortions can adversely impact on the identities of public relations practitioners and on how they are collectively viewed (Tsetsura et al.). Public relations practitioners view this portrayal as the ‘other’ and tend to distance the ideal self from it, continuing to be stuck in the dichotomy of saints and sinners (Fawkes). Our observation of television offerings such as Scandal, Flack, Call My Agent!, Absolutely Fabulous, Sex and the City, You’re the Worst, and Emily in Paris reveals how television programmes continue to perpetuate the negative stereotypes about public relations practice, where practitioners are anything but ethical—therefore monstrous. The characters, mostly well-groomed women, are shown as debased, liars and cheaters who will subvert ethical standards for personal and professional gain. Portrayals of Public Relations Practitioners in Television and Media According to Miller, the eight archetypical traits identified in media representations of public relations practitioners are: ditzy, obsequious, cynical, manipulative, money-minded, isolated, accomplished, or unfulfilled. In later research, Yoon and Black found that television representations of public relations tended to suggest that people in these roles were heartless, manipulative bullies, while Lambert and White contend that the depiction of the profession has improved to be more positive, but nonetheless continues to do a disservice to the practice by presenting female workers, especially, as “shallow but loveable” (18). We too find that public relations practitioners continue to be portrayed as morally ambiguous characters who are willing to break ethical codes of conduct to suit the needs of their clients. We discuss three themes prevalent as popular tropes in television programmes that characterise public relations practitioners as monstrous. To Be or Not to Be a Slick and Skilful Liar? Most television programmes present public relations practitioners as slick and skilful liars, who are shown as well-groomed and authoritative, convinced that they are lying only to protect their clients. In fact, in most cases the characters are shown to not only believe but also advocate to their juniors that ‘a little bit of lying’ is almost necessary to maintain client relationships and ensure campaign success. For example, in the British drama Flack, the main character of Robyn (played by Anna Paquin) is heard advising her prodigy “just assume we are lying to everyone”. The programmes also feature characters who are in dilemma about the monstrous expectations from their roles, struggling to accept that that they engage in deception as part of their jobs. However, most of them are presented as somewhat of an ugly duckling or the modest character in the programme, who is not always rational or in an explicit position of power. For example, Emily from Emily in Paris (played by Lily Collins), while working as a social media manager, regularly questions the approaches taken by the firm she works for. Her boss Sylvie Grateux (played by Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu), who embodies the status quo, is constantly disapproving of Emily’s lack of sophisticated self-presentation, among other aspects. In the episode ‘Faux Amis’, Sylvie quips “it’s not you personally. It’s everything you stand for. You’re the enemy of luxury because luxury is defined by sophistication and taste, not emilyinparis”. Similarly, in the first episode of Call My Agent!, Samuel Kerr (played by Alain Rimoux), the head of a film publicity firm, solves the conundrum faced by his anxious junior Gabriel (played by Grégory Montel) by suggesting that he lie to his client about the real reason why she lost the film. When a modestly dressed Gabriel questions how he can lie to someone he cares for, Samuel, towering over him in an impeccable suit and a confident demeanour, advises “who said anything about lying? Don’t lie. Simply don’t tell her the truth”. However, the subtext here is that the lie is to protect the client from unnecessary hurt and in doing so nurtures the client relationship. So, it lets the audience decide the morality of lying here. It may be argued that moral ambiguity may not necessarily be monstrous. Such grey characters are often crafted because they allow audiences to relate more readily to themselves by encouraging what Hawkins refers to as mental play. Audiences are less interested in the black and white of morality and veer towards shows such as Call My Agent! where storylines hone in on the need to do bad for the greater good. In these ways, public relations practitioners still transgress moral standards but are less likely to be considered monstrous because the impact and effect on others is utilitarian in nature. It is also interesting to note that in these programmes physical appearance is made to play a crucial role in showcasing the power and prestige of the senior public relations practitioner. This focus on attire can tend to further perpetuate unfavourable stereotypes about public relations practitioners being high income earners (Grandien) who are styled with branded apparel but lacking in substance and morals (Fröhlich and Peters). Promiscuous Women The urge to attract audiences to a female character can also lead to developing and cementing unfavourable stereotypes of public relations practitioners as uninhibited women who live on blurred lines between personal and professional. These characters are not portrayed as inherently bad, but instead are found to indulge in lives of excess. In her definition of the monstrous, Arumugam suggests that excess and insatiable appetites direct the monster’s behaviour, and Kearney outlines that this uncontainable excess is what signals the difference between humans and others. Such excess is readily identifiable in the character of Patsy Stone (played by Joanna Lumley) in Absolutely Fabulous. She is an alcoholic, regularly uses recreational drugs, is highly promiscuous, and chain-smokes throughout the series. She is depicted as prone to acting deceptively to maintain her vices. In Flack, Robyn is shown as regularly snorting cocaine and having sex with her clients. Those reviewing the show highlight how it will attract those interested in “its dark, acidic sense of humour” (Greene) while others condemn it because it emphasises the “depraved publicist” trope (Knibbs) and call it “one of the worst TV shows ever made” even though it is trying to highlight concerns raised in the MeToo movement about how men need to respect women (McGurk). Female characters such as Robyn, with her willingness to question why a client has not tried to sleep with her, appear to undermine the empowerment of the movement rather than support it, and continue to maintain the archetypes that those working in the field of public relations abhor. Similarly, Samantha Jones (played by Kim Cattrell) of Sex and the City is portrayed as sexually liberated, and in one episode another character describes Samantha’s vagina as “the hottest spot in town: it’s always open”. In many ways Samantha’s sexual behaviour reflects a post-feminist narrative of empowerment, agency, and choice, but it could also be read as a product of being a public relations practitioner frequenting parties and bars as she rubs shoulders with clients, celebrities, and high-profile businesspeople. To this end, Patsy, Samantha, and Robyn glamourise public relations and paint it as simply an extension of their liberated and promiscuous selves, with little care for any expectation of professionalism or work ethic. This is also in stark contrast to the reality, where women often tend to occupy technical roles that see much of their time spent in doing the hard yards of publicity and promotion (Krugler). Making Others Err Public relations practitioners are not just shown as being morally ambiguous themselves, but often quite adept at making others do deceitful acts on their behalf, thus nonchalantly oppressing others to get their way. For example, although lauded for elevating an African-American woman to the lead role despite the show maintaining misrepresentations of race (Lambert), the main character of Olivia Pope (played by Kerry Washington) in the television programme Scandal regularly subverts the law for her clients despite considering herself one of the “good guys” and wearing a “white hat”. Over the course of seven seasons, Olivia Pope is found to rig elections, plant listening devices in political figures’ offices, bribe, threaten, and conduct an affair with the President. In some cases, she calls on the services of her colleague Huck to literally, and figuratively, get rid of the barriers in the way of protecting her clients. For example, in season one’s episode Crash and Burn she asks Huck to torture a suspect for information about a dead client. Her willingness to request such actions of her friend and colleague, regardless of perceived good motivations, reinforces Mittman’s categorisation that monsters are identified by their effect and impact on others. Here, the impact includes the torturing of a suspect and the revisiting of psychological trauma by Huck’s character. Huck struggles to overcome his past as a killer and spends much of the show trying to curb his monstrous tendencies which are often brought on by PR woman Olivia’s requests. Although she is sometimes striving for justice, Olivia’s desire for results can lead her to act monstrously, which inadvertently contributes to the racist and sexist ideologies that have long been associated with monsters and perceptions of the Other. Across time and space, certain ethnic groups, such as those of African descent, have been associated with the demonic (Cohen). Similarly, all that is feminine often needs to be discarded as the monster to conform to the patriarchal order of society (Creed). Therefore, Olivia Pope’s monstrous behaviour not only does a disservice to representations of public relations practitioners, but also inadvertently perpetuates negative and inaccurate stereotypes about women of African American descent. Striving to be Ethical The majority of public relations practitioners are encouraged, and in some cases expected, to conform to ethical guidelines to practice and gain respect, admiration, and in-group status. In New Zealand, those who opt to become members of the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand (PRINZ) are required to abide by the association’s code of ethics. The code stipulates that members are bound to act in ways that serve public interests by ensuring they are honest, disclose conflict of interests, follow the law, act with professionalism, ensure openness and privacy are maintained, and uphold values of loyalty, fairness, and independence (PRINZ). Similarly, the Global Alliance of Public Relations and Communication Management that binds practitioners together identifies nine guiding principles that are to be adhered to to be recognised as acting ethically. These include obeying laws, working in the public’s interest, ensuring freedom of speech and assembly, acting with integrity, and upholding privacy in sensitive matters (to name a few). These governing principles are designed to maintain ethical practice in the field. Of course, the trouble is that not all who claim to practice public relations become members of the local or global governing bodies. This implies that professional associations like PRINZ are not able to enforce ethics across the board. In New Zealand alone, public relations consultants have had to offer financial reparations for acting in defamatory ways online (Fisher), or have been alleged to have bribed an assault victim to prevent the person giving evidence in a court case (Hurley). Some academics have accused the industry of being engaged in organised lying (Peacock), but these are not common, nor are these moral transgressors accepted into ethical bodies that afford practitioners authenticity and legitimacy. In most cases, public relations practitioners view their role as acting as the moral conscience of the organisations they support (Schauster, Neill, Ferrucci, and Tandoc). Furthermore, they rated better than the average adult when it came to solving ethical dilemmas through moral reasoning (Schuaster et al.). Additionally, training of practitioners through guidance of mentors has continued to contribute to the improved ethical ratings of public relations. What these findings suggest is that the monsters of public relations portrayed on our television screens are exaggerations that are not reflective of most of the practice. Women of Substance, But Not Necessarily Power Exploring the role of women in public relations, Topic, Cunha, Reigstad, Jele-Sanchez, and Moreno found that female practitioners were subordinated to their male counterparts but were found to be more inclined to practice two-way communication, offer balanced perspectives, opt to negotiate, and build relationships through cooperation. The competitiveness, independence, and status identified in popular media portrayals were found to be exhibited more by male practitioners, despite there being more women in the public relations industry than men. As Fitch argues, popular culture continues to suggest that men dominate public relations, and their preferred characteristics end up being those elements that permeate the media messages, regardless of instances where the lead character is a woman or the fact that feminist values of “loyalty, ethics, morality, [and] fairness” are advocated by female practitioners in real life (Vardeman-Winter and Place 333). Additionally, even though public relations is a feminised field, female practitioners struggle to break the glass ceiling, with male practitioners dominating executive positions and out-earning women (Pompper). Interestingly, in public relations, power is not just limited due to gender but also area of practice. In her ethnographic study of the New Zealand practice, Sissons found that practitioners who worked in consultancies were relatively powerless vis-à-vis their clients, and often this asymmetry negatively affected the practitioner’s decision-making. This implies that in stark contrast to the immoral, glamourous, and authoritative depiction of public relations women in television programmes, in reality they are mired by the struggles of a gendered occupation. Accordingly, they are not in fact in a position to have monstrous power over and impact on others. Therefore, one of the only elements the shows seem to capture and emphasise is that public relations is an occupation that specialises in image management; but what these shows contribute to is an ideology that women are expected to look and carry themselves in particular ways, ultimately constructing aesthetic standards that can diminish women’s power and self-esteem. Conclusion Miller’s archetypes may be over twenty years old, but the trend towards obsequious, manipulative, and cynical television characters remains. Although there have been identifiable shifts to loveable, yet shallow, public relations practitioners, such as Alexis Rose on Schitt’s Creek, the appeal of monstrous public relations practitioners remains. As Cohen puts it, monsters reveal to audiences “what a member of that society can become when those same dictates are rejected, when the authority of leaders or customs disintegrates and the subordination of individual to hierarchy is lost” (68). In other words, audiences enjoy watching the stories of metaphorical monsters because they exhibit the behaviours that are expected to be repressed in human beings; they depict what happens when the social norms of society are disturbed (Levina and Bui). At the very least, these media representations can act, much as monster narratives do, as a cautionary tale on how not to think and act to remain accepted as part of the in-group rather than being perceived as the Other. As Mittman and Hensel argue, society can learn much from monsters because monsters exist within human beings. According to Cohen, they offer meaning about the world and can teach audiences so they can learn, in this case, how to be better. Although the representations of public relations in television can offer insights into roles that are usually most effective when they are invisible (Chorazy and Harrington), the continued negative stereotypes of public relations practitioners can adversely impact on the industry if people are unaware of the practices of the occupation, because lacking a reference point limits audiences’ opportunities to critically evaluate the media representations. This will certainly harm the occupation by perpetuating existing negative stereotypes of charming and immoral practitioners, and perhaps add to its struggles with gendered identity and professional legitimacy. References Absolutely Fabulous. Created by Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French. 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In 2019, Netflix released the first season of its highly anticipated show The Witcher. Based on the books of Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, the fantasy show tells the intersecting stories of the Witcher Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill), the princess of Cintra Ciri (Freya Allan), and sorceress Yennefer of Vengerberg (Anya Chalotra), who is commonly referred to as a ‘mage’. Although not as popular among critics as its original book incarnations and adapted game counterparts, the show went on to achieve an 89% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and was subsequently renewed for more seasons. Although the general success of the show is clear among viewers, The Witcher was not without its detractors, who accused creator Lauren Hissrich of developing a woke series with a feminist agenda (Worrall), especially because of her desire to emphasise strong female characters (Crow). The latter is, of course, a direction that the Netflix series inherited from the video game version of The Witcher – especially The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – even if the portrayal is often considered to be biased and “problematic” (Heritage). Supporting the view that the show focusses on the character trajectories of independent and capable women is the analysis offered by Worrow (61), who attests that “the female representations in season one of The Witcher offer prominent female characters who are imbued with agency, institutional power and well-developed narrative arcs”. Although Worrow’s analysis offers a clear critical account of Yennefer’s story arc – among the other female characters – what it does not consider is the relationship between women and magic, which has historically seen the mistreatment and ostracising of women as practitioners, and which tacitly informs representation in The Witcher by providing a gendered view of magical power. In response to this, the purpose of our article is to consider how Yennefer’s pursuit of magic both maintains and challenges gender stereotypes, particularly as they pertain to sorceresses and witches. The analysis will focus primarily on the episodes of Season One. Through the course of Season One, audiences are introduced to the character of Yennefer as she transitions from a deformed woman into a ‘beautiful’ sorceress. Alienated by her community because of a hunched back and cleft palate, Yennefer remains mistreated until she exhibits magical tendencies – or “the ability to conduct Chaos” (Guimarães). This is an aptitude that will later be revealed to be a direct outcome of her Elvin heritage (Worrow). Having gained the attention of Tissaia (MyAnna Buring), the Rectress of the magical school Aretuza, Yennefer is purchased from her family and relocated to Aretuza to train as a mage. Initially, Yennefer struggles with the magic training, where magic itself is referred to as “chaos”. In particular, she specifically finds it hard to “control [her] chaos”, as the series puts it, because of her emotional tendencies. After a short period of time, however, Yennefer develops into a strong, talented sorceress who is later instrumental in the final battle of Season One against the Nilfgaardian forces that are at war with the city-state of Cintra (Chitwood); the conflict with the kingdom of Nilfgaard is a central plot development in The Witcher, running across multiple seasons of the series. Throughout Season One, audiences view Yennefer’s character development, as she sheds her kind, naïve personality in favour of becoming an agent of chaos, who is fully immersed in the political intrigue that influences the Continent – the broader geographical land where the events of The Witcher take place. What It Means to Be a Sorceress For the purpose of this article, we will be using the terms “sorceress” and “witch” interchangeably (Stratton). It is important to mention here that several strands of anthropological research contend that the two terms are not synonymous, with “sorcery” referring to the ability to “manipulate supernatural forces for malicious or deviant purposes” (Moro, 2); the term “witch”, on the other hand, would preferably be used for “people suspected of practising, either deliberately or unconsciously, socially prohibited forms of magic“ (Moro, 1). Nonetheless, historians and sociologists have long equated the two because of their prepotency to describe magic users who channel power for productive and nefarious purposes (Godsend; Lipscomb). We cite our understanding of these important terminologies in the latter critical area, seeing the important social, cultural, and political interconnections concomitantly held by the terms “sorceress” and “witch” in the context of magical practices within The Witcher series. ‘Mage’, for its part, seems to be used in the series as a gender-neutral term, openly recalling a well-known narrative trajectory from both fantasy novels and games. Regardless of whether they were deemed witches, sorceresses, mages, or enchantresses, and despite historical records that prove the contrary, practitioners of magic, as such, have predominantly been gendered as female (Godwin; Stratton). Such a misconception has meant that stereotypes and representations of magic and witchcraft in popular culture have continued to show a penchant for depicting witches not only as female but also as powerful and intimidating beings that continuously challenge hegemonic power structures (Burger & Mix; Stratton). Historically, and especially so in the Western context, individuals labelled as witches and sorceresses have been ostracised, in some instances eradicated through mass killings, to ostensibly contain their power and remove the threat of the evil they inevitably embodied and represented (Johnson). This established historical framework is tacitly embedded in the narrative structure of The Witcher, with examples such as Yennefer often being portrayed as out of control because of her magical powers. The series, however, acknowledges unspoken historical truths and reinforces its own canon, as it is made clear throughout that men can also be magic users; indeed, the show includes a variety of male druids, sorcerers, and mages. Where a potential gender divide exists, however, is in reference to the Brotherhood of Sorcerers, who seemingly control the activities and powers of magical practitioners. Although there is a female equivalent in Sapkowski’s novels, called the Lodge of Sorceresses, the first season of The Witcher does not openly engage with it. Such an omission could be construed as a gender concern in the Netflix show, as a patriarchal group seemingly oversees the activities of mages. As Worrow argues, the show implies that “The Brotherhood controls and legitimizes the use of magic” (66), and by being referred to as a ‘brotherhood’, creates a gender imbalance within the series. This interpretation is not unexpected, bearing in mind that gender studies scholars have consistently pointed out how structural inequalities exist, even in fictitious offerings. In social, cultural, and media contexts alike, these offerings subordinate women in favour of maintaining ideologies that advantage hegemonic masculinity (Connell; Butler). Where the stereotypes of women diverge in The Witcher, however, is in the general characterisation of these powerful witches and sorceresses as empathetic and compassionate individuals. Across the history of representation, witches have been portrayed as cruel, evil, manipulative, and devious, making witches one of the most recognisable tropes of evil women in storytelling, from fairy tales to film, TV, novels, and games (Zipes). While a number of notable exceptions exist – one should only think here of Practical Magic, both in its book and film adaptations (1995/1998), as examples of texts exploring the notion of the good witch – the representational stereotype of witches as wicked and malevolent creatures has held centrally true. A witch’s activities are generally focussed on controlling and bringing misfortune upon others, in favour of their own gain (Moro). As Schimmelpfennig puts it, the recurrent image of the witch is that of someone who is “envious” of others: “nobody loves, likes, or pities her. She seems to have brought disaster upon herself and lives on the margins of society, [often] visualised by her residence in the woods” (31). The common perception, as cemented in fictional contexts, has been that witches have nefarious and villainous intents, and their magical actions (especially) are perpetually motivated by this. Although she was initially alienated by both her magical and non-magical communities, Yennefer’s character development does not adhere exactly to the broadly established characterisation of witches. Admittedly, she does act in morally ambiguous ways. For example, in the episode “Bottled Appetites”, her desire to have children leads her to attempt to control a jinn regardless of the dangerous costs to herself and others. And yet, in the following episode, "Rare Species", Yennefer changes her mind about trying to slay a dragon whose magical properties could help her, and instead works with Geralt to defend the Dragon and its family from Reavers. She also confronts injustices by helping to defend the territory of Sodden Hill which is threatened by Nilfgaardian forces ("Much More"). Rather than being purely evil, as witches have long been considered to be, Yennefer offers a more nuanced and relatable depiction, as both a witch and, arguably, a woman character. The moral complexity of Yennefer as a magical figure, then, not only makes for compelling viewing – with such magical characters often being an expected presence in mainstream programming (Greene) – but her continued growth, and the attention given to her identity development by showrunners, challenge gender stereotypes. On screen, female characters have often been treated as auxiliaries to their male counterparts (Taber et al.); they have fulfilled roles as mother, lover, or damsel in distress, reducing any potential for growth (Nairn). The Witcher Season One gives Yennefer her own arc and, in doing so, becomes a series that elevates the status of women rather than treating them as, to borrow Simone de Bauvoir’s famous words, ‘the second sex’. Power & Empowerment Differentiating Yennefer from the stereotypes of female characters, and witches/sorceresses more specifically within the broader popular media and culture landscape, is her obvious agency within The Witcher series. Gammage et al. argue that agency can be understood as “the capacity for purposive action, the ability to make decisions and pursue goals free from violence, retribution, and fear, but it also includes a cognitive dimension” (6). Throughout The Witcher, Yennefer does not act subserviently and will even oppose the will of those around her. For example, in the episode “Before the Fall”, she gives advice to young girls training to be mages to ignore the instructions of their tutors and "to think for themselves" (26:19-26:20). She follows up by later telling the young mages about how Aretuza takes away their opportunity to bear children, to ensure the mages stay loyal to the cause. As she puts it: "Even if you do everything right, follow their rules, that's still no guarantee you will get what you want" (29:42-29:51). This exposes her character as not tied to traditional patriarchal notions of subservience. And while personal motivations may laterally aid the conception of witches as egotistical, her actions still stand out as being propelled by individual agency. Female characters on screen have often been portrayed as submissive and passive, and this includes iconic on-screen witches from Samantha in Bewitched to the titular character in Sabrina the Teenage Witch. It is not uncommon to see good witches in popular media and culture, in particular, as still defined by male relationships in terms of cultural and social value (for instance, Sally Owens in Practical Magic, and Wanda Maximoff in the Marvel Cinematic Universe). As Godwin puts it, these characters embody the expected gender roles of a patriarchal society, with storylines, for example, that favour love potions or keeping house. As far as The Witcher is concerned, being submissive and passive is often in direct contrast with Yennefer’s preferences. For example, in “Betrayer Moon”, she intentionally ignores the decision of the Brotherhood to act as the mage in Nilfgaard by intentionally catching the eye of the King of Aedirn: the King then asks for Yennefer to be his mage. Fringilla (Mimi Ndiweni), who was supposed to be the mage in Aedirn, is forced to go to Nilfgaard instead. Yennefer's behaviour not only defies The Brotherhood in favour of her own interests but also demonstrates her unwillingness to conform to the expectations placed on her. Such depictions of Yennefer acting with agency make her, arguably, relatable to audiences. Female characters and witches such as Yennefer become emblematic of independent, competent women who use magic to take control of their own destiny (Burger and Mix) and can be praised for opposing “oppressive societal norms” and instead advocating for “independent thought” (Godwin 92). It is possible to argue here that what drives Yennefer appears to be her sense of Otherness, as an intrinsic difference that is central to her being, both physically and emotionally. Although initially her othered nature is seemingly the product of her deformities and ethnic background (with elves being socially, culturally, and politically ostracised on the Continent), she openly admits to feeling othered throughout the series, even after her physical disfigurement is cured by magic. Her individualised agency makes her inevitably stand out and becomes a marker of difference. This representation is not dissimilar to the feelings expressed by women across First, Second, and Third-wave Feminism (Butler; Connell). Indeed, Worrow observes that “The Witcher encodes female characters with power as ‘other’, enhancing this otherness through magical abilities” (61). It would seem that, in essence, the show surreptitiously gives voice to the plight of minority groups through the hard work, dedication, and determination of Yennefer as an Othered character, as she struggles and defies expectations in pursuit of her goal of becoming a powerful sorceress. Her independence and agency tell a story of empowerment because, like other fictional witches of the last decade in the twenty-first century, Yennefer “refuses to pretend to be someone or something they are not, eschewing the lie to instead embody the truth of themselves, their identity's, and their unapologetic strength” (Burger and Mix 14). This profoundly diverges from other representations where being the ‘other’ was seen as a justification for punishment, marginalisation, or mistreatment, and amply seen across the historicised media spectrum, from Disney films to horror narratives and beyond. Nonetheless, although it appears as if Yennefer has agency and is empowered, there is the argument that she is a conduit of magic, and as such, lacks real power and influence without a capacity to control the chaos. As Godwin contends, witches are often limited in their capacity to be influential and to have true autonomy by the fact that they do not possess magic but are often seemingly controlled by it. At various times in Season One, Yennefer struggles to control the chaos magic. For example, while being beaten up, she inadvertently portals for the first time. During her magical training, she can't manage a number of magical tasks ("Four Marks"). Here, the suggestion is that she is not completely free to act as she chooses because it can produce unintentional consequences or no consequences at all; this conceptual enslavement to magic as the source of her power and individuality seemingly dilutes some of her agency. Furthermore, instances of her trying to control the chaos within the show also conform to stereotypes of women being ruled by emotions and prone to hysterical outbursts (Johnson). Aesthetics & Sexuality Stereotypically, and in keeping with fictional tropes in literature, media, and film, witches have been described as “mature” women, “with bad skin, crooked teeth, foul breath, a cackling laugh, and a big nose with a wart at the end of it” (Henderson 66). Classic examples include the witches depicted in the works of the Brothers Grimm, Disney’s instances of Madam Mim in The Sword in the Stone and the transformed Evil Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the witches of Roald Dahl’s eponymous novel (1983), and (even more traditionally and iconically) the hags of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1623). Yet, more recently the witch aesthetic has altered significantly in the media spectrum with an increased focus on young, alluring, and enchanting women, such as Rowan Fielding in Mayfair Witches (2023 –), Sabrina Spellman of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018–2020), Freya Mikealson of The Originals (2013–2018), and of course, Yennefer in The Witcher. These examples emphasise that female magic users, much like a significant ratio of female characters in popular culture, are sexualised, with the seductive nature of the witch taking precedence and, in some cases, detracting from the character's agency as she becomes objectified for the male gaze (Mulvey). The hiring of actress Chaltora as Yennefer, although designed to challenge racialised beauty standards (Kain), does not dispel the treatment of women as sex objects as she is filmed nude during some magic rituals and in intimate scenes. Importantly, and as briefly mentioned above, when Yennefer’s back story is told, she is introduced as a young woman with physical deformities. As part of her ascension to a sorceress, she is required to undergo a physical transformation to make her beautiful, as conventional beauty and allure appear to be requirements for mages. As Worrow (66) attests, she is seen “undergoing an invasive, painful, magical metamorphosis which remakes her in the image of classical feminine beauty”. Unsurprisingly, the makeover received backlash for being ableist (Calder), but the magical change also enforced stereotypical views of women needing to be “manicured and coiffed” (Eckert, 530) to have relevancy and value. Yennefer’s beautifying procedure could also be interpreted as paralleling current cultural currents in contemporary society, where cosmetic interventions and physical transformations, often in the form of plastic surgery, are encouraged for women to be accepted. Indeed, Yennefer is shown as being much more accepted by human and mage communities alike after her transformation, as both her political and magical influence grows. In these terms, the portrayal of Yennefer maintains rather than challenges gender norms, making for a disappointing turn in the plotline of The Witcher. The decision to submit to the transformation also came at a cost to Yennefer. She was forced to forfeit her uterus and by extension her potential to become a mother. Such a storyline conforms to Creed’s long-standing perspective that “when a woman is represented as monstrous it is almost always in relation to her mothering and reproductive functions” (118). Here, even after achieving the expected beauty standards, Yennefer is still treated as abject because she can no longer “fulfil the function dictated by patriarchal and phallocentric hegemony” (Worrow 68), which further contributes to the widespread ideological perspective that women’s roles are to be nurturing and child-rearing (Bueskens). Of course, motherhood remains a contentious topic for Yennefer as, although she made the decision to forgo her uterus in pursuit of power and beauty, she later comes to regret that decision. In the episode “Rare Specifies”, Yennefer admits to Geralt that she feels loss and sadness over her inability to reproduce, which contributes to the complexity and inner turmoil of her character, while equally reinforcing the perception that women should be mothers. Her initial independence and choice are undermined by her attempts to regain her uterus and later, in Season 3, by her adopting the role of mother figure to Ciri. Conclusion In many respects, the story arc of sorceress Yennefer of Vengerberg conforms to what McRobbie describes as female individualism, and Gill considers post-feminist. That is, Yennefer has choice and agency. She makes decisions out of a sense of entitlement, and privileges her desire for power, beauty, and freedom, sometimes above all else. Much like other post-feminist icons, Yennefer is empowered and challenges gender stereotypes that charge women with being passive and submissive. Yet, despite the fact that 60% of the writing credits are held by women on The Witcher (Worrow), Yennefer’s character is still objectified. Although the male gaze might not always be privileged, there are examples where her sexuality is exploited; by being portrayed as physically attractive, desirable, and promiscuous, she still conforms to gender norms about ideal beauty standards. The sexuality of her character maintains perceptions of witches and sorceresses as seducers, and while she is not cavorting with Satan, as many witches have historically claimed to be (Stratton), her depiction maintains the adage that sex sells – at least as far as media production goes. Ultimately, the character of Yennefer in The Witcher appears to be an attempt to respond to a tacit cultural desire for strong female characters with relatable storylines, without ostracising male fans. 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This single and critical case study evaluated a faith-based natural family planning program's salient features using a framework on implementation fidelity. Multiple focus group discussions were conducted, with three groups of stakeholders (n=100), to gather qualitative data on their knowledge and experience of the program. Overall, the findings showed that the program primarily adhered to the essential elements of implementation fidelity, such as content, frequency, duration, and coverage prescribed by its designers. Three lessons were drawn to address some issues that have influenced the degree of fidelity in which the program was implemented. The first is the need to secure adequate and sustained human and financial resources. The second is the need to strengthen its partnership with government and non-government organizations that have provided them with much-needed assistance. 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Introduction The Disney brand has become synonymous with magic through its numerous depictions of spells, curses, prophecies, and pixie dust. Thus, it is ironic that in 2023, the 100th anniversary of the Walt Disney Studio’s founding (“Disney History”), the final film released during Walt Disney’s life, The Sword in the Stone (celebrating its 60th anniversary) remains stuck in obscurity (Aronstein 129) despite being steeped in magic and wizardry. The Sword in the Stone is regarded as “one of the most obscure [films] in the Disney animated canon” (Booker 38). Although it performed moderately well during its debut in 1963, its 1983 re-release and home video sales failed to renew public interest. To date, The Sword in the Stone has no games, comic series, or even Disneyland merchandise (Aronstein 129). The film is hardly a technical marvel; its sketchy animation style and blue-slate backgrounds create a dingy, unfinished look (Beck 272), while its simplistic storyline and anachronistic humour have been criticised for being ill-matched with its Arthurian subject matter (Gossedge 115). Despite these flaws, The Sword in the Stone offers the studio’s most fully rendered representation of Disney magic as benevolent forces sourced in learning and discipline that enable good-hearted protagonists to prepare for future leadership roles. By approaching the film as a didactic text separate from its Arthurian origins, I will demonstrate how The Sword in the Stone defines magic, not by nebulous spells or hexes, but by its facilitation of societal advancement and transformative powers via the educated mind. Young Arthur’s Humble Beginnings Based loosely on T.H. White’s 1938 novel of the same name (Valle 224), The Sword in the Stone takes place in medieval Europe, with most of its action occurring in a rotting castle and surrounding wolf-infested forests. In this threatening world, magic takes many forms, from powerful acts of “sorcery” to comical displays of “Latin business”. The first allusion to magic occurs during the film’s opening song, which establishes its setting (“when England was young”) and primary conflict (“the good king had died, and no one could decide who was rightful heir”). Without a ruler, England will be destroyed by civil war unless miraculous forces intervene on its behalf. This ‘miracle’ is the eponymous sword in the stone that the rightful ruler of England will free. The sword is destined for King Arthur, but as he is only an orphaned child living in obscurity at the film’s beginning, no one manages to retrieve the sword in his stead, and so the ‘miracle’ seemingly fails. The film’s off-screen narrator describes this leaderless period as “a dark age … where the strong preyed upon the weak”. As a force that trumps brute strength, magic is prized by those who can wield it, particularly the wizard Merlin. Magic is regarded with suspicion by the majority who cannot practice it (Valle 234), though they still recognise its legitimacy. Even Arthur’s practical stepfather, Sir Ector, begs Merlin not to practice any “black magic” on his family after Merlin creates an indoor “wizard blizzard” to prove his seriousness in tutoring Arthur. Merlin is a far cry from the mysterious soothsayer of Arthurian legend. He has been Disneyfied into a caricature of the famed wizard, appearing more like an eccentric academic than an all-seeing mystic (Beck 272). Susan Aronstein describes him as “the reification of Disney’s post-World War II rebranding of itself as a leader in education in the wake of a postwar shift in American child rearing” (130)—a playful pedagogue who makes learning fun for Arthur and audiences. After meeting Arthur in the woods near his home, Merlin becomes determined to rectify the boy’s educational deficiencies. It is not yet clear whether Merlin knows who Arthur is or will become; Merlin merely repeats to his owl companion, Archimedes, that the boy needs an education—specifically, a modern education. In addition to presenting Arthur with evidence of his travels to the future, such as helicopter models, Merlin rattles off a litany of subjects common to twentieth-century American curricula (English, science, mathematics) but hardly the sort of fare pages of Arthur’s status would study in fifth-century England. Because Arthur’s royal lineage is unknown to him, he aspires to be a squire for his soon-to-be-knighted stepbrother and so must learn the rules of jousting and horsemanship when not otherwise preoccupied with page duties. These include scrubbing pots and pans, cleaning floors, and fetching anything his stepfather requests. While Arthur is not resistant to Merlin’s attempts to teach him, he struggles to balance Merlin’s demands on his time with Sir Ector’s (Pinsky 85). Young Arthur’s gangly stature conveys how stretched the boy is between his indentured servitude to Ector and Merlin’s insistence upon his liberation through education. Arthur is constantly in motion, scurrying from one task to the next to please all parties involved and often failing to do so. Each time Merlin’s instruction causes the boy to miss Sir Ector’s call, Arthur is punished with additional duties (Holcomb et al.). Merlin’s Instructive Magic Merlin uses magic to bridge the gap between Arthur’s responsibilities to his present and his future. The word “magic” is spoken fifteen times in the film, six by Merlin himself. The wizard first utters the word after packing his entire house (furniture and all) into a carpet bag. Arthur is impressed, but Merlin warns him that magic is no panacea: “don’t you get any foolish ideas that magic will solve all your problems”. Even Merlin struggles to convince Sir Ector to let him tutor Arthur and to prevent predatory animals from killing the boy during their adventures together. Magic has limits. It cannot penetrate the minds of humans nor quell the instincts of wild animals. Its impact seems restricted to the physical world. Merlin primarily uses magic for physical transformation; his lessons centre on changing Arthur into different animals to enable the future king to experience life from others’ perspectives. Merlin turns Arthur into a fish, a squirrel, and a bird, with each animal’s situation representing increasingly complex problems that Arthur must overcome. Each lesson also corresponds with one or more levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: (1) safety and survival, (2) love and belonging, and (3) self-esteem and self-actualisation (Lester 15). As a perch swimming around the castle moat, Arthur learns to use his intellect to evade a toothy pike that nearly eats him alive. As a squirrel, Arthur observes the heartbreak of unrequited love, foreshadowing his complicated love triangle with Guinevere and Lancelot (Grellner 125). In avian form, Arthur experiences a much-needed boost in his self-worth after Sir Ector strips him of his squire-in-training status. In flight, Arthur seems most in his element. After struggling with the logistics of swimming as a fish and navigating trees as a squirrel, Arthur soars over the countryside, even showing off his acrobatics to Archimedes flying alongside him. Although Arthur relishes these experiences, he does not seem to grasp their broader implications. He describes his first magical lesson as “so much fun” (despite having nearly died) and pauses only momentarily at the end of his second lesson to reflect on the emotional damage he causes a heartbroken female squirrel who falls madly in love with him. Still, Arthur faces mortal danger with each lesson, so one could argue that by transforming the young boy into different animals, Merlin is honing Arthur’s problem-solving skills (Holcomb et al.). Madam Mim’s Destructive Magic When Arthur is turned into a bird, his third lesson takes an unexpected turn. After narrowly escaping a hawk, Arthur flies into the forest and falls down the chimney of a rival magician named Mad Madam Mim. After introducing herself, Mim insists to Arthur that she has far more magic “in one little finger” than Merlin possesses in his entire repertoire. She displays her powers by killing plants, changing sizes, and making herself monstrous or lovely according to her whims. Mim’s demonstrations suggest a breezy familiarity with magic that Merlin lacks. Whereas Merlin sometimes forgets the “Latin business” needed to invoke spells, Mim effortlessly transitions from one transformation to another without any spell use. The source of her power soon becomes apparent. “Black sorcery is my dish of tea”, she croons to Arthur. Compared to Merlin’s Latin-based magic, Mim’s “black sorcery” is easier to master and well-suited to her undisciplined lifestyle. Mim’s cottage is filthy and in disrepair, yet she is playing solitaire (and cheating) when Arthur stumbles into her fireplace. This anachronism (since playing cards would not be introduced to Europeans until the fourteenth century; DeBold) characterises, through visual shorthand, Mim’s idle hands as the Devil’s workshop; she also possesses a modern dartboard that she throws Arthur against. Unlike Merlin’s domicile, Mim’s cottage contains no books, scientific instruments, or other props of study, indicating that there is no deeper understanding behind her magic. As Latin is the root language of science and law, it seems fitting that Latin is not part of Mim’s repertoire. She simply points a finger at an unfortunate subject, and it bends to her will—or dies. Efficient though Mim’s magic may be, its power is fleeting. Mim briefly changes herself into a beautiful young woman. But she concedes that her magic is “only skin deep” and turns herself back into “an ugly old creep”. Evidently, her magic’s potency does not last long, nor is it capable of improving her situation, as she continues living in her broken-down cottage as a bored, friendless hermit. Her black magic may be easy to master but cannot impart meaningful change. And so, while Merlin can use his magic to improve Arthur’s life, Mim’s magic can only serve the status quo described at the film’s beginning: the strong preying upon the weak. Although Mim lives outside the feudal social hierarchy, she uses her magic to terrorise any unfortunate creatures who wander into her clutches, including Arthur. When Arthur (still in bird form) states that he prefers the benevolence and usefulness of Merlin’s magic, an infuriated Mim transforms herself into a hungry cat and chases Arthur around the cottage until Merlin arrives to save the boy. Merlin then challenges Mim to a wizard’s duel, during which he and Mim attack each other in animal forms ranging from foxes and caterpillars to tigers, goats, and elephants. Each time Mim transforms, she does so seamlessly, requiring no momentary pause to recall a spell, unlike Merlin, who stumbles across the Latin phrases necessary to change himself into something faster or bigger. But after Merlin transforms into a walrus and squashes a clucking chicken Mim, the momentum shifts in his favour. Her magic becomes tinged with rage that causes her to make mistakes, including biting herself as a snake and ramming herself into a tree in rhinoceros form. Merlin’s disciplined playing style is nearly errorless. Although he becomes frightened when Mim transforms into a fire-breathing dragon, Merlin continues to play sensibly and courageously. His final winning move is to transform himself into a measle-like germ that incapacitates Mim with violent sneezing and cold flashes (Perciaccante and Coralli 1171). Arthur is astonished by the brilliant manoeuvring of his mentor, who manages to win the duel fairly “by dint of his knowledge and study” (Pinsky 86). After stating the lesson’s summative point for Merlin—“knowledge and wisdom is the real power”—Arthur vows to redouble his efforts to complete his education. Education: The Film’s Real Magic The lesson for viewers is simple enough: an education has a magical impact on one’s life. Put more succinctly, education is magic. Merlin defeats Mim because of his greater knowledge and cleverer use of spells. Arthur will overcome his low social status and ascend to the throne by becoming literate and sharpening his intellect. But as with Merlin’s acquisition of magical knowledge through intense study, Arthur’s royal ascension must be earned. He must learn the literal ABCs of language acquisition to gain others’ shared knowledge, as illustrated by a scene in which Archimedes painstakingly teaches Arthur how to write the alphabet in preparation for reading an enormous stack of books. Merlin cannot magically impart such knowledge to the future king; Arthur must learn it through sustained effort. He also must learn to make informed decisions rather than respond to panic or anger as Mim does during her duel with Merlin. Herein lies the distinction between Mim’s and Merlin’s magic: transformative impact. Mim’s black magic has locked her into her chosen fate. By using her powers to amuse herself or cause others harm, Mim perpetuates her outcast status as the stereotypical witch to be feared (Valle 234). While her cottage contains anachronistic elements such as playing cards (suggesting that she, like Merlin, has time-travelled), it contains no evidence of the modern advances that Merlin shares with Arthur, like aeroplane models, nor anything that might improve their feudal society. Merlin’s magic, by contrast, facilitates immediate changes to Arthur’s world and offers the promise of technological advancements in the centuries to come. To reduce the boy’s workload, for instance, Merlin magically conjures up a factory-style assembly line of brushes, tubs, and mops to wash dishes and scrub kitchen floors. Merlin also shares his knowledge of humankind’s future achievements with Arthur to advance his education, providing him with models, maps, globes, and hundreds of books. To become a proper king, Arthur must learn how to use such information to others’ advantage, not just his own. As Caroline Buts and Jose Luis Buendia Sierra observe of magic’s paradox, “using the wand without knowing properly the rules may sometimes lead to catastrophic situations” (509). This point is reaffirmed in the film’s final sequence, which takes place in London on New Year’s Day at a jousting tournament, the winner of which will be crowned king of England. Arthur, now a squire to his recently knighted stepbrother, forgets to bring his stepbrother’s sword to the tournament grounds. He attempts to replace the missing weapon with the sword in the stone when he spots the aging relic in a nearby churchyard. As Arthur pulls out the sword, angelic choral music swells, signalling that the rightful ruler of England has fulfilled the prophecy. After some scepticism from the assembled masses, Sir Ector and the other knights and spectators bow to the befuddled twelve-year-old. The film’s final scene shows a panic-stricken Arthur conceding that he does not know how to rule England and crying out for Merlin. When the wizard blows in from his most recent trip to the twentieth century, he confirms that he has known all along who Arthur is and assures the boy that he will become a great king. Arthur seems ready to put in the work, recognising that his knowledge and wisdom will improve the lives of England’s inhabitants. Conclusion Magic is thus portrayed as an intervening force that either facilitates or stymies societal progress. Good magic ensures that intelligent, educated individuals such as Arthur become great leaders, while those who would attain positions of power through brute force are thwarted from doing so. At the film’s conclusion, Arthur has not been fully transformed into a great leader because his education is far from finished; he has only learned enough to realise that he knows too little to rule effectively. Yet, from the Socratic perspective, such self-awareness is the germination for attaining true wisdom (Tarrant 263). Arthur also already knows that he will not be able to learn how to rule well through trickery or shortcuts, even with a powerful magician by his side. But the film’s closing scene reiterates this point with Merlin promising Arthur that he will succeed. “Why, they might even make a motion picture about you!” he exclaims in a clever fourth-wall joke (Gellner 120). The Sword in the Stone’s mere existence proves that Arthur will acquire the knowledge and wisdom necessary to become a truly great monarch. The fledgling pupil will live long and rule well, not because of pixie dust or magic spells, but because of his willingness to learn and to be transformed by his education into a wise and fair ruler. References Aronstein, Susan. “‘Higitus Figitus!’ Of Merlin and Disney Magic.” It’s the Disney Version! Popular Cinema and Literary Classics. Eds. Douglas Brode and Shea T. Brode. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 129-139. Beck, Jerry. The Animated Movie Guide. Chicago: A Capella, 2005. Booker, M. Keith. Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children's Films. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2010. Buts, Caroline, and Jose Luis Buendia Sierra. “The Sword in the Stone.” European State Aid Law Quarterly 16.4 (2017): 509-511. 10 June 2023 <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26694185>. DeBold, Elizabeth. “Fortune’s Fools: Early Tarot Cards.” The Collation: Folger Shakespeare Library 2 Feb. 2021. 5 June 2023 <https://www.folger.edu/blogs/collation/fortunes-fools-early-tarot-cards/>. “Disney History.” D23, 2023. <https://d23.com/disney-history/>. Gossedge, Rob. “The Sword in the Stone: American Translatio and Disney’s Antimedievalism.” The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy-Tale and Fantasy Past. Eds. Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein. Palgrave Macmillan: 2012. 115–131. Grellner, Alice. “Two Films That Sparkle: The Sword in the Stone and Camelot.” Cinema Arthuriana: Twenty Essays. Rev. ed. Ed. Kevin J. Harty. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010. 118-126. Holcomb, Jeanne, Kenzie Latham, and Daniel Fernandez-Baca. “Who Cares for the Kids? Caregiving and Parenting in Disney Films.” Journal of Family Issues 36.14 (2015): 1957–81. DOI: 10.1177/0192513X13511250. Lester, David. “Measuring Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.” Psychological Reports: Mental & Physical Health 113.1 (2013): 15-17. 20 May 2023 <https://doi.org/10.2466/02.20.PR0.113x16z1>. Perciaccante, Antonio, and Alessia Coralli. “The Virus Defeating Madam Mim.” American Journal of Infection Control 45.10 (2017): 1171. 1 June 2023 <http://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajic.2017.07.017>. Pinsky, Mark I. The Gospel According to Disney: Faith, Trust, and Pixie Dust. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004. The Sword in the Stone. Dir. Wolfgang Reitherman. Perf. Karl Swenson and Rickie Sorensen. Buena Vista, 1963. Tarrant, Harold. “Socratic Method and Socratic Truth.” A Companion to Socrates. Eds. Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. 254-272. Valle, Maria Luiza Cyrino. "The New Matter of Britain: T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone." Estudos Germânicos 5.1 (1984): 224-265.

This essay combines life writing with meditations on the significance of walking as integral to the ritual practice of pilgrimage, where the individual improves her soul or health through the act of walking to a shrine containing healing relics of a saint. Braiding together insights from medieval literature, contemporary ecocriticism, and memory studies, I reflect on my own pilgrimage practice as it impacts the land itself. Canterbury, England serves as the central shrine for four pilgrimages over decades: 1966, 1994, 1997, and 2003.The act of memory was not invented in the Anthropocene. Rather, the nonhuman world has taught humans how to remember. From ice-core samples retaining the history of Europe’s weather to rocks embedded with fossilized extinct species, nonhuman actors literally petrifying or freezing the past—from geologic sites to frozen water—become exposed through the process of anthropocentric discovery and human interference. The very act of human uncovery and analysis threatens to eliminate the nonhuman actor which has hospitably shared its own experience. How can humans script nonhuman memory?As for the history of memory studies itself, a new phase is arguably beginning, shifting from “the transnational, transcultural, or global to the planetary; from recorded to deep history; from the human to the nonhuman” (Craps et al. 3). Memory studies for the Anthropocene can “focus on the terrestrialized significance of (the historicized) forms of remembrance but also on the positioning of who is remembering and, ultimately, which ‘Anthropocene’ is remembered” (Craps et al. 5). In this era of the “self-conscious Anthropocene” (Craps et al. 6), narrative itself can focus on “the place of nonhuman beings in human stories of origins, identity, and futures point to a possible opening for the methods of memory studies” (Craps et al. 8). The nonhuman on the paths of this essay range from the dirt on the path to the rock used to build the sacred shrine, the ultimate goal. How they intersect with human actors reveals how the “human subject is no longer the one forming the world, but does indeed constitute itself through its relation to and dependence on the object world” (Marcussen 14, qtd. in Rodriguez 378). Incorporating “nonhuman species as objects, if not subjects, of memory [...] memory critics could begin by extending their objects to include the memory of nonhuman species,” linking both humans and nonhumans in “an expanded multispecies frame of remembrance” (Craps et al. 9). My narrative—from diaries recording sacred journey to a novel structured by pilgrimage—propels motion, but also secures in memory events from the past, including memories of those nonhuman beings I interact with.Childhood PilgrimageThe little girl with brown curls sat crying softly, whimpering, by the side of the road in lush grass. The mother with her soft brown bangs and an underflip to her hair told the story of a little girl, sitting by the side of the road in lush grass.The story book girl had forgotten her Black Watch plaid raincoat at the picnic spot where she had lunched with her parents and two older brothers. Ponchos spread out, the family had eaten their fresh yeasty rolls, hard cheese, apples, and macaroons. The tin clink of the canteen hit their teeth as they gulped metallic water, still icy cold from the taps of the ancient inn that morning. The father cut slices of Edam with his Swiss army knife, parsing them out to each child to make his or her own little sandwich. The father then lay back for his daily nap, while the boys played chess. The portable wooden chess set had inlaid squares, each piece no taller than a fingernail paring. The girl read a Junior Puffin book, while the mother silently perused Agatha Christie. The boy who lost at chess had to play his younger sister, a fitting punishment for the less able player. She cheerfully played with either brother. Once the father awakened, they packed up their gear into their rucksacks, and continued the pilgrimage to Canterbury.Only the little Black Watch plaid raincoat was left behind.The real mother told the real girl that the story book family continued to walk, forgetting the raincoat until it began to rain. The men pulled on their ponchos and the mother her raincoat, when the little girl discovered her raincoat missing. The story book men walked two miles back while the story book mother and girl sat under the dripping canopy of leaves provided by a welcoming tree.And there, the real mother continued, the storybook girl cried and whimpered, until a magic taxi cab in which the father and boys sat suddenly appeared out of the mist to drive the little girl and her mother to their hotel.The real girl’s eyes shone. “Did that actually happen?” she asked, perking up in expectation.“Oh, yes,” said the real mother, kissing her on the brow. The girl’s tears dried. Only the plops of rain made her face moist. The little girl, now filled with hope, cuddled with her mother as they huddled together.Without warning, out of the mist, drove up a real magic taxi cab in which the real men sat. For magic taxi cabs really exist, even in the tangible world—especially in England. At the very least, in the England of little Susie’s imagination.Narrative and PilgrimageMy mother’s tale suggests how this story echoes in yet another pilgrimage story, maintaining a long tradition of pilgrimage stories embedded within frame tales as far back as the Middle Ages.The Christian pilgrim’s walk parallels Christ’s own pilgrimage to Emmaus. The blisters we suffer echo faintly the lash Christ endured. The social relations of the pilgrim are “diachronic” (Alworth 98), linking figures (Christ) from the past to the now (us, or, during the Middle Ages, William Langland’s Piers Plowman or Chaucer’s band who set out from Southwark). We embody the frame of the vera icon, the true image, thus “conjur[ing] a site of simultaneity or a plane of immanence where the actors of the past [...] meet those of the future” (Alworth 99). Our quotidian walk frames the true essence or meaning of our ambulatory travail.In 1966, my parents took my two older brothers and me on the Pilgrims’ Way—not the route from London to Canterbury that Chaucer’s pilgrims would have taken starting south of London in Southwark, rather the ancient trek from Winchester to Canterbury, famously chronicled in The Old Road by Hilaire Belloc. The route follows along the south side of the Downs, where the muddy path was dried by what sun there was. My parents first undertook the walk in the early 1950s. Slides from that pilgrimage depict my mother, voluptuous in her cashmere twinset and tweed skirt, as my father crosses a stile. My parents, inspired by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, decided to walk along the traditional Pilgrims’ Way to Canterbury. Story intersects with material traversal over earth on dirt-laden paths.By the time we children came along, the memories of that earlier pilgrimage resonated with my parents, inspiring them to take us on the same journey. We all carried our own rucksacks and walked five or six miles a day. Concerning our pilgrimage when I was seven, my mother wrote in her diary:As good pilgrims should, we’ve been telling tales along the way. Yesterday Jimmy told the whole (detailed) story of That Darn Cat, a Disney movie. Today I told about Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey, which first inspired me to think of walking trips and everyone noted the resemblance between Stevenson’s lovable, but balky, donkey and our sweet Sue. (We hadn’t planned to tell tales, but they just happened along the way.)I don’t know how sweet I was; perhaps I was “balky” because the road was so hard. Landscape certainly shaped my experience.As I wrote about the pilgrimage in my diary then, “We went to another Hotel and walked. We went and had lunch at the Boggly [booglie] place. We went to a nother hotel called The Swan with fether Quits [quilts]. We went to the Queens head. We went to the Gest house. We went to aother Hotle called Srping wells and my tooth came out. We saw some taekeys [turkeys].” The repetition suggests how pilgrimage combines various aspects of life, from the emotional to the physical, the quotidian (walking and especially resting—in hotels with quilts) with the extraordinary (newly sprung tooth or the appearance of turkeys). “[W]ayfaring abilities depend on an emotional connection to the environment” (Easterlin 261), whether that environment is modified by humans or even manmade, inhabited by human or nonhuman actors. How can one model an “ecological relationship between humans and nonhumans” in narrative (Rodriguez 368)? Rodriguez proposes a “model of reading as encounter [...] encountering fictional story worlds as potential models” (Rodriguez 368), just as my mother did with the Magic Taxi Cab story.Taxis proliferate in my childhood pilgrimage. My mother writes in 1966 in her diary of journeying along the Pilgrims’ Way to St. Martha’s on the Hill. “Susie was moaning and groaning under her pack and at one desperate uphill moment gasped out, ‘Let’s take a taxi!’ – our highborn lady as we call her. But we finally made it.” “Martha’s”, as I later learned, is a corruption of “Martyrs”, a natural linguistic decay that developed over the medieval period. Just as the vernacular textures pilgrimage poems in the fourteeth century, the common tongue in all its glorious variety seeps into even the quotidian modern pilgrim’s journey.Part of the delight of pilgrimage lies in the characters one meets and the languages they speak. In 1994, the only time my husband and I cheated on a strictly ambulatory sacred journey occurred when we opted to ride a bus for ten miles where walking would have been dangerous. When I ask the bus driver if a stop were ours, he replied, “I'll give you a shout, love.” As though in a P. G. Wodehouse novel, when our stop finally came, he cried out, “Cheerio, love” to me and “Cheerio, mate” to Jim.Language changes. Which is a good thing. If it didn’t, it would be dead, like those martyrs of old. Like Latin itself. Disentangling pilgrimage from language proves impossible. The healthy ecopoetics of languages meshes with the sustainable vibrancy of the land we traverse.“Nettles of remorse…”: Derek Walcott, The Bounty Once my father had to carry me past a particularly tough patch of nettles. As my mother tells it, we “went through orchards and along narrow woodland path with face-high nettles. Susie put a scarf over her face and I wore a poncho though it was sunny and we survived almost unscathed.” Certain moments get preserved by the camera. At age seven in a field outside of Wye, I am captured in my father’s slides surrounded by grain. At age thirty-five, I am captured in film by my husband in the same spot, in the identical pose, though now quite a bit taller than the grain. Three years later, as a mother, I in turn snap him with a backpack containing baby Sarah, grumpily gazing off over the fields.When I was seven, we took off from Detling. My mother writes, “set off along old Pilgrims’ Way. Road is paved now, but much the same as fifteen years ago. Saw sheep, lambs, and enjoyed lovely scenery. Sudden shower sent us all to a lunch spot under trees near Thurnham Court, where we huddled under ponchos and ate happily, watching the weather move across the valley. When the sun came to us, we continued on our way which was lovely, past sheep, etc., but all on hard paved road, alas. Susie was a good little walker, but moaned from time to time.”I seem to whimper and groan a lot on pilgrimage. One thing is clear: the physical aspects of walking for days affected my phenomenological response to our pilgrimage which we’d undertaken both as historical ritual, touristic nature hike, and what Wendell Berry calls a “secular pilgrimage” (402), where the walker seeks “the world of the Creation” (403) in a “return to the wilderness in order to be restored” (416). The materiality of my experience was key to how I perceived this journey as a spiritual, somatic, and emotional event. The link between pilgrimage and memory, between pilgrimage poetics and memorial methods, occupies my thoughts on pilgrimage. As Nancy Easterlin’s work on “cognitive ecocriticism” (“Cognitive” 257) contends, environmental knowledge is intimately tied in with memory (“Cognitive” 260). She writes: “The advantage of extensive environmental knowledge most surely precipitates the evolution of memory, necessary to sustain vast knowledge” (“Cognitive” 260). Even today I can recall snatches of moments from that trip when I was a child, including the telling of tales.Landscape not only changes the writer, but writing transforms the landscape and our interaction with it. As Valerie Allen suggests, “If the subject acts upon the environment, so does the environment upon the subject” (“When Things Break” 82). Indeed, we can understand the “road as a strategic point of interaction between human and environment” (Allen and Evans 26; see also Oram)—even, or especially, when that interaction causes pain and inflames blisters. My relationship with moleskin on my blasted and blistered toes made me intimately conscious of my body with every step taken on the pilgrimage route.As an adult, my boots on the way from Winchester to Canterbury pinched and squeezed, packed dirt acting upon them and, in turn, my feet. After taking the train home and upon arrival in London, we walked through Bloomsbury to our flat on Russell Square, passing by what I saw as a new, less religious, but no less beckoning shrine: The London Foot Hospital at Fitzroy Square.Now, sadly, it is closed. Where do pilgrims go for sole—and soul—care?Slow Walking as WayfindingAll pilgrimages come to an end, just as, in 1966, my mother writes of our our arrival at last in Canterbury:On into Canterbury past nice grassy cricket field, where we sat and ate chocolate bars while we watched white-flannelled cricketers at play. Past town gates to our Queen’s Head Inn, where we have the smallest, slantingest room in the world. Everything is askew and we’re planning to use our extra pillows to brace our feet so we won’t slide out of bed. Children have nice big room with 3 beds and are busy playing store with pounds and shillings [that’s very hard mathematics!]. After dinner, walked over to cathedral, where evensong was just ending. Walked back to hotel and into bed where we are now.Up to early breakfast, dashed to cathedral and looked up, up, up. After our sins were forgiven, we picked up our rucksacks and headed into London by train.This experience in 1966 varies slightly from the one in 1994. Jim and I walk through a long walkway of tall, slim trees arching over us, a green, lush and silent cloister, finally gaining our first view of Canterbury with me in a similar photo to one taken almost thirty years before. We make our way into the city through the West Gate, first passing by St. Dunstan’s Church where Henry II had put on penitential garb and later Sir Thomas More’s head was buried. Canterbury is like Coney Island in the Middle Ages and still is: men with dreadlocks and slinky didjeridoos, fire tossers, mobs of people, tourists. We go to Mercery Lane as all good pilgrims should and under the gate festooned with the green statue of Christ, arriving just in time for evensong.Imagining a medieval woman arriving here and listening to the service, I pray to God my gratefulness for us having arrived safely. I can understand the fifteenth-century pilgrim, Margery Kempe, screaming emotionally—maybe her feet hurt like mine. I’m on the verge of tears during the ceremony: so glad to be here safe, finally got here, my favorite service, my beloved husband. After the service, we pass on through the Quire to the spot where St. Thomas’s relic sanctuary was. People stare at a lit candle commemorating it. Tears well up in my eyes.I suppose some things have changed since the Middle Ages. One Friday in Canterbury with my children in 2003 has some parallels with earlier iterations. Seven-year-old Sarah and I go to evensong at the Cathedral. I tell her she has to be absolutely quiet or the Archbishop will chop off her head.She still has her head.Though the road has been paved, the view has remained virtually unaltered. Some aspects seem eternal—sheep, lambs, and stiles dotting the landscape. The grinding down of the pilgrimage path, reflecting the “slowness of flat ontology” (Yates 207), occurs over vast expanses of time. Similarly, Easterlin reflects on human and more than human vitalism: “Although an understanding of humans as wayfinders suggests a complex and dynamic interest on the part of humans in the environment, the surround itself is complex and dynamic and is frequently in a state of change as the individual or group moves through it” (Easterlin “Cognitive” 261). An image of my mother in the 1970s by a shady tree along the Pilgrims’ Way in England shows that the path is lower by 6 inches than the neighboring verge (Bright 4). We don’t see dirt evolving, because its changes occur so slowly. Only big time allows us to see transformative change.Memorial PilgrimageOddly, the erasure of self through duplication with a precursor occurred for me while reading W.G. Sebald’s pilgrimage novel, The Rings of Saturn. I had experienced my own pilgrimage to many of these same locations he immortalizes. I, too, had gone to Somerleyton Hall with my elderly mother, husband, and two children. My memories, sacred shrines pooling in familial history, are infused with synchronic reflection, medieval to contemporary—my parents’ periodic sojourns in Suffolk for years, leading me to love the very landscape Sebald treks across; sadness at my parents’ decline; hope in my children’s coming to add on to their memory palimpsest a layer devoted to this land, to this history, to this family.Then, the oddest coincidence from my reading pilgrimage. After visiting Dunwich Heath, Sebald comes to his friend, Michael, whose wife Anne relays a story about a local man hired as a pallbearer by the local undertaker in Westleton. This man, whose memory was famously bad, nevertheless reveled in the few lines allotted him in an outdoor performance of King Lear. After her relating this story, Sebald asks for a taxi (Sebald 188-9).This might all seem unremarkable to the average reader. Yet, “human wayfinders are richly aware of and responsive to environment, meaning both physical places and living beings, often at a level below consciousness” (Easterlin “Cognitive” 265). For me, with a connection to this area, I startled with recollection emerging from my subconscience. The pallbearer’s name in Sebald’s story was Mr Squirrel, the very same name of the taxi driver my parents—and we—had driven with many times. The same Mr Squirrel? How many Mr Squirrels can there be in this small part of Suffolk? Surely it must be the same family, related in a genetic encoding of memory. I run to my archives. And there, in my mother’s address book—itself a palimpsest of time with names and addressed scored through; pasted-in cards, names, and numbers; and looseleaf memoranda—there, on the first page under “S”, “Mr. Squirrel” in my mother’s unmistakable scribble. She also had inscribed his phone number and the village Saxmundum, seven miles from Westleton. His name had been crossed out. Had he died? Retired? I don’t know. Yet quick look online tells me Squirrell’s Taxis still exists, as it does in my memory.Making KinAfter accompanying a class on a bucolic section of England’s Pilgrims’ Way, seven miles from Wye to Charing, we ended up at a pub drinking a pint, with which all good pilgrimages should conclude. There, students asked me why I became a medievalist who studies pilgrimage. Only after the publication of my first book on women pilgrims did I realize that the origin of my scholarly, long fascination with pilgrimage, blossoming into my professional career, began when I was seven years old along the way to Canterbury. The seeds of that pilgrimage when I was so young bore fruit and flowers decades later.One story illustrates Michel Serres’s point that we should not aim to appropriate the world, but merely act as temporary tenants (Serres 72-3). On pilgrimage in 1966 as a child, I had a penchant for ant spiders. That was not the only insect who took my heart. My mother shares how “Susie found a beetle up on the hill today and put him in the cheese box. Jimmy put holes in the top for him. She named him Alexander Beetle and really became very fond of him. After supper, we set him free in the garden here, with appropriate ceremony and a few over-dramatic tears of farewell.” He clearly made a great impression on me. I yearn for him today, that beetle in the cheese box. Though I tried to smuggle nature as contraband, I ultimately had to set him free.Passing through cities, landscape, forests, over seas and on roads, wandering by fields and vegetable patches, under a sky lit both by sun and moon, the pilgrim—even when in a group of fellow pilgrims—in her lonesome exercise endeavors to realize Serres’ ideal of the tenant inhabitant of earth. Nevertheless, we, as physical pilgrims, inevitably leave our traces through photos immortalizing the journey, trash left by the wayside, even excretions discretely deposited behind a convenient bush. Or a beetle who can tell the story of his adventure—or terror—at being ensconced for a time in a cheese box.On one notorious day of painful feet, my husband and I arrived in Otford, only to find the pub was still closed. Finally, it became time for dinner. We sat outside, me with feet ensconced in shoes blessedly inert and unmoving, as the server brought out our salads. The salad cream, white and viscous, was presented in an elegantly curved silver dish. Then Jim began to pick at the salad cream with his fork. Patiently, tenderly, he endeavored to assist a little bug who had gotten trapped in the gooey sauce. Every attempt seemed doomed to failure. The tiny creature kept falling back into the gloppy substance. Undaunted, Jim compassionately ministered to our companion. Finally, the little insect flew off, free to continue its own pilgrimage, which had intersected with ours in a tiny moment of affinity. Such moments of “making kin” work, according to Donna Haraway, as “life-saving strateg[ies] for the Anthropocene” (Oppermann 3, qtd. in Haraway 160).How can narrative avoid the anthropocentric centre of writing, which is inevitable given the human generator of such a piece? While words are a human invention, nonhuman entities vitally enact memory. The very Downs we walked along were created in the Cretaceous period at least seventy million years ago. The petrol propelling the magic taxi cab was distilled from organic bodies dating back millions of years. Jurassic limestone from the Bathonian Age almost two hundred million years ago constitutes the Caen stone quarried for building Canterbury Cathedral, while its Purbeck marble from Dorset dates from the Cretaceous period. Walking on pilgrimage propels me through a past millions—billions—of eons into the past, dwarfing my speck of existence. Yet, “if we wish to cross the darkness which separates us from [the past] we must lay down a little plank of words and step delicately over it” (Barfield 23). Elias Amidon asks us to consider how “the ground we dig into and walk upon is sacred. It is sacred because it makes us neighbors to each other, whether we like it or not. Tell this story” (Amidon 42). And, so, I have.We are winding down. Time has passed since that first pilgrimage of mine at seven years old. Yet now, here, I still put on my red plaid wollen jumper and jacket, crisp white button-up shirt, grey knee socks, and stout red walking shoes. Slinging on my rucksack, I take my mother’s hand.I’m ready to take my first step.We continue our pilgrimage, together.ReferencesAllen, Valerie. “When Things Break: Mending Rroads, Being Social.” Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads. Eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016.———, and Ruth Evans. Introduction. Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads. Eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2016.Alworth, David J. Site Reading: Fiction, Art, Social Form. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2016.Amidon, Elias. “Digging In.” Dirt: A Love Story. Ed. Barbara Richardson. Lebanon, NH: ForeEdge, 2015.Barfield, Owen. History in English Words. Grand Rapids: William B. 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Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2010. 257-274.Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159-65.James, Erin, and Eric Morel. “Ecocriticism and Narrative Theory: An Introduction.” English Studies 99.4 (2018): 355-365.Marcussen, Marlene. Reading for Space: An Encounter between Narratology and New Materialism in the Works of Virgina Woolf and Georges Perec. PhD diss. University of Southern Denmark, 2016.Oppermann, Serpil. “Introducing Migrant Ecologies in an (Un)Bordered World.” ISLE 24.2 (2017): 243–256.Oram, Richard. “Trackless, Impenetrable, and Underdeveloped? Roads, Colonization and Environmental Transformation in the Anglo-Scottish Border Zone, c. 1100 to c. 1300.” Roadworks: Medieval Britain, Medieval Roads. Eds. Valerie Allen and Ruth Evans. 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Indigenous cross-cultural training has been around since the 1980s. It is often seen as a way to increase the skills and competency of staff engaged in providing service to Indigenous clients and customers, teaching Indigenous students within universities and schools, or working with Indigenous communities (Fredericks and Bargallie, “Indigenous”; “Which Way”). In this article we demonstrate how such training often exposes power, whiteness, and concepts of an Indigenous “other”. We highlight how cross-cultural training programs can potentially provide a setting in which non-Indigenous participants can develop a deeper realisation of how their understandings of the “other” are formed and enacted within a “white” social setting. Revealing whiteness as a racial construct enables people to see race, and “know what racism is, what it is not and what it does” (Bargallie, 262). Training participants can use such revelations to develop their racial literacy and anti-racist praxis (Bargallie), which when implemented have the capacity to transform inequitable power differentials in their work with Indigenous peoples and organisations.What Does the Literature Say about Cross-Cultural Training? An array of names are used for Indigenous cross-cultural training, including cultural awareness, cultural competency, cultural responsiveness, cultural safety, cultural sensitivity, cultural humility, and cultural capability. Each model takes on a different approach and goal depending on the discipline or profession to which the training is applied (Hollinsworth). Throughout this article we refer to Indigenous cross-cultural training as “cultural competence” or “cultural awareness” and discuss these in relation to their application within higher education institutions. While literature on health and human services programs in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and other nation states provide clear definitions of terms such as “cultural safety”, cultural competence or cultural awareness is often lacking a concise and consistent definition.Often delivered as a half day or a one to two-day training course, it is unrealistic to think that Indigenous cultural competence can be achieved through one’s mere attendance and participation. Moreover, when courses centre on “cultural differences” and enable revelations about those differences they are in danger of presenting idealised notions of Indigeneity. Cultural competence becomes a process through which an Indigenous “other” is objectified, while very little is offered by way of translating knowledge and skills into practice when working with Indigenous peoples.What this type of learning has the capacity to do is oversimplify and reinforce racism and racist stereotypes of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous cultures. What is generally believed is that if non-Indigenous peoples know more about Indigenous peoples and cultures, relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples will somehow improve. The work of Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson is vital to draw on here, when she asks, has the intellectual investment in defining our cultural differences resulted in the valuing of our knowledges? Has the academy become a more enlightened place in which to work, and, more important, in what ways have our communities benefited? (xvii)What is revealed in a range of studies – whether centring on racism and discrimination or the ongoing disparities across health, education, incarceration, employment, and more – is that despite forty plus years of training focused on understanding cultural differences, very little has changed. Indigenous knowledges continue to be devalued and overlooked. Everyday and structural racisms shape everyday experiences for Indigenous employees in Australian workplaces such as the Australian Public Service (Bargallie) and the Australian higher education sector (Fredericks and White).As the literature demonstrates, the racial division of labour in such institutions often leaves Indigenous employees languishing on the lower rungs of the employment ladder (Bargallie). The findings of an Australian university case study, discussed below, highlights how power, whiteness, and concepts of “otherness” are exposed and play out in cultural competency training. Through their exposure, we argue that better understandings about Indigenous Australians, which are not based on culture difference but personal reflexivity, may be gained. Revealing What Was Needed in the Course’s Foundation and ImplementationThis case study is centred within a regional Australian university across numerous campuses. In 2012, the university council approved an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander strategy, which included a range of initiatives, including the provision of cross-cultural training for staff. In developing the training, a team explored the evidence as it related to university settings (Anning; Asmar; Butler and Young; Fredericks; Fredericks and Thompson; Kinnane, Wilks, Wilson, Hughes and Thomas; McLaughlin and Whatman). This investigation included what had been undertaken in other Australian universities (Anderson; University of Sydney) and drew on the recommendations from earlier research (Behrendt, Larkin, Griew and Kelly; Bradley, Noonan, Nugent and Scales; Universities Australia). Additional consultation took place with a broad range of internal and external stakeholders.While some literature on cross-cultural training centred on the need to understand cultural differences, others exposed the problems of focusing entirely on difference (Brach and Fraser; Campinha-Bacote; Fredericks; Spencer and Archer; Young). The courses that challenged the centrality of cultural difference explained why race needed to be at the core of its training, highlighting its role in enabling discussions of racism, bias, discrimination and how these may be used as means to facilitate potential individual and organisational change. This approach also addressed stereotypes and Eurocentric understandings of what and who is an Indigenous Australian (Carlson; Gorringe, Ross and Forde; Hollinsworth; Moreton-Robinson). It is from this basis that we worked and grew our own training program. Working on this foundational premise, we began to separate content that showcased the fluidity and diversity of Indigenous peoples and refrained from situating us within romantic notions of culture or presenting us as an exotic “other”. In other words, we embraced work that responded to non-Indigenous people’s objectified understandings and expectations of us. For example, the expectation that Indigenous peoples will offer a Welcome to Country, performance, share a story, sing, dance, or disseminate Indigenous knowledges. While we recognise that some of these cultural elements may offer enjoyment and insight to non-Indigenous people, they do not challenge behaviours or the nature of the relationships that non-Indigenous people have with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (Bargallie; Fredericks; Hollinsworth; Westwood and Westwood; Young).The other content which needed separating were the methods that enabled participants to understand and own their standpoints. This included the use of critical Indigenous studies as a form of analysis (Moreton-Robinson). Critical race theory (Delgado and Stefancic) was also used as a means for participants to interrogate their own cultural positionings and understand the pervasive nature of race and racism in Australian society and institutions (McLaughlin and Whatman). This offered all participants, both non-Indigenous and Indigenous, the opportunity to learn how institutional racism operates, and maintains discrimination, neglect, abuse, denial, and violence, inclusive of the continued subjugation that exists within higher education settings and broader society.We knew that the course needed to be available online as well as face-to-face. This would increase accessibility to staff across the university community. We sought to embed critical thinking as we began to map out the course, including the theory in the sections that covered colonisation and the history of Indigenous dispossession, trauma and pain, along with the ongoing effects of federal and state policies and legislations that locates racism at the core of Australian politics. In addition to documenting the ongoing effects of racism, we sought to ensure that Indigenous resistance, agency, and activism was highlighted, showing how this continues, thus linking the past to the contemporary experiences of Indigenous peoples.Drawing on the work of Bargallie we wanted to demonstrate how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples experience racism through systems and structures in their everyday work with colleagues in large organisations, such as universities. Participants were asked to self-reflect on how race impacts their day-to-day lives (McIntosh). The final session of the training focused on the university’s commitment to “Closing the Gap” and its Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP). The associated activity involved participants working individually and in small groups to discuss and consider what they could contribute to the RAP activities and enact within their work environments. Throughout the training, participants were asked to reflect on their personal positioning, and in the final session they were asked to draw from these reflections and discuss how they would discuss race, racism and reconciliation activities with the governance of their university (Westwood and Westwood; Young).Revelations in the Facilitators, Observers, and Participants’ Discussions? This section draws on data collected from the first course offered within the university’s pilot program. During the delivery of the in-person training sessions, two observers wrote notes while the facilitators also noted their feelings and thoughts. After the training, the facilitators and observers debriefed and discussed the delivery of the course along with the feedback received during the sessions.What was noticed by the team was the defensive body language of participants and the types of questions they asked. Team members observed how there were clear differences between the interest non-Indigenous participants displayed when talking about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and a clear discomfort when they were asked to reflect on their own position in relation to Indigenous people. We noted that during these occasions some participants crossed their arms, two wrote notes to each other across the table, and many participants showed discomfort. When the lead facilitator raised this to participants during the sessions, some expressed their dislike and discomfort at having to talk about themselves. A couple were clearly unhappy and upset. We found this interesting as we were asking participants to reflect and talk about how they interpret and understand themselves in relation to Indigenous people and race, privilege, and power.This supports the work of DiAngelo who explains that facilitators can spend a lot of time trying to manage the behaviour of participants. Similarly, Castagno identifies that sometimes facilitators of training might overly focus on keeping participants happy, and in doing so, derail the hard conversations needed. We did not do either. Instead, we worked to manage the behaviours expressed and draw out what was happening to break the attempts to silence racial discussions. We reiterated and worked hard to reassure participants that we were in a “safe space” and that while such discussions may be difficult, they were worth working through on an individual and collective level.During the workshop, numerous emotions surfaced, people laughed at Indigenous humour and cried at what they witnessed as losses. They also expressed anger, defensiveness, and denial. Some participants revelled in hearing answers to questions that they had long wondered about; some openly discussed how they thought they had discovered a distant Aboriginal relative. Many questions surfaced, such as why hadn’t they ever been told this version of Australian history? Why were we focusing on them and not Aboriginal people? How could they be racist when they had an Aboriginal friend or an Aboriginal relative?Some said they felt “guilty” about what had happened in the past. Others said they were not personally responsible or responsible for the actions of their ancestors, questioning why they needed to go over such history in the first place? Inter-woven within participants’ revelations were issues of racism, power, whiteness, and white privilege. Many participants took a defensive stance to protect their white privilege (DiAngelo). As we worked through these issues, several participants started to see their own positionality and shared this with the group. Clearly, the revelation of whiteness as a racial construct was a turning point for some. The language in the group also changed for some participants as revelations emerged through the interrogation and unpacking of stories of racism. Bargallie’s work exploring racism in the workplace, explains that “racism”, as both a word and theme, is primarily absent in conversations amongst non-Indigenous colleagues. Despite its entrenchment in the dialogue, it is rarely, if ever addressed. In fact, for many non-Indigenous people, the fear of being accused of racism is worse than the act of racism itself (Ahmed; Bargallie). We have seen this play out within the media, sport, news bulletins, and more. Lentin describes the act of denying racism despite its existence in full sight as “not racism”, arguing that its very denial is “a form of racist violence” (406).Through enhancing racial literacy, Bargallie asserts that people gain a better understanding of “what racism is, what racism is not and how race works” (258). Such revelations can work towards dismantling racism in workplaces. Individual and structural racism go hand-in-glove and must be examined and addressed together. This is what we wanted to work towards within the cultural competency course. Through the use of critical Indigenous studies and critical race theory we situated race, and not cultural difference, as central, providing participants with a racial literacy that could be used as a tool to challenge and dismantle racism in the workplace.Revelations in the Participant Evaluations?The evaluations revealed that our intention to disrupt the status quo in cultural competency training was achieved. Some of the discussions were difficult and this was reflected in the feedback. It was valuable to learn that numerous participants wanted to do more through group work, conversations, and problem resolution, along with having extra reading materials. This prompted our decision to include extra links to resource learning materials through the course’s online site. We also opted to provide all participants with a copy of the book Indigenous Australia for Dummies (Behrendt). The cost of the book was built into the course and future participants were thankful for this combination of resources.One unexpected concern raised by participants was that the course should not be “that hard”, and that we should “dumb down” the course. We were astounded considering that many participants were academics and we were confident that facilitators of other mandatory workplace training, for example, staff Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO), Fire Safety, Risk Management, Occupational Health and Safety, Discrimination and more, weren’t asked to “dumb down” their content. We explained to the participants what content we had been asked to deliver and knew their responses demonstrated white fragility. We were not prepared to adjust the course and dumb it down for white understandings and comfortabilities (Leonardo and Porter).Comments that were expected included that the facilitators were “passionate”, “articulate”, demonstrated “knowledge” and effectively “dealt with issues”. A couple of the participants wrote that the facilitators were “aggressive” or “angry”. This however is not new for us, or new to other Aboriginal women. We know Aboriginal women are often seen as “aggressive” and “angry”, when non-Indigenous women might be described as “passionate” or “assertive” for saying exactly the same thing. The work of Aileen Moreton-Robinson in Australia, and the works of numerous other Aboriginal women provide evidence of this form of racism (Fredericks and White; Bargallie; Bond). Internationally, other Indigenous women and women of colour document the same experiences (Lorde). Participants’ assessment of the facilitators is consistent with the racism expressed through racial microaggression outside of the university, and in other organisations. This is despite working in the higher education sector, which is normally perceived as a more knowledgeable and informed environment. Needless to say, we did not take on these comments.The evaluations did offer us the opportunity to adjust the course and make it stronger before it was offered across the university where we received further evaluation of its success. Despite this, the university decided to withdraw and reallocate the money to the development of a diversity training course that would cover all equity groups. This meant that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples would be covered along with sexual diversity, gender, disability, and people from non-English speaking backgrounds. The content focused on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples was reduced to one hour of the total course. Including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in this way is not based on evidence and works to minimise Indigenous Australians and their inherent rights and sovereignty to just another “equity group”. Conclusion We set out to develop and deliver a cross-cultural course that was based on evidence and a foundation of 40 plus years’ experience in delivering such training. In addition, we sought a program that would align with the university’s Reconciliation Action Plan and the directions being undertaken in the sector and by Universities Australia. Through engaging participants in a process of critical thinking centring on race, we developed a training program that successfully fostered self-reflection and brought about revelations of whiteness.Focusing on cultural differences has proven ineffective to the work needed to improve the lives of Indigenous Australian peoples. Recognising this, our discussions with participants directly challenged racist and negative stereotypes, individual and structural racism, prejudices, and white privilege. By centring race over cultural difference in cultural competency training, we worked to foster self-revelation within participants to transform inequitable power differentials in their work with Indigenous peoples and organisations. The institution’s disbandment and defunding of the program however is a telling revelation in and of itself, highlighting the continuing struggle and importance of placing additional pressure on persons, institutions, and organisations to implement meaningful structural change. ReferencesAhmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press, 2012.Anderson, Ian. “Advancing Indigenous Health through Medical Education”. 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In Cultural Competence and the Higher Education Sector: Perspectives, Policies and Practice, eds. Jack Frawley, Gabrielle Russell, and Juanita Sherwood, Springer Publications, 295-308. <https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-981-15-5362-2>.Fredericks, Bronwyn, and Debbie Bargallie. “‘Which Way? Talking Culture, Talking Race’: Unpacking an Indigenous Cultural Competency Course”. International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies 9.1 (2016): 1-14.Fredericks, Bronwyn, and Marlene Thompson. “Collaborative Voices: Ongoing Reflections on Cultural Competency and the Health Care of Australian Indigenous People”. Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues 13.3 (2010): 10-20.Fredericks, Bronwyn, and Nereda White. “Using Bridges Made by Others as Scaffolding and Establishing Footings for Those That Follow: Indigenous Women in the Academy”. Australian Journal of Education 62.3 (2018): 243–255.Gorringe, Scott, Joe Ross, and Cressida Fforde. Will the Real Aborigine Please Stand Up? 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Archer. “Surveys of Cultural Competency in Health Professional Education: A Literature Review”. Journal of Emergency Primary Health Care 6.2 (2008): 17.Universities Australia. National Best Practice Framework for Indigenous Cultural Competency in Australian Universities. Universities Australia, 2011. <http://www.universitiesaustralia.edu.au/lightbox/1312>.University of Sydney. National Centre for Cultural Competence, 2016. <http://sydney.edu.au/nccc/>.Westwood, Barbara, and Geoff Westwood. “Aboriginal Cultural Awareness Training: Policy v. Accountability – Failure in Reality”. Australian Health Review 34 (2010): 423-429.Young, Susan. “Not Because It’s a Bloody Black Issue! Problematics of Cross Cultural Training”. In Unmasking Whiteness: Race Relations and Reconciliation, ed. Belinda McKay, 204-219. Queensland Studies Centre, University of Queensland Press, 1999.

Unlike some current discourse on automediality, this essay eschews most of the analysis concerning the adoption or modification of avatars to deliberately enhance, extend or distort the self. Rather than the automedial enabling of alternative, virtual selves modified by playful, confronting or disarming avatars we concentrate instead on emerging efforts to present the self in hyper-realist, interactive modes. In doing so we ask, what is the relationship between traumatic forms of automediation and the affective impact on and response of the audience? We argue that, while on the one hand there are promising avenues for valuable individual and social engagements with traumatic forms of automediation, there is an overwhelming predominance of suffering as a theme in such virtual depictions, comingled with uncritically asserted promises of empathy, which are problematic as the technology assumes greater mainstream uptake.As Smith and Watson note, embodiment is always a “translation” where the body is “dematerialized” in virtual representation (“Virtually” 78). Past scholarship has analysed the capacity of immersive realms, such as Second Life or online games, to highlight how users can modify their avatars in often spectacular, non-human forms. Critics of this mode of automediality note that users can adopt virtually any persona they like (racial, religious, gendered and sexual, human, animal or hybrid, and of any age), behaving as “identity tourists” while occupying virtual space or inhabiting online communities (Nakamura). Furthermore, recent work by Jaron Lanier, a key figure from the 1980s period of early Virtual Reality (VR) technology, has also explored so-called “homuncular flexibility” which describes the capacity for humans to seemingly adapt automatically to the control mechanisms of an avatar with multiple legs, other non-human appendages, or for two users to work in tandem to control a single avatar (Won et. al.). But this article is concerned less with these single or multi-player online environments and the associated concerns over modifying interactive identities. We are principally interested in other automedial modes where the “auto” of autobiography is automated via Artificial Intelligences (AIs) to convincingly mimic human discourse as narrated life-histories.We draw from case studies promoted by the 2017 season of ABC television’s flagship science program, Catalyst, which opened with semi-regular host and biological engineer Dr Jordan Nguyen, proclaiming in earnest, almost religious fervour: “I want to do something that has long been a dream. I want to create a copy of a human. An avatar. And it will have a life of its own in virtual reality.” As the camera followed Nguyen’s rapid pacing across real space he extolled: “Virtual reality, virtual human, they push the limits of the imagination and help us explore the impossible […] I want to create a virtual copy of a person. A digital addition to the family, using technology we have now.”The troubling implications of such rhetoric were stark and the next third of the program did little to allay such techno-scientific misgivings. Directed and produced by David Symonds, with Nguyen credited as co-developer and presenter, the episode “Meet the Avatars” immediately introduced scenarios where “volunteers” entered a pop-up inner city virtual lab, to experience VR for the first time. The volunteers were shown on screen subjected to a range of experimental VR environments designed to elicit fear and/or adverse and disorienting responses such as vertigo, while the presenter and researchers from Sydney University constantly smirked and laughed at their participants’ discomfort. We can only wonder what the ethics process was for both the ABC and university researchers involved in these broadcast experiments. There is little doubt that the participant/s experienced discomfort, if not distress, and that was televised to a national audience. Presenter Nguyen was also shown misleading volunteers on their way to the VR lab, when one asked “You’re not going to chuck us out of a virtual plane are you?” to which Nguyen replied “I don't know what we’re going to do yet,” when it was next shown that they immediately underwent pre-programmed VR exposure scenarios, including a fear of falling exercise from atop a city skyscraper.The sweat-inducing and heart rate-racing exposures to virtual plank walks high above a cityscape, or seeing subjects haptically viewing spiders crawl across their outstretched virtual hands, all elicited predictable responses, showcased as carnivalesque entertainment for the viewing audience. As we will see, this kind of trivialising of a virtual environment’s capacity for immersion belies the serious use of the technology in a range of treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder (see Rizzo and Koenig; Rothbaum, Rizzo and Difede).Figure 1: Nguyen and researchers enjoying themselves as their volunteers undergo VR exposure Defining AutomedialityIn their pioneering 2008 work, Automedialität: Subjektkonstitution in Schrift, Bild und neuen Medien, Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser coined the term “automediality” to problematise the production, application and distribution of autobiographic modes across various media and genres—from literary texts to audiovisual media and from traditional expression to inter/transmedia and remediated formats. The concept of automediality was deployed to counter the conventional critical exclusion of analysis of the materiality/technology used for an autobiographical purpose (Gernalzick). Dünne and Moser proffered a concept of automediality that rejects the binary division of (a) self-expression determining the mediated form or (b) (self)subjectivity being solely produced through the mediating technology. Hence, automediality has been traditionally applied to literary constructs such as autobiography and life-writing, but is now expanding into the digital domain and other “paratextual sites” (Maguire).As Nadja Gernalzick suggests, automediality should “encourage and demand not only a systematics and taxonomy of the constitution of the self in respectively genre-specific ways, but particularly also in medium-specific ways” (227). Emma Maguire has offered a succinct working definition that builds on this requirement to signal the automedial universally, noting it operates asa way of studying auto/biographical texts (of a variety of forms) that take into account how the effects of media shape the kinds of selves that can be represented, and which understands the self not as a preexisting subject that might be distilled into story form but as an entity that is brought into being through the processes of mediation.Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point to automediality as a methodology, and in doing so emphasize how the telling or mediation of a life actually shapes the kind of story that can be told autobiographically. They state “media cannot simply be conceptualized as ‘tools’ for presenting a preexisting, essential self […] Media technologies do not just transparently present the self. They constitute and expand it” (Smith and Watson “Virtually Me” 77).This distinction is vital for understanding how automediality might be applied to self-expression in virtual domains, including the holographic avatar dreams of Nguyen throughout Catalyst. Although addressing this distinction in relation to online websites, following P. David Marshall’s description of “the proliferation of the public self”, Maguire notes:The same integration of digital spaces and platforms into daily life that is prompting the development of new tools in autobiography studies […] has also given rise to the field of persona studies, which addresses the ways in which individuals engage in practices of self-presentation in order to form commoditised identities that circulate in affective communities.For Maguire, these automedial works operate textually “to construct the authorial self or persona”.An extension to this digital, authorial construction is apparent in the exponential uptake of screen mediated prosumer generated content, whether online or theatrical (Miller). According to Gernalzick, unlike fictional drama films, screen autobiographies more directly enable “experiential temporalities”. Based on Mary Anne Doane’s promotion of the “indexicality” of film/screen representations to connote the real, Gernalzick suggests that despite semiotic theories of the index problematising realism as an index as representation, the film medium is still commonly comprehended as the “imprint of time itself”:Film and the spectator of film are said to be in a continuous present. Because the viewer is aware, however, that the images experienced in or even as presence have been made in the past, the temporality of the so-called filmic present is always ambiguous” (230).When expressed as indexical, automedial works, the intrinsic audio-visual capacities of film and video (as media) far surpass the temporal limitations of print and writing (Gernalzick, 228). One extreme example can be found in an emergent trend of “performance crime” murder and torture videos live-streamed or broadcast after the fact using mobile phone cameras and FaceBook (Bender). In essence, the political economy of the automedial ecology is important to understand in the overall context of self expression and the governance of content exhibition, access, distribution and—where relevant—interaction.So what are the implications for automedial works that employ virtual interfaces and how does this evolving medium inform both the expressive autobiographical mode and audiences subjectivities?Case StudyThe Catalyst program described above strove to shed new light on the potential for emerging technology to capture and create virtual avatars from living participants who (self-)generate autobiographical narratives interactively. Once past the initial gee-wiz journalistic evangelism of VR, the episode turned towards host Nguyen’s stated goal—using contemporary technology to create an autonomous virtual human clone. Nguyen laments that if he could create only one such avatar, his primary choice would be that of his grandfather who died when Nguyen was two years old—a desire rendered impossible. The awkward humour of the plank walk scenario sequence soon gives way as the enthusiastic Nguyen is surprised by his family’s discomfort with the idea of digitally recreating his grandfather.Nguyen next visits a Southern California digital media lab to experience the process by which 3D virtual human avatars are created. Inside a domed array of lights and cameras, in less than one second a life-size 3D avatar is recorded via 6,000 LEDs illuminating his face in 20 different combinations, with eight cameras capturing the exposures from multiple angles, all in ultra high definition. Called the Light Stage (Debevec), it is the same technology used to create a life size, virtual holocaust survivor, Pinchas Gutter (Ziv).We see Nguyen encountering a life-size, high-resolution 2D screen version of Gutter’s avatar. Standing before a microphone, Nguyen asks a series of questions about Gutter’s wartime experiences and life in the concentration camps. The responses are naturalistic and authentic, as are the pauses between questions. The high definition 4K screen is photo-realist but much more convincing in-situ (as an artifact of the Catalyst video camera recording, in some close-ups horizontal lines of transmission appear). According to the project’s curator, David Traum, the real Pinchas Gutter was recorded in 3D as a virtual holograph. He spent 25 hours providing 1,600 responses to a broad range of questions that the curator maintained covered “a lot of what people want to say” (Catalyst).Figure 2: The Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan presented an installation of New Dimensions in Testimony, featuring Pinchas Gutter and Eva SchlossIt is here that the intersection between VR and auto/biography hybridise in complex and potentially difficult ways. It is where the concept of automediality may offer insight into this rapidly emerging phenomenon of creating interactive, hyperreal versions of our selves using VR. These hyperreal VR personae can be questioned and respond in real-time, where interrogators interact either as casual conversers or determined interrogators.The impact on visitors is sobering and palpable. As Nguyen relates at the end of his session, “I just want to give him a hug”. The demonstrable capacity for this avatar to engender a high degree of empathy from its automedial testimony is clear, although as we indicate below, it could simply indicate increased levels of emotion.Regardless, an ongoing concern amongst witnesses, scholars and cultural curators of memorials and museums dedicated to preserving the history of mass violence, and its associated trauma, is that once the lived experience and testimony of survivors passes with that generation the impact of the testimony diminishes (Broderick). New media modes of preserving and promulgating such knowledge in perpetuity are certainly worthy of embracing. As Stephen Smith, the executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation suggests, the technology could extendto people who have survived cancer or catastrophic hurricanes […] from the experiences of soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder or survivors of sexual abuse, to those of presidents or great teachers. Imagine if a slave could have told her story to her grandchildren? (Ziv)Yet questions remain as to the veracity of these recorded personae. The avatars are created according to a specific agenda and the autobiographical content controlled for explicit editorial purposes. It is unclear what and why material has been excluded. If, for example, during the recorded questioning, the virtual holocaust survivor became mute at recollecting a traumatic memory, cried or sobbed uncontrollably—all natural, understandable and authentic responses given the nature of the testimony—should these genuine and spontaneous emotions be included along with various behavioural ticks such as scratching, shifting about in the seat and other naturalistic movements, to engender a more profound realism?The generation of the photorealist, mimetic avatar—remaining as an interactive persona long after the corporeal, authorial being is gone—reinforces Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra, where a clone exists devoid of its original entity and unable to challenge its automedial discourse. And what if some unscrupulous hacker managed to corrupt and subvert Gutter’s AI so that it responded antithetically to its purpose, by denying the holocaust ever happened? The ethical dilemmas of such a paradigm were explored in the dystopian 2013 film, The Congress, where Robyn Wright plays herself (and her avatar), as an out of work actor who sells off the rights to her digital self. A movie studio exploits her screen persona in perpetuity, enabling audiences to “become” and inhabit her avatar in virtual space while she is limited in the real world from undertaking certain actions due to copyright infringement. The inability of Wright to control her mimetic avatar’s discourse or action means the assumed automedial agency of her virtual self as an immortal, interactive being remains ontologically perplexing.Figure 3: Robyn Wright undergoing a full body photogrammetry to create her VR avatar in The Congress (2013)The various virtual exposures/experiences paraded throughout Catalyst’s “Meet the Avatars” paradoxically recorded and broadcast a range of troubling emotional responses to such immersion. Many participant responses suggest great caution and sensitivity be undertaken before plunging headlong into the new gold rush mentality of virtual reality, augmented reality, and AI affordances. Catalyst depicted their program subjects often responding in discomfort and distress, with some visibly overwhelmed by their encounters and left crying. There is some irony that presenter Ngyuen was himself relying on the conventions of 2D linear television journalism throughout, adopting face-to-camera address in (unconscious) automedial style to excitedly promote the assumed socio-cultural boon such automedial VR avatars will generate.Challenging AuthenticityThere are numerous ethical considerations surrounding the potential for AIs to expand beyond automedial (self-)expression towards photorealist avatars interacting outside of their pre-recorded content. When such systems evolve it may be neigh impossible to discern on screen whether the person you are conversing with is authentic or an indistinguishable, virtual doppelganger. In the future, a variant on the Turning Test may be needed to challenge and identify such hyperreal simulacra. We may be witnessing the precursor to such a dilemma playing out in the arena of audio-only podcasts, with some public intellectuals such as Sam Harris already discussing the legal and ethical problems from technology that can create audio from typed text that convincingly replicate the actual voice of a person by sampling approximately 30 minutes of their original speech (Harris). Such audio manipulation technology will soon be available to anybody with the motivation and relatively minor level of technological ability in order to assume an identity and masquerade as automediated dialogue. However, for the moment, the ability to convincingly alter a real-time computer generated video image of a person remains at the level of scientific innovation.Also of significance is the extent to which the audience reactions to such automediated expressions are indeed empathetic or simply part of the broader range of affective responses that also include direct sympathy as well as emotions such as admiration, surprise, pity, disgust and contempt (see Plantinga). There remains much rhetorical hype surrounding VR as the “ultimate empathy machine” (Milk). Yet the current use of the term “empathy” in VR, AI and automedial forms of communication seems to be principally focused on the capacity for the user-viewer to ameliorate negatively perceived emotions and experiences, whether traumatic or phobic.When considering comments about authenticity here, it is important to be aware of the occasional slippage of technological terminology into the mainstream. For example, the psychological literature does emphasise that patients respond strongly to virtual scenarios, events, and details that appear to be “authentic” (Pertaub, Slater, and Barker). Authentic in this instance implies a resemblance to a corresponding scenario/activity in the real world. This is not simply another word for photorealism, but rather it describes for instance the experimental design of one study in which virtual (AI) audience members in a virtual seminar room designed to treat public speaking anxiety were designed to exhibit “random autonomous behaviours in real-time, such as twitches, blinks, and nods, designed to encourage the illusion of life” (Kwon, Powell and Chalmers 980). The virtual humans in this study are regarded as having greater authenticity than an earlier project on social anxiety (North, North, and Coble) which did not have much visual complexity but did incorporate researcher-triggered audio clips of audience members “laughing, making comments, encouraging the speaker to speak louder or more clearly” (Kwon, Powell, and Chalmers 980). The small movements, randomly cued rather than according to a recognisable pattern, are described by the researchers as creating a sense of authenticity in the VR environment as they seem to correspond to the sorts of random minor movements that actual human audiences in a seminar can be expected to make.Nonetheless, nobody should regard an interaction with these AIs, or the avatar of Gutter, as in any way an encounter with a real person. Rather, the characteristics above function to create a disarming effect and enable the real person-viewer to willingly suspend their disbelief and enter into a pseudo-relationship with the AI; not as if it is an actual relationship, but as if it is a simulation of an actual relationship (USC). Lucy Suchman and colleagues invoke these ideas in an analysis of a YouTube video of some apparently humiliating human interactions with the MIT created AI-robot Mertz. Their analysis contends that, while it may appear on first glance that the humans’ mocking exchange with Mertz are mean-spirited, there is clearly a playfulness and willingness to engage with a form of AI that is essentially continuous with “long-standing assumptions about communication as information processing, and in the robot’s performance evidence for the limits to the mechanical reproduction of interaction as we know it through computational processes” (Suchman, Roberts, and Hird).Thus, it will be important for future work in the area of automediated testimony to consider the extent to which audiences are willing to suspend disbelief and treat the recounted traumatic experience with appropriate gravitas. These questions deserve attention, and not the kind of hype displayed by the current iteration of techno-evangelism. Indeed, some of this resurgent hype has come under scrutiny. From the perspective of VR-based tourism, Janna Thompson has recently argued that “it will never be a substitute for encounters with the real thing” (Thompson). Alyssa K. Loh, for instance, also argues that many of the negatively themed virtual experiences—such as those that drop the viewer into a scene of domestic violence or the location of a terrorist bomb attack—function not to put you in the position of the actual victim but in the position of the general category of domestic violence victim, or bomb attack victim, thus “deindividuating trauma” (Loh).Future work in this area should consider actual audience responses and rely upon mixed-methods research approaches to audience analysis. In an era of alt.truth and Cambridge Analytics personality profiling from social media interaction, automediated communication in the virtual guise of AIs demands further study.ReferencesAnon. “New Dimensions in Testimony.” Museum of Jewish Heritage. 15 Dec. 2017. 19 Apr. 2018 <http://mjhnyc.org/exhibitions/new-dimensions-in-testimony/>.Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Meet The Avatars.” Catalyst, 15 Aug. 2017.Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Simulations.” Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. 166-184.Bender, Stuart Marshall. Legacies of the Degraded Image in Violent Digital Media. 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