Journal articles on the topic 'Current intimate writing'

The use of social-networking application such as WhatsApp in learning writing enables students to foster individual learning experiences during the class and after the class. WhatsApp itself has a special feature to create the specific group in order to bound the members and intimate the interaction among lecturer and students relating to the course matters. This current study generally explores the students’ perceptions in experiencing WhatsApp Group Chat in learning writing. This qualitative research was conducted in one of universities in Lampung province, Indonesia. The subjects were 28 second year undergraduate students who enrolled writing course. The data used were questionnaire, interview, and observations. The findings present the multitude of views that most students significantly showed positive result to use WhatsApp Group in their writing class. By experiencing WhatsApp Group Chat in their learning writing, the students admitted that it is user-friendly and easy to use because it can intensify the interaction with the other group members during the class and after the class, be effective in submitting the writing assignment by uploading the file in the group, get the lecturer’s feedback directly after submitting the writing assignment, and freely ask and share the writing materials. However, some students also revealed that there were some technical problems found when they used the WhatsApp Group Chat such as abundant chats, poor signal, and junks notification. Nevertheless, learning writing through these cross-platform instant messaging might broaden the student’s self-learning experiences.Keywords: Students’ experience, WhatsApp Group, writing class

Keats's tracks into the nineteenth century angle toward a “modernism” often defined at his expense—yet with latent identifications. In relations of past and present, figurai identifications may register in nuances different from conscious allusion or the psychodramas of influence, ravages and resistance, hauntings and felt belatedness that issue in self-interested misreadings. “Latent Keats” and “Latent Yeats” play into an important, underreported current in both Keats studies and Yeats studies: a “Long Romanticism” in intimate verbal figures that trouble any “Modernism” of definitional difference from “Romantic.” Keats's writing harbors figures to which Yeats could respond, even correspond, vexed as he was by “Keats” as the name for the puerile outsider's dreamy sensuousness that a proper “modernist” needed to spurn. Such complication is one of the variable formations by which a “modernist” program manages to conjure the “Romantic” precedence it would supersede.

Abstract This article approaches recent discussions on the state of contemporary CanLit as a body of literary texts, an academic field, and an institution. The discussion is informed primarily by a number of recent or relatively recent publications, such as Trans.CanLit. Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature (Kamboureli & Miki 2007), Refuse. CanLit in Ruins (McGregor, Rak & Wunker 2018), Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada (McWatt, Maharaj & Brand 2018), and the discussions and/or controversies some of those generated – expressed through newspaper and magazine articles, scholarly essays, but also through tweets, etc. The texts have been written as a response to the current state and – in some cases – scandals of CanLit. Many constitute attempts at starting or contributing to a discussion aimed at not only taking stock of, but also reinterpreting and re-defining the field and the institution in view of the challenges of the globalising world. Perhaps more importantly, they address also the challenges resulting from the rift between CanLit as implicated in the (post)colonial nation-building project and rigid institutional structures, perpetuating the silencings, erasures, and hierarchies resulting from such entanglements, and actual literary texts produced by an increasingly diversified group of writers working with a widening range of topics and genres, and creating often intimate, autobiographically inspired art with a sense of responsibility to marginalised communities. The article concludes with the example of Indigenous writing and the position some young Indigenous writers take in the current discussions.

The specifics of the diary as a genre of literature is considered. An attempt is made to understand the genre nature of the diary and identify the characteristic features of its narrative structure. Turning to the diary entries of Bakhyt Kairbekov, we analyze the subspecies of the diary as a genre and pose the question of the intertextual specifics of the poet’s diaries. We reveal such characteristic features of the narrative structure of diaries as chronology, dating, aphorism, dialogics, evaluation. It is proved that the specific form of the diary is one of the individual style of a artistic person who realizes his abilities in various fields of artistic work. We establish that the diary form of writing is characterized by a number of features that can be implemented to a greater or lesser extent in each diary: 1) the frequency, regularity of recordings; 2) the relationship of records with current, and not with long-past events; 3) the spontaneous nature of the records; 4) literary rawness of records; 5) addresslessness or uncertainty of the addressee; 6) the intimate and therefore sincere, private nature of the notes.

AbstractWhile a superb scholarship on Morgenthau as a political theorist has literally exploded over the past ten years, his analysis of foreign policy has been generally neglected, overlooking the intimate relationship between theory and policy in his practical philosophy. This article presents Morgenthau's public opposition to the Vietnam War by placing it in the broader framework of his theoretical work. In doing so, I illustrate and clarify the meaning of three theses that are at the very centre of his political reflection: the critique to any type of universalistic understanding of world politics; his claim about the intangible roots and social bases of political order; and, finally, the dangers of the ‘military displacement of politics’. Writing about Morgenthau's critique of American intervention in Vietnam today is neither a purely academic exercise, nor a mere historical reconstruction of a great scholar's position on one of the most important military conflicts of the twentieth century. In fact, this article aims to shed light on some intellectual categories which seem to be useful in order to understand current political phenomena, and to criticise philosophies and faulty modes of thought that still enjoy a predominant but unjustified political status.

This article examines the writing and reception of Tchaikovskii's biography in Russia since 1991, arguing that there has been a constant tension between documentary approaches to the composer's life on the one hand, and popular responses that have frequently resisted scholarly narratives on the other. After the Soviet collapse, a number of former taboos relating to Tchaikovskii's life were lifted, including his homosexuality. Documentary sources began to appear in print, including unexpurgated editions of his letters and diaries. Yet this process has not been without its detractors. Alongside a general tendency to decry the publication and citation of intimate personal correspondence, there have been a number of attempts in the popular press to “disprove” that Tchaikovskii was a homosexual. Social media have proved to be a further site for the discussion of these issues, disseminating the findings of scholarly literature to a readership far wider than originally anticipated. By way of conclusion, it will be suggested that one of the fundamental reasons for the frequent denial of Tchaikovskii's sexuality is that the cause of equal rights is in tension with current trends in Russian politics and society.

Este artículo propone interesarse por Une Fille amoureuse de Pauline Réage, un texto que se inscribe en el ámbito muy amplio de las escrituras del yo. Entre los diferentes modelos de literatura íntima existentes, Une Fille amoureuse se acerca a la autoficción, un tipo textual que progresivamente ha invadido el paisaje literario de principios del siglo XXI. La obra fue publicada en 1969, es así anterior a los primeros intentos de conceptualización a los que la autoficción ha dado lugar y también es anterior a la aparición misma de la noción de autoficción. Este artículo analiza los rasgos distintivos de la autoficción que reúne Une Fille amoureuse, un relato en el que Pauline Réage explora las fronteras entre la ficción novelesca y la realidad autobiográfica y deja expresarse una voz femenina que se desvela inventándose a través del juego de la escritura. This article examines Pauline Réage’s Une Fille amoureuse, a text that can be categorized as belonging to the vast field of writings on the self. Among the various types of current intimate literature, Une Fille amoureuse is closer to autofiction, a kind of text that has progressively taken over the literary landscape of the 21st century. It was published in 1969, which makes it not only prior to the first conceptualization tentatives that resulted from autofiction, but also prior to the appearance of the very notion of autofiction. This study enquires into the distinctive traits of autofiction present in Une Fille amoureuse, in which Pauline Réage explores the boundaries between novel and autobiography, allowing a feminine voice to unfold as it is revealed by the writing itself. Cet article propose d’étudier Une Fille amoureuse de Pauline Réage, un texte qui s’inscrit dans le champ très vaste des écritures du moi. Parmi les différents modèles de littérature intime existants, Une Fille amoureuse se rapproche de l’autofiction, un type textuel qui a progressivement envahi le paysage littéraire du début du XXIe siècle. L’œuvre a été publiée en 1969, elle est donc antérieure aux premières tentatives de conceptualisation auxquelles l’autofiction a donné lieu et elle est aussi antérieure à l’apparition même de la notion d’autofiction. Cet article analyse les traits distinctifs de l’autofiction que réunit Une Fille amoureuse, un récit dans lequel Pauline Réage explore les frontières entre la fiction romanesque et la réalité autobiographique et laisse s’exprimer une voix féminine qui se dévoile tout en s’inventant par le jeu de l’écriture.

Abstrak Wabah covid-19 yang melanda seluruh dunia di awal tahun 2020 telah menyebabkan kesusahan dan penderitaan bagi siapa saja. Akibat dari wabah ini memaksa semua orang untuk melakukan semaksimal mungkin aktivitasnya secara daring yang berbasis online. Ini dilakukan untuk menghindari kerumunan orang banyak guna pencegahan penularan covid-19. Media sosial menjadi pilihan utama dalam melakukan berbagai aktivitas sepeti belajar, bekerja, terlebih aktivitas keagamaan. Metode yag digunakan dalam penulisan artikel ini adalah metode deskriftif kualitatif. Peristiwa covid yang terjadi saat ini tentu mengharuskan umat Tuhan untuk melakukan ibadah di rumah masing-masing dengan mengikuti live streming secara daring, karena peribadatan secara offline tidak direkomendasikan pemerintah di masa pandemi. Pemanfaatan media sosial untuk tetap menjaga rohani dan pertumbuhan jemaat harus diupayakan oleh gereja. Oleh karena itu, penggunaan media sosial sebagai sarana dalam beribadah agar tetap tercipta pertumbuhan iman jemaat merupakan biblika, karena dimasa para jemaat mula-mula pun memulai peribadatan dari rumah ke rumah. Karena konsep ibadah yang tercatat di dalam Perjajian Lama dan Perjanjian Baru dapat menggambarkan bahwa essensi dari ibadah yang sebenarnya adalah hubungan pribadi yang intim antara manusia dengan Allahnya. Kata Kunci: Covid19, Media Sosial, Pertumbuhan Iman, Jemaat. AbstractThe covid-19 outbreak that hit the world in early 2020 has caused distress and suffering for everyone. The aftermath of this outbreak forced everyone to do their best online-based activities. This is done to avoid crowds to prevent the transmission of covid-19. Social media is the main choice in doing various activities such as studying, working, especially religious activities. The method used in the writing of this article is the qualitative descriptive method. The current covid event certainly requires God's people to perform worship in their homes by following live streming online, because offline worship is not recommended by the government during the pandemic. The use of social media to maintain spiritual and congregational growth should be pursued by the church. Therefore, the use of social media as a means of worship in order to keep the growth of the faith of the church is a biblical, because in the early church began to worship from house to house. Because the concept of worship recorded in the Old and New Testaments can describe that the essensi of worship is actually an intimate personal relationship between man and his God. Keywords: Covid19, Social Media, Faith Growth, Church.

The Ukrainian philologist, philosopher, psychologist and didactic V. V. Repkin (1927) is the third most important figure in the Elkonin-Davydov system, however, his work is virtually unknown in the West, especially in Brazil. This educator and scientist made important contributions to the system and, in general, to the developmental didactic of activity in fields as diverse as: theory of study activity, Russian language teaching methodology, teacher training, transition between different levels of education, system diagnosis, creation and consolidation of groups and research centers, as well as the foundation of the International Association of Developmental Education. This article specifically approaches Repkin’s theoretical and methodological contributions in three specific fields of knowledge: 1) activity (content, objectives, tasks and structure); 2) transition from the primary to the secondary level of studies (the new contents of the learning activity, new methods and teacher training) and; 3) developmental teaching of language and the problem of orthographic alphabetization (the phonetic principle, the formation of the phoneme concept, and orthographic writing). One has concluded that most of the work written by V.V.Repkin remains in the Russian and Ukrainian language, which makes it difficult to know its contributions, mainly in the field of the psychological and didactics theory of the Study Activity and the specific didactics of the Russian language. V.V.Repkin, besides criticizing the traditional school because it wrongly tries to prepare for a whole life, formulated a new proposal for the basis of the idea of developmental teaching, whose fundamental aim is to form in the subject the Study Activity that leads to his own transformation via theoretical thought formation (scientific concepts, ways of action and principles of action). Within the study activity theory, V.V.Repkin has contributed specifically in relation to, on one side, the study of developing cognitive interests, its differences to the needs, as well as the attachment existing between them; on the other side, going deeply into the principles of action as a component of the theoretical thought. About the transition process from a level to another, V.V.Repkin contributed pointing to the main challenges inherent to such question, mainly, the methods and contents belonging to the next level and the kind of suitable formation that was necessary for teachers. One has also considered that for the teaching of the Russian language the same hypothesis elaborated for primary teaching could be used, at the same time defended a specific way of Study Activity that had permitted the intimate and personal communication of the adolescents, as well as the learning of regulations of social and organizational work. Based on these and other contributions, it is possible to measure the magnitude of the theoretical and didactics work of V.V.Repkin, which still may be of great utility in the current Brazilian context, taking into consideration the different realities for the improvement of teaching and education.

Pablo Corro‘s 2014 book Retóricas del cine chileno (Rhetorics of Chilean Cinema) is a wide-ranging examination of the style and concerns that have come to characterise Chilean film-making from the 1950s to the present day. Corro demonstrates how ideas of national cinema are always to some extent dependent on transnational currents of cinematic ideas and techniques, as well as on local political contexts. The chapter presented here, Weak Poetics, adapts Gianni Vattimo‘s notion of weak thought to discuss the growing attention paid by Chilean films to the mundane, the everyday and the intimate. Corro‘s dense, allusive writing skilfully mirrors the films he describes, in which meaning is fragmented and dispersed into glimpsed appearances and acousmatic sounds. Corros historicisation of this fracturing of meaning allows the cinema of the everyday to be understood not as a retreat from politics, but as a recasting of the grounds on which it might occur.

Laboratory courses have a central and distinctive role in sci- ence education. The need of improving laboratory curricular materials in environmental soil microbiology education is a must more than ever as due to the followings: (i) emerg- ing of new types of soil biological problems associated with new manipulated environments, (ii) the intimacy of human, plants, and animals to soil microbial activities, and (iii) en- vironmental soil-connected issues is the area of current re- search interests. We present a novel research-oriented labo- ratory course for undergraduates in soil science, according to the need of reforming the laboratory curriculum as called by the National Science Education Standards to advocate in- quiry and cognitivity in teaching and learning. Our inquiry- based environmental soil microbiology laboratory course provides a good pedagogical opportunity in promoting criti- cal thinking, making predictions, proposing causative factors, and presenting consistent arguments to support a position through effective scientific writing. The novelty of our labora- tory curriculum relies on the integration of three main com- ponents namely the “skill learning”, “research experience”, and “effective writing skills” which ultimately may help in optimizing students thinking performance towards research oriented mindset. The course is divided into two modules (I & II), where in module I students are introduced to the basic principles and techniques in soil microbiology. As for module II, students are assigned a research project to enhance their critical thinking and develop their conceptual skills in design- ing an experiment, problem solving, gathering and analy- sis of data, and scientific writing. The unit content can be modified to suit other specific laboratory curriculums in other branches of natural science without loss of students learning efficiency or impact.

Jean-François Lyotard's work remains a largely untapped resource for film-philosophy. This article surveys four fundamental concepts which indicate the fecundity of this work for current studies and debates. While Lyotard was generally associated with the “theory” of the 1980s which privileged language, signs, and cultural representations, much of his work in fact resonates more strongly with the new materialisms and realisms currently taking centre stage. The concepts examined here indicate the relevance of Lyotard's work in four related contemporary contexts: the renewed interest in the dispositif, new materialism, the affective turn, and speculative realism. The concept of the dispositif (or apparatus) is being rehabilitated in the contemporary context because it shows a way beyond the limiting notion of mise en scène which has dominated approaches to film, and Lyotard's prevalent use of this concept feeds into this renewal. While matter is not an explicit theme in Lyotard's writings on film, it is nevertheless one at the heart of his aesthetics, and it may be extended for application to film. Affect was an important theme for Lyotard in many contexts, including his approaches to film, where it appears to subvert film's “seductive” (ideological) effects. Finally, the Real emerges as a central concept in Lyotard's last essay on cinema, where, perhaps surprisingly, it intimates something close to a speculative realist aesthetics. Each of the fundamental concepts of Lyotard's film-philosophy are introduced in the context of the current fields and debates to which they are relevant, and are discussed with filmic examples, including Michael Snow's La Région centrale (1971), Roberto Rossellini's Stromboli (Stromboli, terra di Dio, 1950), Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), and neo-realist cinema.

This article draws on the findings of in-depth interviews with consumers of portable storage devices in Melbourne, Australia, to explore the enduring significance of Universal Serial Bus (USB) portable flash drives. In the article, we develop the concept of ‘liminoid media’ as a way of coming to terms with continued use, and complications of use. Our understanding of this term is inspired by the seminal anthropological writings of Victor Turner ( pace Arnold van Gennep), more recent scholarship applying liminality to media studies and debates within media theory concerning the status of old and new media (where it has been argued, among other things, that media are always in transition rather than part of a strict old–new binary). Against this backdrop, we employ ‘liminoid media’ as a way of making critical sense of the ‘betwixt and between’ status of USB portable flash drives – their ongoing ‘suspendedness’ – and the complicated tensions that characterise participant use of these devices. For our participants, USBs are understood as fulfilling a compromise between emergent practices of cloud computing and more established forms of centralised data storage; they are understood as temporary data storage devices that are often used in semi-permanent ways to protect against data loss; they are seen as ephemeral devices that are rarely disposed of. USBs are also ‘ritualised’ insofar as they frequently become intimate, aestheticised everyday objects; yet, accompanying this ritualised ‘suspendedness’ are certain forms of risk and danger – of obsolescence, of data loss, of device failure, and so on. USBs, in short, occupy an essential if complicated position in people’s contemporary data storage practices. Examining USBs, and the practices of use that surround them, we argue, provides insight into current (and always ongoing) changes in the media environment, and demonstrates the extent to which liminoid media are contemporary in use.

My appreciation of textual criticism – a nowadays somewhat marginalized subdiscipline that continues nevertheless to provide the foundation of our subject – has been vastly enhanced by Richard Tarrant's new book on the subject. I read it from cover to cover with great pleasure and satisfaction (several times laughing out loud, which doesn't happen often with works of scholarship), with great interest, and with dismay at my own ignorance, and I came away determined to be a better Classicist. This little volume is the fourteenth ‘suggestive essay’ published in CUP's Roman Literature and its Contexts series (established in 1990 by Denis Feeney and Stephen Hinds), but it does not – sadly – mark a revival of this excellent series, but rather a late addition. (There cannot be many Latinists of my generation who did not, as young scholars, aspire one day to be the author of one of these elegantly concise yet ground-breaking volumes.) On the face of it this volume is rather different from its predecessors, which usually engaged with cutting-edge theory from a Classical perspective; instead, Texts, Editors and Readers opens up to non-initiates such as myself a whole world of existing scholarship into which many literary scholars seldom venture, inhabited not only by the towering ‘heroic editors’ of the past (Chapter 1) but also by colourful characters such as ‘interpolation hunters’ (86), freewheeling neo-sceptics (77), elegant minimalists, and unrestrained maximalists. With a combination of vivid characterization, lucid explanation, and delicious detail, Tarrant outlines the challenges of establishing a decent text, and the techniques involved; in Chapters 3 to 5 we learn about recension, conjecture, interpolation, collaboration, and intertextuality. He also makes exceptionally clear the issues that are at stake in editing a text, and the tensions with which the discipline is charged. At every stage of the process, from the selection of manuscripts for scrutiny to the display of information in the final edition, choices need to be made that are bound to provoke dissent. The twin aims of providing a legible text and legible apparatus are often in conflict with one another. Eventually, to establish a readable text, an editor needs to choose a single solution and put all alternatives in the apparatus, which must then record the evidence and the decision process as far as possible. Done well, it allows us to understand the process by which the text of the edition has been established, and the contributions made by scholars over the years. But within Classics there is no agreement about precisely how this should be achieved, as Tarrant points out. As he makes clear with his comparison of two reviews of the same edition, one reviewer's ‘accuracy’ and ‘methodological rigor’ is another's ‘frivolous superfluities’ (25–6). Tarrant comments that one would hardly believe these evaluations pertained to the same edition of Lucan, but in fact the picture is consistent and the divergence of opinion is telling; what comes across strongly is that these two reviewers want something very different from their editions. The disagreement here is between a scholar who wants progress towards a better text, amending scribal errors and providing confident, robust conjectures, and another who is glad to find a text relatively untouched, but in the apparatus all the material that enables a reader to come to their own decisions about the variants to be preferred. The merits of both are clear; the tensions are between the aspiration for a readable, usable text and the desire to be transparent about the difficulties involved in establishing that text. A decisive reading may obscure ambiguities; excessive hedging muddies the reading. Every choice involves compromise: minimalists may omit important information that might allow the reader to draw different conclusions; maximalists risk cluttering up the page and seeming undiscriminating. Tarrant (a self-confessed minimalist) alarms us on pages 130–1 with the sight of the monstrous apparatus produced by an unrestrained maximalist. Meanwhile, while conservative critics are averse to new conjectures and stick as close to the manuscript reading as possible, conjecture emerges as a creative art form, where natural talent is enhanced by intimate appreciation of Latin literature and style (73); it can attract great admiration. I now aspire to be able someday to compile, as Tarrant does, my own list of favourite conjectures – a bit like a montage of favourite sporting moments, as one revels in the pleasure of seeing the execution of skilful manoeuvres. Chapter 6 brings our attention to a representative case where textual tradition and literary interpretation cannot be disentangled: is Propertius a ‘difficult’ poet, prone to elliptical writing, or is he an elegant writer whose text has been unfortunately mangled in transmission? In other words, where the text is hard to understand, do we spend our energies reading his poetry as if he were a modernist poet, teasing out cryptic meaning, or do we channel our energies into amending the text to something more easily comprehensible? One's prejudice about the nature of Propertius’ poetry inevitably shapes one's approach to editing the text. The question is insoluble, but the debates thereby evoked are illuminating. As Chapter 2 makes clear, this is a discipline that relies on persuasion and is characterized by strong rhetoric; the contempt and disgust that are directed at fellow scholars and inferior manuscripts are remarkable. Language is often emotive and moralizing; the bracketing of problematic lines described as ‘a coward's remedy’ (86, n. 2). Tarrant himself, who takes a light and genial tone throughout, doesn't shy away from describing a certain practice of citing scholars in the apparatus criticus as ‘an abomination’ (161). One of many evocative details is the idea of Housman storing up denunciations of editorial vices without a particular target yet in mind (68). Traditionally, self-belief and decisive authority have been the hallmarks of the ‘heroic’ style of editing, and these qualities are especially unfashionable in our own era, which prizes the acknowledgement of ambiguity and hermeneutic openness. Tarrant encourages us to accept that the notions of the ‘recoverable original’ or the ‘definitive edition’ are myths, but at the same time to acknowledge that they are necessary myths (40) for this ‘doomed yet noble’ endeavour (156). A critical edition is no more nor less than a provisional ‘working hypothesis’ which invites continued and continual engagement. As Tarrant puts it: ‘any edition, to the degree that it stimulates thinking about the text, begins the process that will lead to its being succeeded by another edition’ (147). Textual criticism should be, therefore, a collaborative endeavour to be marked by humility and an acceptance of the open-endedness of interpretation, of the hermeneutic work that an editor needs to undertake, and also of the overlap between the roles of editor and reader. It is easy to perceive textual criticism – with its heyday in the nineteenth century – as constituting the dry and dusty past of Classics, and indeed Tarrant treats us to a most entertaining account of its Heroic Age, when Housman et al. lashed one another with cruel wit and erudite put-downs. However, Tarrant also makes an irrefutable case for the continued relevance, and indeed the exciting future, of textual criticism – despite the fact that it has lost its position at the centre of our discipline, and so many of us are untrained and unable to appreciate its value. Tarrant's depiction of the discipline brings home the lesson – which we already knew, but now really get – that all classical scholars ought accordingly to be aware of these general issues and to have some grasp of the specific routes by which the text they are reading has been reached, the problematic aspects of that text, and the issues involved in attempting to resolve its problems. Such is the information that an apparatus criticus attempts to convey, and it may therefore be judged on how effectively and efficiently it does so. Having made all of this so clear and in such an engaging fashion, Tarrant concludes by providing as an appendix a helpful guide for the inexperienced to reading a critical apparatus. The final chapters explore two questions in particular: what can technological advances contribute (for instance in access to and presentation of manuscripts), and is the current model of the apparatus criticus fit for purpose? On the latter issue, Tarrant would like to see, at the very least, more scope for providing in the notes nuanced indication of the editor's feelings about the choices he or she has made. He proposes the wider use of phrases that allude to the internal struggles behind a rejected variant, for instance (such as utinam recte or aegre reieco) or the introduction of new symbols for the apparatus that would signal degrees of suspicion – although he doesn't go quite so far as to second Donaldson's suggestion for a pictorial symbol of ‘a small ostrich, with head in the sand’ to denote occasions where an editor follows a manuscript out of despair of making actual sense of the text (58, n. 25). Early in his essay, Tarrant expresses regret that new editions are less likely to be reviewed than other forms of scholarship, and, with the decline in the requisite editorial knowhow, it easy to see why: reviewing a new edition of a text is not a job that can be undertaken with confidence by most scholars of Latin literature. How can one pass judgement on an editor's decisions without a very sound knowledge not only of the work but also of the manuscripts available, of the relationships between them, and of the subsequent critical tradition? How can one comment on individual amendments or conjectures without an understanding of the entire interpretative framework which the critic has brought to bear? One of the many valuable things I have learned from Tarrant's book is that it not always necessary to comment on individual cruces; equally useful can be an evaluation of the general approach and principles upon which an edition is both established and communicated.

To dwell and to build is not an art, is not a technique, but a realm where things belong. This is a statement addressed by Heidegger in Bauen Wohnen Denken, his text more connected with architecture that is more contemporary than ever. In effect, two questions as What is it to dwell? and How does building belong to dwelling? are intertwined with others like How to dwell in the current world? and How to give form to the quality of dwelling? The responses should point out again to Heideggerian’s line of thought: ‘Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build’. He pushes the argument to the limit adding that dwelling is to conciliate ‘earth’, ‘heaven’, ‘the mortals’ and ‘the gods’ (the divine). To dwell and to build should be the preservation of such square. It is remarkable that Heidegger’s writings on this topic, that stimulated and still stimulate the architectural debate, were strongly influenced by the philosopher’s life in the Schwarzwald, close to the village of Todtnauberg. In Heidegger’s Hut (Adam Scharr) the hut in which Heidegger lived in for five decades, since he ordered its construction in 1922, is described, as well as the bonds he created with the landscape and all environment. The hut was a place for him to dwell and to think, because both belong together and were mutually influencing body, feelings and sense of place. And if Norberg-Shulz left the phenomenological legacy of the genius loci as the spirit of the place, with its particular atmosphere and fundamental implications for building, genius loci within Heidegger’s thoughts on building, dwelling and thinking recall the sense of protection and of sacredness of a place like the one called home. Life in balance with the spirit of the place showed Heidegger that the emotional space is measured very differently from space measured mathematically. And to build and to dwell are activities with a significant order that resonates in mind, body and spirit. For phenomenology, place is not just the geographic or topographic location, but consists of effective elements such as materials, form, texture, colour, light, shadow playing together. The interdependence of all those elements, along with others allows the opportunity for some spaces, with identical functions, to express diverse architectural features and therefore countlessatmospheres to perceive, enjoy and cherish. ‘Sometimes I can almost feel a particular door handle in my hand, a piece of metal shaped like the back of a spoon. I used to take hold of it when I went into my aunt’s garden. That door handle still seems to me like a special sign of entry into a world of different moods and smells. I remember the sound of the gravel under my feet, the soft gleam of the waxed oak staircase, I can hear the heavy front door closing behind me as I walk along the dark corridor and enter the kitchen, the only really brightly lit room in the house’, confesses Peter Zumthor. On the shoulders of these inspiring ideas and experiences, the plot for the 5th number of Sophia was designed. It called original articles that discuss the core of interiority in architecture as a matter open to diverse ideas and practices in the realm of built space to be experienced by its dwellers. Interiority to be argued as a dimension that differentiates a place of a non-place. The non-places are spots with which the individual does not create any relation; they are transit- places without memory, identity, history, personal construction, references, emotions of which solace is not a minor one. Interiority claims that kind of space that accommodates thoughts, dreams, nightmares, intimacy, changes, silence, noise, neurosis...life. Shelter, shape, place, atmosphere portray scenarios that enhance experiences, events, occurrences beyond the functionalistic rhetoric enveloping them. All the texts that compose this issue display the strong insights the authors chose to approach the proposed topic. They trigger new thoughts and new questions. Three articles and an interview appear as the hard core of this volume. Preserving heritage through new narratives: designing a guesthouse within a cross-disciplinary team from Pedro Bandeira Maia and Raul Pinto discusses a very demanding design program of transformation of an interior space from a former pharmacy to a guest house in a historical building from the nineteenth century. The article exposes the methodology followed by a cross disciplinary team debating the project’s narrative illustrated with very expressive images. The role of architecture in an engaging and meaningful experience of the physical exhibition from Bárbara Coutinho and Ana Tostões evolves from the main argument that the physical exhibition is the immediate way to encounter the arts in line with the phenomenological understanding of the aesthetic experience. It recalls the inspiring role of exhibition designs of Frederick Kiesler, Franco Albini and Lina Bo Bardi as examples to contrast with the growing process of digitalisation and dematerialisation of the involvement with art. Authors address then the reasons why for contemporary times it is important that an exhibition is designed to be a physical matter between spectators and art. The need for Shelter. Laugier, Ledoux, and Enlightenment’s shadows from Rui Aristides and José António Bandeirinha discourses about the human need for shelter as the essence that defines the discipline of architecture. This approach is developed within an historical framework, namely referring the legacy of Laugier and Ledoux intertwined with philosophical and political issues.Based upon these reasoning, the authors go further and tackle the architecture’s role regarding shelter in contemporary times. The interview The Power of Imagination made to Danish Designer Hans Thyge is an exciting journey to pertinent themes thought from the professional practice of a designer who after 30 years in design still believes in the use of a pencil and a paper to sketch and to imagine. ‘Interiors’ is central in this storytelling as a challenge to create spatial experiences and staging atmospheres. Also his own house, designed by him, is a key moment to make special considerations regarding dwelling and building. We are very thankful for authors’ contributions and vivid minds.

In the last two decades, education scholarship has made significant progress in advancing the feminist social justice agenda with women scholars having been almost entirely the drivers of this movement. Women scholars in teacher education have been successful in establishing and consolidating this disciplinary field of study quite firmly in the teacher education curriculum. Despite this, many forms of oppression, including domestic or intimate partner violence and sex- and gender-based violence, continue to plague South African universities and society in general. The current COVID-19 pandemic's mandatory home confinement restrictions have further exacerbated the conditions for individuals likely to experience domestic violence. Men have been relatively silent and inactive in this social justice project. There is also limited extant scholarship that addresses the role that profeminist men might play in this social justice enterprise. There is also little work that attempts to understand the level of sophistication with which men understand feminism, determine with which feminisms men might align themselves, and the accountability and responsibility that might come with assuming certain positions. In this critical autoethnographic piece, I engage with the questions of how critical pedagogical encounters in a teacher education course might serve as disruptive devices that trouble stubbornly resistant gendered socialisations. I draw on my experiences as a teacher educator as I struggle to locate and identify my own profeminist positionality and the tensions this presents. I contemplate the poststructuralist caution about writing (my)self into a text given that the writing self is an evolving/changing self. I reflect on my attempt to disrupt obliviousness as I contemplate the prospect of self-disclosure as a point of entry for profeminist men's praxis in a teacher education programme subscribed to by young men (and women) deeply socialised in a patriarchal history and culture.

In a media saturated world, doodles have recently received the kind of attention usually reserved for coverage of racy extra marital affairs, corrupt governance, and product malfunction. Former British Prime Minister Blair’s private doodling at a World Economic Forum meeting in 2005 raised suspicions that he, according to one keen graphologist, struggled “to maintain control in a confusing world," which infers he was attempting to cohere a scattershot, fragmentary series of events (Spiegel). However, placid-faced Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, who sat nearby, actually scrawled the doodles. In this case, perhaps the scrawls mimicked the ambience in the room: Gates might have been ‘tuning’–registering the ‘white noise’ of the participants, letting his unconscious dictate doodles as a way to cope with the dissonance trekking in with the officialspeak. The doodles may have documented and registered the space between words, acting like deposits from his gestalt.Sometimes the most intriguing doodles co-exist with printed texts. This includes common vernacular graffiti that lines public and private books and magazines. Such graffiti exposes tensions in the role of readers as well as horror vacui: a fear of unused, empty space. Yet, school children fingering fresh pages and stiff book spines for the first few times often consider their book pages as sanctioned, discreet, and inviolable. The book is an object of financial and cultural investment, or imbued both with mystique and ideologies. Yet, in the e-book era, the old-fashioned, physical page is a relic of sorts, a holdover from coarse papyrus culled from wetland sage, linking us to the First Dynasty in Egypt. Some might consider the page as a vessel for typography, a mere framing device for text. The margins may reflect a perimeter of nothingness, an invisible borderland that doodles render visible by inhabiting them. Perhaps the margins are a bare landscape, like unmarred flat sand in a black and white panchromatic photo with unique tonal signature and distinct grain. Perhaps the margins are a mute locality, a space where words have evaporated, or a yet-to-be-explored environment, or an ambient field. Then comes the doodle, an icon of vernacular art.As a modern folklorist, I have studied and explored vernacular art at length, especially forms that may challenge and fissure aesthetic, cultural, and social mores, even within my own field. For instance, I contend that Grandma Prisbrey’s “Bottle Village,” featuring millions of artfully arranged pencils, bottles, and dolls culled from dumps in Southern California, is a syncretic culturescape with underlying feminist symbolism, not merely the product of trauma and hoarding (Ensminger). Recently, I flew to Oregon to deliver a paper on Mexican-American gravesite traditions. In a quest for increased multicultural tolerance, I argued that inexpensive dimestore objects left on Catholic immigrant graves do not represent a messy landscape of trinkets but unique spiritual environments with links to customs 3,000 years old. For me, doodles represent a variation on graffiti-style art with cultural antecedents stretching back throughout history, ranging from ancient scrawls on Greek ruins to contemporary park benches (with chiseled names, dates, and symbols), public bathroom latrinalia, and spray can aerosol art, including ‘bombing’ and ‘tagging’ hailed as “Spectacular Vernaculars” by Russell Potter (1995). Noted folklorist Alan Dundes mused on the meaning of latrinalia in Here I Sit – A Study of American Latrinalia (1966), which has inspired pop culture books and web pages for the preservation and discussion of such art (see for instance, www.itsallinthehead.com/gallery1.html). Older texts such as Classic American Graffiti by Allen Walker Read (1935), originally intended for “students of linguistics, folk-lore, abnormal psychology,” reveal the field’s longstanding interest in marginal, crude, and profane graffiti.Yet, to my knowledge, a monograph on doodles has yet to be published by a folklorist, perhaps because the art form is reconsidered too idiosyncratic, too private, the difference between jots and doodles too blurry for a taxonomy and not the domain of identifiable folk groups. In addition, the doodles in texts often remain hidden until single readers encounter them. No broad public interaction is likely, unless a library text circulates freely, which may not occur after doodles are discovered. In essence, the books become tainted, infected goods. Whereas latrinalia speaks openly and irreverently, doodles feature a different scale and audience.Doodles in texts may represent a kind of speaking from the ‘margin’s margins,’ revealing the reader-cum-writer’s idiosyncratic, self-meaningful, and stylised hieroglyphics from the ambient margins of one’s consciousness set forth in the ambient margins of the page. The original page itself is an ambient territory that allows the meaning of the text to take effect. When those liminal spaces (both between and betwixt, in which the rules of page format, design, style, and typography are abandoned) are altered by the presence of doodles, the formerly blank, surplus, and soft spaces of the page offer messages coterminous with the text, often allowing readers to speak, however haphazardly and unconsciously, with and against the triggering text. The bleached whiteness can become a crowded milieu in the hands of a reader re-scripting the ambient territory. If the book is borrowed, then the margins are also an intimate negotiation with shared or public space. The cryptic residue of the doodler now resides, waiting, for the city of eyes.Throughout history, both admired artists and Presidents regularly doodled. Famed Italian Renaissance painter Filippo Lippi avoided strenuous studying by doodling in his books (Van Cleave 44). Both sides of the American political spectrum have produced plentiful inky depictions as well: roughshod Democratic President Johnson drew flags and pagodas; former Hollywood fantasy fulfiller turned politician Republican President Reagan’s specialty was western themes, recalling tropes both from his actor period and his duration acting as President; meanwhile, former law student turned current President, Barack Obama, has sketched members of Congress and the Senate for charity auctions. These doodles are rich fodder for both psychologists and cross-discipline analysts that propose theories regarding the automatic writing and self-styled miniature pictures of civic leaders. Doodles allow graphologists to navigate and determine the internal, cognitive fabric of the maker. To critics, they exist as mere trifles and offer nothing more than an iota of insight; doodles are not uncanny offerings from the recesses of memory, like bite-sized Rorschach tests, but simply sloppy scrawls of the bored.Ambient music theory may shed some light. Timothy Morton argues that Brian Eno designed to make music that evoked “space whose quality had become minimally significant” and “deconstruct the opposition … between figure and ground.” In fact, doodles may yield the same attributes as well. After a doodle is inserted into texts, the typography loses its primacy. There is a merging of the horizons. The text of the author can conflate with the text of the reader in an uneasy dance of meaning: the page becomes an interface revealing a landscape of signs and symbols with multiple intelligences–one manufactured and condoned, the other vernacular and unsanctioned. A fixed end or beginning between the two no longer exists. The ambient space allows potential energies to hover at the edge, ready to illustrate a tension zone and occupy the page. The blank spaces keep inviting responses. An emergent discourse is always in waiting, always threatening to overspill the text’s intended meaning. In fact, the doodles may carry more weight than the intended text: the hierarchy between authorship and readership may topple.Resistant reading may take shape during these bouts. The doodle is an invasion and signals the geography of disruption, even when innocuous. It is a leveling tool. As doodlers place it alongside official discourse, they move away from positions of passivity, being mere consumers, and claim their own autonomy and agency. The space becomes co-determinant as boundaries are blurred. The destiny of the original text’s meaning is deferred. The habitus of the reader becomes embodied in the scrawl, and the next reader must negotiate and navigate the cultural capital of this new author. As such, the doodle constitutes an alternative authority and economy of meaning within the text.Recent studies indicate doodling, often regarded as behavior that announces a person’s boredom and withdrawal, is actually a very special tool to prevent memory loss. Jackie Andrade, an expert from the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth, maintains that doodling actually “offsets the effects of selective memory blockade,” which yields a surprising result (quoted in “Doodling Gets”). Doodlers exhibit 29% more memory recall than those who passively listen, frozen in an unequal bond with the speaker/lecturer. Students that doodle actually retain more information and are likely more productive due to their active listening. They adeptly absorb information while students who stare patiently or daydream falter.Furthermore, in a 2006 paper, Andrew Kear argues that “doodling is a way in which students, consciously or not, stake a claim of personal agency and challenge some the values inherent in the education system” (2). As a teacher concerned with the engagement of students, he asked for three classes to submit their doodles. Letting them submit any two-dimensional graphic or text made during a class (even if made from body fluid), he soon discovered examples of “acts of resistance” in “student-initiated effort[s] to carve out a sense of place within the educational institution” (6). Not simply an ennui-prone teenager or a proto-surrealist trying to render some automatic writing from the fringes of cognition, a student doodling may represent contested space both in terms of the page itself and the ambience of the environment. The doodle indicates tension, and according to Kear, reflects students reclaiming “their own self-recognized voice” (6).In a widely referenced 1966 article (known as the “doodle” article) intended to describe the paragraph organisational styles of different cultures, Robert Kaplan used five doodles to investigate a writer’s thought patterns, which are rooted in cultural values. Now considered rather problematic by some critics after being adopted by educators for teacher-training materials, Kaplan’s doodles-as-models suggest, “English speakers develop their ideas in a linear, hierarchal fashion and ‘Orientals’ in a non-liner, spiral fashion…” (Severino 45). In turn, when used as pedagogical tools, these graphics, intentionally or not, may lead an “ethnocentric, assimilationist stance” (45). In this case, doodles likely shape the discourse of English as Second Language instruction. Doodles also represent a unique kind of “finger trace,” not unlike prints from the tips of a person’s fingers and snowflakes. Such symbol systems might be used for “a means of lightweight authentication,” according to Christopher Varenhorst of MIT (1). Doodles, he posits, can be used as “passdoodles"–a means by which a program can “quickly identify users.” They are singular expressions that are quirky and hard to duplicate; thus, doodles could serve as substitute methods of verifying people who desire devices that can safeguard their privacy without users having to rely on an ever-increasing number of passwords. Doodles may represent one such key. For many years, psychologists and psychiatrists have used doodles as therapeutic tools in their treatment of children that have endured hardship, ailments, and assault. They may indicate conditions, explain various symptoms and pathologies, and reveal patterns that otherwise may go unnoticed. For instance, doodles may “reflect a specific physical illness and point to family stress, accidents, difficult sibling relationships, and trauma” (Lowe 307). Lowe reports that children who create a doodle featuring their own caricature on the far side of the page, distant from an image of parent figures on the same page, may be experiencing detachment, while the portrayal of a father figure with “jagged teeth” may indicate a menace. What may be difficult to investigate in a doctor’s office conversation or clinical overview may, in fact, be gleaned from “the evaluation of a child’s spontaneous doodle” (307). So, if children are suffering physically or psychologically and unable to express themselves in a fully conscious and articulate way, doodles may reveal their “self-concept” and how they feel about their bodies; therefore, such creative and descriptive inroads are important diagnostic tools (307). Austrian born researcher Erich Guttman and his cohort Walter MacLay both pioneered art therapy in England during the mid-twentieth century. They posited doodles might offer some insight into the condition of schizophrenics. Guttman was intrigued by both the paintings associated with the Surrealist movement and the pioneering, much-debated work of Sigmund Freud too. Although Guttman mostly studied professionally trained artists who suffered from delusions and other conditions, he also collected a variety of art from patients, including those undergoing mescaline therapy, which alters a person’s consciousness. In a stroke of luck, they were able to convince a newspaper editor at the Evening Standard to provide them over 9,000 doodles that were provided by readers for a contest, each coded with the person’s name, age, and occupation. This invaluable data let the academicians compare the work of those hospitalised with the larger population. Their results, released in 1938, contain several key declarations and remain significant contributions to the field. Subsequently, Francis Reitman recounted them in his own book Psychotic Art: Doodles “release the censor of the conscious mind,” allowing a person to “relax, which to creative people was indispensable to production.”No appropriate descriptive terminology could be agreed upon.“Doodles are not communications,” for the meaning is only apparent when analysed individually.Doodles are “self-meaningful.” (37) Doodles, the authors also established, could be divided into this taxonomy: “stereotypy, ornamental details, movements, figures, faces and animals” or those “depicting scenes, medley, and mixtures” (37). The authors also noted that practitioners from the Jungian school of psychology often used “spontaneously produced drawings” that were quite “doodle-like in nature” in their own discussions (37). As a modern folklorist, I venture that doodles offer rich potential for our discipline as well. At this stage, I am offering a series of dictums, especially in regards to doodles that are commonly found adjacent to text in books and magazines, notebooks and journals, that may be expanded upon and investigated further. Doodles allow the reader to repopulate the text with ideogram-like expressions that are highly personalised, even inscrutable, like ambient sounds.Doodles re-purpose the text. The text no longer is unidirectional. The text becomes a point of convergence between writer and reader. The doodling allows for such a conversation, bilateral flow, or “talking back” to the text.Doodles reveal a secret language–informal codes that hearken back to the “lively, spontaneous, and charged with feeling” works of child art or naïve art that Victor Sanua discusses as being replaced in a child’s later years by art that is “stilted, formal, and conforming” (62).Doodling animates blank margins, the dead space of the text adjacent to the script, making such places ripe for spontaneous, fertile, and exploratory markings.Doodling reveals a democratic, participatory ethos. No text is too sacred, no narrative too inviolable. Anything can be reworked by the intimate graffiti of the reader. The authority of the book is not fixed; readers negotiate and form a second intelligence imprinted over the top of the original text, blurring modes of power.Doodles reveal liminal moments. Since the reader in unmonitored, he or she can express thoughts that may be considered marginal or taboo by the next reader. The original subject of the book itself does not restrict the reader. Thus, within the margins of the page, a brief suspension of boundaries and borders, authority and power, occurs. The reader hides in anonymity, free to reroute the meaning of the book. Doodling may convey a reader’s infantalism. Every book can become a picture book. This art can be the route returning a reader to the ambience of childhood.Doodling may constitute Illuminated/Painted Texts in reverse, commemorating the significance of the object in hitherto unexpected forms and revealing the reader’s codex. William Blake adorned his own poems by illuminating the skin/page that held his living verse; common readers may do so too, in naïve, nomadic, and primitive forms. Doodling demarcates tension zones, yielding social-historical insights into eras while offering psychological glimpses and displaying aesthetic values of readers-cum-writers.Doodling reveals margins as inter-zones, replete with psychogeography. While the typography is sanctioned, legitimate, normalised, and official discourse (“chartered” and “manacled,” to hijack lines from William Blake), the margins are a vernacular depository, a terminus, allowing readers a sense of agency and autonomy. The doodled page becomes a visible reminder and signifier: all pages are potentially “contested” spaces. Whereas graffiti often allows a writer to hide anonymously in the light in a city besieged by multiple conflicting texts, doodles allow a reader-cum-writer’s imprint to live in the cocoon of a formerly fossilised text, waiting for the light. Upon being opened, the book, now a chimera, truly breathes. Further exploration and analysis should likely consider several issues. What truly constitutes and shapes the role of agent and reader? Is the reader an agent all the time, or only when offering resistant readings through doodles? How is a doodler’s agency mediated by the author or the format of texts in forms that I have to map? Lastly, if, as I have argued, the ambient space allows potential energies to hover at the edge, ready to illustrate a tension zone and occupy the page, what occurs in the age of digital or e-books? Will these platforms signal an age of acquiescence to manufactured products or signal era of vernacular responses, somehow hitched to html code and PDF file infiltration? Will bytes totally replace type soon in the future, shaping unforeseen actions by doodlers? Attached Figures Figure One presents the intimate graffiti of my grandfather, found in the 1907 edition of his McGuffey’s Eclectic Spelling Book. The depiction is simple, even crude, revealing a figure found on the adjacent page to Lesson 248, “Of Characters Used in Punctuation,” which lists the perfunctory functions of commas, semicolons, periods, and so forth. This doodle may offset the routine, rote, and rather humdrum memorisation of such grammatical tools. The smiling figure may embody and signify joy on an otherwise machine-made bare page, a space where my grandfather illustrated his desires (to lighten a mood, to ease dissatisfaction?). Historians Joe Austin and Michael Willard examine how youth have been historically left without legitimate spaces in which to live out their autonomy outside of adult surveillance. For instance, graffiti often found on walls and trains may reflect a sad reality: young people are pushed to appropriate “nomadic, temporary, abandoned, illegal, or otherwise unwatched spaces within the landscape” (14). Indeed, book graffiti, like the graffiti found on surfaces throughout cities, may offer youth a sense of appropriation, authorship, agency, and autonomy: they take the page of the book, commit their writing or illustration to the page, discover some freedom, and feel temporarily independent even while they are young and disempowered. Figure Two depicts the doodles of experimental filmmaker Jim Fetterley (Animal Charm productions) during his tenure as a student at the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1990s. His two doodles flank the text of “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath, regarded by most readers as an autobiographical poem that addresses her own suicide attempts. The story of Lazarus is grounded in the Biblical story of John Lazarus of Bethany, who was resurrected from the dead. The poem also alludes to the Holocaust (“Nazi Lampshades”), the folklore surrounding cats (“And like the cat I have nine times to die”), and impending omens of death (“eye pits “ … “sour breath”). The lower doodle seems to signify a motorised tank-like machine, replete with a furnace or engine compartment on top that bellows smoke. Such ominous images, saturated with potential cartoon-like violence, may link to the World War II references in the poem. Meanwhile, the upper doodle seems to be curiously insect-like, and Fetterley’s name can be found within the illustration, just like Plath’s poem is self-reflexive and addresses her own plight. Most viewers might find the image a bit more lighthearted than the poem, a caricature of something biomorphic and surreal, but not very lethal. Again, perhaps this is a counter-message to the weight of the poem, a way to balance the mood and tone, or it may well represent the larval-like apparition that haunts the very thoughts of Plath in the poem: the impending disease of her mind, as understood by the wary reader. References Austin, Joe, and Michael Willard. “Introduction: Angels of History, Demons of Culture.” Eds. Joe Austion and Michael Willard. Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America. New York: NYU Press, 1998. “Doodling Gets Its Due: Those Tiny Artworks May Aid Memory.” World Science 2 March 2009. 15 Jan. 2009 ‹http://www.world-science.net/othernews/090302_doodle›. Dundes, Alan. “Here I Sit – A Study of American Latrinalia.” Papers of the Kroeber Anthropological Society 34: 91-105. Ensminger, David. “All Bottle Up: Reinterpreting the Culturescape of Grandma Prisbey.” Adironack Review 9.3 (Fall 2008). ‹http://adirondackreview.homestead.com/ensminger2.html›. Kear, Andrew. “Drawings in the Margins: Doodling in Class an Act of Reclamation.” Graduate Student Conference. University of Toronto, 2006. ‹http://gradstudentconference.oise.utoronto.ca/documents/185/Drawing%20in%20the%20Margins.doc›. Lowe, Sheila R. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Handwriting Analysis. New York: Alpha Books, 1999. Morton, Timothy. “‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ as an Ambient Poem; a Study of Dialectical Image; with Some Remarks on Coleridge and Wordsworth.” Romantic Circles Praxis Series (2001). 6 Jan. 2009 ‹http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/ecology/morton/morton.html›. Potter, Russell A. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. Albany: State University of New York, 1995. Read, Allen Walker. Classic American Graffiti: Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy in Western North America. Waukesha, Wisconsin: Maledicta Press, 1997. Reitman, Francis. Psychotic Art. London: Routledge, 1999. Sanua, Victor. “The World of Mystery and Wonder of the Schizophrenic Patient.” International Journal of Social Psychiatry 8 (1961): 62-65. Severino, Carol. “The ‘Doodles’ in Context: Qualifying Claims about Contrastive Rhetoric.” The Writing Center Journal 14.1 (Fall 1993): 44-62. Van Cleave, Claire. Master Drawings of the Italian Rennaissance. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2007. Varenhost, Christopher. Passdoodles: A Lightweight Authentication Method. Research Science Institute. Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004.

Perhaps the supreme quality of print is one that is lost on us, since it has so casual and obvious an existence (McLuhan 160). Print Machine (Thad Donovan, 1995) In the introduction to his book on 9/11, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Slavoj Zizek uses an analogy of letter writing to emphasize the contingency of post-9/11 reality. In the example, Zizek discusses the efforts of writers to escape the eyes of governmental censors and a system that used blue ink to indicate a message was true, red ink to indicate it was false. The story ends with an individual receiving a letter from the censored country stating that the writer could not find any red ink. The ambiguity and the duplicity of writing, suggested in Zizek’s tale of colored inks, is a condition of the contemporary world, even if we are unaware of it. We exist in an age in which print—the economization of writing—has an increasingly significant and precarious role in our lives. We turn to the Internet chat room for textual interventions in our sexual, political and aesthetic lives. We burn satanic Harry Potter books and issue fatwas against writers like Salman Rushdie. We narrate our lives using pictures, fonts of varying typeface and color, and sound on our personalized homepages. We throw out our printed books and buy audio ones so we can listen to our favorite authors in the car. We place trust of our life savings, personal numbers, and digital identity in the hands of unseen individuals behind computer screens. Decisively, we are a print people, but our very nature of being dependent on the technologies of print in our public and private lives leads to our inability to consider the epistemological, social and existential effects of print on us. In this article, I focus on the current manifestations of print—what I call “newprint”—including their relationships to consumerism, identity formation and the politics of the state. I will then consider the democratic possibilities of print, suggested by the personalization of print through the Internet and home publishing, and conclude with the implications of the end of print that include the possibility of a post-print language and the middle voice. In order to understand the significance of our current print culture, it is important to situate print in the context of the history of communication. In earlier times, writing had magical associations (Harris 10), and commonly these underpinnings led to the stratification of communities. Writing functioned as a type of black box, “the mysterious technology by which any message [could] be concealed from its illiterate bearer” (Harris 16). Plato and Socrates warned against the negative effects of writing on the mind, including the erosion of memory (Ong 81). Though it once supplemented the communicational bases of orality, the written word soon supplanted it and created a dramatic existential shift in people—a separation of “the knower from the known” (Ong 43-44). As writing moved from the inconvenience of illuminated manuscripts and hand-copied texts, it became systemized in Gutenberg print, and writing then took on the signature of the state—messages between people were codified in the technology of print. With the advent of computer technologies in the 1990s, including personal computers, word processing programs, printers, and the Internet, the age of newprint begins. Newprint includes the electronic language of the Internet and other examples of the public alphabet, including billboards, signage and the language of advertising. As much as members of consumer society are led to believe that newprint is the harbinger of positive identity construction and individualism, closer analysis of the mechanisms of newprint leads to a different conclusion. An important context of new print is found in the space of the home computer. The home computer is the workstation of the contemporary discursive culture—people send and receive emails, do their shopping on the Internet, meet friends and even spouses through dating services, conceal their identity on MUDs and MOOs, and produce state-of-the-art publishing projects, even books. The ubiquity of print in the space of the personal computer leads to the vital illusion that this newprint is emancipatory. Some theorists have argued that the Internet exhibits the spirit of communicative action addressed by Juergen Habermas, but such thinkers have neglected the fact that the foundations of newprint, just like those of Gutenberg print, are the state and the corporation. Recent advertising of Hewlett-Packard and other computer companies illustrates this point. One advertisement suggested that consumers could “invent themselves” through HP computer and printer technology: by using the varied media available to them, consumers can make everything from personalized greeting cards to full-fledged books. As Friedrich Kittler illustrates, we should resist the urge to separate the practices of writing from the technologies of their production, what Jay David Bolter (41) denotes as the “writing space”. For as much as we long for new means of democratic and individualistic expression, we should not succumb to the urge to accept newprint because of its immediacy, novelty or efficiency. Doing so will relegate us to a mechanistic existence, what is referenced metaphorically in Thad Donovan’s “print machine.” In multiple contexts, newprint extends the corporate state’s propaganda industry by turning the written word into artifice. Even before newprint, the individual was confronted with the hegemony of writing. Writing creates “context-free language” or “autonomous discourse,” which means an individual cannot directly confront the language or speaker as one could in oral cultures (Ong 78). This further division of the individual from the communicational world is emphasized in newprint’s focus on the aesthetics of the typeface. In word processing programs like Microsoft Word, and specialized ones like TwistType, the consumer can take a word or a sentence and transform it into an aesthetic formation. On the word processing program that is producing this text, I can choose from Blinking Background, Las Vegas Lights, Marching Red or Black Ants, Shimmer, and Sparkle Text. On my campus email system I am confronted with pictorial backgrounds, font selection and animation as an intimate aspect of the communicational system of my college. On my cell phone I can receive text messages, and I can choose to use emoticons (iconic characters and messages) on the Internet. As Walter Ong wrote, “print situates words in space more relentlessly than writing ever did … control of position is everything in print” (Ong 121). In the case of the new culture of print, the control over more functions of the printed page, specifically its presentation, leads some consumers to believe that choice and individuality are the outcomes. Newprint does not free the writer from the constraints imposed by the means of traditional print—the printing press—rather, it furthers them as the individual operates by the logos of a predetermined and programmed electronic print. The capacity to spell and write grammatically correct sentences is abated by the availability of spell- and grammar-checking functions in word processing software. In many ways, the aura of writing is lost in newprint in the same way in which art lost its organic nature as it moved into the age of reproducibility (Benjamin). Just as filters in imaging programs like Photoshop reduce the aesthetic functions of the user to the determinations of the software programmer, the use of automated print technologies—whether spell-checking or fanciful page layout software like QuarkXpress or Page Maker—will further dilute the voice of the writer. Additionally, the new forms of print can lead to a fracturing of community, the opposite intent of Habermas’ communicative action. An example is the recent growth of specialized languages on the Internet. Some of the newer forms of such languages use combinations of alphanumeric characters to create a language that can only be read by those with the code. As Internet print becomes more specialized, a tribal effect may be felt within our communities. Since email began a few years ago, I have noticed that the nature of the emails I receive has been dramatically altered. Today’s emails tend to be short and commonly include short hands (“LOL” = “laugh out loud”), including the elimination of capitalization and punctuation. In surveying students on the reasons behind such alterations of language in email, I am told that these short hands allow for more efficient forms of communication. In my mind, this is the key issue that is at stake in both print and newprint culture—for as long as we rely on print and other communicational systems as a form of efficiency, we are doomed to send and receive inaccurate and potentially dangerous messages. Benedict Anderson and Hannah Arendt addressed the connections of print to nationalistic and fascist urges (Anderson; Arendt), and such tendencies are seen in the post-9/11 discursive formations within the United States. Bumper stickers and Presidential addresses conveyed the same simplistic printed messages: “Either You are with Us or You are with the Terrorists.” Whether dropping leaflets from airplanes or in scrolling text messages on the bottom of the television news screen, the state is dependent on the efficiency of print to maintain control of the citizen. A feature of this efficiency is that newprint be rhetorically immediate in its results, widely available in different forms of technology, and dominated by the notion of individuality and democracy that is envisioned in HP’s “invent yourself” advertsiements. As Marshall McLuhan’s epigram suggests, we have an ambiguous relationship to print. We depend on printed language in our daily lives, for education and for the economic transactions that underpin our consumer world, yet we are unable to confront the rhetoric of the state and mass media that are consequences of the immediacy and magic of both print and new print. Print extends the domination of our consciousness by forms of discourse that privilege representation over experience and the subject over the object. As we look to new means of communicating with one another and of expressing our intimate lives, we must consider altering the discursive foundations of our communication, such as looking to the middle voice. The middle voice erases the distinctions between subjects and objects and instead emphasizes the writer being in the midst of things, as a part of the world as opposed to dominating it (Barthes; Tyler). A few months prior to writing this article, I spent the fall quarter teaching in London. One day I received an email that changed my life. My partner of nearly six years announced that she was leaving me. I was gripped with the fact of my being unable to discuss the situation with her as we were thousands of miles apart and I struggled to understand how such a significant and personal circumstance could be communicated with the printed word of email. Welcome to new print! References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1976. Barthes, Roland. “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?” The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy. Ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1970. 134-56. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version.” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938. Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard, 2002. Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991. Habermas, Jürgen. The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. I. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985. Harris, Roy. The Origin of Writing. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1986. Kittler, Friedrich A. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge: MIT P, 1994. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1991. Tyler, Stephen A. “The Middle Voice: The Influence of Post-Modernism on Empirical Research in Anthropology.” Post-modernism and Anthropology. Eds. K. Geuijen, D. Raven, and J. de Wolf. Assen, The Neatherlands: Van Gorcum, 1995. Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso, 2002. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Lukas, Scott A. "Nevermoreprint." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/04-lukas.php>. APA Style Lukas, S. (Jun. 2005) "Nevermoreprint," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/04-lukas.php>.

In November 2015 the progressive rock band, Coheed and Cambria, released their latest album and art-book, both titled The Color before the Sun (Color) (2015). This album deviates from their previous six releases by explicitly using a biographical frame for the art-book, the album, and their paratexts. This is a divergence from the band’s concept album approach, a transmedia storyworld, The Amory Wars (TAW) (2002-17), which fictionalised the life experiences of Claudio Sanchez, the band’s lead singer. When scholars discuss transmedia they often refer to fantastic and speculative fictions, such as the Star Wars (1977-2018), Star Trek (1966-2018), Doctor Who (1963-2018) and Marvel Universe (1961-2018) franchises, and TAW fits this framework. However, there is increasing consideration of the impact transmedia reading and writing practices have on storytelling that straddles representations of the “real” world. By making collaborative life-writing explicit, Color encourages readers to resist colonising ontologies. Framing the life-writing within the band’s earlier auto-fiction(s) (TAW), Color destabilises genre divides between fiction and life-writing, and positions readers to critique Sanchez’s narration of his subjectivity. This enables readers to abstract their critique to ontological narratives that have a material impact on their own subjectivities: law, medicine, religion, and economics.The terms subject and identity are often used interchangeably in the study of life-writing. By “subjectivity” I mean the individual’s understanding of their status and role in relation to their community, culture, socio-political context, and the operations of power dynamics therein. In contrast “identity” speaks to the sense of self. While TAW and Color share differing literary conceits—one is a space opera, the other is more explicitly biographical—they both explore Sanchez’s subjectivity and can be imagined as a web of connections between recordings (both audio and video), social media, books (comics, art books, novels and scripts), and performances that contribute to a form of transmedia life-writing. Life-writing is generic term that covers “protean forms of contemporary personal narrative” (Eakin 1). These narratives can be articulated across expressive practices, including interviews, profiles, diaries, social media, prose, poetry and so on. Zachary Leader notes in his introduction to On Life-Writing that “theoreticians and historians of life-writing commonly fuse or meld sub-genres [… and this] blurring of distinctions may help to account for life-writing’s growing acceptance as a field of academic study” (1-2). The growing relationship between life-writing and transmedia is therefore unsurprising.This article ties my research considering the construction of subjectivity through transmedia life-writing, with Emma Hill and Máiréad Nic Craith’s consideration of transmedia storytelling’s political potential (87-109). My intention is to determine how readers might construct their own subjectivity to resist oppressive interpellations. Hill and Nic Craith argue that the “lack of closure” in transmedia storyworlds creates “a greater breadth and depth of interpretation … than a single telling could achieve” (104). They conclude that “this expansive quality has allowed the campaigners to continue their activism in a number of different arenas” (104). I contest their assertion that transmedia lacks closure, and instead contend that closure, or the recognition of meaning, inheres with the reader (McCloud 33) rather than in a universalised meaning attributed to the text: transmedia storytelling therefore arouses political potential in reading communities. It is precisely this feature that enables the “expansive quality” valued in political activism. I therefore focus my discussion on the readers of transmedia life-writing, rather than on its writer(s). I argue that in reading a life or lives across multiple media the reader is exposed to the texts’ self-referential citations, its extra-diegetic reiterations, and its contradictions. The reader is invited to make meaning from these citations, reiterations and contradictions; they are positioned to confront the ways in which space and time shape life-writing and subjectivity. Transmedia life-writing can therefore empower readers to invoke critical reading practices.The reader’s agency offers the potential for resistance and revolution. This agency is invited in Color where readers are asked to straddle the fictional world of TAW and the “real” world. The Unravelling Palette of Dawn (2015) is the literary narrative that parallels this album. The book is written by Chondra Echert, Sanchez’s collaborator and wife, and is an amalgam of personal essay and photo-book. It opens by invoking the space opera that informs The Amory Wars: “Sector.12, Paris, Earth. A man and a woman sit in a café debating their fate” (n.p.). This situates the reader in the fictional world of TAW, but also brings the reader into the mundanity and familiarity of a discussion between two people. The reader is witness to a discussion between intimates that focusses on the question of “where to from here.” The idea of “fate” is either misunderstood or misapplied: fate is predetermined, and undebatable. The reader is therefore positioned to remember the band’s previous “concept,” and juxtapose it against a new “realistic” trajectory: fictional characters might have a fate that is determined by their writer, but does that fate extend to the writer themselves? To what extent is Sanchez and Echert’s auto/biography crafted by writers other than themselves?The opening passage provides a skin for the protagonists of the essay, enabling a fantastical space within which Echert and Sanchez might cloak themselves, as they have done throughout TAW. However, this conceit is peeled away on the second page:This might have been the story you find yourself holding. A Sci-fi tale, shrouded in fiction. The real life details modified. All names changed. Threads neatly tied up at the end and altered for the sake of ego and feelings.But the truth is rarely so well planned. The story isn’t filled with epic action scenes or glossed-over romance. Reality is gritty and mucky and thrown together in the last seconds. It’s painful. It is not beautiful … and so it is. The events that inspired this record are acutely personal. (n.p.)In this passage Echert makes reference to the method of storytelling employed throughout the texts that make up TAW. She lays bare the shroud of fiction that covers the lived realities of her and her husband’s lives. She goes on to note that their lives have been interpreted “to fit the bounds of the concept” (n.p.), that is TAW as a space opera, and that the current album was an opportunity to “pull back the curtain” (n.p.) on this conceit. This narrative is echoed by Sanchez in the documentary component of the project, The Physics of Color (2015). Like Echert, Sanchez locates the narrative’s genesis in Paris, but in the Paris of our own world, where he and Echert finalised the literary component of the band’s previous project, The Afterman (2012). Color, like the previous works, is written as a collaboration, not just between Sanchez and Echert, but also by the other members of the band who contributed to the composition of each track. This collaborative writing is an example of relationality that facilitates a critical space for readers and invites them to consider the ways in which their own subjectivity is constructed.Ivor Goodson and Scherto Gill provide a means of critically engaging with relational reading practices. They position narrative as a tool that can be used to engage in critical self, and social, reflection. Their theory of critical narrative as a form of pedagogy enables readers to shift away from reading Color as auto-fiction and towards reading it as an act of collaborative auto/biography. This transition reflects a shifting imperative from the personal, particularly questions of identity, to the political, to engaging with the web of human relations, in order to explore subjectivity. Given transmedia is generally employed by writers of fantasy and speculative literatures, it can be difficult for readers to negotiate their expectations: transmedia is not just a tool for franchises, but can also be a tool for political resistance.Henry Jenkins initiated the conversation about transmedia reading practices and reality television in his chapters about early seasons of Survivor and American Idol in his book Convergence Culture. He identifies the relationship between viewers and these shows as one that shifts from “real-time interaction toward asynchronous participation” (59): viewers continue their engagement with the shows even when they are not watching a broadcast. Hill and Nic Craith provide a departure from literary and media studies approaches to transmedia by utilising an anthropological approach to understanding storyworlds. They maintain that both media studies and anthropological methodologies “recognize that storytelling is a continually contested act between different communities (whether media communities or social communities), and that the final result is indicative of the collective rather than the individual” (88–89). They argue that this collectivity results from “negotiated meaning” between the text and members of the reading community. This is a recognition of the significance held by readers of life-writing regarding the “biographical contract” (Lejeune 22) resulting from the “rationally motivated inter subjective recognition of norms” (Habermas n.p.). Collectivity is analogous to relationality: the way in which the readers’ subjectivity is impacted upon by their engagement with the storyworld, helixed with the writer(s) of transmedia life-writing having their subjectivity impacted upon by their engagement with reader responses to their developing texts. However, the term “relationality” is used to slightly different effect in both transmedia and life-writing studies. Colin Harvey’s definition of transmedia storytelling as relational emphasises the relationships between different media “with the wider storyworld in question, and by extension the wider culture” (2). This can be juxtaposed with Paul John Eakin’s assertion that life-writing as a genre that requires interaction between the author and their audience: “autobiography of the self but the biography and autobiography of the other” (58). It seems to me that the differing articulations of “relationality” arising from both life-writing and transmedia scholarship rely on, but elide, the relationship between the reader and the storyworld. In both instances it is left to the reader to make meaning from the text, both in terms of understanding the subject(s) represented in relation to their own, and also as the nexus between the transmedia text, the storyworld, and the broader culture. The readers’ own experiences, their memories, are central to this relationality.The song “Colors” (2015), which Echert notes in her essay was the first song to be written for the album, chronicles the anxieties that arose after Sanchez and Echert discovered that their home (which they had been leasing out) had been significantly damaged by their tenants. In the documentary The Physics of Color, both Echert and Sanchez speak about this song as a means for Sanchez to reassert his identity as a musician after an extended period where he struggled with the song-writing process. The song is pared back, the staccato guitar in the introduction echoing a similar theme in the introduction to the song “The Afterman” (2012) which was released on the band’s previous album. This tonal similarity, the plucked electric guitar and the shared rhythm, provides a sense of thoroughness between the songs, inviting the listener to remember the ways in which the music on Color is in conversation with the previous albums. This conversation is significant: it relies on the reader’s experience of their own memory. In his book Fantastic Transmedia, Colin Harvey argues that memories are “the mechanisms by which the ‘storyworld’ was effectively sewn together, helping create a common diegetic space for me—and countless others—to explore” (viii). Both readers’ and creators’ experiences of personal and political time and space in relation to the storyworld challenge traditional understandings of readers’ agency in relation to the storyworld, and this challenge can be abstracted to frame the reader’s agency in relation to other economic, political, and social manifestations of power.In “The Audience” Sanchez sings:This is my audience, forever oneTogether burning starsCut from the same diseaseEver longing what and who we areIn the documentary, Sanchez states that this song is an acknowledgement that he, the band and their audience are “one and the same in [their] oddity, and it’s like … family.” Echert echoes this, referring to the intimate relationships built with fans over the years at conventions, shows and through social media: “they’ve superseded fandom and become a part of this extended family.” Readers come to this song with the memory of TAW: the memory of “burning Star IV,” a line that is included in the titles of two of Coheed’s albums (Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV Vols. 1 (2005) and 2 (2007), and to the Monstar disease that is referenced throughout Second Stage Turbine Blade, both the album (2002) and the comic books (2010). As a depiction of his destabilised identity however, the lyrics can also be read as a poetic commentary on Sanchez’s experiences with renegotiating his subjectivity: his status as an identity that gains its truth through consensus with others, an audience who is “ever longing what and who we are.” In the documentary Sanchez states “I could do the concept thing again with this album, you know, take it and manipulate it and make it this other sort of dimension … but this one … it means so much more to be … I really wanted this to be exposed, I really want this to be my story.” Sanchez imagines that his story, its truth, its sacredness, is contingent on its exposure on being shared with an audience. For Sanchez his subjectivity arises from on his relationality with his audience. This puts the reader at the centre of the storyworld. The assertion of subjectivity arises as a result of community.However, there is an uncertainty that floats in the lacunae between the texts contributing to the Color storyworld. As noted, in the documentary, both Echert and Sanchez speak lovingly of their relationships with Coheed audiences, but Sanchez goes on to acknowledge that “there’s a little bit of darkness in there too, that I don’t know if I want to bring up… I’ll keep that a mystery,” and some of the “The Audience” lyrics hint at a more sinister relationship between the audience and the band:Thieves of our timeWatch as they rape your integrityMarch as the beat suggests.One reader, Hecatonchair, discusses these lyrics in a Reddit post responding to “The Audience”. They write:The lyrics are pretty aggressive, and could easily be read as an attack against either the music industry or the fans. Considering the title and chorus, I think the latter is who it was intended to reach, but both interpretations are valid.This acknowledgement by the poster that there the lyrics are polyvalent speaks to the decisions that readers are positioned to make in responding to the storyworld.This phrase makes explicit the inconsistency between what Sanchez says about the band’s fans, and what he feels. It is left to the reader to account for this inconsistency between the song lyrics and the writers’ assertions. Hecatonchair and the five readers who respond to their post all write that they enjoy the song, regardless of what they read as its aggressive position on the band’s relationship with them as audience members. In identifying as both audience members and readers with different interpretations, the Reddit commentators recognise their identities in intersecting communities, and demonstrate their agency as subjects. Goodson and Gill invoke Charles Taylor’s assertion that one of the defining elements of “identity” is a “defining community,” that is “identity is lived in social and historical particulars, such as the literature, philosophy, religious teaching and great conversations taking place along one’s life’s journeys” (Goodson and Gill 27).Harvey identified readers as central to transmedia practices. In reading a life across multiple media readers assert agency within the storyworld: they choose which texts to engage with, and how and when to engage with them. They must remember, or more specifically re-member, the life or lives with which they are engaging. This re-membering is an evocative metaphor: it could be described as Frankensteinian, the bringing together of texts and media through a reading that is stretched across the narrative, like the creature’s yellow skin. It also invokes older stories of death (the author’s) and resurrection (of the author, by the reader): the murder and dismemberment of Osiris by his brother Set, and Isis, Osiris's wife, who rejoins the fragmented pieces of Osiris, and briefly brings him back.Coheed and Cambria regularly cite musical themes or motifs across their albums, while song lyrics are quoted in the text of comic books and the novel. The readers recognise and weave together these citations with the more explicitly autobiographical writing in Color. Readers are positioned to critique the function of a canonical truth underpinning the storyworld: whose life is being told? Sanchez invokes memory throughout the album by incorporating soundscapes, such as the sounds of a train-line on the song “Island.” Sanchez notes he and his wife would hear these sounds as they took the train from their home in Brooklyn to the island of Manhattan. Sanchez brings his day-to-day experiences to his readers as overlapping but not identical accounts of perspectives. They enable a plurality of truths and destabilise the Western focus on a singular or universal truth of lived experience.When life-writing is constructed transmedially the author must—of necessity—relinquish control over their story’s temporality. This includes both the story’s internal and external temporalities. By internal temporality I am referring to the manner in which time plays out within the story: given that the reader can enter into and engage with the story through a number of media, the responsibility for constructing the story’s timeline lies with the reader; they may therefore choose, or only be able, to engage with the story’s timeline in a haphazard, rather than a chronological, manner. For example, in Sanchez’ previous work, TAW, comic book components of the storyworld were often released years after the albums with which they were paired. Readers can only engage with the timelines as they are published, as they loop back through and between the storyworld’s temporality.The different media—CD, comic, novel, or art-book—often represent different perspectives or experiences within the same or at least within overlapping internal temporalities: significant incidences are narrated between the media. This results in an unstable external temporality, over which the author, again, has no control. The reader may listen to the music before reading the book, or the other way around, but reading the book and listening to the music simultaneously may not be feasible, and may detract from the experience of engaging with each aspect of the storyworld. This brings us back to the importance of memory to readers of transmedia narratives: they must remember in order to, as Harvey says, stitch together a common “diegetic space.” Although the author often relinquishes control to the external temporality of the text, placing the reader in control of the internal temporality of their life-writing destabilises the authority that is often attributed to an auto/biographer. It also makes explicit that transmedia life-writing is an ongoing project. This allows the author(s) to account for “a reflexive process where individuals take the opportunity to evaluate their actions in connection with their intentions and thus ‘write a further part’ of their histories” (Goodson and Gill 33).Goodson and Gill note that “life’s events are never linear and any intention for life to be coherent and progressive in accordance with a ‘plan’ will constantly be interrupted” (30). This is why transmedia offers writers and readers a more authentic means of engaging with life-writing. Its weblike structure enables readers to view subjectivity through a number of lenses: transmedia life-writing narrates a relational subjectivity that resists attempts at delineation. There is still a “continuity” that arises when Sanchez invokes the storyworld’s self-referential citations, reiterations, and contradictions in order to “[define] narratives within a temporal, social and cultural framework” (Goodson and Gill 29), however transmedia life-writing refuses to limit itself, or its readers, to the narratives of space and time that regulate mono-medial life-writing. Instead it positions readers to “unmask the world and then change it” (43).ReferencesArendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1958.Coheed and Cambria. Second Stage Turbine Blade. New York: Equal Vision Records, 2002.———. In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3. New York: Equal Vision Records, 2003.———. Good Apollo I’m Burning Star IV, Vol. 1: From Fear through the Eyes of Madness. New York: Columbia, 2005.———. Good Apollo I’m Burning Star IV, Vol. 2: No World for Tomorrow. New York: Columbia, 2007.———. The Year of the Black Rainbow. New York: Columbia, 2010.———. The Afterman: Ascension. Los Angeles: Hundred Handed/Everything Evil, 2012.———. The Afterman: Descension. Los Angeles: Hundred Handed/Everything Evil, 2013.———. The Colour before the Sun. Brooklyn: the bag.on-line.adventures and Everything Evil Records, 2015.———. “The Physics of Color” Documentary DVD. Brooklyn: Everything Evil Records, 2015. Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1999. ———. The Ethics of Life Writing. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004.Echert, Chondra. The Unravelling Palette of Dawn. Brooklyn: the bag.on-line.adventures and Everything Evil Records, 2015.Goodson, Ivor, and Scherto Gill. Critical Narrative as Pedagogy. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.Habermas, Jürgen. The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalisation of Society. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984.Harvey, Colin. Fantastic Transmedia: Narrative, Play and Memory Across Science-Fiction and Fantasy Storyworlds. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.Hecatonchair. “r/TheFence's Song of the Day Database Update Day 9: The Audience”. 11 Feb. 2018 <https://www.reddit.com/r/TheFence/comments/4eno9o/rthefences_song_of_the_day_database_update_day_9/>.Hill, Emma, and Máiréad Nic Craith. “Medium and Narrative Change: The Effects of Multiple Media on the ‘Glasgow Girls’ Story and Their Real-Life Campaign.” Narrative Culture 3.1 (2016). 9 Dec. 2017 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13110/narrcult.3.1.0087>.Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006.Leader, Zachary, ed. On Life-Writing. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015.Lejeune, Philippe, and Paul John Eakin, eds. On Autobiography. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York: Harper Perennial, 1994.Sanchez, Claudio, and Gus Vasquez. The Amory Wars Sketchbook. Los Angeles: Evil Ink Comics, 2006.———, Gus Vasquez, et al. The Amory Wars: The Second Stage Turbine Blade Ultimate Edition. Los Angeles: BOOM! Studios, 2010.———, Peter David, Chris Burnham, et al. In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3 Ultimate Edition. Los Angeles: BOOM! Studios, 2010.———, and Christopher Shy. Good Apollo I’m Burning Star IV, Vol. 1: From Fear through the Eyes of Madness. Los Angeles: Evil Ink Comics, 2005.———, and Peter David. Year of the Black Rainbow. Nashville: Evil Ink Books, 2010.———, and Nathan Spoor, The Afterman. Los Angeles: Evil Ink Comics/Hundred Handed Inc., 2012.

Through a critical engagement with substantive and stylistic guidelines dictated by dominant journals in the social sciences, this article enquires on what it means to write like a social scientist in the twenty-first century. Academic production and diffusion now regularly take place beyond and across national borders, with English often standing in as the lingua franca of these global exchanges. Though just one effect of this restructuration, academic journals have become more transnational in scope with regards to the authors whose work they publish and the audiences whose readership they seek to attract. However, while one could expect the “globalization” of the social sciences to lead to the transnational circulation of national disciplinary traditions and perhaps multiple manifestations of cultural hybridization, we are instead witnessing the imposition of a strangely singular and harmonized mode of doing the social sciences. Paradoxically, standards of how long a scientific article should be or how one should fashion an argument are so familiar and intimately known, yet curiously opaque and of unknown origins. In interrogating the historical-contextual origins of conventions that so strongly shape the world of academic publishing and, dare we say, reasoning, we raise questions about the conditions of the present and the naturalization of standards on how to write a scientific article. As a consequence of this exploration, we propose alternatives guidelines that a new journal such as ours has to present to its anticipated authors and readers.

AbstractDecisive advances in the fields of nanosciences and nanotechnologies are intimately related to the development of new instruments and of related writing schemes and methodologies. Therefore we have recently proposed exploitation of the nano-structuring potential of a highly Focused Ion Beam as a tool, to overcome intrinsic limitations of current nano-fabrication techniques and to allow innovative patterning schemes urgently needed in many nanoscience challenges. In this work, we will first detail a very high resolution FIB instrument we have developed specifically to meet these nano-fabrication requirements. Then we will introduce and illustrate some advanced FIB processing schemes. These patterning schemes are (i) Ultra thin membranes as an ideal template for FIB nanoprocessing. (ii) Local defect injection for magnetic thin film direct patterning. (iii) Functionalization of graphite substrates to prepare 2D-organized arrays of clusters. (iv) FIB engineering of the optical properties of microcavities.

Resumo: Apropriando-me de certas formulações de Derrida, procuro fazer ver como o pensamento de Ibn ʿArabī oferece um vasto campo para a abordagem de problemas contemporâneos. A impressionante riqueza com que o Sufismo trata, por exemplo, a ideia de “escrita” e suas várias concepções de linguagem, ou os desdobramentos da relação de profunda intimidade com a revelação corânica,na qual a responsabilidade do sujeito perante o Outro-em-cada-outro é quase esmagadora, fazem dessa via mística em geral, e de Ibn ʿArabī em particular, uma trajetória indispensável para o Pensamento atual.Palavras-chave: Derrida. Ibn ʿArabī. Interpretação. Lingua. Pensamento actual. SufismoAbstract: Taking advantage of certain formulations of Derrida, I try to show how Ibn ʿArabī’s thought offers a vast field for approaching contemporary problems. The impressive richness with which Sufism deals, for example, with the idea of “writing” and its various conceptions of language, or the unfolding of the relationship of deep intimacy with the Quranic revelation, in which the subject’s responsibility to the Other-of-each-other is almost overwhelming, make this mystical path in general, and of Ibn ʿArabī in particular, an indispensable trajectory for the current Thought.Key words: Derrida. Ibn ʿArabī. Interpretation. Language. Current Thought. Sufism.

Abstract Researchers have become interested in the emotion in feedback situations, yet little research has examined peer feedback-giving emotions. Giving feedback is emotionally laden and it is challenging and demanding for feedback givers to manage their emotions. Uncovering how feedback givers regulate their emotions as well as determining what influences them could extend the current understanding of the peer feedback-giving process. Informed by emotional intelligence (EI) (Goleman, Daniel. 1995. Emotional intelligence. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.), a notion describing an individual’s ability to monitor and manage one’s own and others’ emotions, this case study investigated how two Chinese Ph.D. English as a foreign language students utilized EI to regulate their feedback-giving process on research proposal writing. Data was collected from research proposal drafts and revisions, peer feedback, self-reported emotions, interviews, and stimulated recalls. The textual and qualitative data analysis revealed that individual differences existed regarding feedback focus, strategies, and emotions. The findings suggested that the feedback givers adopted different EI patterns to regulate their feedback giving process under the influence of five factors: goals and purposes, prior feedback experience, time constraints, the intimacy of relations, and the feedback givers’ perceived significance of the sections in a research proposal. Practical implications for teachers, supervisors, and students were discussed.

Depression memes are a widespread phenomenon across all social media platforms. To get your hit of depression memes, you can go to any number of pages on Facebook, the subreddit “2me4meirl”, where the posts that are “too real” for more mainstream subreddits go, but nevertheless counting over one million subscribers or, on Instagram, and find innumerable accounts dedicated to “sad memes”, many with tens to hundreds of thousands of followers. In a recent study, depression memes were found to be responsible for 35 per cent of the content researchers analysed in the “#depressed” hashtag on Instagram (McCosker and Gerrard). As a subculture, it is one that has truly embraced the polyvocality of memes, allowing many voices to speak at once through their lack of fixed meaning (Milner). In depression memes, polyvocality allows the user to identify with any number of anxieties affectively represented by the memes without being authentically tied to them, under the guise of irony. Therefore, depression memes find themselves being used in a myriad of ways that do not refer to a stable structure of meaning. This allows me to problematise their roles as both masks and intimate texts within an ironic meme culture.Drawing on traditional readings of irony such as Wayne C. Booth but also contemporary approaches to authenticity, mask cultures and meme culture (de Zeeuw; Tuters), this article situates depression memes specifically within neoliberal regimes of feeling, manifested both in online practices of authenticity and the subject of value (Skeggs and Yuill) and in discourses of resilience and accountability surrounding mental health (Fullagar et al.; James; McCosker). It argues that an internet depression culture based on the principles of dissimulation serves both the purpose of protection from recuperation by dominant narratives but paradoxically creates an ambiguity that generates that risk. In this way, I speak to current anxieties surrounding memes, including ambiguity, irony, and identity formation.Internet Depression Culture Intrinsic to their nature as memes, depression memes can be found in a variety of spaces, formats and platforms. The ones below (Figure 1) circulate on mainstream social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram through accounts dedicated to “sadposting” or the sharing of mental illness memes. They refer to overwhelming feelings of anxiety, a lack of will to live and a desire to recover. In their recent study on hashtagging depression on Instagram, McCosker and Gerrard found memes to be responsible for a wide range of content in the “depressed” hashtag on the platform. They argue that the use of the hashtag “depressed” is primarily as a “memetic device, often with a sense of irreverence, subversiveness and pathos, but in an effort to use the connective power of the popular tag to gain attention and Likes” (McCosker & Gerrard 9). Intimacy and memes as identity performance are therefore intimately intertwined, espousing the memetic logic that there is “safety in relatability” (Ask and Abidin 844), which is dependent on “connecting to common anxieties in a pleasurable, noncompromising way” (Kanai 228).Figure 1. Depression Memes. Sources, from left to right. Top row: <https://www.instagram.com/p/Bl5p88Tg8Cw/>; <https://www.facebook.com/mentallythrillmemes/>; <https://twitter.com/animatedtext>. Bottom row: <https://lovenotlogic.tumblr.com/post/168640369069>; <https://disasterlesbian.com/post/158174792381>; <https://www.facebook.com/mentallythrillmemes>.Indeed, meme culture depends both on the notion that certain forms of content can be relied on to “gain attention and likes” and increase a user’s social capital, but can also be interpreted as intimate and private forms of expression. The popularity of depression memes is a testament to this principle, but at the heart of this culture is a usage of irony that remains ambiguous and undefined. Whether these texts can be found to reflect genuine feelings of relatability is complex, but ultimately irrelevant. As Burton remarks on the culture of Kek, “sociologically speaking”, the sharing of these memes still constitutes a cultural engagement. Therefore, what I refer to as internet depression culture must be understood not as an attitude of self-presentation, but an inter-affective network that relies on precarious and overwhelmingly ironic objects whose authenticities as intimate texts are dependent on volatile and unstable structures of meaning.Wayne C. Booth’s A Rhetoric of Irony tells us that for an expression to be understood as ironic, their meaning needs to be reconstructed by the reader and intended by the author. The reader must therefore draw from the cultural and historical context of the expression to reconstruct covert meaning that the author intended. The inferential process draws from the context of the expression to give meaning to irony. Online, the cultural context in which depression memes have risen to popularity is precisely that which gives them their reason for being. To understand this, we need to realise that, for the last decade, the symptoms that depression memes cultivate have been lying dormant under the tyranny of happiness era of social media (Freitas). I tie this notion to the doctrine of authenticity behind the identity imperative of social media platforms like Facebook (Van Dijck), and contrast it to the forms of subjectivisation anonymous or pseudonym-based cultures on platforms like 4chan embody. Within this dialectic, memes have arisen as the logic of the Internet, and irony as their social contract (Tuters; Burton). New forms of sociality that manifest within this culture are necessarily ambiguous and risk-filled ones, and need to be explored.From the Happiness Effect to a New Sensibility In The Happiness Effect, Donna Freitas investigated social media usage in young adults by surveying over 800 college students about the relationship between social media and their emotional well-being. Her results allowed her to coin the term “happiness effect”, when: “young people feel so pressured to post happy things on social media”. She writes: “most of what everyone sees on social media from their peers are happy things; as a result, they often feel inferior because they aren’t actually happy all of the time” (14). Feelings of inadequacy result when users interpret what other users post to be authentically felt, despite themselves feeling “pressured” to post a certain type of content, one they do not resonate with but fabricate for the purpose of posting. Indeed, the authenticity imperative behind identity-based social media is what defines our relationship to it.Identity-based platforms like Facebook rely on allowing the user to create an identity on their site, but demand from users that the platform be used for “‘expressing who they are’, implying that users do not “perform” their identity on Facebook; they are the selves they portray on Facebook” (Kant 34). As always, this must be situated within the commercial logic behind the seemingly “free” and “public” service the platform offers. Multiplicity and having “multiple identities” (van Dijck) does not cooperate with Facebook’s platform logic because it does not produce valuable legible data which conforms to “normative, regulatory and commercially viable frameworks” (Kant 35). As Skeggs and Yuill note, the contemporary neo-liberal imperative to perform and authorize one’s value in public is more likely to produce a curated persona rather than the “authentic” self demanded by Facebook (380). The happiness effect manifests this. Despite not being legitimate, an identity must be curated to fit in with the other performed personas on the platforms, which are taken as authentic.To many, the irony that makes depression memes such as those in Figure 1 work is in their subversion of the happiness effect and the authenticity imperative. The meaning to be reconstructed in a depression meme consists in peeling back the layer that demands from us to act as the best, happiest, version of ourselves online. Simply put, it unmasks the actual authentic self behind the curated one. Therefore, the self made visible by partaking, sharing or liking depression memes is not necessarily the best one, but, fundamentally, it is a more authentic one. Indeed, it seemed that, in the early phase of its life, users were enamoured with depression memes because it released them from the burden of identity management. What emerged in this phase of the depression memes movement was the perception of a new sensibility based on a more authentic intimacy than had ever been associated with memes. Press coverage of the topic continued to celebrate the emancipatory potential of depression memes, citing the movement as reflective of a new, more sentimental public made possible by the internet (Roffman).As has been argued before by McCosker, the forms of digital intimacy that render personalised distress visible are ones entrenched in visibility and authenticity, pillars of the face culture of Facebook. Comments on memes or reviews of depression meme pages continuously cited relatability and visibility as their reason for identification with the page. Users felt that these memes allowed them to be seen online, with their mental illness, and feel intimately connected to other viewers; “it feels good to know that other people go through the same thing as me” (Figure 2). Though it is a form of public performance, the intimacy generated here feels inherently private because it relies on unravelling certain structures of meaning. This is a skill that, users imply, can only be attained by having experienced the feelings evoked in the depression memes. In these comments, intimacy is a form of identity performance, and a discourse of accountability underpins one of authenticity. Irony, though present, is quickly reconstructed and explained away into more stable structures of meaning through these discourses.Figure 2. Reviewers of “Mentally thrill memes” on Facebook. Irony and Masked PracticesHowever, the tension produced within the user’s psyche by years of subjectivisation and the “curated self” has taken its toll. The social contract of irony in digital culture has come just in time to recuperate authenticity from the burden of management it was placing on its subjects. I’ve spoken to the use of irony as generative of new forms on intimacy, but here I turn to how irony can simultaneously be adopted for the purposes of evading that stifling regime of the self and doctrine of authenticity. In terms of platform moderation in the case of sensitive or problematic issues, subversion through irony allows an alternative discursive economy to exist by evading censorship. When it rejects models through which the self can be turned into data by turning its back on commensurable ways of displaying public emotion, it is a commentary on the authenticity culture of social media. In this, it reflects practices of dissimulation.Ideologically, anonymity and multiplicity in the “deep vernacular web” stands in antithesis to the doctrine of authenticity. Anonymised imageboard cultures such as those found on 4chan have moulded themselves as the Other to the straightforward intentionality of profile based social media (de Zeeuw, Between). Their truth is in their collectivistic rejection of authenticity, constituting an anti-personal, faceless and authorless mass, infamous for their subversion through trolling. They obey an Internet logic that can be summarised as follows; “the internet is not serious business, and anyone who thinks otherwise should be corrected and is, essentially, undeserving of pity” (Tuters). In this, the logic of dissimulation operates as their reason for being. Dissimulation entails a play with identity, one not interested in stability but more in the constant deferral of meaning and self. This negotiation is based on evading the notion of the self in order to gain further freedom through collective play. For these anonymised and anti-personal cultures, the value of dissimulation is to mediate their relationship to society at large.Indeed, as Daniel de Zeeuw notes, mask cultures’ play with identity is not simply a reactionary movement against the subjectivisation of social media but can be understood as part of a rich carnivalesque tradition which revels in the potential of the mask. In this case, the collective culture gathers around the picture of the mask as a symbol of the “dialectic between the masked mass and the authorial, personal self” (de Zeeuw, Immunity 276). The notion that a more authentic, truer self lies under a series of masks is also one taken up by psychoanalysis and various schools of thought. In this way, irony has often been compared to “peering behind a mask” (Booth 33), leading to its valorisation as an act of dissimulation by these cultures. Taking as gospel that “there is no true Self, only an endless series of interchangeable masks” (Lovink 40), for these cultures the mask “is the work of art that best exemplifies the detachment achieved through irony” (Trilling 120). However, irony “risks disaster more aggressively than any other device” (Booth 41). The potential that mask cultures value irony for also creates risk because it trains readers to expect something but never tells us when to stop interpreting its irony. The emancipatory capacity of irony then, is a tension-filled one.Ironic Depression MemesDepression memes I addressed before peel back the layers of the happiness effect and social media cultures by legitimising themselves through authenticity. I turn now to ironic memes about depression memes and their tie to the principles of dissimulation as influenced by mask cultures. Meme culture’s existence across social media platforms, and structural nature as logic of ironic undermining means that, once depression memes were praised in earnest as the new sensibility of the Internet, the next step for the depression memes movement was to be deeply disingenuous and self-aware about the promise of authenticity they were offering. Memes about depression memes are meta memes that are self-reflective about the depression meme movement, referencing using memes to combat loneliness, sadness or overthinking in an ironic way.Figure 3. Ironic memes referencing the use of depression humour. Sources, from left to right. Top row: <https://www.instagram.com/p/B3aH9cmIr1L>; <https://www.reddit.com/r/MemeEconomy/comments/8wotcn/invest/>; <https://jennyhoelzer-deactivated2016120.tumblr.com/post/153443805168/>. Bottom row: <https://twitter.com/animatedtext>; <https://www.instagram.com/p/B0ZsQAMHiAU>; <https://www.reddit.com/r/2meirl4meirl/comments/8se3l5/2meirl4meirl/>.Ironic depression memes can be found on the same platforms other depression memes circulate in, existing as a parallel discourse to, and meta-commentary on, the celebratory, cathartic engagement in depression memes as seen on Facebook. They acknowledge the use of the mask, drawing attention to the divide between one’s chosen digital self-presentation and offline identity. Through this, they re-edify boundaries that depression memes were praised as obliterating. In the ironic memes above, presenting yourself as depressed online is okay, but actually being depressed is no laughing matter (actual suicide = no), and therefore should not be memed about. Memes are a mask that depressed millennials offer to other depressed millennials, to be used against depression, sadness, and overthinking, but mostly to hide that, though the memes are “ironic”, the depression is still very much “chronic”.Ironic depression memes shed the burden of cultures of authenticity and accountability when they disavow the notion of a fixed self. The use of the meme as a mask evokes a privacy and anonymity found within irony that rejects the contemporary mediation of mental ill health through a set of discourses based in neoliberal personhood (Fullagar et al.; McCosker). The bonds being made here are supposedly private, revelling in the facelessness of collective irony, but both weak and risky. The value of the meme is defined by the acknowledgement of the usage of the mask to hide emotions still too taboo or painful to publicly gesture too. Though depression memes undermine that authenticity and accountability should be the pillars of mental health discourse, their use of irony creates unstable ground for a new structure of feeling to emanate from these memes. Irony is about expecting something to mean something else, therefore valuing one set of meaning over another (Booth 33). If the new set of meaning fundamentally cannot be identified, which is key in dissimulation and mask-cultural practices, then this new culture opens up ambiguity which can be recuperated by dominant narratives. In this way, I argue that dissimulation serves the purposes of protection from the mediation of depression through individualising discourse, but paradoxically creates an opening to do so. Wholesome Memes and Resilience I turn now to how “wholesome memes” provide non-ironic commentary on the irony of memes. I argue that, even in a logic removed from the authenticity imperative of face media, and therefore from a notion of identity and profile based interaction, narratives of accountability still recuperate the subversion of depression memes. In the case of depression memes, discourses of resilience and overcoming are promoted as the “correcting” set of values, preferential to the ambiguous multiplicity of dissimulation. Figure 4. “Fixedyourmeme” wholesome memes making use of editing and re-writing.The “wholesome memes” movement aims to edit and correct depression memes, such as examples from a Tumblr page entitled “fixed your meme”. These memes take on popular meme formats that are either neutral and open to remixing, or are known in popular meme culture to be predetermined. On the right, “My memes are ironic, my depression is [chronic]” is a popular motif whose grammar is predetermined (seen in Figure 3) but also an easily deciphered subtext, even if written over, if one is well-versed in meme culture and the mechanisms through which it replicates itself. The explicit editing and re-writing, crossing out the “toxic” message to make apparent the re-writing of the narrative, is purposeful here. The relation to resilience is built as much inside and outside the text. It serves to exemplify the overcoming of the mental illness and the move towards a radical attitude of self-love and recovery. Wholesomeness, positivity, wellness and self-care are the keywords. In these texts, the wellness industry serves as a counter-narrative, preaching a discourse that dictates: “it is within an individual’s power and even a moral obligation to be happy” (Garde-Hansenand Gorton 104).When I refer to resilience, I refer to a specific kind of discourse as coined by Robin James that follows the logic of acknowledging and overcoming damage in order to be “rewarded with increased human capital, status, and other forms of recognition and recompense” (19). Overcoming brings added human capital because it demonstrates resilience which boosts society’s resilience. When depression memes render embodied suffering visible and publicly intelligible, they perform resilience through a therapeutic narrative. In these types of narratives, we see what Fullagar et al. describe as “affective work and action which is required in efforts to be ‘happy’ and achieve ‘normality’” that “commonly evokes a particular form of introspection and surveillance” (10). In this way, wholesome memes can be thought of as an affective assemblage that recuperates narratives of subversion as embodied by ironic memes and mask cultures, thereby “re-ordering flows through capitalist relations that exploit the connection between desire and lack” (Holland 68). Conclusion Internet depression culture operates at the crux of meme culture and neoliberal subjectivisation by both enacting and overcoming mental health regimes of care through irony. The irony within depression memes to be reconstructed is dependent on two structures of meaning. The first is the one within which the memes are being read and interpreted, namely an online meme culture and its collective irony imperative, which I argue is also a parallel discursive area of the neoliberal subjectivisation of value on social media. The second is a product of years of increasing individualisation of mental health discourse, one that emphasises resilience and overcoming in line with values of authenticity and accountability. In different Internet cultures, the intersection of these two contexts manifests differently. Online, irony and polysemy are both tools of subversion and privacy. However, cultures of play are constantly challenged by social media and places where dominant narratives are ones of authenticity and accountability. Depression memes demonstrate that irony can be mobilised into authentic flows of intimacy in the context of certain dominant discourses.Figure 5. “I thought it was just memes”. Source: <https://thisiselliz.com/post/152882025410>.ReferencesAsk, Kristine, and Crystal Abidin. “My Life Is a Mess: Self-Deprecating Relatability and Collective Identities in the Memification of Student Issues.” Information, Communication & Society 21.6 (2018): 834-850.Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. 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"Digital Mental Health and Visibility: Tagging Depression." In Digital Media: Transformations in Human Communication. Eds. Paul Messaris and Lee Humphreys. New York: Peter Lang, 2017.Milner, Ryan M. “Pop Polyvocality: Internet Memes, Public Participation, and the Occupy Wall Street Movement.” International Journal of Communication 7 (2013): 2357-2390.Rottenberg, Jonathan. “Ending Stigma by All Memes Necessary.” Huffington Post, 10 Apr. 2014. <https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-rottenberg/depression-stigma_b_5108140.html>.Skeggs, Beverley, and Simon Yuill. “Capital Experimentation with Person/a Formation: How Facebook's Monetization Refigures the Relationship between Property, Personhood and Protest.” Information, Communication & Society, 19.3 (2016): 380-396.Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, [1974] 2009.Tuters, Marc. "LARPing & Liberal Tears: Irony, Belief and Idiocy in the Deep Vernacular Web." In Post-Digital Cultures of the Far Right. 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Introduction Let me start by telling you about my “first-world problem”: I study girls’ autobiographical practice in digital spaces but the conceptual tools in my field have been developed chiefly in order to read and analyse printed books. Girls’ digital engagements with self-representation—such as web comics and blogs—are fascinating texts and I want to know what they can tell us about how girls’ written selves connect in complex ways to broader cultural constructions of girlhood. The Greek roots of the word autobiography autos, bios, and graphe (self, life, writing) inform the kinds of approaches that have been taken to address the relationship between an autobiographical text and its author (Smith and Watson, Reading 1). Further, the understanding of autobiography as “self life writing” has shaped what kinds of texts get to be called autobiography and what texts are something else—identity work, media-making, or marginal textual practice. Fortunately, due to the proliferation of online activity that engages autobiographical modes of textual practice, life writing scholars are beginning to develop new tools in order to address these “texts”—blogs, tweets, status updates, avatars, and a variety of digital personas—to find out what they can tell us about cultural understandings of selfhood and what it means to communicate “real” life through media. One of these tools under construction is the idea of “automedia,” which I will elaborate on below. The same integration of digital spaces and platforms into daily life that is prompting the development of new tools in autobiography studies—which P. David Marshall has described as “the proliferation of the public self”—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 (Marshall 163). To the field of persona studies, this essay contributes an approach to the author website as a site of self-presentation that works to “package” an authorial persona for circulation within contemporary literary marketplaces. Significantly, I address these websites not as direct representations of a pre-existing self, but as automedial texts that need to be read and interpreted, and which work to construct the authorial self or persona. I draw on theories of authorship to propose the “author website” as a genre of automedial representation that creates authorial personas for public consumption. Specifically, I consider the website of Erika Moen—a young, female author working in the medium of autobiographical comics—as a case study in order to explore the tensions between Moen’s authorial self (as produced in the digital elements of erikamoen.com) and the other, more deliberately autobiographical, renderings of her self that appear in her comics. Although young cartoonists tend to position themselves as artists rather than authors, the recent academic and critical interest in the “graphic novel” form has resulted in a growing sense of these works as literary and their makers as authors. In thinking through this distinction, Andrew Bennett’s suggestion that “asking ‘what is an author?’ is intimately related to the question ‘what is literature?’” (118) points to why cartoonists, whose texts are part image and part text and only sometimes bound up as books, have not always been contextualised as authors. Contemporary Authors and the Impetus to “Connect” To have an identity as an author is distinct from being an author. It is one thing to sit at a desk doing the work of writing a book. Making oneself visible as an author is a very different kind of work. Writers are asked to present themselves as authors in a range of contexts such as writers’ festivals, readings, book signings, interviews and book promotion tours, and this demand has increased with the rise of social media: writers are now expected to represent themselves across a variety of digital platforms, which currently include Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. These events and spaces reflect changing reading practices in which readers wish to move beyond the “solitary act of reading” and to participate in literary communities (Johanson and Freeman, 304). Within these communities authors occupy a role that is part celebrity, part guru, and part (imagined) close friend. Johanson and Freeman, in considering the appeal of writers’ festivals, argue “audiences seek genuine relationships with artists […] and are sensitive to a lack of authenticity on the part of the artist in the relationship” (306). Readers want to have access to authors: to get near them, the real them. And this sets up the expectation of a two-way street in which there is pressure on authors to also be participants and to grant readers the access they desire. Author websites are one way that writers respond to the call to make themselves visible and accessible as authors within literary communities, and this call is often framed as an impetus to “connect with” an audience. But the primary function of the author website is to exploit readers’ fascination with the author in order to sell books. In neoliberal cultures the pressure is on for all kinds of people to use online tools and spaces to commoditise their self-representation by cultivating a “self-brand,” and, to varying degrees of alarm, disgust, or pragmatism, this is certainly one way that the author is conceptualised: as a brand name (See Australian Society of Authors; Evers; Force; and Rankin). The author as brand name guarantees and markets a reading experience particular to that brand. As with many other commodities, author brands are a mechanism for organising books into categories with identifiable traits in order that readers/consumers may identify which books appeal to their reading tastes and choose their purchases accordingly. It is as Michel Foucault remarks in answer to the question “What is an Author?”: it is “a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes and chooses” (159). Digital spaces in particular are seen as opportunities for authors to create an “online presence” by communicating themselves as a brand on a website. I am proposing that we might look at how these websites draw on intimate modes of self-representation to create an author-subject that is knowable to a reading public, and to think about how the features of these sites and their digital contexts shape the kinds of authorial personas that can be produced in the medium of the author website. In order to do this, I now want to turn to the field of auto/biography studies in which there is a growing body of work that considers a range of online modes of self-representation as texts that can be read, analysed and understood within a broader framework of auto/biographical practices (autobiography is sometimes written with a slash, as in, auto/biography in order to acknowledge both biography and autobiography within a range of textual practices that broadly deal with life narrative). It is worth mentioning here that there is much diversity within author websites, and not all of them work to facilitate a connection with the reader. In fact, some work conversely to distance the author or to shroud them in mystery, among a range of other functions and formats. These sites of resistance to the pressure to “connect” are just as interesting in the context of finding out how online spaces are used to construct authors, however, there is not room to explore them here. The Author Website: An Automedial Genre In order to address new forms of (chiefly digital) self-representation that go beyond the printed book, scholars working in the field of auto/biography studies have proposed the concept of “automedia” as an alternative to terms such as autobiography, life writing or life narrative. Leading memoir and life narrative theorist Julie Rak (2013) argues that the concept of autobiography—and the ways that scholars have approached the genre—has been dominated by ideas of “narrative” and “writing” that are ill-suited to reading and analysing many online modes of self-representation. For example, although we might have trouble trying to read a Facebook wall or a Second Life avatar as “an autobiography” in the traditional sense, these performances of self-identity demonstrate ways in which users are taking up technology in order to engage in the business of autobiographical representation. And they are interesting for what they might be able to tell us about cultural understandings of selfhood and what it means to “live” a “life.” Rak proposes that these texts, which move beyond the medium of the written word, and which are not necessarily crafted (or read) as a story or narrative, might be studied not as autobiography but instead as automedia. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson also point to automedia as a way of approaching autobiographical texts in a way that emphasizes how the telling or mediation of a life actually shapes the kind of story that can be told about it. They state that “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” (“Virtually Me” 77). So we might understand an automedial approach as a 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. In my conceptualisation, this approach understands that the self does not exist outside of mediation, and it seeks to comprehend how the processes of (auto-)mediation shape selfhood both in individual terms (by analysing a particular automedial text to understand how it constructs the specific subject of that text) and in more general terms (how conventions and practices of different kinds of media shape and reflect cultural ideas of the self). As such, I do not think that automedia as an approach to autobiographical texts need be limited to digital media—after all, books are still media. But the modes of self-representation being taken up in online contexts present scholars with urgent questions about what it means to represent life and the self in increasingly social, networked, multi-media ways. The author website is an increasingly valuable tool for making writers visible as authors in online environments; but how are they automedial? By creating a mediated construction of an authorial persona that functions as a space in which readers (or to be more inclusive, internet users) can move around and experience the author’s mediated persona, the author website draws on strategies of auto/biographical representation in order to respond to a demand for personal access to the author. The author website works to create an often interactive space of contact between the writer as author and the public, where an audience (or internet user) is able to explore the author as he or she is constructed by his or her website. In order to explore how this kind of analysis might begin, I will turn to comics artist Erika Moen and her website erikamoen.com. Case Study: Erika Moen’s Authorial Persona Erika Moen is a self-published comics author based in the US. Her online diary comic DAR!: A Super-Girly Top Secret Comic Diary (2003-2009) grew out of her printed mini comics about coming out as lesbian. Moen’s website erikamoen.com is a good example of a highly developed automedial space, and it works to construct her as a comics author by offering for public consumption an authorial persona that functions as a brand, packaging and marketing her work. This case study is compelling for two reasons. Firstly, the graphic medium that Moen works in is particularly suited to the current moment in Web 2.0 history in which images—often in conjunction with words—are increasingly central. Secondly, the autobiographical nature of her work makes for interesting tensions between the authorial persona that is represented on her website and the autobiographical subject of her comics. For autobiographical authors, the call for them to be accessible to the public takes on an extra dimension. A consistent author brand should maintain an alignment between the kind of work they produce and their persona. In the case of autobiographical writers, their persona is anchored in a textual representation of their real-life self, so this allows us to think about the different functions of these two constructions, and the ways they speak to each other (or don’t). Moen is credited with generating the content of the site; however, her website was designed by a web designer and is based on a blog format. Although Moen’s site is much more than a blog, the blog format is evident as an influence on the design of the site which comprises nine pages: “Home,” “Art Portfolio,” “Comics,” “About,” “Events and Appearances,” “Press,” “Blog,” “Shop,” and “Contact.” In a broader consideration of this kind of author website, the four pages Home, About, Shop, and Contact, represent the key functions that these sites perform. The home page grounds the site, giving the user a first impression and overview of the author brand. “About” is the place that users can find biographical information. The site’s shop indicates the context of the space as a site that occurs within commercial networks of production and consumption, and which also works to disguise the commoditisation of the author by delineating a separate space for commerce that focuses on their work as the object for sale. The “Contact” page provides further channels for “connecting” with the author. The focus of this essay is Moen’s “Home” page (Figure 1). The home page anchors the site and works to create a professional persona for Moen that draws heavily on her autobiographical voice and cartoon style (which she has honed in her works DAR! and Oh Joy Sex Toy). It is highly significant that the face that welcomes the user to the site is not a photographic image of Moen but rather her cartoon avatar, which greets users with an assured and friendly smile. Those familiar with her work will recognise this picture as Moen. If readers fail to make this connection, there are clickable headings immediately to the right of the figure that use the first-person voice: the headings invite the user to “check out my work” and ask them “what am I up to?” (my emphasis). Taking a cue from the comic medium, the user might associate the proximity of the image of the cartoon girl to these statements, and read the two elements cohesively like a comics panel, understanding that the girl is the speaker, and the speaker is the author Erika Moen. Moen, as the author constructed by the website, almost always addresses the reader in this chatty, informal voice which echoes the voice she uses in her comics. On the home page, the reader is asked several questions and all of these appear in close proximity to the drawing of Moen. In addition to the one mentioned above, the reader is asked if they are “Looking to purchase some art?” and whether they “Want to see what I’ve created?” Instead of using labels here, the website uses questions addressed to the reader, and these appear clustered around the cartoon image of Moen which is rendered in her style. These questions draw the reader into an implied conversation, and they also suggest a presence or speaker behind the screen which, prompted by the cartoon Erika, the reader is encouraged to imagine as Erika Moen. This illusion of two-way communication invites the reader to experience the site as a personal encounter, and Moen’s perky, friendly voice that speaks intimately to her readers about her latest activities, products and appearances is the thread that sews together the different spaces of the site as well as Moen’s published work. Above the drawn image of Moen appear the words “Erika Moen” in a large “handwritten” font that dominates the screen. The illusion of handwriting here is significant. Hilary Chute, a scholar of autobiographical comics, in her book Graphic Women argues that handwriting constitutes an important autobiographical act on the part of the comic memoirist. She states that handwriting “underscores the subjective personality of the author” and acts as “a trace of autobiography in the mark of its maker” (10-11). Indeed, handwriting is often read as a sign of humanity and authenticity that is understood in opposition to the machined construction of computer generated fonts. The idea that handwriting can be traced back to an individual and that personal traits can be discovered by decoding a person’s handwriting are ideas that reflect an autobiographical reading of handwriting and its place within textual culture. In this context, on the website of a comics artist, in addition to referencing the medium of cartoons, it also signals these ideas about authenticity and autobiography, and it implies the human behind the digital text. Everything on the home page is a product of Moen herself and each element communicates her persona as an indie, DIY, self-published cartoonist: each image that appears on the home page is drawn by her hand; her voice inflects the majority of the text on the page; some of the writing appears in a handwritten font; even, the bio states, her degree from Pitzer College is “self-made.” Moen’s Home page is an automedial space that facilitates a connection between author and reader that is grounded in the commoditised networks of persona production and consumption: the site serves not only to encourage the reader to buy Moen’s autobiographical comics, but effectively to “buy into” her personal brand. It constructs a persona that draws on a combination of visual and textual signals which at once connect Moen to her comics works and also encourage readers to feel as if they “know” Erika: her name in handwriting, her comics portrait which welcomes the reader, and the subheadings that draw the reader into a conversation. Although there is much more to explore on Moen’s website, in order to demonstrate some key considerations of an automedial approach I have examined several significant elements of the homepage which form the basis for a fuller reading of the site. Conclusion This essay sits at the burgeoning intersection of autobiography studies and digital media studies, and is part of an attempt to understand how digital media practices impact on what kinds of self-representation are produced and consumed. In this way, it contributes to the field of persona studies, which is also invested in exploring systems that facilitate the “presentation of the self that are now ubiquitous in contemporary culture” (Barbour & Marshall). I have suggested that the author website can be read as a genre of automedia in order to explore how these digital spaces—which are embedded in networks of literary production and consumption—draw on auto/biographical strategies to construct an authorial persona that works to sell books by connecting with an audience. This essay works towards further research on paratextual sites that can tell us more about how writers are constructed as authors in the contemporary literary landscape, and I have proposed that a consideration of the deployment and construction of authorial personas is integral to understanding “the author” in this cultural moment. References Anderson, Hephzibah. “How Authors Become Mega-Brands.” BBC. British Broadcasting Corporation. 19 Feb. 2014. 15 Apr. 2014. Australian Society of Authors. “Marketing: The Author as Brand Name.” DVD. Australian Society of Authors, n.d. 15 Apr. 2014. Barbour, Kim, and David Marshall. “The Academic Online: Constructing Persona through the World Wide Web.” First Monday 17.9 (2012). 19 May 2014. Bennett, Andrew. The Author. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. Chute, Hilary L. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Evers, Stuart. “Bestselling Authors, or Branding Machines?” The Guardian 12 June 2008. 15 Apr. 2014. Force, Marie. “A Finger on the Pulse of Readers – New Survey Confirms Reader Passion for e-Books, But Half Still Want Paperbacks.” PR Newswire 1 Aug. 2013. 14 Apr. 2014. Johanson, Katya, and Robin Freeman. “The Reader as Audience: The Appeal of the Writers’ Festival to the Contemporary Audience.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 26.2 (2012): 303-314. Marshall, P David. “Persona Studies: Mapping the Proliferation of the Public Self.” Journalism 15.2 (2014): 153-170. Moen, Erika. DAR!: A Super-Girly Top Secret Comic Diary. 2003-2009. 10 Apr. 2014. Moen, Erika. Erika Moen. c. 2014. 22 Apr. 2014. Moen, Erika. Oh Joy Sex Toy. 2011-2014. 10 Apr. 2014. Pitsaki, Irini. “Strategic Brand Management Tools in Publishing.” The International Journal of the Book 8.3 (2008): 103-112. Rak, Julie. “First Person? Life Writing versus Automedia.” Beyond the Subject: New Developments in Life Writing: IABA Europe 2013. 31 Oct. - 3 Nov. 2013. Rankin, Jennifer. “Publish and Be Branded: The New Threat to Literature’s Laboratory.” The Guardian 14 Jan. 2014. 15 Apr. 2014. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. “Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. 70-95.

All critics declare not only their judgment of the work but also their claim to the right to talk about it and judge it. In short, they take part in a struggle for the monopoly of legitimate discourse about the work of art, and consequently in the production of the value of the work of art. (Pierre Bourdieu 36). As it becomes blindingly obvious that ‘cultural production’, including the cinema, now underpins an economy every bit as brutal in its nascent state as the Industrial Revolution was for its victims 200 years ago, both critique and cinephilia seem faded and useless to me. (Meaghan Morris 700). The music’s loud, the lights are low. I’m at a party and somebody’s shouting at me. “How many films do you see every week?” “Do you really get in for free?” “So what should I see next Saturday night?” These are the questions that shape the small talk of my life. After seven years of reviewing movies you’d think I’d have ready answers and sparkling rehearsed tip-offs to scatter at the slightest quiver of interest. And yet I feel anxious when I’m asked to predict some stranger’s enjoyment – their 15-odd bucks worth of dark velvet pleasure. Who am I to say what they’ll enjoy? Who am I to judge what’s worthwhile? As editor of the film pages of The Big Issue magazine (Australian edition), I make such value judgments every day, sifting through hundreds of press releases, invitations and interview offers. I choose just three films and three DVDs to be reviewed each fortnight, and one film to form the subject of a feature article or interview. The film pages are a very small part of an independent magazine that exists to provide an income for the homeless and long-term unemployed people who sell it on the streets of Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. And no, homeless people don’t go to the movies very often but our relatively educated and affluent city-dwelling readers do. The letters page of the magazine suggests that readers’ favourite pages are the Vendor Portraits – the extraordinary and sobering photographs and life stories of the people who are out there on the streets selling the magazine. Yet the editorial policy is to maintain a certain lightness of touch amidst the serious business. Thus, the entertainment pages (music, books, film, TV and humour) have no specific social justice agenda. But if there’s a new Australian film out there that deals with the topic of homelessness, it seems imperative to at least consider the story. Rather than offering in-depth analysis of particular films and the ways I go about judging them, the following diary excerpts instead offer a sketch of the practical process of editorial decision-making. Why review this film and not that one? Why interview this actor or that film director? And how do these choices fit within the broad goals of a social justice publication? Created randomly, from a quick scan of the last twelve months, the diary is a scribbled attempt to justify, or in Bourdieu’s terms, “legitimate” the critical role I play, and to try and explain how that role can never be fully defined by an aesthetic that is divorced from social and political realities. August 2004 My editor calls me and asks if I’ve seen Tom White, the new low-budget Australian film by Alkinos Tsilimidos. I have, and I hated it. Starring Colin Friels, the film follows the journey of a middle-aged middle-class man who walks out of his life and onto the streets. It’s a grimy, frustrating film, supported by only the barest bones of narrative. I was bored and infuriated by the central character, and I know it’s the kind of under-developed story that’s keeping Australian audiences away from our own films. And yet … it’s a local film that actually dares to tackle issues of homelessness and mental illness, and it’s a story that presents a truth about homelessness that’s borne out by many of our vendors: that any one of us could, except by the grace of God or luck, find ourselves sleeping rough. My editor wants me to interview Colin Friels, who will appear on the cover of the magazine. I don’t want to touch the film, and I prefer interviewing people whose work genuinely interests and excites me. But there are other factors to be considered. The film’s exhibitor, Palace Films, is offering to hold charity screenings for our benefit, and they are regular advertising supporters of The Big Issue. My editor, a passionate and informed film lover himself, understands the quandary. We are in no way beholden to Palace, he assures me, and we can tread the fine line with this film, using it to highlight the important issues at hand, without necessarily recommending the film to audiences. It’s tricky and uncomfortable; a simple example of the way in which political and aesthetic values do not always dance so gracefully together. Nevertheless, I find a way to write the story without dishonesty. September 2004 There’s no denying the pleasure of writing (or reading) a scathing film review that leaves you in stitches of laughter over the dismembered corpse of a bad movie. But when space is limited, I’d rather choose the best three films every fortnight for review and recommendation. In an ideal world I’d attend every preview and take my pick. They’d be an excitingly diverse mix. Say, one provocative documentary (maybe Mike Moore or Errol Morris), one big-budget event movie (from the likes of Scorsese or Tarantino), and one local or art-house gem. In the real world, it’s a scramble for deadlines. Time is short and some of the best films only screen in one or two states, making it impossible for us to cover them for our national audience. Nevertheless, we do our best to keep the mix as interesting and timely as possible. For our second edition this month I review the brilliant documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky), while I send other reviewers to rate Spielberg’s The Terminal (only one and a half stars out of five), and Cate Shortland’s captivating debut Australian feature Somersault (four stars). For the DVD review page we look at a boxed set of The Adventures of Tintin, together with the strange sombre drama House of Sand and Fog (Vadim Perelman), and the gripping documentary One Day in September (Kevin MacDonald) about the terrorist attacks at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. As editor, I try to match up films with the writers who’ll best appreciate them. With a 200-word limit we know that we’re humble ‘reviewers’ rather than lofty ‘critics’, and that we can only offer the briefest subjective response to a work. Yet the goal remains to be entertaining and fair, and to try and evaluate films on their own terms. Is this particular movie an original and effective example of the schlocky teen horror thriller? If so, let’s give it the thumbs up. Is this ‘worthy’ anti-globalisation documentary just a boring preachy sermon with bad hand-held camera work? Then we say so. For our film feature article this edition, I write up an interview with Italian director Luigi Falorni, whose simple little film The Weeping Camel has been reducing audiences to tears. It’s a strange quiet film, a ‘narrative documentary’ set in the Gobi desert, about a mother camel that refuses to give milk to her newborn baby. There’s nothing political or radical about it. It’s just beautiful and interesting and odd. And that’s enough to make it worthy of attention. November 2004 When we choose to do a ‘celebrity’ cover, we find pretty people with serious minds and interesting causes. This month two gorgeous film stars, Natalie Portman and Gael Garcia Bernal find their way onto our covers. Portman’s promoting the quirky coming of age film, Garden State (Zach Braff), but the story we run focuses mainly on her status as ambassador for the Foundation of International Community Assistance (FINCA), which offers loans to deprived women to help them start their own businesses. Gabriel Garcia Bernal, the Mexican star of Walter Salle’s The Motorcycle Diaries appears on our cover and talks about his role as the young Che Guevara, the ultimate idealist and symbol of rebellion. We hope this appeals to those radicals who are prepared to stop in the street, speak to a homeless person, and shell out four dollars for an independent magazine – and also to all those shallow people who want to see more pictures of the hot-eyed Latin lad. April 2005 Three Dollars is Robert Connelly’s adaptation of Elliot Perlman’s best-selling novel about economic rationalism and its effect on an average Australian family. I loved the book, and the film isn’t bad either, despite some unevenness in the script and performances. I interview Frances O’Connor, who plays opposite David Wenham as his depressed underemployed wife. O’Connor makes a beautiful cover-girl, and talks about the seemingly universal experience of depression. We run the interview alongside one with Connelly, who knows just how to pitch his film to an audience interested in homelessness. He gives great quotes about John Howard’s heartless Australia, and the way we’ve become an economy rather than a society. It’s almost too easy. In the reviews section of the magazine we pan two other Australian films, Paul Cox’s Human Touch, and the Jimeoin comedy-vehicle The Extra. I’d rather ignore bad Australian films and focus on good films from elsewhere, or big-budget stinkers that need to be brought down a peg. But I’d lined up reviews for these local ones, expecting them to be good, and so we run with the negativity. Some films are practically critic-proof, but small niche films, like most Australian titles, aren’t among these Teflon giants. As Joel Pearlman, Managing Director of Roadshow Films has said, “There are certain types of films that are somewhat critic-proof. They’ve either got a built-in audience, are part of a successful franchise, like The Matrix or Bond films, or have a popular star. It’s films without the multimillion-dollar ad campaigns and the big names where critics are far more influential” ( Pearlman in Bolles 19). Sometimes I’m glad that I’m just a small fish in the film critic pond, and that my bad reviews can’t really destroy someone’s livelihood. It’s well known that a caning from reviewers like David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz (ABC, At the Movies), or the Melbourne Age’s Jim Schembri can practically destroy the prospects of a small local film, and I’m not sure I have the bravery or conviction of the value of my own tastes to bear such responsibility. Admittedly, that’s just gutless tender-heartedness for, as reviewers, our responsibility is to the audience not to the filmmaker. But when you’ve met with cash-strapped filmmakers, and heard their stories and their struggles, it’s sometimes hard to put personal compassion aside and see the film as the punter will. But you must. August 2005 It’s a busy time with the Melbourne International Film Festival just finishing up. Hordes of film directors accompany their films to the festival, promoting them here ahead of a later national release schedule, and making themselves available for rare face-to face interviews. This year I find a bunch of goodies that seem like they were tailor-made for our readership. There are winning local films like Sarah Watt’s life-affirming debut Look Both Ways; and Rowan Woods’ gritty addiction-drama Little Fish. There’s my personal favourite, Bahman Ghobadi’s stunning and devastating Kurdish/Iranian feature Turtles Can Fly; and Avi Lewis’s inspiring documentary The Take, about Argentine factory workers who unite to revive their bankrupt workplaces. It’s when I see films like this, and get to talk to the people who bring them into existence, that I realize how much I value writing about films for a publication that doesn’t exist just to make a profit or fill space between advertisements. As the great American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has eloquently argued, most of the worldwide media coverage concerning film is merely a variation on the ‘corporate stories’ that film studios feed us as part of their advertising. To be able to provide some small resistance to that juggernaut is a wonderful privilege. I love to be lost in the dark, studying films frame by frame, and with reference only to some magical internal universe of ‘cinema’ and its endless references to itself. But as the real world outside falls apart, such airless cinephilia feels just plain wrong. As a writer whose subject is films, what I’m compelled to do is to come out of the cinema and try to use my words to convey the best of what I’ve seen to my friends and readers, pointing them towards small treasures they may have overlooked amidst the hype. So maybe I’m not a ‘pure’ critic, and maybe there’s no shame in that. The films I’ll gravitate towards share an almost indefinable quality – to use Jauss’s phrase, they reconstruct and expand my “horizon of expectation” (28). Sometimes these films are overtly committed to a cause, but often they’re just beautiful and strange and fresh. Always they expand me, open me, make me feel that there’s more to the world than expected, and make me want more too – more information, more freedom, more compassion, more equality, more beauty. And, after all these years in the dark, I still want more films like that. Endnotes As of August 2005, the role of DVD editor of The Big Issue has been filled by Anthony Morris. According the latest Morgan Poll, readers of The Big Issue are likely to be young (18-39), urban, educated, and affluent professionals. Current readership is estimated at 144,000 fortnightly and growing. References Bolles, Scott. “The Critics.” Sunday Life. The Age 10 Jul. 2005: 19. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. Randal Johnson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993. Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Trans. Timothy Bahti. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1982. Morris, Meaghan. “On Going to Bed Early: Once Upon a Time in America.” Meanjin 4 (1998): 700. Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Junket Bonds.” Chicago Reader Movie Review (2000). 2 Sept. 2005 http://www.chicagoreader.com/movies/archives/2000/1000/00117.html>. The Big Issue Australia. http://www.bigissue.org.au/> 10 Oct. 2005. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Siemienowicz, Rochelle. "Diary of a Film Reviewer: Intimate Reflections on Writing about the Screen for a Popular Audience." M/C Journal 8.5 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/01-siemienowicz.php>. APA Style Siemienowicz, R. (Oct. 2005) "Diary of a Film Reviewer: Intimate Reflections on Writing about the Screen for a Popular Audience," M/C Journal, 8(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/01-siemienowicz.php>.

Being is an empty fiction. The “apparent” world is the only world: the “true world” is just a lie added on to it… —Nietzsche. Anna Poletti: I’m attracted to autobiography in a non-narrative context because I’m very interested in texts that people create that demonstrate their thinking or their fantasies or their processing, generally.Lauren Berlant: Right, in that sense it’s autobiography in your larger sense of what autobiography is: a record of […] processing. —Anna Poletti and Julie Rak with Lauren Berlant. The medium is the message. —Marshall McLuhanWelcome to the M/C Journal issue on automediality. If “automediality” sounds like another academic buzzword to you, you are right. But it is more than a buzzword for scholars interested in exploring the significant role of mediation in auto/biographical engagement. Automediality is, we think, an incredibly useful way of framing and grouping scholarly investigations of the processes and practices that people engage when they mediate their lives and selves in a range of auto/biographical forms.We are incredibly excited to bring you this vibrant collection of research about what we are calling “automediality,” but first it is useful to lay some groundwork in terms of explicitly articulating what we think automediality is and does, and why we think it is necessary.As life writing scholars exploring contemporary examples of digital auto/biography in our own research, we were both struck by the need for a new definition of auto/biography that expands beyond text, beyond narrative, beyond subject in any complete sense or form, to reflect the multiplicity of ways that lives are lived and recorded using new media today. We each found ourselves limited, at times, by existing assumptions about what auto/biography traditionally is. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, in their field defining work Reading Autobiography, offer an etymological cue that summarises the prevailing use and perception of autobiographical work: “in Greek, autos denotes ‘self,’ bios ‘life,’ and graphe ‘writing.’ Taken together in this order, the words self life writing offer a brief definition of the autobiography” (1).If “autobiography” has denoted a way to write the self from the location of the self, automediality points to the range of media forms and technologies through which people engage in digital, visual, filmic, performative, textual, and transmediated forms of documenting, constructing and presenting the self. Smith and Watson introduce automediality as a possible theoretical framework for “approaching life storytelling in diverse visual and digital media” (Reading 168). Originally developed by European scholars such as Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser, the term was introduced in order “to expand the definition of how subjectivity is constructed in writing, image, or new media” (Smith and Watson Reading 168).Conjoining autos and media, the concept redresses a tendency in autobiography studies to consider media as “tools” for rendering a pre-existent self. Theorists of automediality emphasize that the choice of medium is determined by self-expression; and the materiality of the medium is constitutive of the subjectivity rendered. Thus media technologies do not simplify or undermine the interiority of the subject but, on the contrary, expand the field of self-representation beyond the literary to cultural and media practices. New media of the self revise notions of identity and the rhetoric and modalities of self-presentation, and they prompt new imaginings of virtual sociality enabled by concepts of community that do not depend on personal encounter. (Reading 168)Looking at auto/biographical practices from a framework of automediality moves away from a conception of texts as able to capture and transmit preexisting selves, lives and identities, and towards an understanding of selves, lives and identities as constructed by and through textual and media practices. It is through creating an autobiographical text that the “self” a person thinks they are comes into being. The mode of creation here, be it a Facebook status update, a memoir, or an alt account, for example, is situated within networks of power, meaning and social capital to shape ways of being a “self” in a particular environment or context. Automedial reading takes all of these formative elements into consideration.Julie Rak suggests that automedia “describes the enactment of a life story in a new media environment” (155), but we think that the term is even more useful as a framework or approach to studying not only new media life stories, but auto/biographical practices as they are enacted in a range of media forms, analogue and digital alike. Importantly, our aim here is not simply to introduce another buzzword, but rather to draw attention to the current need to rethink the significant role of mediation in auto/biographical production, performance, and practices. As Rak points out, “it is time not only to rename the practices we study, but also to think critically about online life as life, and not as the texts many of us are more used to studying, which are meant to represent a life” (156). This kind of critical rethinking about how media is embedded in the living of lives, and the scholarly shift that Rak suggests from examining representation in texts to examining “online life as life” is crucial to the notion of automediality. And it has us—the editors of this issue—divided. A Conversation between EditorsÜmit: choosing “subject” and “process” over “text.”I think what automediality is, which is different to auto/biography, is process rather than product. Automediality allows us to explore how our lives intertwine with different mediums and technologies resulting in new subjects, but subjects in motion. There is no product, there is no complete narrative, there is no snapshot that captures the subject. The subject is always developing, always in motion, always in the “process of doing” (Rak 156), of being and becoming. It is a “moving target” as Smith and Watson suggest (“Virtually” 71). And therefore, automediality, as Rak suggests, is the process of living: living in relationship with media. Where as an autobiographical enquiry has usually (not always) involved the study of a subject in a complete form (although susceptible to other “versions”)—a text in other words, which can be examined by itself—an automedial enquiry has to adapt to the fact that there isn’t a product that can be examined in isolation. As Emma has argued elsewhere, we can never hold “a single cohesive version” of automedial subjects in our hands and we never reach “the end” of a subject’s self-representation as long as they continue to “post” (“Self-Branding” 75). What we are exploring as scholars of automediality is a process of living. How people live, create and present themselves, participate, narrativise, and simply “be” in different spaces, using different mediums and technologies. The mediated lives and subjects that we’re exploring in this issue require new language, new words and definitions. We are not dealing with “texts,” although there are textual components, we are not dealing with “narratives,” although one (or many) is (or are) always in formation (see Rak 156), and most importantly, we are not dealing with “products,” that hold any significance in isolation. What we are dealing with are processes: processes of being, doing, creating, and distributing the self, in relationship with media and their affordances, limitations and participants. My objection to language such as “text” is that it implies something tangible, taking for granted the ephemerality of the subjects of automediality. So often in my research I have taken a “snapshot” of a subject (in the form of a YouTube video, for example) and treated it like a text ready for analysis only to find when I revisit it that it has changed, been edited or contradicted, or completely erased (see Kennedy). And when we treat “snapshots” as “texts” for analysis I think we miss the most important point: that is the process through which the subject was and is being formed (in relationship with the medium, its technologies, and the people and things that congregate and participate in that space). We need to expand the way we explore mediated subjects and lives and “automediality” allows us to do this—it gives us a “space” in which to develop new language and methods of enquiry.Emma: texts are vital to studying automediality.Elsewhere, I have suggested that textuality is key to a definition of automediality: “The aim of an automedial approach is to discover what texts can tell us about cultural understandings of selfhood and what it means to portray ‘real’ life and ‘real’ selves through media. The emphasis is on thinking critically about mediation” (Girls, 22). However, Ümit’s thinking about automedia as process has been instrumental to progressing how I am defining and thinking about automediality. For me, though, (and perhaps my background in literary studies is showing here), framing autobiographical production and performance as texts that we can read is a useful framework that allows us to disentangle and examine abstract, slippery concepts like being, living, identity, and selfhood in process in a way that brings the roles and effects of mediation into sharp focus.Retaining the terminology around texts and textual practices—specifically that branch that is concerned with cultural production—also means that we can observe the labour of auto/biography, which is important for thinking about the economies in which automediation occurs as well as acknowledging the work that goes into creating these self-presentations or performances. It takes skills, labour, literacies, and—for me—nuanced understanding and facility with crucial modalities of reading to participate and "play" in any kind of media form. My definition of reading is broad: people read meaning, identities, lives, media, and the world around them in order to figure out how they fit into any given context, and it is the texts produced in even the most fleeting or participatory automediation that record or hold traces of this work, this process, that we as scholars can then examine.The spirit in which I apply “text” is deeply influenced by the field of semiotics within Cultural Studies. The work of semioticians like Saussure, Althusser, Derrida and Lotman that I studied during my undergraduate degree leads me, like many literary scholars, to think about not only cultural products like books and media as texts, but also bodies, surfaces, ephemeral and immaterial performances, and a range of autobiographical practices as texts. As agents we create meaning by reading, decoding, interpreting, and negotiating texts. The work of mediation, for me, is deeply connected to textual practices.I still think that texts—as well as the practices and processes that go into creating, distributing, and reading them—are a productive framework for examining strategies of self-presentation and identity performance. However, Ümit’s observations around process (articulated in her short essay “Vulnerability” and developed here) is particularly vital to thinking about the context for the participation of produsers in media economies where automedial production is often fleeting, ephemeral, and in flux. And I think that the importance of process in analysing more (apparently or materially) stable media is important, too. One way of thinking about a middle ground between text and subject is by considering the concept of becoming as central to the conceptual framework of automediality. Ümit: finding a middle ground.I agree our difference of opinion about viewing these subjects as texts comes from our different disciplines. For you, Emma, the word “text” is important because it emphasises the agency and labour involved in its creation. As a communications and media scholar, I operate on the assumption that communicating the self involves a huge amount of conscious and unconscious work. I take the agency and labour involved in mediating the self for granted. I still have an issue with “text,” however, as taking the process through which it was created for granted. I do concede, though, that we can’t completely disregard the products of mediation, because there are products (as long as we agree that they are in motion), and these are worthy of study.Although mediated subjects and texts can be fleeting and ephemeral, the fact that they are mediated, as you suggest, means that to some extent they are traceable. The mediation of the self means we can see and track its progression, its influencers, its forms, its relationships and dialogues. Although it is changeable and deletable, “doing” (living in relationship with media) leaves a record. On YouTube, for example, I can see the interactions that take place, through comments, likes and subscriptions, and I can therefore trace the subject as it changes. Mediating the self in this way materialises the process of self-formation. Automediality illuminates the process and makes it accessible to us to research. I think the concept of becoming is a perfect middle ground. “Becoming” as a Middle GroundWe are interested in using the concept of automediality to unpack and examine how selves and lives are brought into being through media forms by examining, simultaneously, both the process of mediation and the product (i.e. the autobiographical subjects and text). A crucial part of this examination is attending to the process of construction, of the process through which the textual self is mediated. One way of thinking about this in relation to the construction of lives and selves, is by thinking about how the concept of becoming is traceable in mediation.Rob Cover’s discussion of becoming in social networking is influential to our thinking here. Cover, drawing on Judith Butler, explains that underlying his approach is “the idea that identity and subjectivity is an ongoing process of becoming, rather than an ontological state of being” (56) and he argues that looking at the practices and artifacts of online identity performance can reveal the intricacies of identity in process. Also important here is the work of Stuart Hall who, in 1989, wrote about becoming in terms of how it is implicated in identity as a cultural practice or process:Cultural identity […] is a matter of 'becoming' as well as of 'being'. […] It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant trans-formation. Far from being eternally fixed […], they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in a mere 'recovery' of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which, when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narrative of the past. (70)Hall’s description of becoming as the process by which identity is continually brought into being has parallels to how we are thinking of mediation and life narrative in this issue. Hall is speaking about reading and representing identity, about the processes and products through which people enact, express, perform, and consume identity categories. Similarly, we are looking at subjectivities and identities in process, and we both agree that automediality as a conceptual tool and classifying label turns our attention to the ways in which people identify themselves and others using media. Media use, here, encompasses practices of engagement in terms of both consumption and creation. And, increasingly, users participate by engaging in both production and consumption simultaneously, becoming produsers—a term coined by the editor of this journal, Axel Bruns (2). Bruns’s notion of produsers illustrates the complex relationship between consumers, producers and users in the current media economy (2). One of the significant aspects of an automedial enquiry is the blurring of boundaries between creators and consumers. Automedial subjects are created in dialogue with the other participants in the space. The lives and identities are not only merged with the medium and technologies involved in their creation, but also with the other produsers in the space. This is critical when we begin to explore how to research automediality, as an automedial enquiry demands automediation of the researcher. In order to explore these subjects, the researcher must participate, to some extent, in the practice. Exploring subjects on social media, for example, requires the researcher to create an account and therefore participate in the same activity they are observing/consuming/researching.Questions for Automedial EnquiryTaking these ideas from theory to practice, from our point of view, reading auto/biographical texts and practices through a framework of automediality involves asking some of the following questions and paying attention to some of the following elements:What are the affordances, constraints and features of this medium that have shaped how a subject can inscribe, perform, or construct a self-presentation? As Nancy Baym writes, “our ability to construct an online self-presentation ... is limited and enabled by the communicative tools, or affordances, a platform makes available and our skills at strategically managing them” (124).What networks of power traverse this technology, this medium, and thus this mode of self-presentation?How does this performance of selfhood engage the different autobiographical “I”s: the narrating self and the narrated self; the subject and its creator; the online self and the offline IRL (in real life) self or selves. Although, as Smith and Watson state, “theorists of media and autobiography […] approach the constructed self not as an essence but as a subject” (Reading, 71), we have to acknowledge the person or constructs that exist outside of (and informs) the performance. How do these different facets of the self, and identities, speak to each other in automedia? In what networks of production and consumption does the automedia exist? How is the audience positioned in relation to the text or subject?Surface reading: the textual elements that form the interface between reader and story can tell us about what forces are shaping the self-presentations within the text, and also how the reader is positioned in relation to the autobiographical narrative. What does a surface reading reveal about how the self is being constructed by both media conventions and cultural meanings? The possibility of multiple and fragmented selves. The self that a subject performs or creates in one media platform may be a very different self that they perform in another or that they feel themselves to “be” in “real” life. What is the relationship between these selves? How do they inform and speak to each other?Authenticity is always suspect. Rather than a concrete guarantee that the media presentation correlates truthfully or sincerely to the IRL (in real life) identity or life of the narrator, authenticity in automedia is “an effect created by the form and style” of an auto/biographical performance (Maguire Girls, 11; drawing on Poletti Intimate, 28-9; emphasis added). Thus, it is less useful to weigh up how authentic or how real a particular self-presentation or media form is, and more interesting to examine how particular media constructs or creates effects of authenticity, or makes appeals to truth/authenticity. And finally, method: How can we develop methods to explore automedia which critically examine the text/subject, as well as the “process of doing” (Rak) through which the text/subject is being and “becoming” (Hall). Introducing the ArticlesEach of these excellent articles responds to technological effects on selfhood. By canvassing a range of media forms and approaches to conceptualising the mediation of lives and selves, our contributors’ ideas probe new directions for automediality as a framework for reading and thinking through self-mediation.The feature article, authored by Anna Poletti and Julie Rak, proposes that RuPaul’s Drag Race demonstrates automedia in action and suggests that the reality TV show, by modelling “queer time,” presents a challenge to dominant (straight) patterns of temporality in life narratives. This piece presents an argument for considering how identities that have been positioned as marginal are able, through automediality, to reconfigure understandings of what a life and a self can look like.Wes Hill addresses a key claim that we are making when we talk about autmediality: that media interfaces and contexts shape and construct the forms of selfhood that are brought into being through them. Hill takes the case study of artist and filmmaker Ryan Trecartin and argues that Trecartin’s videos demonstrate a fragmented set of identities that are deeply constituted by a style of performance that Hill calls “Internet-era camp.” Here, Internet-era camp becomes a mode through which to constitute the self through fragmented sets of intertextual and affective meanings. Emily van der Nagel highlights the multi-faceted nature of the mediated self through her investigation of Alt (alternative) accounts on Twitter. Her article demonstrates the way people use different accounts on the same platform for different facets of the self, and for different audiences. Isabel Pederson and Kristen Aspevig extend our discussion of automediality to explore agency and consent in the example of children producing their own automedial subjects and texts on YouTube, in the form of toy reviews. Kylie Cardell explores the digital self-tracking device many of us wear on our wrists, the Fitbit, and asks whether this wearable technology constitutes a diary. In her article, Cardell examines how a Fitbit can become an almanac for self-improvement, where the constant tracking of our physical behaviour changes the way that we live.Anu A Harju critically examines the world of “fatshion” blogging to reveal the relational way “fatshionistas” are formed in dialogue with medium, community and market. Harju situates the self as a product of relations, “borne out of them as well as dependent on them.” Chad Habel takes up masculine gender performance in video games by investigating how genre facilitates (or doesn’t) particular modes of identification by coaxing aggressive gameplay.Mick Broderick, Stuart Marshall Bender and Tony McHugh take a look how artificial intelligence technologies are currently being used to create immersive virtual reality experiences. They question the use of trauma in such projects, and suggest that affect—particularly when used to explore suffering within virtual worlds—needs careful thought moving forward with these technologies.ConclusionThis collection of interdisciplinary scholarship is an exploration of the different ways that people mediate the self. Focusing on mediation as a process that brings the subject into being, these essays explore the connections between lives, selves, identities and media technologies. The textual constructs that hold selves together become traces or products that can perform social functions, but they also have immense richness as objects of study. By taking apart and examining the processes and effects of mediation on life narratives, as scholars we are able to re-focus the microscope on the becoming of lives, selves and identities that are constructed in autobiographical texts. In seeking contributions for this collection, we were guided by two key questions: How do people mediate their identities, selves and experiences? How do media forms and conventions limit or facilitate the possibilities for particular kinds of selfhood to be articulated? Scholars of life narrative warn us that “the self” is not a unified and pre-existing entity that can simply be transcribed or translated through media. Rather, the self is brought into being through writing—or mediation. Media technologies like the camera, the diary, social media platforms, and books each have conventions, affordances, abilities and limits that both enable and restrict the kinds of self-presentation that are possible. Particular media bring particular subjectivities to life. It is our opinion that examining such sites and modes of automediality can tell us about the ways in which “technologies and subjectivity” are connected (Smith and Watson “Virtually” 77), and this is what we hope this collection of work offers to scholars of media and life narrative, as well as those working in interrelated fields. But this is only the beginning. The interfaces between life narrative and media technologies remains an exciting space for new ideas and theories to flourish.Future avenues for investigation of automediality might include examining: the platforms, mediums and technologies of automediality; the affordances of automediality for alternative narratives and identities; the vulnerabilities of mediated narratives and identities; the mediated self as brand/consumable product; cases that explore when automediality is lasting and permanent and when it is ephemeral and shifting; and multiple methodologies for investigating the mediated self, particularly in the context of digital media. An upcoming development that we’re particularly excited about is Anna Poletti’s forthcoming monograph Biomediations which will, we expect, move this thinking forward again.We hope that this issue of M/C Journal inspires more ideas about how media shapes the kinds of selves we think we are, now, in the past, and into the future. ReferencesBaym, Nancy K. Personal Connections in the Digital Age. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Polity, 2015. Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.Cover, Rob. “Becoming and Belonging: Performativity, Subjectivity, and the Cultural Purposes of Social Networking.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. 55-69.Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 36 (1989): 68-81.Kennedy, Ümit. “The Vulnerability of Contemporary Digital Autobiography.” a/b Auto/Biography Studies 32.2 (2017): 409-11.Maguire, Emma. Girls, Autobiography, Media: Gender and Self-Meditation in Digital Economies. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.———. “Self-Branding, Hotness, and Girlhood in the Video Blogs of Jenna Marbles.” Biography 38.1 (2015): 72-86.Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. “Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer.” The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings. Eds. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman. Trans. Judith Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 153-230.Poletti, Anna. Biomediations. New York: New York UP, forthcoming 2019.———. Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture. Carlton, VIC: Melbourne UP, 2008.Poletti, Anna, and Julie Rak. “The Blog as Experimental Setting: An Interview with Lauren Berlant.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. 259-72.Rak, Julie. “Life Writing versus Automedia: The Sims 3 Game as a Life Lab.” Biography 38.2 (2015): 155-80.Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.———. “Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2014. 70-95.

IntroductionIn 2017, both the disability community and popular culture are using the term “inspiration porn” to describe one form of discrimination against people with disability. ABC’s Speechless, “a sitcom about a family with a son who has a disability, (has) tackled why it’s often offensive to call people with disabilities ‘inspirational’” (Wanshel). The reasons why inspiration porn is considered to be discriminatory have been widely articulated online by people with disability. Amongst them is Carly Findlay, a disabled writer, speaker, and appearance activist, who has written that:(inspiration porn) shows non-disabled people doing good deeds for disabled people—feeding them chips at McDonald’s—’serving us all lessons in kindness’: or taking them to the high school dance. These stories usually always go viral. The person with disability probably never gave their permission for the photo or story to be used in a meme or told to the media (Findlay).The definition and dynamics of inspiration porn as illustrated in this quote will be expanded upon in this paper’s critical analysis of captions. Here, the term captions is used to describe both writing found on memes and on Facebook posts (created by a “poster”), and the comments written below these posts (created by “commenters”). Facebook threads underneath posts about people with disability both “reflect and create” (Barnes, Mercer and Shakespeare 202) current societal attitudes towards disability. That is, such threads not only illustrate negative societal attitudes towards disability, but can also perpetuate these attitudes by increasing people’s exposure to them. This paper will focus on a specific case study of inspiration porn on Facebook—the crowning of a student with autism as prom king—and consider both the conflict of whether people’s kind words are patronising use of language, as well as the concerns of over-disclosure used in this thread.What Is Inspiration Porn?The genesis of the term inspiration porn is commonly attributed to the late Stella Young, a disabled woman who was an advocate for people with disability. However, the term has been traced to a blog post written in February 2012 (bear). Anecdotal evidence from Lisa Harris, a disability consultant and advocate with over 20 years’ disability education experience, suggests that the term was blogged about as far back as 2006 on Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg’s Webpage Disability and Representation (Harris). However, it was Young who popularised the term with her 2012 article We’re Not Here for Your Inspiration and 2014 TED Talk I’m Not Your Inspiration, Thank You Very Much. Young defined inspiration porn as “an image of a person with a disability, often a kid, doing something completely ordinary—like playing, or talking, or running, or drawing a picture, or hitting a tennis ball—carrying a caption like ‘your excuse is invalid’ or ‘before you quit, try’”.It is worth noting that the use of the word porn has been considered controversial in this context. Yet it can be argued that the perception of the person with disability having achieved something great gives the person without disability a hit of positive “inspired” emotion. In this way, such inspiration could be termed as porn as it serves the purpose of fulfilling the “pornographic” self-gratification of people without disability.The term inspiration porn has historically been used in disability studies in two ways. Firstly, it has been used to describe the “ableist gaze” (Davis), which is when a person with disability is ‘seen’ through the eyes of someone without disability. Indeed, just as the “male gaze” (Mulvey) is implicit in sexualised porn, so too the “ableist gaze” is implicit in inspiration porn. Secondly, it has been used to highlight the lack of power experienced by people with disability in cultural representation (Barnes, Mercer, and Shakespeare 201). This study is a good example of the latter—it is not uncommon for people with disability to be refuted when they speak out against the inherent discrimination found within captions of (intended) kindness on Facebook threads.Inspiration porn is also a form of “objectification” (Perry) of people with disability, and is based on stereotypes (Haller and Zhang 22) about disability held by people without disability. According to Dr. Paul Sinclair, a disability scholar with 15 years’ experience in disability education, objectification and stereotyping are essential factors to understanding inspiration porn as discrimination:when a person with disability engages in their daily life, it is possible that a person without disability sees them as inspirational by superimposing his/her stereotypical perception of, or understanding about, people with disability onto the identity of the person, as a human being.Such objectification and stereotyping of people with disability is evident across various media captioning. This is particularly so in social media which often includes memes of images with “inspiring” captions—such as the ones Young highlighted as clear examples of inspiration porn, which “feature the Hamilton quote (‘The only disability in life is a bad attitude’)”. Another example of this kind of captioning is found in news items such as the 2015 article Disabled Teen Crowned Homecoming Queen in Awesome Way as featured in the article USA Today (Saggio). This article described how a student not identified as having a disability gave her homecoming queen crown to a student with a disability and captioned the YouTube clip of these students with, “High school senior [Name] was hoping she’d be crowned homecoming queen. She has cerebral palsy and has never felt like she fit in at school. What happened during the crowning ceremony will warm your heart” (Saggio). The fact that the young woman was pleased with getting the crown does not mitigate the objectifying dynamics of inspiration porn present within this example. Captioning such as this both creates and reflects some of the existing attitudes—including charity and its appeal to emotionality—that perpetuate inspiration porn.Measuring Inspiration Porn with Sentiment AnalysisThe challenge for the researcher analysing Facebook threads is how to meaningfully interpret the captions’ numerous contexts. The methodology of this research used a quantitative approach to gather numerical data about selected Facebook captions. This paper discusses data gained from a sentiment analysis (Pang and Lee; Thelwall et al.; Driscoll) of these captions within the contexts of my own and other researchers’ analyses of inspiration porn, as well as the perspectives of people with disability.The sentiment analysis was conducted using SentiStrength, a software tool that extracts both positive and negative sentiment strengths “from short informal electronic text” (Thelwall et al., 2545), and ranks it “on a numerical scale” (Driscoll 3). Sentiment analysis and SentiStrength are useful, but not perfect, tools with which to analyse Facebook captions. For example, SentiStrength determines two scales: a positive emotion measurement scale ranging from +1 (neutral) to +5 (most positive), and a negative emotion measurement scale ranging from –1 (neutral) to –5 (most negative). It calculates the positive and negative scores concurrently rather than averaging them out in order to acknowledge that captions can and do express mixed emotion (Driscoll 5).News articles about people with disability attending proms and comparable events, such as the homecoming queen example described above, are often criticised by disability activists for perpetuating inspiration porn (Mort; Findlay; Brown). Based on this criticism, sentiment analysis was used in this research to measure the emotional strength of captions—particularly their possible use of patronising language—using the Autism Speaks Facebook post as a case study. The post featured an image of a high school student with autism who had been crowned prom king.The Autism Speaks Facebook page was set up to fund “research into the causes, prevention, treatments and a cure for autism; increas(e) awareness of autism spectrum disorders; and advocat(e) for the needs of individuals with autism and their families” (Autism Speaks). The location of the prom was not specified; however, Autism Speaks is based in New York. This particular Facebook page was selected for this study based on criticism that Autism Speaks receives from disability advocates. One of the major critiques is that “(its) advertising depends on offensive and outdated rhetoric of fear and pity, presenting the lives of autistic people as tragic burdens on our families and society” (Boycott Autism Speaks). Autism Speaks has also been described as a problematic example of an organisation that “dictate(s) how disability should be perceived and dealt with. Often without input of disabled people either in the design or implementation of these organizations” (crippledscholar). This article goes on to state that “charities always frame what they do as positive and helpful even when the people who are the intended recipients disagree.”The prom king post included a photo of a young man with autism after he was crowned. He was standing beside a woman who wasn’t identified. The photo, posted by the young man’s aunt on the Autism Speaks Facebook page, included a status update that read:My autistic nephew won PROM KING today! Just so you all know, having a disability doesn’t hold you back if you don’t let it! GO [NAME]. #AutismAwareness (Autism Speaks)The following caption from the comment thread of the same Facebook post is useful as an example of how SentiStrength works. The caption read:Tears of Joy! Thank you for posting!!! Wow this gives me hope for his and my son’s and everyone’s special wonderful child nephew and niece! Way cool!However, because SentiStrength does not always accurately detect and measure sarcasm or idiomatic language usage, ”Tears” (the only negatively interpreted word in this caption) has been scored as –4, while the overall positive sentiment was scored as 3. Therefore, the final SentiStrength score of this caption was 3, –4, thereby demonstrating both the utility and limitations of SentiStrength as a sentiment analysis tool. This is useful to understand when analysing the data it produces.When analysing the entire thread, the sentiment analysis results across 238 captions, showed that 2 was the average strength of positive emotion, and that –1.16 was the average strength of negative emotion. The following section will analyse how a specific caption chosen from the most positively-scored captions from these data indicates that inspiration porn is possibly evident within.Use of Language: Kind, or Patronising?This discussion analyses the use of language in one caption from this thread, focusing on the way it likely demonstrated the ableist gaze. The caption was the most positive one from these data as scored by SentiStrength (5, –1) and read, ”CONGRATULATIONS SWEETIE!!!”. While it is noted that basing this analysis primarily on one caption provides limited insight into the dynamics of inspiration porn, this analysis forms a basis from which to consider other “inspirational” Facebook posts about people with disability. As well as this caption, this discussion will also draw upon other examples mentioned in this paper—from the homecoming queen article in USA Today to another caption on the Autism Speaks thread—to illustrate the dynamics of inspiration porn.On the surface, this congratulatory caption seems like a kind thing to post. However, inspiration porn has been identified in this analysis based on the caption’s effusive use of punctuation coupled with use of capital letters and the word “sweetie”. The excitement depicted through use of multiple exclamation marks and capital letters implies that the commenter has a personal connection with the prom king, which is a possibility. However, this possibility becomes less feasible when the caption is considered within the context of other captions that display not dissimilar use of language, as well as some that also display intimate emojis, such as grin faces and love heart eyes. Further, when this use of language is used with any consistency across a thread and is not coupled with textual information that implies a personal connection between the commenter/s and the prom king, it could be interpreted as patronising, condescending and/or infantilising. In addition, “sweetie” is a term of endearment commonly used in conversation with a romantic partner, child, or someone the speaker/writer knows intimately. While, again, it is possible that these commenters knew the prom king intimately, a more likely possibility is that he was being written to by strangers, yet using language that implied he was close to them—which would then have the same patronising connotations as above. It can therefore be argued that there is a strong possibility that this heightened use of intimate and emotional language was chosen based on his autism diagnosis.The conclusion drawn above is based in part on contextual similarities between the Autism Speaks post and its associated thread, and the aforementioned homecoming queen news article. In the former, it is likely that the young prom king was congratulated effusively because of his autism diagnosis. Similarly, in the latter article, the young woman was crowned not because she was named homecoming queen, but because the crown was given to her because of her diagnosis of cerebral palsy. As both gestures appear to have been based on others’ perceptions of these individuals’ disabilities rather than on their achievements, they are both likely to be patronising gestures.Over-DisclosureIn addition to use of language, another noteworthy issue in the captions thread on the Autism Speaks Facebook page was that many of them were from parents disclosing the diagnosis of their child. One example of this was a post from a mother that read (in part):I’ll be over here worried & concerned with the other 9,999 & ½ things to deal with, keeping up with new therapies, current therapy, we came in progress from any past therapies, meltdowns, dietary restrictions, educational requirements, The joy and difficulties of not just learning a new word but actually retaining that word, sleep, being hit, keeping him from hitting himself, tags on clothes etc. etc. [sic] (Autism Speaks)The above commenter listed a number of disability-specific issues that she experienced while raising her son who has autism. The context for her caption was a discussion, unrelated to the original post, that had sparked underneath a sub-thread regarding whether the use of person-first language (“person with autism”) or identity-first language (“Autistic person”) was best when referring to someone with autism. The relationship between inspiration porn and this intimately negative post about someone with disability is that both types of post are examples of the “ableist gaze”: inspiration porn demonstrates an exaggerated sense of positivity based on someone’s disability, and this post demonstrates disregard for the privacy of the person being posted about—perhaps due to his disability. The ease with which this negative comparison (over-disclosure) can be made between ‘inspirational’ and ‘negative’ posts illustrates in part why inspiration porn is a form of discrimination—intentional or otherwise.Furthermore, some of the children who were disclosed about on the main thread were too young to be asked consent, and it is unclear whether those who were old enough had the capacity to provide informed consent. Research has found that online over-disclosure in general is a matter of concern.The specific practice of online over-disclosure from parents about their children—with or without disability—has been raised by Leaver (151), “what happens before young people have the agency, literacy or skills to take the reins of their own selves online? Parents, guardians, loved ones and others inevitably set the initial identity parameters for young people online.” Over-disclosure is therefore also an issue that concerns people with disability, and the people closest to them.There exists both anecdotal evidence and academic research regarding online over-disclosure about people with disability. The research states that when people with physical disability disclose online, they employ strategic approaches that involve the degree to which they disclose (Furr, Carreiro, and McArthur). This suggests that there are complex factors to consider around such disclosure. Also relevant is that the practice of over-disclosure about another person’s disability, regardless of whether that disclosure is made by a close family member, has been critiqued by people (Findlay; Stoltz) within the disability community: “would you publicly share this information about your other children, an aging parent, or yourself?” (Stoltz). Finally, the practice of disability over-disclosure by anyone other than the person themselves supports the understanding that inspiration porn is not about the “object” of inspiration; rather, it serves to give pleasure (and/or pain) to the objectifier.ConclusionInspiration porn via the ableist gaze is discriminatory because it focuses on a (societally) undesirable trait in a way that serves the “gazer” at the expense of the “gazed-at”. That is, people with disability are objectified and exploited in various ways that can initially appear to be positive to people without disability. For example, when someone with disability posts or is posted about on Facebook, a person without disability might then add a caption—possibly with good intentions—that serves as their “inspired” response to what it “must” be like to have a disability. It can be argued that such captions, whether on news articles or when framing social media images, therefore either reflect or create existing social inequalities—and possibly do both.In continuing to use the term inspiration porn to describe one form of discrimination against people with disability, both the disability community and popular culture are contributing to an important narrative that scholarship needs to continue to address. Indeed, the power imbalance that is celebrated within inspiration porn is in some ways more insidious than malicious discrimination against people with disability, because it is easier to mistake as kindness. The research sample presented in this paper supports the countless expressions of anecdotal evidence given by people with disability that this “kindness” is inspiration porn; a damaging expression of the ableist gaze.ReferencesAutism Speaks. Facebook 21 May 2017 <https://www.facebook.com/autismspeaks>.Barnes, Colin, Geof Mercer, and Tom Shakespeare. Exploring Disability. Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1999.bear, romham a. “Inspiration Porn.” radical access mapping project 7 Apr. 2014. 21 May 2017 <https://radicalaccessiblecommunities.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/inspiration-porn/>.The Autistic Self Advocacy Network, et al. “Why Boycott.” Boycott Autism Speaks, 6 Jan. 2014. 21 May 2017 <http://www.boycottautismspeaks.com/why-boycott-1.html>.Brown, Lydia X.Z. “Disabled People Are Not Your Feel-Good Back-Pats.” Autistic Hoya 11 Feb. 2016. 21 May 2017 <http://www.autistichoya.com/2016/02/disabled-people-are-not-your-feel-good-back-pats.html>.Crippledscholar. “Inspiration Porn Is Not Progress, It’s a New Kind of Oppression.” crippledscholar 5 May 2015. 21 May 2017 <https://crippledscholar.com/2015/05/05/inspiration-porn-is-not-progress-its-a-new-kind-of-oppression/>.Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London: Verso, 1995.Driscoll, Beth. “Sentiment Analysis and the Literary Festival Audience.” Continuum 29.6 (2015): 861–873.Findlay, Carly. “Inspiration and Objectification of People with Disability – A Resource for Teachers and Parents.” Tune into Radio Carly 5 Feb. 2017. 21 May 2017 <http://carlyfindlay.blogspot.com.au/2017/02/inspiration-and-objectification-of.html>.Findlay, Carly. “When Parents Overshare Their Children’s Disability.” Sydney Morning Herald 23 July 2015. 21 May 2017 <http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/news-and-views/opinion/when-parents-overshare-their-childrens-disability-20150724-gijtw6.html>.Furr, June B., Alexis Carreiro, and John A. McArthur. “Strategic Approaches to Disability Disclosure on Social Media.” Disability & Society 31.10 (2016): 1353–1368.Haller, Beth, and Lingling Zhang. “Stigma or Empowerment? What Do Disabled People Say about Their Representation in News and Entertainment Media?” Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal 9.4 (2014).Harris, Lisa. “Genesis of Term ‘Inspiration Porn’?” Letter. 5 Oct. 2016.Leaver, Tama. “Born Digital? Presence, Privacy, and Intimate Surveillance.” Re-Orientation: Translingual Transcultural Transmedia. Studies in Narrative, Language, Identity, and Knowledge. Eds. John Hartley and Weigou Qu. Shanghai: Fudan University Press, 2015. 23 May 2017 <https://www.academia.edu/11736307/Born_Digital_Presence_Privacy_and_Intimate_Surveillance>.Mulvey, Laura. “Narrative Cinema and Visual Pleasure.” Visual and Other Pleasures. 1975.Mort, Mike. “Pity and the Prom.” Disabled Identity 9 May 2016. 21 May 2017 <https://disabledidentity.wordpress.com/2016/04/27/pity-and-the-prom/>.Pang, Bo, and Lillian Lee. “Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis.” Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval 2.1-2 (2008): 1–135.Perry, David M. “How ‘Inspiration Porn’ Reporting Objectifies People with Disabilities.” The Establishment 25 Feb. 2016. 23 May 2017 <https://theestablishment.co/how-inspiration-porn-reporting-objectifies-people-with-disabilities-db30023e3d2b>.Saggio, Jessica. “Disabled Teen Crowned Homecoming Queen in Awesome Way.” USA Today 13 Nov. 2015. 21 May 2017 <https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/humankind/2015/11/13/disabled-teen-crowned-homecoming-queen-awesome-way/75658376/>.Sinclair, Paul. “Inspiration Porn: Email Interview.” Letter. 21 Oct 2016.Stoltz, Melissa. “Parents of Children with Disabilities: Are We Speaking with or for a Community?” Two Thirds of the Planet 22 Jan. 2016. 21 May 2017 <http://www.twothirdsoftheplanet.com/parents-disability/>.Thelwall, Mike, et al. “Sentiment Strength Detection in Short Informal Text.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 61.12 (2010): 2544–2558.Wanshel, Elyse. “This Show Just Schooled Everyone on ‘Inspiration Porn’.” Huffington Post 16 Jan. 2017. 21 May 2017 <http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/speechless-disability-porn_us_5877ddf6e4b0e58057fdc342>.Young, Stella. “I’m Not Your Inspiration, Thank You Very Much.” TED Talk Apr. 2014. 21 May 2017 <https://www.ted.com/talks/stella_young_i_m_not_your_inspiration_thank_you_very_much>.Young, Stella. “We’re Not Here for Your Inspiration.” ABC Ramp Up 1 July 2012. 21 May 2017 <http://www.abc.net.au/rampup/articles/2012/07/02/3537035.htm>.

As the distinction between disclosure-fuelled celebrity and lasting fame becomes difficult to discern, the “based on a true story” label has gained a particular traction among readers and viewers. This is despite much public approbation and private angst sometimes resulting from such disclosure as “little in the law or in society protects people from the consequences of others’ revelations about them” (Smith 537). Even fiction writers can stray into difficult ethical and artistic territory when they disclose the private facts of real lives—that is, recognisably biographical information—in their work, with autoethnographic fiction where authors base their fiction on their own lives (Davis and Ellis) not immune as this often discloses others’ stories (Ellis) as well. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously counselled writers to take their subjects from life and, moreover, to look to the singular, specific life, although this then had to be abstracted: “Begin with an individual, and before you know it, you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created—nothing” (139). One of the problems when assessing fiction through this lens, however, is that, although many writers are inspired in their work by an actual life, event or historical period, the resulting work is usually ultimately guided by literary concerns—what writers often term the quest for aesthetic truth—rather than historical accuracy (Owen et al. 2008). In contrast, a biography is, and continues to be, by definition, an accurate account of a real persons’ life. Despite postmodern assertions regarding the relativity of truth and decades of investigation into the incorporation of fiction into biography, other non-fiction texts and research narratives (see, for instance: Wyatt), many biographers attest to still feeling irrevocably tied to the factual evidence in a way that novelists and the scriptors of biographically-based fictional television drama, movies and theatrical pieces do not (Wolpert; Murphy; Inglis). To cite a recent example, Louis Nowra’s Ice takes the life of nineteenth-century self-made entrepreneur and politician Malcolm McEacharn as its base, but never aspires to be classified as creative nonfiction, history or biography. The history in a historical novel is thus often, and legitimately, skewed or sidelined in order to achieve the most satisfying work of art, although some have argued that fiction may uniquely represent the real, as it is able to “play […] in the gap between the narratives of history and the actualities of the past” (Nelson n.p.). Fiction and non-fictional forms are, moreover, increasingly intermingling and intertwining in content and intent. The ugly word “faction” was an attempt to suggest that the two could simply be elided but, acknowledging wide-ranging debates about whether literature can represent the complexities of life with any accuracy and post-structuralist assertions that the idea of any absolute truth is outmoded, contemporary authors play with, and across, these boundaries, creating hybrid texts that consciously slide between invention and disclosure, but which publishers, critics and readers continue to define firmly as either fiction or biography. This dancing between forms is not particularly new. A striking example was Marion Halligan’s 2001 novel The Fog Garden which opens with a personal essay about the then recent death of her own much-loved husband. This had been previously published as an autobiographical memoir, “Cathedral of Love,” and again in an essay collection as “Lapping.” The protagonist of the novel is a recently widowed writer named Clare, but the inclusion of Halligan’s essay, together with the book’s marketing campaign which made much of the author’s own sadness, encourages readers to read the novel as a disclosure of the author’s own personal experience. This is despite Halligan’s attempt to keep the two separate: “Clare isn’t me. She’s like me. Some of her experience, terrors, have been mine. Some haven’t” (Fog Garden 9). In such acts of disclosure and denial, fiction and non-fiction can interrogate, test and even create each other, however quite vicious criticism can result when readers feel the boundaries demarking the two are breached. This is most common when authors admit to some dishonesty in terms of self-disclosure as can be seen, for instance, in the furore surrounding highly inflated and even wholly fabricated memoirs such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, Margaret B. Jones’s Love and Consequences and Misha Defonseca’s A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. Related problems and anxieties arise when authors move beyond incorporating and disclosing the facts of their own lives in memoir or (autobiographical) fiction, to using the lives of others in this way. Daphne Patai sums up the difference: “A person telling her life story is, in a sense, offering up her self for her own and her listener’s scrutiny […] Whether we should appropriate another’s life in this way becomes a legitimate question” (24–5). While this is difficult but seemingly manageable for non-fiction writers because of their foundational reliance on evidence, this anxiety escalates for fiction writers. This seems particularly extreme in relation to how audience expectations and prior knowledge of actual events can shape perceptions and interpretations of the resulting work, even when those events are changed and the work is declared to be one of fiction. I have discussed elsewhere, for instance, the difficult terrain of crafting fiction from well-known criminal cases (Brien, “Based on a True Story”). The reception of such work shows how difficult it is to dissociate creative product from its source material once the public and media has made this connection, no matter how distant that finished product may be from the original facts.As the field of biography continues to evolve for writers, critics and theorists, a study of one key text at a moment in that evolution—Jill Shearer’s play Georgia and its reliance on disclosing the life of artist Georgia O’Keeffe for its content and dramatic power—reveals not only some of the challenges and opportunities this close relationship offers to the writers and readers of life stories, but also the pitfalls of attempting to dissemble regarding artistic intention. This award-winning play has been staged a number of times in the past decade but has attracted little critical attention. Yet, when I attended a performance of Georgia at La Boite Theatre in Brisbane in 1999, I was moved by the production and admiring of Shearer’s writing which was, I told anyone who would listen, a powerfully dramatic interpretation of O’Keeffe’s life, one of my favourite artists. A full decade on, aspects of the work and its performance still resonate through my thinking. Author of more than twenty plays performed throughout Australia and New Zealand as well as on Broadway, Shearer was then (and is) one of Australia’s leading playwrights, and I judged Georgia to be a major, mature work: clear, challenging and confident. Reading the Currency Press script a year or so after seeing the play reinforced for me how distinctive and successful a piece of theatre Shearer had created utilising a literary technique which has been described elsewhere as fictionalised biography—biography which utilises fictional forms in its presentation but stays as close to the historical record as conventional biography (Brien, The Case of Mary Dean).The published version of the script indeed acknowledges on its title page that Georgia is “inspired by the later life of the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe” (Shearer). The back cover blurb begins with a quote attributed to O’Keeffe and then describes the content of the play entirely in terms of biographical detail: The great American artist Georgia O’Keeffe is physically, emotionally and artistically debilitated by her failing eyesight. Living amidst the Navajo spiritual landscape in her desert home in New Mexico, she becomes prey to the ghosts of her past. Her solitude is broken by Juan, a young potter, whose curious influence on her life remains until her death at 98 (Georgia back cover). This short text ends by unequivocally reinforcing the relation between the play and the artist’s life: “Georgia is a passionate play that explores with sensitivity and wry humour the contradictions and the paradoxes of the life of Georgia O’Keeffe” (Georgia back cover). These few lines of plot synopsis actually contain a surprisingly large number of facts regarding O’Keeffe’s later life. After the death of her husband (the photographer and modern art impresario Alfred Steiglitz whose ghost is a central character in the play), O’Keeffe did indeed relocate permanently to Abiquiú in New Mexico. In 1971, aged 84, she was suffering from an irreversible degenerative disease, had lost her central vision and stopped painting. One autumn day in 1973, Juan Hamilton, a young potter, appeared at her adobe house looking for work. She hired him and he became her lover, closest confidante and business manager until her death at 98. These facts form not only the background story but also much of the riveting content for Georgia which, as the published script’s introduction states, takes as its central themes: “the dilemma of the artist as a an older woman; her yearning to create against the fear of failing artistic powers; her mental strength and vulnerability; her sexuality in the face of physical deterioration; her need for companionship and the paradoxical love of solitude” (Rider vii). These issues are not only those which art historians identify as animating the O’Keeffe’s later life and painting, but ones which are discussed at length in many of the biographies of the artist published from 1980 to 2007 (see, for instance: Arrowsmith and West; Berry; Calloway and Bry; Castro; Drohojowska-Philp; Eisler; Eldredge; Harris; Hogrefe; Lisle; Peters; Reily; Robinson).Despite this clear focus on disclosing aspects of O’Keeffe’s life, both the director’s and playwright’s notes prefacing the published script declare firmly that Georgia is fiction, not biography. While accepting that these statements may be related to copyright and privacy concerns, the stridency of the denials of the biography label with its implied intention of disclosing the facts of a life, are worthy of analysis. Although noting that Georgia is “about the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe”, director of the La Boite production Sue Rider asserts that not only that the play moves “beyond the biographical” (vii) but, a few pages later, that it is “thankfully not biography” (xii). This is despite Rider’s own underscoring of the connection to O’Keeffe by setting up an exhibition of the artist’s work adjacent to the theatre. Shearer, whose research acknowledgments include a number of works about O’Keeffe, is even more overtly strident in her denial of any biographical links stating that her characters, “this Juan, Anna Marie and Dorothy Norman are a work of dramatic fiction, as is the play, and should be taken as such” (xiii).Yet, set against a reading of the biographies of the artist, including those written in the intervening decade, Georgia clearly and remarkably accurately discloses the tensions and contradictions of O’Keeffe’s life. It also draws on a significant amount of documented biographical data to enhance the dramatic power of what is disclosed by the play for audiences with this knowledge. The play does work as a coherent narrative for a viewer without any prior knowledge of O’Keeffe’s life, but the meaning of the dramatic action is enhanced by any biographical knowledge the audience possesses. In this way, the play’s act of disclosure is reinforced by this externally held knowledge. Although O’Keeffe’s oeuvre is less well known and much anecdotal detail about her life is not as familiar for Australian viewers as for those in the artist’s homeland, Shearer writes for an international as well as an Australian audience, and the program and adjacent exhibition for the Brisbane performance included biographical information. It is also worth noting that large slabs of biographical detail are also omitted from the play. These omissions to disclosure include O’Keeffe’s early life from her birth in 1887 in Wisconsin to her studies in Chicago and New York from 1904 to 1908, as well as her work as a commercial artist and art teacher in Texas and other Southern American states from 1912 to 1916. It is from this moment in 1916, however, that the play (although opening in 1946) constructs O’Keeffe’s life right through to her death in 1986 by utilising such literary devices as flashbacks, dream sequences and verbal and visual references.An indication of the level of accuracy of the play as biographical disclosure can be ascertained by unpacking the few lines of opening stage directions, “The Steiglitz’s suite in the old mid-range Shelton Hotel, New York, 1946 ... Georgia, 59, in black, enters, dragging a coffin” (1). In 1946, when O’Keeffe was indeed aged 59, Steiglitz died. The couple had lived part of every year at the Shelton Towers Hotel at 525 Lexington Avenue (now the New York Marriott East Side), a moderately priced hotel made famous by its depiction in O’Keeffe’s paintings and Steiglitz’s photographs. When Stieglitz suffered a cerebral thrombosis, O’Keeffe was spending the summer in New Mexico, but she returned to New York where her husband died on 13 July. This level of biographical accuracy continues throughout Georgia. Halfway through the first page “Anita, 52” enters. This character represents Anita Pollitzer, artist, critic and O’Keeffe’s lifelong friend. The publication of her biography of O’Keeffe, A Woman on Paper, and Georgia’s disapproval of this, is discussed in the play, as are their letters, which were collected and published in 1990 as Lovingly, Georgia (Gibiore). Anita’s first lines in the play after greeting her friend refer to this substantial correspondence: “You write beautifully. I always tell people: “I have a friend who writes the most beautiful letters” (1). In the play, as in life, it is Anita who introduces O’Keeffe’s work to Stieglitz who is, in turn, accurately described as: “Gallery owner. Two Nine One, Fifth Avenue. Leader of the New York avant-garde, the first to bring in the European moderns” (6). The play also chronicles how (unknown to O’Keeffe) Steiglitz exhibited the drawings Pollitzer gave him under the incorrect name, a scene which continues with Steiglitz persuading Georgia to allow her drawings to remain in his gallery (as he did in life) and ends with a reference to his famous photographs of her hands and nude form. Although the action of a substantial amount of real time is collapsed into a few dramatic minutes and, without doubt, the dialogue is invented, this invention achieves the level of aesthetic truth aimed for by many contemporary biographers (Jones)—as can be assessed when referring back to the accepted biographical account. What actually appears to have happened was that, in the autumn 1915, while teaching art in South Carolina, O’Keeffe was working on a series of abstract charcoal drawings that are now recognised as among the most innovative in American art of that time. She mailed some of these drawings to Pollitzer, who showed them Steiglitz, who exhibited ten of them in April 1916, O’Keeffe only learning of this through an acquaintance. O’Keeffe, who had first visited 291 in 1908 but never spoken to Stieglitz, held his critical opinion in high regard, and although confronting him over not seeking her permission and citing her name incorrectly, eventually agreed to let her drawings hang (Harris). Despite Shearer’s denial, the other characters in Georgia are also largely biographical sketches. Her “Anna Marie”, who never appears in the play but is spoken of, is Juan’s wife (in real life Anna Marie Hamilton), and “Dorothy Norman” is the character who has an affair with Steiglitz—the discovery of which leads to Georgia’s nervous breakdown in the play. In life, while O’Keeffe was in New Mexico, Stieglitz became involved with the much younger Norman who was, he claimed, only his gallery assistant. When O’Keeffe discovered Norman posing nude for her husband (this is vividly imagined in Georgia), O’Keeffe moved out of the Shelton and suffered from the depression that led to her nervous breakdown. “ Juan,” who ages from 26 to 39 in the play, represents the potter Juan Hamilton who encouraged the nearly blind O’Keeffe to paint again. In the biographical record there is much conjecture about Hamilton’s motives, and Shearer sensitively portrays her interpretation of this liaison and the difficult territory of sexual desire between a man and a much older woman, as she also too discloses the complex relationship between O’Keeffe and the much older Steiglitz.This complexity is described through the action of the play, but its disclosure is best appreciated if the biographical data is known. There are also a number of moments of biographical disclosure in the play that can only be fully understood with biographical knowledge in hand. For instance, Juan refers to Georgia’s paintings as “Beautiful, sexy flowers [... especially] the calla lilies” (24). All attending the play are aware (from the exhibition, program and technical aspects of the production) that, in life, O’Keeffe was famous for her flower paintings. However, knowing that these had brought her fame and fortune early in her career with, in 1928, a work titled Calla Lily selling for U.S. $25,000, then an enormous sum for any living American artist, adds to the meaning of this line in the play. Conversely, the significant level of biographical disclosure throughout Georgia does not diminish, in any way, the power or integrity of Shearer’s play as a literary work. Universal literary (and biographical) themes—love, desire and betrayal—animate Georgia; Steiglitz’s spirit haunts Georgia years after his death and much of the play’s dramatic energy is generated by her passion for both her dead husband and her younger lover, with some of her hopeless desire sublimated through her relationship with Juan. Nadia Wheatley reads such a relationship between invention and disclosure in terms of myth—relating how, in the process of writing her biography of Charmain Clift, she came to see Clift and her husband George Johnson take on a larger significance than their individual lives: “They were archetypes; ourselves writ large; experimenters who could test and try things for us; legendary figures through whom we could live vicariously” (5). In this, Wheatley finds that “while myth has no real beginning or end, it also does not bother itself with cause and effect. Nor does it worry about contradictions. Parallel tellings are vital to the fabric” (5). In contrast with both Rider and Shearer’s insistence that Georgia was “not biography”, it could be posited that (at least part of) Georgia’s power arises from the creation of such mythic value, and expressly through its nuanced disclosure of the relevant factual (biographical) elements in parallel to the development of its dramatic (invented) elements. Alongside this, accepting Georgia as such a form of biographical disclosure would mean that as well as a superbly inventive creative work, the highly original insights Shearer offers to the mass of O’Keeffe biography—something of an American industry—could be celebrated, rather than excused or denied. ReferencesArrowsmith, Alexandra, and Thomas West, eds. Georgia O’Keeffe & Alfred Stieglitz: Two Lives—A Conversation in Paintings and Photographs. Washington DC: HarperCollins and Calloway Editions, and The Phillips Collection, 1992.Berry, Michael. Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.Brien, Donna Lee. The Case of Mary Dean: Sex, Poisoning and Gender Relations in Australia. Unpublished PhD Thesis. Queensland University of Technology, 2004. –––. “‘Based on a True Story’: The Problem of the Perception of Biographical Truth in Narratives Based on Real Lives”. TEXT: Journal of Writers and Writing Programs 13.2 (Oct. 2009). 19 Oct. 2009 < http://www.textjournal.com.au >.Calloway, Nicholas, and Doris Bry, eds. Georgia O’Keeffe in the West. New York: Knopf, 1989.Castro, Jan G. The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Crown Publishing, Random House, 1985.Davis, Christine S., and Carolyn Ellis. “Autoethnographic Introspection in Ethnographic Fiction: A Method of Inquiry.” In Pranee Liamputtong and Jean Rumbold, eds. Knowing Differently: Arts-Based and Collaborative Research. New York: Nova Science, 2008. 99–117.Defonseca, Misha. Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. Bluebell, PA: Mt. Ivy Press, 1997.Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter. Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: WW Norton, 2004.Ellis, Carolyn. “Telling Secrets, Revealing Lives: Relational Ethics in Research with Intimate Others.” Qualitative Inquiry 13.1 (2007): 3–29. Eisler, Benita. O’Keeffe and Stieglitz: An American Romance. New York: Doubleday, 1991.Eldredge, Charles C. Georgia O’Keeffe: American and Modern. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993.Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Other Stories. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1962.Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. New York: N.A. Talese/Doubleday, 2003.Gibiore, Clive, ed. Lovingly, Georgia. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990.Halligan, Marion. “Lapping.” In Peter Craven, ed. Best Australian Essays. Melbourne: Bookman P, 1999. 208–13.Halligan, Marion. The Fog Garden. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2001.Halligan, Marion. “The Cathedral of Love.” The Age 27 Nov. 1999: Saturday Extra 1.Harris, J. C. “Georgia O’Keeffe at 291”. Archives of General Psychiatry 64.2 (Feb. 2007): 135–37.Hogrefe, Jeffrey. O’Keeffe: The Life of an American Legend. New York: Bantam, 1994.Inglis, Ian. “Popular Music History on Screen: The Pop/Rock Biopic.” Popular Music History 2.1 (2007): 77–93.Jones, Kip. “A Biographic Researcher in Pursuit of an Aesthetic: The Use of Arts-Based (Re)presentations in “Performative” Dissemination of Life Stories”. Qualitative Sociology Review 2.1 (Apr. 2006): 66–85. Jones, Margaret B. Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.Lisle, Laurie. Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Seaview Books, 1980.Murphy, Mary. “Limited Lives: The Problem of the Literary Biopic”. Kinema 17 (Spr. 2002): 67–74. Nelson, Camilla. “Faking It: History and Creative Writing.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 11.2 (Oct. 2007). 19 Oct. 2009 < http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct07/nelson.htm >.Nowra, Louis. Ice. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2008.Owen, Jillian A. Tullis, Chris McRae, Tony E. Adams, and Alisha Vitale. “Truth Troubles.” Qualitative Inquiry 15.1 (2008): 178–200.Patai, Daphne. “Ethical Problems of Personal Narratives, or, Who Should Eat the Last Piece of Cake.” International Journal of Oral History 8 (1987): 5–27.Peters, Sarah W. Becoming O’Keeffe. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991.Pollitzer, Anita. A Woman on Paper. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.Reily, Nancy Hopkins. Georgia O’Keeffe. A Private Friendship, Part II. Santa Fe, NM: Sunstone Press, 2009.Rider, Sue. “Director’s Note.” Georgia [playscript]. Sydney: Currency Press, 2000. vii–xii.Robinson, Roxana. Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1990. Shearer, Jill. Georgia [playscript]. Sydney: Currency Press, 2000.Smith, Thomas R. “How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves [review]”. Biography 23.3 (2000): 534–38.Wheatley, Nadia. The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift. Sydney: Flamingo, 2001.Wolpert, Stanley. “Biography as History: A Personal Reflection”. 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IntroductionCatastrophe surrounds us perpetually: from the Queensland floods, Christchurch earthquake, global warming, and Global Financial Crisis to social conflicts, psychological breaking points, relationship failures, and crises of understanding. As a consequence of the pervasiveness of catastrophe, its representation saturates our everyday awareness. On a daily basis we encounter stories of people impacted by and coping with natural, economic, ecological, and emotional disasters of all kinds.But what is the relationship between culture, catastrophe, and creativity? Can catastrophe be an impetus for the creative transformation of societies and individuals? Conversely, how can culture moderate, transform, and re-imagine catastrophe? And in the final analysis, how should we conceive of catastrophe; does catastrophe have a bad name? These questions and others have guided us in editing the “catastrophe” issue of M/C Journal. The word catastrophe has been associated with extreme disaster only since the 1700s. In an earlier etymological sense, catastrophe simply connoted “a reversal of what is expected” or, in Western literary history, a defining turn in a drama (Harper). Catastrophe derives from the Greek katastrophe for “an overturning; a sudden end.” As this issue clearly demonstrates, whilst catastrophes vary in scale, context, and meaning, their outcomes are life-changing inversions of the interpersonal, social, or environmental norm. In The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon echoes this definition and argues that catastrophe “can be a source of immense creativity—a shock that opens up political, social, and psychological space for fresh ideas, actions, institutions, and technologies that weren't possible before” (23). According to Homer-Dixon and on a hopeful note, “in any complex adaptive system, breakdown, if limited, can be a key part of that system's long-term resilience and renewal” (308). Indeed, many of the articles in this issue sound a note of hope. Catastrophe and Creativity The impetus for this issue comes from the Catastrophe and Creativity symposium convened at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia, in 2012. The symposium brought together artists and researchers from around Australia to engage with the theme “catastrophe.” The organisers encouraged participants to conceptualise catastrophe broadly and creatively: from natural disasters to personal turning points, and from debilitating meltdowns to regenerative solutions. As a result, the topics explored in this issue stretch deeply and widely, and demonstrate the different forms and scales of catastrophe. Many of the 24 articles submitted for possible inclusion in this issue emerged as responses to the symposium theme. Distinct moods and meanings of catastrophe reverberate in the final selection of 12. The articles that shape the issue are intimate, collective, and geographical engagements with and reflections upon cataclysm that move from the highly personal to the global and speak of countries, communities, networks, friends, families, and colleagues. As a collection, the articles re-envision catastrophe as a pathway for creative interventions, artistic responses, community solidarities, social innovations, individual modes of survival and resilience, and environmental justices. In thinking through the relationship between catastrophe and culture, the authors challenge existing discourses and ways of knowing trauma, and offer fresh interpretations and hope. Catastrophe leads to metanoia: a change of perception after a significant crisis. The editors appreciate that there are no hierarchies between interpretations of catastrophe. Instead, the articles represent a dialogue between diverse experiences of pain, disaster, and abuse, as well as different theories about the nature of catastrophe—from the catastrophic loss of millions through genocide to the impact of trauma on an individual’s body and psyche. Part of the challenge of crafting this issue of M/C Journal has been in delineating what constitutes catastrophe. Admittedly we end up with more questions than we started with. Is catastrophe the same as trauma? Is it disaster? When is it apocalypse? Can catastrophe entail all these things? Who is silenced, and who can tell the narratives of catastrophe? How? Despite these unanswerable questions, we can be certain that catastrophe, as described by the authors, foundationally changes the fabric of human and non-human being in the world. The authors leave us with the lingering reverberations and resonances of catastrophe, revealing at the same time how catastrophic events can “reverse the expected” in the true sense of the word. The transformative potential of catastrophe is prominent in the issue. Some authors call for justice, support, inspiration, and resilience—on personal and community levels. The contributions remind us that, after catastrophe, the person, society, or planet will never be the same. Responses to Catastrophe The issue opens with the intimate nature of catastrophes. A feature article by esteemed Canadian academic and poet Lorri Neilsen Glenn takes the form of a lyric essay originally presented as the keynote address at the symposium. Composed of extracts from her book Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry (published here with kind permission of the author and Hagios Press) and reflective interludes, Neilsen combines her acute academic insights with personal experiences of loss to create evocative prose and poetry that, as she says, “grounds our grief in form […] connects us to one another and the worlds.” Her work opens for the reader “complex and nuanced understandings of our human capacities for grief.” In this piece, Neilsen speaks of personal catastrophe through lyric inquiry, a method she has described eloquently in the Sage Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. The second feature article is a commentary on Neilsen’s work by the equally esteemed feminist scholar Lekkie Hopkins. In her article, Hopkins explains Neilsen’s journey from literacy researcher to arts-based social science researcher to poet and lyric inquirer. Hopkins uses her reflections on the work of Neilsen in order to draw attention, not only to Neilsen’s “ground-breaking uses of lyric inquiry,” but also to another kind of communal catastrophe which Hopkins calls “the catastrophe of the methodological divide between humanities and the social sciences that runs the risk of creating, for the social sciences, a limiting and limited approach to research.” In her article “Casualties on the Road to Ethical Authenticity,” Kate Rice applies a powerful narrative inquiry to the relationship between catastrophe and ethics. As a playwright experienced in projects dealing with personal catastrophe, Rice nevertheless finds her usual research and writing practice challenged by the specific content of her current project—a play about the murder of innocents—and its focus on the real-life perpetrator. Ambivalent regarding the fascinated human response such catastrophe draws, Rice suggests that spectacle creates “comfort” associated with “processing sympathy into a feeling of self-importance at having felt pain that isn’t yours.” She also argues against a hierarchy of grief, noting that, “when you strip away the circumstances, the essence of loss is the same, whether your loved one dies of cancer, in a car accident, or a natural disaster.” In an article tracing the reverberation of catastrophe over the course of 100 years, Marcella Polain explores the impact of the Armenian Genocide’s 1.5 million deaths. Through a purposefully fragmented, non-linear narrative, Polain evokes with exquisite sensitivity the utter devastation the Genocide wreaked upon one family—her own: “When springs run red, when the dead are stacked tree-high, when ‘everything that could happen has already happened,’ then time is nothing: ‘there is no future [and] the language of civilised humanity is not our language’” (Nichanian 142).The potentiality that can be generated in the aftermath of catastrophe also resonates in an article co-authored by Brenda Downing and Alice Cummins. (A photograph of Downing’s performance aperture is the issue’s cover image.) In their visceral evocation, the catastrophe of childhood rape is explored and enfleshed with a deft and generous touch. Downing, embodying for the reader her experience as researcher, writer, and performer, and Cummins, as Body-Mind Centering® practitioner and artistic director, explore the reciprocity of their collaboration and the performance aperture that they created together. Their collaboration made possible the realisation that “a performance […] could act as a physical, emotional, and intellectual bridge of communication between those who have experienced sexual violence and those who have not.” Maggie Phillips evokes the authoritative yet approachable voice of her 2012 symposium presentation in “Diminutive Catastrophe: Clown’s Play;” her meditation on clowns and clowning as not only a discipline and practice, but also “a state of being.” In response to large-scale catastrophe, and the catastrophic awareness of “the utter meaninglessness of human existence,” the clown offers “a tiny gesture.” As Phillips argues, however, “those fingers brushing dust off a threadbare jacket may speak volumes.” By inducing “miniscule shifts of consciousness” as they “wander across territories designated as sacred and profane with a certain insouciance and privilege,” clowns offer “glimpses of the ineffable.” In “Creativity in an Online Community as a Response to the Chaos of a Breast Cancer Diagnosis,” Cynthia Witney, Lelia Green, Leesa Costello, and Vanessa Bradshaw explore the role of online communities, such as the “Click” website, in providing support and information for women with breast cancer. Importantly, the authors show how these communities can provide a forum for the expression of creativity. Through Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow” (53), the authors suggest that “becoming totally involved in the creative moment, so as to lose all track of time” allows women temporary space to “forget the trials and worries of breast cancer.” By providing a forum for women and their supporters to reach out to others in similar situations, online communities, inspired by notions of creativity and flow, can offer “some remedy for catastrophe.” A different impulse pervades Ella Mudie’s insightful examination of the Surrealist city novel. Mudie argues against the elision of historical catastrophe through contemporary practices; specifically, the current reading in the field of psychogeography of Surrealist city dérives (drifts) as playful city walks, or “an intriguing yet ultimately benign method of urban research.” Mudie revisits the Surrealist city novel, evoking the original “praxis of shock” deployed through innovative experiments in novelistic form and content. Binding the theory and practice of Surrealism to the catastrophic event from which it sprang—the Great War—Mudie argues against “domesticating movements” which “dull the awakening power” of such imaginative and desperate revolts against an increasingly mechanised society. Through discussions of natural disasters, the next three articles bring a distinctive architectural, geographical, and ecological stream to the issue. Michael Levine and William Taylor invoke Susan Sontag’s essay “The Imagination of Disaster” in conceptualising approaches to urban recovery and renewal after catastrophic events, as exemplified by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The authors are interested explicitly in the “imagination of disaster” and the “psychology, politics, and morality of rebuilding,” which they find absent in Sontag’s account of the representation of urban cataclysms in 1950s and 60s science fiction films. Levine and Taylor’s article points to community ethics and social justice issues that—as they outline through different examples from film—should be at the centre of urban reconstruction initiatives. Interpretations of what is meant by reconstruction will vary substantially and, hence, so should community responses be wide-ranging. Extending the geo-spatial emphasis of Levine and Taylor’s article, Rod Giblett theorises the historical and environmental context of Hurricane Katrina using Walter Benjamin’s productive notion of the “Angel of History.” However, Giblett offers the analogous metaphor of the “Angel of Geography” as a useful way to locate catastrophe in both time (history) and space (geography). In particular, Giblett’s reading of the New Orleans disaster addresses the disruption of the city’s ecologically vital habitats over time. As such, according to Giblett, Katrina was the culmination of a series of smaller environmental catastrophes throughout the history of the city, namely the obliteration of its wetlands. Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” thereby, recognises the unity of temporal events and “sees a single, catastrophic history, not just of New Orleans but preceding and post-dating it.” Giblett’s archaeology of the Hurricane Katrina disaster provides a novel framework for reconceptualising the origins of catastrophes. Continuing the sub-theme of natural disasters, Dale Dominey-Howes returns our attention to Australia, arguing that the tsunami is poised to become the “new Australian catastrophe.” Through an analysis of Australian media coverage of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, Dominey-Howes asks provocatively: “Has extensive media coverage resulted in an improved awareness of the catastrophic potential of tsunami for Australians?” After speaking with more than 800 Australians in order to understand popular attitudes towards tsunami, the author responds with a definitive “no.” In his view, Australians are “avoiding or disallowing the reality; they normalise and dramaticise the event. Thus in Australia, to date, a cultural transformation about the catastrophic nature of tsunami has not occurred for reasons that are not entirely clear.” As the final article in the issue, “FireWatch: Creative Responses to Bushfire Catastrophe” gives insights into the real-world experience of managing catastrophes as they occur, in this case, bushfires in the remote Kimberley region of Western Australia. Donell Holloway, Lelia Green, and Danielle Brady detail an Australian Research Council funded project that creatively engages with Kimberley residents who “improvise in a creative and intuitive manner” when responding to catastrophe. The authors capture responses from residents in order to redesign an interface that will provide real-time, highly useable information for the management of bushfires in Western Australia. Conclusion This “catastophe” issue of M/C Journal explores, by way of the broad reach of the articles, the relationship between culture, creativity, and catastrophe. Readers will have encountered collective creative responses to bushfire or breast cancer, individual responses to catastrophe, such as childhood rape or genocide, and cultural conceptualisations of catastrophe, for example, in relation to New Orlean’s Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The editors hope that, just like the metanoia that catastrophe can bring about (demonstrated so articulately by Downing and Cummins), readers too will experience a change of their perception of catastrophe, and will come to see catastrophe in its many fascinating iterations. References Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and Row, 1990. Harper, Douglas. “catastrophe.” Online Etymology Dictionary. 22 Mar. 2013 . Homer-Dixon, Thomas. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization. Melbourne : Text Publishing, 2007. Kazanjian, David, and Marc Nichanian. “Between Genocide and Catastrophe.” Loss. Eds. David Eng and David Kazanjian. Los Angeles: U of California P, 2003. 125–47. Neilsen Glenn, Lorri. Threading Light. Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Neilsen, Lorri. “Lyric Inquiry.” Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. Eds. J. Gary Knowles and Ardra Cole. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2008. 88–98.

Introduction Lillian Ng was born in Singapore and lived in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom before migrating to Australia with her daughter and Ah Mah Yin Jie (“Ah Mahs are a special group of people who took a vow to remain unmarried … [so they] could stick together as a group and make a living together” (Yu 118)). Ng studied classical Chinese at home, then went to an English school and later on studied Medicine. Her first book, Silver Sister (1994), was short-listed for the inaugural Angus & Robertson/Bookworld Prize in 1993 and won the Human Rights Award in 1995. Ng defines herself as a “Chinese living in Australia” (Yu 115). Food, flesh and meat are recurrent topics in Lillian Ng´s second novel Swallowing Clouds, published in 1997. These topics are related to desire and can be used as a synecdoche (a metaphor that describes part/whole relations) of the human body: food is needed to survive and pleasure can be obtained from other people´s bodies. This paper focuses on one type of meat and animal, pork and the pig, and on the relation between the two main characters, Syn and Zhu Zhiyee. Syn, the main character in the novel, is a Shanghainese student studying English in Sydney who becomes stranded after the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989. As she stops receiving money from her mother and fears repression if she goes back to China, she begins to work in a Chinese butcher shop, owned by Zhu Zhiyee, which brings her English lessons to a standstill. Syn and Zhu Zhiyee soon begin a two-year love affair, despite the fact that Zhu Zhiyee is married to KarLeng and has three daughters. The novel is structured as a prologue and four days, each of which has a different setting and temporal location. The prologue introduces the story of an adulterous woman who was punished to be drowned in a pig´s basket in the HuanPu River in the summer of 1918. As learnt later on, Syn is the reincarnation of this woman, whose purpose in life is to take revenge on men by taking their money. The four days, from the 4th to the 7th of June 1994, mark the duration of a trip to Beijing and Shanghai that Syn takes as member of an Australian expedition in order to visit her mother with the security of an Australian passport. During these four days, the reader learns about different Chinese landmarks, such as the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Ming Tomb and the Summer Palace, as well as some cultural events, such as a Chinese opera and eating typical foods like Peking duck. However, the bulk of the plot of the book deals with the sexual relationship, erotic games and fantasies of Syn and Zhu Zhiyee in the period between 1989 and 1992, as well as Syn´s final revenge in January 1993. Pigs The fact that Zhu Zhiyee is a butcher allows Lillian Ng to include references to pigs and pork throughout the novel. Some of them refer to the everyday work of a butcher shop, as the following examples illustrate: “Come in and help me with the carcass,” he [Zhu Zhiyee] pointed to a small suckling pig hung on a peg. Syn hesitated, not knowing how to handle the situation. “Take the whole pig with the peg,” he commanded (11).Under dazzling fluorescent tubes and bright spotlights, trays of red meat, pork chops and lamb cutlets sparkled like jewels … The trays edged with red cellophane frills and green underlay breathed vitality and colour into the slabs of pork ribs and fillets (15).Buckets of pig´s blood with a skim of froth took their place on the floor; gelled ones, like sliced cubes of large agate, sat in tin trays labelled in Chinese. More discreetly hidden were the gonads and penises of goats, bulls and pigs. (16)These examples are representative of Syn and Zhu Zhiyee´s relationship. The first quotation deals with their interaction: most of the time Zhu Zhiyee orders Syn how to act, either in the shop or in bed. The second extract describes the meat’s “vitality” and this is the quality of Syn's skin that mesmerised Zhu when he met her: “he was excited, electrified by the sight of her unblemished, translucent skin, unlined, smooth as silk. The glow of the warmth of human skin” (13). Moreover, the lights seem to completely illuminate the pieces of meat and this is the way Zhu Zhiyee leers at Syn´s body, as it can be read in the following extract: “he turned again to fix his gaze on Syn, which pierced and penetrated her head, her brain, eyes, permeated her whole body, seeped into her secret places and crevices” (14). The third excerpt introduces the sexual organs of some of the animals, which are sold to some customers for a high price. Meat is also sexualised by Zhu Zhiyee´s actions, such as his pinching the bottoms of chickens and comparing them with “sacrificial virgins”: “chickens, shamelessly stripped and trussed, hung by their necks, naked in their pimply white skin, seemed like sacrificial virgins. Syn often caught Zhu pinching their fleshy bottoms, while wrapping and serving them to the housewives” (15-16). Zhu also makes comments relating food with sex while he is having lunch next to Syn, which could be considered sexual harassment. All these extracts exemplify the relationship between Syn and Zhu Zhiyee: the orders, the looks and the implicit sexuality in the quotidian activities in the butcher´s shop. There are also a range of other expressions that include similes with the word `pig´ in Ng´s novel. One of the most recurrent is comparing the left arm and hand of Zhu Zhiyee´s mother with a “pig´s trotter”. Zhu Zhiyee´s mother is known as ZhuMa and Syn is very fond of her, as ZhuMa accepts her and likes her more than her own daughter-in-law. The comparison of ZhuMa´s arm and hand with a trotter may be explained by the fact that ZhuMa´s arm is swollen but also by the loving representation of pigs in Chinese culture. As Seung-Og Kim explains in his article “Burials, Pigs, and Political Prestige in Neolithic China”: In both Melanesia and Asia, pigs are viewed as a symbolic representation of human beings (Allen 1976: 42; Healey 1985; Rappaport 1967: 58; Roscoe 1989: 223-26). Piglets are treated as pets and receive a great deal of loving attention, and they in turn express affection for their human “parents.” They also share some physiological features with human beings, being omnivorous and highly reproductive (though humans do not usually have multiple litters) and similar internal anatomy (Roscoe 1989: 225). In short, pigs not only have a symbiotic relationship with humans biologically but also are of great importance symbolically (121). Consequently, pigs are held in high esteem, taken care of and loved. Therefore, comparing a part of a human´s body, such as an arm or a hand, for example, to a part of a pig´s body such as a pig´s trotter is not negative, but has positive connotations. Some descriptions of ZhuMa´s arm and hand can be read in the following excerpts: “As ZhuMa handed her the plate of cookies Syn saw her left arm, swollen like a pig´s trotter” (97); “Syn was horrified, and yet somewhat intrigued by this woman without a breast, with a pig´s trotter arm and a tummy like a chessboard” (99), “mimicking the act of writing with her pig-trotter hand” (99), and ZhuMa was praising the excellence of the opera, the singing, acting, the costumes, and the elaborate props, waving excitedly with her pig trotter arm and pointing with her stubby fingers while she talked. (170) Moreover, the expression “pig´s trotters” is also used as an example of the erotic fetishism with bound feet, as it can be seen in the following passage, which will be discussed below: I [Zhu Zhiyee] adore feet which are slender… they seem so soft, like pig´s trotters, so cute and loving, they play tricks on your mind. Imagine feeling them in bed under your blankets—soft cottonwool lumps, plump and cuddly, makes you want to stroke them like your lover´s hands … this was how the bound feet appealed to men, the erotic sensation when balanced on shoulders, clutched in palms, strung to the seat of a garden swing … no matter how ugly a woman is, her tiny elegant feet would win her many admirers (224).Besides writing about pigs and pork as part of the daily work of the butcher shop and using the expression “pig´s trotter”, “pig” is also linked to money in two sentences in the book. On the one hand, it is used to calculate a price and draw attention to the large amount it represents: “The blouse was very expensive—three hundred dollars, the total takings from selling a pig. Two pigs if he purchased two blouses” (197). On the other, it works as an adjective in the expression “piggy-bank”, the money box in the form of a pig, an animal that represents abundance and happiness in the Chinese culture: “She borrowed money from her neighbours, who emptied pieces of silver from their piggy-banks, their life savings”(54). Finally, the most frequent porcine expression in Ng´s Swallowing Clouds makes reference to being drowned in a pig´s basket, which represents 19 of the 33 references to pigs or pork that appear in the novel. The first three references appear in the prologue (ix, x, xii), where the reader learns the story of the last woman who was killed by drowning in a pig´s basket as a punishment for her adultery. After this, two references recount a soothsayer´s explanation to Syn about her nightmares and the fact that she is the reincarnation of that lady (67, 155); three references are made by Syn when she explains this story to Zhu Zhiyee and to her companion on the trip to Beijing and Shanghai (28, 154, 248); one refers to a feeling Syn has during sexual intercourse with Zhu Zhiyee (94); and one when the pig basket is compared to a cricket box, a wicker or wooden box used to carry or keep crickets in a house and listen to them singing (73). Furthermore, Syn reflects on the fact of drowning (65, 114, 115, 171, 172, 173, 197, 296) and compares her previous death with that of Concubine Pearl, the favourite of Emperor Guanxu, who was killed by order of his aunt, the Empress Dowager Cixi (76-77). The punishment of drowning in a pig´s basket can thus be understood as retribution for a transgression: a woman having an extra-marital relationship, going against the establishment and the boundaries of the authorised. Both the woman who is drowned in a pig´s basket in 1918 and Syn have extra-marital affairs and break society’s rules. However, the consequences are different: the concubine dies and Syn, her reincarnation, takes revenge. Desire, Transgression and Eroticism Xavier Pons writes about desire, repression, freedom and transgression in his book Messengers of Eros: Representations of Sex in Australian Writing (2009). In this text, he explains that desire can be understood as a positive or as a negative feeling. On the one hand, by experiencing desire, a person feels alive and has joy de vivre, and if that person is desired in return, then, the feelings of being accepted and happiness are also involved (13). On the other hand, desire is often repressed, as it may be considered evil, anarchic, an enemy of reason and an alienation from consciousness (14). According to Pons: Sometimes repression, in the form of censorship, comes from the outside—from society at large, or from particular social groups—because of desire´s subversive nature, because it is a force which, given a free rein, would threaten the higher purpose which a given society assigns to other (and usually ideological) forces … Repression may also come from the inside, via the internalization of censorship … desire is sometimes feared by the individual as a force alien to his/her true self which would leave him/her vulnerable to rejection or domination, and would result in loss of freedom (14).Consequently, when talking about sexual desire, the two main concepts to be dealt with are freedom and transgression. As Pons makes clear, “the desiring subject can be taken advantage of, manipulated like a puppet [as h]is or her freedom is in this sense limited by the experience of desire” (15). While some practices may be considered abusive, such as bondage or sado-masochism, they may be deliberately and freely chosen by the partners involved. In this case, these practices represent “an encounter between equals: dominance is no more than make-believe, and a certain amount of freedom (as much as is compatible with giving oneself up to one´s fantasies) is maintained throughout” (24). Consequently, the perception of freedom changes with each person and situation. What is transgressive depends on the norms in every culture and, as these evolve, so do the forms of transgression (Pons 43). Examples of transgressions can be: firstly, the separation of sex from love, adultery or female and male homosexuality, which happen with the free will of the partners; or, secondly, paedophilia, incest or bestiality, which imply abuse. Going against society’s norms involves taking risks, such as being discovered and exiled from society or feeling isolated as a result of a feeling of difference. As the norms change according to culture, time and person, an individual may transgress the rules and feel liberated, but later on do the same thing and feel alienated. As Pons declares, “transgressing the rules does not always lead to liberation or happiness—transgression can turn into a trap and turn out to be simply another kind of alienation” (46). In Swallowing Clouds, Zhu Zhiyee transgresses the social norms of his time by having an affair with Syn: firstly, because it is extra-marital, he and his wife, KarLeng, are Catholic and fidelity is one of the promises made when getting married; and, secondly, because he is Syn´s boss and his comments and ways of flirting with her could be considered sexual harassment. For two years, the affair is an escape from Zhu Zhiyee´s daily worries and stress and a liberation and fulfillment of his sexual desires. However, he introduces Syn to his mother and his sisters, who accept her and like her more than his wife. He feels trapped, though, when KarLeng guesses and threatens him with divorce. He cannot accept this as it would mean loss of face in their neighbourhood and society, and so he decides to abandon Syn. Syn´s transgression becomes a trap for her as Zhu, his mother and his sisters have become her only connection with the outside world in Australia and this alienates her from both the country she lives in and the people she knows. However, Syn´s transgression also turns into a trap for Zhu Zhiyee because she will not sign the documents to give him the house back and every month she sends proof of their affair to KarLeng in order to cause disruption in their household. This exposure could be compared with the humiliation suffered by the concubine when she was paraded in a pig´s basket before she was drowned in the HuangPu River. Furthermore, the reader does not know whether KarLeng finally divorces Zhu Zhiyee, which would be his drowning and loss of face and dishonour in front of society, but can imagine the humiliation, shame and disgrace KarLeng makes him feel every month. Pons also depicts eroticism as a form of transgression. In fact, erotic relations are a power game, and seduction can be a very effective weapon. As such, women can use seduction to obtain power and threaten the patriarchal order, which imposes on them patterns of behaviour, language and codes to follow. However, men also use seduction to get their own benefits, especially in political and social contexts. “Power has often been described as the ultimate aphrodisiac” (Pons 32) and this can be seen in many of the sexual games between Syn and Zhu Zhiyee in Swallowing Clouds, where Zhu Zhiyee is the active partner and Syn becomes little more than an object that gives pleasure. A clear reference to erotic fetishism is embedded in the above-mentioned quote on bound feet, which are compared to pig´s trotters. In fact, bound feet were so important in China in the millennia between the Song Dynasty (960-1276) and the early 20th century that “it was impossible to find a husband” (Holman) without them: “As women’s bound feet and shoes became the essence of feminine beauty, a fanatical aesthetic and sexual mystique developed around them. The bound foot was understood to be the most intimate and erotic part of the female anatomy, and wives, consorts and prostitutes were chosen solely on the size and shape of their feet” (Holman). Bound feet are associated in Ng’s novel with pig´s trotters and are described as “cute and loving … soft cottonwool lumps, plump and cuddly, [that] makes you want to stroke them like your lover´s hands” (224). This approach towards bound feet and, by extension, towards pig´s trotters, can be related to the fond feelings Melanesian and Asian cultures have towards piglets, which “are treated as pets and receive a great deal of loving attention” (Kim 121). Consequently, the bound feet can be considered a synecdoche for the fond feelings piglets inspire. Food and Sex The fact that Zhu Zhiyee is a butcher and works with different types of meat, including pork, that he chops it, sells it and gives cooking advice, is not gratuitous in the novel. He is used to being in close proximity to meat and death and seeing Syn’s pale skin through which he can trace her veins excites him. Her flesh is alive and represents, therefore, the opposite of meat. He wants to seduce her, which is human hunting, and he wants to study her, to enjoy her body, which can be compared to animals looking at their prey and deciding where to start eating from. Zhu´s desire for Syn seems destructive and dangerous. In the novel, bodies have a price: dead animals are paid for and eaten and their role is the satiation of human hunger. But humans, who are also animals, have a price as well: flesh is paid for, in the form of prostitution or being a mistress, and its aim is satiation of human sex. Generally speaking, sex in the novel is compared to food either in a direct or an indirect way, and making love is constantly compared to cooking, the preparation of food and eating (as in Pons 303). Many passages in Swallowing Clouds have cannibalistic connotations, all of these being used as metaphors for Zhu Zhiyee’s desire for Syn. As mentioned before, desire can be positive (as it makes a person feel alive) or negative (as a form of internal or social censorship). For Zhu Zhiyee, desire is positive and similar to a drug he is addicted to. For example, when Zhu and Syn make delivery rounds in an old Mazda van, he plays the recordings he made the previous night when they were having sex and tries to guess when each moan happened. Sex and Literature Pons explains that “to write about sex … is to address a host of issues—social, psychological and literary—which together pretty much define a culture” (6). Lillian Ng´s Swallowing Clouds addresses a series of issues. The first of these could be termed ‘the social’: Syn´s situation after the Tiananmen Massacre; her adulterous relationship with her boss and being treated and considered his mistress; the rapes in Inner Mongolia; different reasons for having an abortion; various forms of abuse, even by a mother of her mentally handicapped daughter; the loss of face; betrayal; and revenge. The second issue is the ‘psychological’, with the power relations and strategies used between different characters, psychological abuse, physical abuse, humiliation, and dependency. The third is the ‘literary’, as when the constant use of metaphors with Chinese cultural references becomes farcical, as Tseen Khoo notes in her article “Selling Sexotica” (2000: 164). Khoo explains that, “in the push for Swallowing Clouds to be many types of novels at once: [that is, erotica, touristic narrative and popular], it fails to be any one particularly successfully” (171). Swallowing Clouds is disturbing, full of stereotypes, and with repeated metaphors, and does not have a clear readership and, as Khoo states: “The explicit and implicit strategies behind the novel embody the enduring perceptions of what exotic, multicultural writing involves—sensationalism, voyeuristic pleasures, and a seemingly deliberate lack of rooted-ness in the Australian socioscape (172). Furthermore, Swallowing Clouds has also been defined as “oriental grunge, mostly because of the progression throughout the narrative from one gritty, exoticised sexual encounter to another” (Khoo 169-70).Other novels which have been described as “grunge” are Edward Berridge´s Lives of the Saints (1995), Justine Ettler´s The River Ophelia (1995), Linda Jaivin´s Eat Me (1995), Andrew McGahan´s Praise (1992) and 1988 (1995), Claire Mendes´ Drift Street (1995) or Christos Tsiolkas´ Loaded (1995) (Michael C). The word “grunge” has clear connotations with “dirtiness”—a further use of pig, but one that is not common in the novel. The vocabulary used during the sexual intercourse and games between Syn and Zhu Zhiyee is, however, coarse, and “the association of sex with coarseness is extremely common” (Pons 344). Pons states that “writing about sex is an attempt to overcome [the barriers of being ashamed of some human bodily functions], regarded as unnecessarily constrictive, and this is what makes it by nature transgressive, controversial” (344-45). Ng´s use of vocabulary in this novel is definitely controversial, indeed, so much so that it has been defined as banal or even farcical (Khoo 169-70).ConclusionThis paper has analysed the use of the words and expressions: “pig”, “pork” and “drowning in a pig’s basket” in Lillian Ng´s Swallowing Clouds. Moreover, the punishment of drowning in a pig’s basket has served as a means to study the topics of desire, transgression and eroticism, in relation to an analysis of the characters of Syn and Zhu Zhiyee, and their relationship. This discussion of various terminology relating to “pig” has also led to the study of the relationship between food and sex, and sex and literature, in this novel. Consequently, this paper has analysed the use of the term “pig” and has used it as a springboard for the analysis of some aspects of the novel together with different theoretical definitions and concepts. Acknowledgements A version of this paper was given at the International Congress Food for Thought, hosted by the Australian Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona in February 2010. References Allen, Bryan J. Information Flow and Innovation Diffusion in the East Sepic District, Papua New Guinea. PhD diss. Australian National University, Australia. 1976. Berridge, Edward. Lives of the Saints. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1995. C., Michael. “Toward a sound theory of Australian Grunge fiction.” [Weblog entry] Eurhythmania. 5 Mar. 2008. 4 Oct. 2010 http://eurhythmania.blogspot.com/2008/03/toward-sound-theory-of-australian.html. Ettler, Justine. The River Ophelia. Sydney: Picador, 1995. Healey, Christopher J. “Pigs, Cassowaries, and the Gift of the Flesh: A Symbolic Triad in Maring Cosmology.” Ethnology 24 (1985): 153-65. Holman, Jeanine. “Bound Feet.” Bound Feet: The History of a Curious, Erotic Custom. Ed. Joseph Rupp 2010. 11 Aug. 2010. http://www.josephrupp.com/history.html. Jaivin, Linda. Eat Me. Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 1995. Khoo, Tseen. “Selling Sexotica: Oriental Grunge and Suburbia in Lillian Ngs’ Swallowing Clouds.” Diaspora: Negotiating Asian-Australian. Ed. Helen Gilbert, Tseen Khoo, and Jaqueline Lo. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2000. 164-72. Khoo, Tseen; Danau Tanu, and Tien. "Re: Of pigs and porks” 5-9 Aug. 1997. Asian- Australian Discussion List Digest numbers 1447-1450. Apr. 2010 . Kim, Seung-Og. “Burials, Pigs, and Political Prestige in Neolithic China.” Current Anthopology 35.2 (Apr. 1994): 119-141. McGahan, Andrew. Praise. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992. McGahan, Andrew. 1988. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1995. Mendes, Clare. Drift Street. Pymble: HarperCollins, 1995. Ng, Lillian. Swallowing Clouds. Ringwood: Penguin Books Australia,1997. Pons, Xavier. Messengers of Eros. Representations of Sex in Australian Writing. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Rappaport, Roy. Pigs for the Ancestors. New Have: Yale UP, 1967. Roscoe, Paul B. “The Pig and the Long Yam: The Expansion of the Sepik Cultural Complex”. Ethnology 28 (1989): 219-31. Tsiolkas, Christos. Loaded. Sydney: Vintage, 1995. Yu, Ouyang. “An Interview with Lillian Ng.” Otherland Literary Journal 7, Bastard Moon. Essays on Chinese-Australian Writing (July 2001): 111-24.

IntroductionSince its launch in 2005, YouTube has fast become one of the most popular video sharing sites, one of the largest sources of user generated content, and one of the most frequently visited sites globally (Burgess and Green). As YouTube’s popularity has increased, more and more people have taken up the site’s invitation to “Broadcast Yourself.” Vlogging (video blogging) on YouTube has increased in popularity, creating new genres and communities. Vlogging not only allows individuals to create their own mediated content for mass consumption—making it a site for participatory culture (Burgess and Green; Jenkins) and resembling contemporary forms of entertainment such as reality television—but it also allows individuals to engage in narrative and identity forming practices. Through filming their everyday lives, and presenting themselves on camera, YouTubers are engaging in a process of constructing and presenting their identity online. They often form communities around these identities and continue the practice in dialogue and collaboration with their communities of viewers on YouTube. Because of YouTube’s mass global reach, the ability to create one’s own mediated content and the ability to publicly play with and project different self representations becomes a powerful tool allowing YouTubers to publicly challenge social norms and encourage others to do the same. This paper will explore these features of YouTube using the recent “The Power of MAKEUP!” movement, started by NikkieTutorials, as an example. Through a virtual ethnography of the movement as developed by Christine Hine—following the people, dialogue, connections, and narratives that emerged from Nikkie’s original video—this paper will demonstrate that YouTube is not only a tool for self transformation, but has wider potential to transform norms in society. This is achieved mainly through mobilising communities that form around transformative practices, such as makeup transformations, on YouTube. Vlogging as an Identity Forming Practice Vlogging on YouTube is a contemporary form of autobiography in which individuals engage in a process of documenting their life on a daily or weekly basis and, in doing so, constructing their identity online. Although the aim of beauty vlogs is to teach new makeup techniques, demonstrate and review new products, or circulate beauty-related information, the videos include a large amount of self-disclosure. Beauty vloggers reveal intimate things about themselves and actively engage in the practice of self-representation while filming. Beauty vlogging is unique to other vlogging genres as it almost always involves an immediate transformation of the physical self in each video. The vloggers typically begin with their faces bare and “natural” and throughout the course of the video transform their faces into how they want to be seen, and ultimately, who they want to be that day, using makeup. Thus the process of self-representation is multi-dimensional as not only are they presenting the self, but they are also visually constructing the self on camera. The construction of identity that beauty vloggers engage in on YouTube can be likened to what Robert Ezra Park and later Erving Goffman refer to as the construction and performance of a mask. In his work Race and Culture, Park states that the original meaning of the word person is a mask (249). Goffman responds to this statement in his work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, saying the mask is “our truer self, the self we would like to be” (30). Beauty vloggers are engaging in the process of constructing their mask—their truer self and the self they would like to be—both through their performance on YouTube, and through the visual transformation that takes place on camera. Their performance on YouTube not only communicates a desired identity, but through their performance they realise this identity. The process of filming and the visual process of constructing or transforming the self on camera through makeup brings the subject into being. Scholarship in the fields of Life Writing and Digital Media including Autobiography, Automedia and Persona Studies has acknowledged and explored the ways narratives and identities—both online and offline—are constructed, created, shaped, chosen, and invented by the individual/author (Garner; Bridger; Eakin; Maguire; Poletti and Rak; Marshall; Smith and Watson). It is widely accepted that all representations of the self are constructed. Crucially, it is the process of documenting or communicating the self that is identity forming (Richardson; Bridger), as the process, including writing, filming, and posting, brings the subject or self into being (Neuman). The individual embodies their performance and realises the self through it. Park and Goffman argue that we all engage in this process of performing and realising the self through the roles we play in society. The significance of the beauty vlogger performance and transformation is the space in which it occurs and the community that it fosters. YouTube as a Transformative Tool and MirrorThe space in which beauty vloggers play with and transform the self on camera is significant as digital technologies such as YouTube invite exploration of the self. Networked digital media (Meikle and Young) invite multiplicity, heterogeneity, and fragmentation in/of identity performances (Bolter; Gergen; Turkle, "Parallel Lives"). These technologies create opportunities for defining and re-defining the self (Bolter 130), as they allow people to present a more multi-mediated self, using both audio-visual components and text (Papacharissi 643).YouTube, in particular, allows the individual to experiment with the self, and document an ongoing transformation, through film (Kavoori). Many scholars have described this ongoing process of identity construction online using the metaphor of “the mirror” (see Kavoori; Raun; and Procter as recent examples). In his research on trans gender vlogging on YouTube, Tobias Raun explores the theme of the mirror. He describes vlogging as a “transformative medium for working on, producing and exploring the self” (366). He argues the vlog acts as a mirror allowing the individual to try out and assume various identities (366). He writes, the mirroring function of the vlog “invites the YouTuber to assume the shape of a desired identity/representation, constantly assuming and evaluating oneself as an attractive image, trying out different ‘styles of the flesh’ (Butler 177), poses and appearances” (367). In reference to trans gender vlogging, Raun writes, “The vlog seems to serve an important function in the transitioning process, and is an important part of a process of self-invention, serving as a testing ground for experimentations with, and manifestations of (new) identities” (367). The mirror (vlog) gives the individual a place/space to construct and perform their mask (identity), and an opportunity to see the reflection and adjust the mask (identity) accordingly. An important feature of the vlog as a mirror is the fact that it is less like a conventional mirror and more like a window with a reflective surface. On YouTube the vlog always involves an audience, who not only watch the performance, but also respond to it. This is in keeping with Goffman’s assertion that there is always an audience involved in any performance of the self. On YouTube, Raun argues, “the need to represent oneself goes hand in hand with the need to connect and communicate” (Raun 369). Networked digital media such as YouTube are inherently social. They invite participation (Smith; Sauter)and community through community building functions such as the ability to like, subscribe, and comment. Michael Strangelove refers to YouTube as a social space, “as a domain of self-expression, community and public confession” (4). The audience and community are important in the process of identity construction and representation as they serve a crucial role in providing feedback and encouragement, legitimising the identity being presented. As Raun writes, the vlog is an opportunity “for seeing one’s own experiences and thoughts reflected in others” (366). Raun identifies that for the trans gender vloggers in his study, simply knowing there is an audience watching their vlogs is enough to affirm their identity. He writes the vlog can be both “an individual act of self validation and . . . a social act of recognition and encouragement” (368). However, in the case of beauty vlogging the audience do more than watch, they form communities embodying and projecting the performance in everyday life and thus collectively challenge social norms, as seen in the “The Power of MAKEUP!” movement. Exploring the “The Power of MAKEUP!” MovementOn 10 May 2015, Nikkie, a well-known beauty vlogger, uploaded a video to her YouTube channel NikkieTutorials titled “The Power of MAKEUP!” Nikkie’s video can be watched here. In her video Nikkie challenges “makeup shaming,” arguing that makeup is not only fun, but can “transform” you into who you want to be. Inspired by an episode of the reality television show RuPaul’s Drag Race, in which the competing drag queens transform half of their face into “glam” (drag), and leave the other half of their face bare (male), Nikkie demonstrates that anyone can use makeup as a transformative tool. In her video Nikkie mirrors the drag queen transformations, transforming half her face into “glam” and leaving the other half of her face bare, as shown in Figure 1. In only transforming half of her face, Nikkie emphasises the scope of the transformation, demonstrating just how much you can change your appearance using only makeup on your face. Nikkie’s video communicates that both a transformed “glam” image and an “unedited” image of the self are perfectly fine, “there are no rules” and neither representations of the self should bring you shame. Figure 1: thumbnail of Nikkie’s videoNikkie’s video started a movement and spread throughout the beauty community on YouTube as a challenge. Other famous beauty vloggers, and everyday makeup lovers, took on the challenge of creating YouTube videos or posting pictures on Instagram of their faces half bare and half transformed using makeup with the tag #thepowerofmakeupchallenge. Since its release in May 2015, Nikkie’s video has been watched over thirty million times, has been liked over five hundred and thirty thousand times, and has received over twenty three thousand comments, many of which echo Nikkie’s experience of “makeup shaming.” “The power of makeup” video went viral and was picked up not only by the online beauty community but also by mainstream media with articles by Huffington Post, Yahoo.com, Marie Claire, BuzzFeed, DailyLife, POPSUGAR, Enews, Urbanshowbiz, BoredPanda, and kickvick among others. On Instagram, thousands of everyday makeup lovers have recreated the transformation and uploaded their pictures of the finished result. Various hashtags have been created around this movement and can be searched on Instagram including #thepowerofmakeupchallenge, #powerofmakeupchallenge, #powerofmakeup. Nikkie’s Instagram page dedicated to the challenge can be seen here. “The power of makeup” video is a direct reaction against what Nikkie calls “makeup shaming”—the idea that makeup is bad, and the assumption that the leading motivation for using makeup is insecurity. In her video Nikkie also reacts to the idea that the made-up-girl is “not really you,” or worse is “fake.” In the introduction to her video Nikkie says,I’ve been noticing a lot lately that girls have been almost ashamed to say that they love makeup because nowadays when you say you love makeup you either do it because you want to look good for boys, you do it because you’re insecure, or you do it because you don’t love yourself. I feel like in a way lately it’s almost a crime to love doing your makeup. So after last weeks RuPaul’s Drag Race with the half drag half male, I was inspired to show you the power of makeup. I notice a lot that when I don’t wear makeup and I have my hair up in a bun and I meet people and I show them picture of my videos or, or whatever looks I have done, they look at me and straight up tell me “that is not you.” They tell me “that’s funny” because I don’t even look like that girl on the picture. So without any further ado I’m going to do half my face full on glam—I’m truly going to transform one side of my face—and the other side is going to be me, raw, unedited, nothing, me, just me. So let’s do it.In her introduction, Nikkie identifies a social attitude that many of her viewers can relate to, that the made-up face isn’t the “real you.” This idea reveals an interesting contradiction in social attitude. As this issue of Media/Culture highlights, the theme of transformation is increasingly popular in contemporary society. Renovation shows, weight loss shows, and “makeover” shows have increased in number and popularity around the world (Lewis). Tania Lewis attributes this to an international shift towards “the real” on television (447). Accompanying this turn towards “the real,” confession, intimacy, and authenticity are now demanded and consumed as entertainment (Goldthwaite; Dovey; King). Sites such as YouTube are arguably popular because they offer real stories, real lives, and have a core value of authenticity (Strangelove; Wesch; Young; Tolson). The power of makeup transformations are challenging because they juxtapose a transformation against the natural, on the self. By only transforming half their face, the beauty vloggers juxtapose the “makeover” (transformation) with “authenticity” (the natural). The power of makeup movement is therefore caught between two contemporary social values. However, the desire for authenticity, and the lack of acceptance that the transformed image is authentic seems to be the main criticism that the members of this movement receive. Beauty vloggers identify a strong social value that “natural” is “good” and any attempt to alter the natural is taboo. Even in the commercial world “natural beauty” is celebrated and features heavily in the marketing and advertising campaigns of popular beauty, cosmetic, and skincare brands. Consider Maybelline’s emphasis on “natural beauty” in their byline “Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s Maybelline.” This is not the way the members of “the power of makeup” movement use and celebrate makeup. They use and celebrate makeup as a transformative and identity forming tool, and their use of makeup is most often criticised for not being natural. In her recreation of Nikkie’s video, Evelina Forsell says “people get upset when I’m not natural.” Like Nikkie, Evelina reveals she often receives the criticism that “the person with a full on face with makeup is not you.” Evelina’s video can be watched here.“The power of makeup” movement and its participants challenge this criticism that the made-up self is not the “real” self. Evelina directly responds to this criticism in her video, stating “when I have a full face of makeup . . . that’s still me, but a more . . . creative me, I guess.” The beauty vloggers in this movement use makeup and YouTube as extensions of the self, as tools for self-expression, self-realisation, and ongoing transformation. Beauty vloggers are demonstrating that makeup is a tool and extension of the self that allows them to explore and play with their self-representations. In the same way that technology enables the individual to extend and “reinvent him/herself online” (Papacharissi 645), so does makeup. And in the same way that technology becomes an extension of the self, or even a second self (Turkle, The Second Self; Vaast) so does makeup. Makeup is a tool and technique of the self. Vlogging is about storytelling (Kavoori), but it is also collective—it’s about telling collective stories (Raun 373) which can be seen in various vlogging genres. As Geert Lovink suggests, YouTube is one of the largest databases of global shared experience. YouTube’s global popularity can be attributed to Strangelove’s assertion that “there’s nothing more interesting to real people . . . than authentic stories told about other real people” (65). Individuals are drawn to Nikkie’s experience, seeing themselves reflected in her story. Famous beauty vloggers on YouTube, and everyday beauty lovers, find community in the collective experience of feeling shame for loving makeup and using makeup to transform and communicate their identity. Effectively, the movement forms communities of practice (Wenger) made up of hundreds of people brought together by the shared value and use of makeup as a transformative tool. The online spaces where these activities take place (mainly on YouTube and Instagram) form affinity spaces (Gee) where the community come together, share information, learn and develop their practice. Hundreds of YouTubers from all over the world took up Nikkie’s invitation to demonstrate the power of makeup by transforming themselves on camera. From well-established beauty vloggers with millions of viewers, to amateur beauty lovers with YouTube channels, many people felt moved by Nikkie’s example and embodied the message, adapting the transformation to suit their circumstances. The movement includes both men and women, children and adults. Some transformations are inspirational such as Shalom Blac’s in which she talks about accepting the scars that are all over her face, but also demonstrates how makeup can make them disappear. Shalom has almost five million views on her “POWER OF MAKEUP” video, and has been labelled “inspirational” by the media. Shalom Blac’s video can be watched here and the media article labelling her as “inspirational” can be viewed here. Others, such as PatrickStarrr, send a powerful message that “It’s okay to be yourself.” Unlike a traditional interpretation of that statement, Patrick is communicating that it is okay to be the self that you construct, on any given day. Patrick also has over four million views on his video which can be watched here. During her transformation, Nikkie points out each feature of her face that she does not like and demonstrates how she can change it using makeup. Nikkie’s video is primarily a tutorial, educating viewers on different makeup techniques that can manipulate the appearance of their natural features into how they would like them to appear. These techniques are also reproduced and embodied through the various contributors to the movement. Thus the tutorial is an educational tool enabling others to use makeup for their own self representations (see Paul A. Soukup for an overview of YouTube as an educational tool). A feminist perspective may deconstruct the empowering, educational intentions of Nikkie’s video, insisting that conceptions of beauty are a social construct (Travis, Meginnis, and Bardari) and should not be re-enforced by encouraging women (and men) to use make-up to feel good. However, this sort of discourse does not appear in the movement, and this paper seeks to analyse the movement as its contributors frame and present it. Rather, “the power of makeup” movement falls within a postfeminist framework celebrating choice, femininity, independence, and the individual construction of modern identity (McRobbie; Butler; Beck, Giddens and Lash). Postfeminism embraces postmodern notions of identity in which individuals are “called up to invent their own structures” (McRobbie 260). Through institutions such as education young women have “become more independent and able,” and “‘dis-embedded’ from communities where gender roles were fixed” (McRobbie 260). Angela McRobbie attributes this to the work of scholars such as Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck and their emphasis on individualisation and reflexive modernisation. These scholars take a Foucauldian approach to identity construction in the modern age, where the individual must choose their own structures “internally and individualistically” (260), engaging in an ongoing process of self-monitoring and self-improvement, and resulting in the current self-help culture (McRobbie). In addition to being an educational and constructive tool, Nikkie’s video is also an exercise in self-branding and self-promotion(see Marwick; Duffy and Hund; and van Nuenen for scholarship on self-branding). Through her ongoing presence on YouTube, presenting this video in conjunction with her other tutorials, Nikkie is establishing herself as a beauty vlogger/guru. Nikkie lists all of the products that she uses in her transformation below her video with links to where people can buy them. She also lists her social media accounts, ways that people can connect with her, and other videos that people might be interested in watching. There are also prompts to subscribe, both during her video and in the description bar below her video. Nikkie’s transformation is both an ongoing endeavour to create her image and public persona as a beauty vlogger, and a physical transformation on camera. There is also a third transformation that takes place because her vlog is in the public sphere and consequently mobilises a movement. The transformation is of the way people talk about and eventually perceive makeup. Nikkie’s video aims to end makeup shaming and promote makeup as an empowering tool. With each recreation of her video, with each Instagram photo featuring the transformation, and with each mainstream media article featuring the movement, #thepowerofmakeup movement community are transforming the image of the made-up girl—transforming the association of makeup with presenting an inauthentic identity—in society. ConclusionThe “The Power of MAKEUP!” movement, started by NikkieTutorials, demonstrates one way in which people are using YouTube as a transformative tool, and mirror, to document, construct, and present their identity online, using makeup. Through their online transformation the members of the movement not only engage in a process of constructing and presenting their identity, but they form communities who share a love of makeup and its transformative potential. 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Do we eat what we are, or are we what we eat? Do we eat or are we eaten? In less cryptic terms, in eating, do we confirm our identities, or are our identities reforged, and refracted by what and how we eat? In posing these questions, I want to shift the terms of current debates about identity. I want to signal that the study of identity may take on new insights when we look at how we are or want to be in terms of what, how, and with whom we eat. If the analysis of identity has by and large been conducted through the optic of sex, it may well be that in western societies we are witnessing a shift away from sex as the sovereign signifier, or to put it more finely, the question of what we are is a constantly morphing one that mixes up bodies, appetites, classes, genders and ethnicities. It must be said that the question of identity and subjectivity has been so well trodden in the last several decades that the possibility of any virgin territory is slim. Bombarded by critiques of identity politics, any cultural critic still interested in why and how individuals fabricate themselves must either cringe before accusations of sociological do-gooding (and defend the importance of the categories of race, class, sex, gender and so forth), or face the endless clichés that seemingly support the investigation of identity. The momentum of my investigation is carried by a weak wager, by which I mean that the areas and examples I study cannot be overdetermined by a sole axis of investigation. My point of departure is basic: what if we were to think identities in another dimension, through the optic of eating and its associated qualities: hunger, greed, shame, disgust, pleasure, etc? While the connections suggested by eating are diverse and illuminating, interrogating identity through this angle brings its own load of assumptions and preconceptions. One of the more onerous aspects of 'writing about food' is the weight of previous studies. The field of food is a well traversed one, staked out by influential authors concerned with proper anthropological, historical and sociological questions. They are by and large attracted to food for its role in securing social categories and classifications. They have left a legacy of truisms, such as Lévi-Strauss's oft-stated maxim that food is good to think with1, or Brillat-Savarin's aphorism, 'tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are' (13). In turn, scientific idioms meet up with the buzzing clichés that hover about food. These can be primarily grouped around the notion that food is fundamental, that we all eat, and so on. Indeed, buffeted by the winds of postmodernism that have permeated public debates, it seems that there is a popular acceptance of the fact that identities are henceforth difficult, fragmented, temporary, unhinged by massive changes to modes of employment and the economy, re-formations of family, and the changes in the gender and sexual order. Living with and through these changes on a daily basis, it is no wonder that food and eating has been popularly reclaimed as a 'fundamental' issue, as the last bastion of authenticity in our lives. To put it another way, and in the terms that guide me, eating is seen as immediate -- it is something we all have to do; and it is a powerful mode of mediation, of joining us with others. What, how, and where we eat has emerged as a site of considerable social concern: from the fact that most do not eat en famille, that we increasingly eat out and through drive-in fast food outlets (in the US, 50% of the food budget is spent on eating outside the home), to the worries about genetically altered food and horror food -- mad cows, sick chickens, square tomatoes. Eating performs different connections and disconnections. Increasingly the attention to what we eat is seen as immediately connecting us, our bodies, to large social questions. At a broad level, this can be as diffuse as the winds that some argue spread genetically modified seed stock from one region to another. Or it can be as individually focussed as the knowledge that others are starving as we eat. This connection has long haunted children told 'to eat up everything on your plate because little children are starving in Africa', and in more evolved terms has served as a staple of forms of vegetarianism and other ethical forms of eating. From the pictures of starving children staring from magazine pages, the spectre of hunger is now broadcast by the Internet, exemplified in the Hunger Site where 'users are met by a map of the world and every 3.6 seconds, a country flashes black signifying a death due to hunger'. Here eating is the subject of a double articulation: the recognition of hunger is presumed to be a fundamental capacity of individuals, and our feelings are then galvanised into painless action: each time a user clicks on the 'hunger' button one of the sponsors donates a cup and a half of food. As the site explains, 'our sponsors pay for the donations as a form of advertising and public relations'. Here, the logic is that hunger is visceral, that it is a basic human feeling, which is to say that it is understood as immediate, and that it connects us in a basic way to other humans. That advertising companies know that it can also be a profitable form of meditation, transforming 'humans' into consumers is but one example of how eating connects us in complex ways to other people, to products, to new formulations of identity, and in this case altruism (the site has been called 'the altruistic mouse')2. Eating continually interweaves individual needs, desires and aspirations within global economies of identities. Of course the interlocking of the global and the local has been the subject of much debate over the last decade. For instance, in his recent book on globalisation, John Tomlinson uses 'global food and local identity' as a site through which to problematise these terms. It is clear that changes in food processing and transportation technologies have altered our sense of connection to the near and the far away, allowing us to routinely find in our supermarkets and eat products that previously would have been the food stuff of the élite. These institutional and technological changes rework the connections individuals have to their local, to the regions and nations in which they live. As Tomlinson argues, 'globalisation, from its early impact, does clearly undermine a close material relationship between the provenance of food and locality' (123). As he further states, the effects have been good (availability and variety), and bad (disrupting 'the subtle connection between climate, season, locality and cultural practice'). In terms of what we can now eat, Tomlinson points out that 'the very cultural stereotypes that identify food with, say, national culture become weakened' (124). Defusing the whiff of moralism that accompanies so much writing about food, Tomlinson argues that these changes to how we eat are not 'typically experienced as simply cultural loss or estrangement but as a complex and ambiguous blend: of familiarity and difference, expansion of cultural horizons and increased perceptions of vulnerability, access to the "world out there" accompanied by penetration of our own private worlds, new opportunities and new risks' (128). For the sake of my own argument his attention to the increased sense of vulnerability is particularly important. To put it more strongly, I'd argue that eating is of interest for the ways in which it can be a mundane exposition of the visceral nature of our connectedness, or distance from each other, from ourselves, and our social environment: it throws into relief the heartfelt, the painful, playful or pleasurable articulations of identity. To put it more clearly, I want to use eating and its associations in order to think about how the most ordinary of activities can be used to help us reflect on how we are connected to others, and to large and small social issues. This is again to attend to the immediacy of eating, and the ways in which that immediacy is communicated, mediated and can be put to use in thinking about culture. The adjective 'visceral' comes to mind: 'of the viscera', the inner organs. Could something as ordinary as eating contain the seeds of an extraordinary reflection, a visceral reaction to who and what we are becoming? In mining eating and its qualities might we glimpse gut reactions to the histories and present of the cultures within which we live? As Emily Jenkins writes in her account of 'adventures in physical culture', what if we were to go 'into things tongue first. To see how they taste' (5). In this sense, I want to plunder the visceral, gut levels revealed by that most boring and fascinating of topics: food and eating. In turn, I want to think about what bodies are and do when they eat. To take up the terms with which I started, eating both confirms what and who we are, to ourselves and to others, and can reveal new ways of thinking about those relations. To take the most basic of facts: food goes in, and then broken down it comes out of the body, and every time this happens our bodies are affected. While in the usual course of things we may not dwell upon this process, that basic ingestion allows us to think of our bodies as complex assemblages connected to a wide range of other assemblages. In eating, the diverse nature of where and how different parts of ourselves attach to different aspects of the social becomes clear, just as it scrambles preconceptions about alimentary identities. Of course, we eat according to social rules, in fact we ingest them. 'Feed the man meat', the ads proclaim following the line of masculinity inwards; while others draw a line outwards from biology and femininity into 'Eat lean beef'. The body that eats has been theorised in ways that seek to draw out the sociological equations about who we are in terms of class and gender. But rather than taking the body as known, as already and always ordered in advance by what and how it eats, we can turn such hypotheses on their head. In the act of ingestion, strict divisions get blurred. The most basic fact of eating reveals some of the strangeness of the body's workings. Consequently it becomes harder to capture the body within categories, to order stable identities. This then forcefully reminds us that we still do not know what a body is capable of, to take up a refrain that has a long heritage (from Spinoza to Deleuze to feminist investigations of the body). As Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd argue in terms of this idea, 'each body exists in relations of interdependence with other bodies and these relations form a "world" in which individuals of all kinds exchange their constitutive parts -- leading to the enrichment of some and the demise of others (e.g. eating involves the destruction of one body at the same time as it involves the enhancement of the other)' (101). I am particularly interested in how individuals replay equations between eating and identity. But that phrase sounds impossibly abstracted from the minute instances I have in mind. From the lofty heights, I follow the injunction to 'look down, look way down', to lead, as it were, with the stomach. In this vein, I begin to note petty details, like the fact of recently discovering breakfast. From a diet of coffee (now with a milk called 'Life') and cigarettes, I dutifully munch on fortified cereal that provides large amounts of folate should I be pregnant (and as I eat it I wonder am I, should I be?3). Spurred on by articles sprinkled with dire warnings about what happens to women in Western societies, I search out soy, linseed and other ingredients that will help me mimic the high phytoestrogen diet of Japanese women. Eating cereal, I am told, will stave off depression, especially with the addition of bananas. Washed down with yoghurt 'enhanced' with acidophilius and bifidus to give me 'friendly' bacteria that will fight against nasty heliobacter pylori, I am assured that I will even lose weight by eating breakfast. It's all a bit much first thing in the morning when the promise of a long life seems like a threat. The myriad of printed promises of the intricate world of alimentary programming serve as an interesting counterpoint to the straightforward statements on cigarette packages. 'Smoking kills' versus the weak promises that eating so much of such and such a cereal 'is a good source of soy phytoestrogenes (isolfavones) that are believed to be very beneficial'. Apart from the unpronounceable ingredients (do you really want to eat something that you can't say?), the terms of the contract between me and the cereal makers is thin: that such and such is 'believed to be beneficial'? While what in fact they may benefit is nebulous, it gets scarier when they specify that 'a diet rich in folate may reduce the risk of birth defects such as spina bifida'. The conditional tense wavers as I ponder the way spina bifida is produced as a real possibility. There is of course a long history to the web of nutritional messages that now surrounds us. In her potted teleology of food messages, Sue Thompson, a consultant dietitian, writes that in the 1960s, the slogan was 'you are what you eat'. Then in the 1970s and 1980s, the idea was that food was bad for you. In her words, 'it became a time of "Don't eat" and "bad foods". Now, happily, 'we are moving into a time of appreciating the health benefits of food' (Promotional release by the Dairy Farmers, 1997). As the new battle ground for extended enhanced life, eating takes on fortified meaning. Awed by the enthusiasm, I am also somewhat shocked by the intimacy of detail. I can handle descriptions of sex, but the idea of discussing the ways in which you 'are reducing the bacterial toxins produced from small bowel overgrowth' (Thompson), is just too much. Gut level intimacy indeed. However, eating is intimate. But strangely enough except for the effusive health gurus, and the gossip about the eating habits of celebrities, normally in terms of not-eating, we tend not to publicly air the fact that we all operate as 'mouth machines' (to take Noëlle Châtelet's term). To be blunt about it, 'to eat, is to connect ... the mouth and the anus' (Châtelet 34). We would, with good reason, rather not think about this; it is an area of conversation reserved for our intimates. For instance, in relationships the moment of broaching the subject of one's gut may mark the beginning of the end. So let us stay for the moment at the level of the mouth machine, and the ways it brings together the physical fact of what goes in, and the symbolic production of what comes out: meanings, statements, ideas. To sanitise it further, I want to think of the mouth machine as a metonym4 for the operations of a term that has been central to cultural studies: 'articulation'. Stuart Hall's now classic definition states that 'articulation refers to the complex set of historical practices by which we struggle to produce identity or structural unity out of, on top of, complexity, difference, contradiction' (qtd. in Grossberg, "History" 64). While the term has tended to be used rather indiscriminately -- theorists wildly 'articulate' this or that -- its precise terms are useful. Basically it refers to how individuals relate themselves to their social contexts and histories. While we are all in some sense the repositories of past practices, through our actions we 'articulate', bridge and connect ourselves to practices and contexts in ways that are new to us. In other terms, we continually shuttle between practices and meanings that are already constituted and 'the real conditions' in which we find ourselves. As Lawrence Grossberg argues, this offers 'a nonessentialist theory of agency ... a fragmented, decentered human agent, an agent who is both "subject-ed" by power and capable of acting against power' ("History" 65). Elsewhere Grossberg elaborates on the term, arguing that 'articulation is the production of identity on top of difference, of unities out of fragments, of structures across practices' (We Gotta Get Out 54). We are then 'articulated' subjects, the product of being integrated into past practices and structures, but we are also always 'articulating' subjects: through our enactment of practices we reforge new meanings, new identities for ourselves. This then reveals a view of the subject as a fluctuating entity, neither totally voluntaristic, nor overdetermined. In more down to earth terms, just because we are informed by practices not of our own making, 'that doesn't mean we swallow our lessons without protest' (Jenkins 5). The mouth machine takes in but it also spits out. In these actions the individual is constantly connecting, disconnecting and reconnecting. Grossberg joins the theory of articulation to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of rhizomes. In real and theoretical terms, a rhizome is a wonderful entity: it is a type of plant, such as a potato plant or an orchid, that instead of having tap roots spreads its shoots outwards, where new roots can sprout off old. Used as a figure to map out social relations, the rhizome allows us to think about other types of connection. Beyond the arboreal, tap root logic of, say, the family tree which ties me in lineage to my forefathers, the rhizome allows me to spread laterally and horizontally: as Deleuze puts it, the rhizome is antigenealogical, 'it always has multiple entryways' compelling us to think of how we are connected diversely, to obvious and sometimes not so obvious entities (35). For Grossberg the appeal of joining a theory of articulation with one inspired by rhizomes is that it combines the 'vertical complexity' of culture and context, with the 'wild realism' of the horizontal possibilities that connect us outward. To use another metaphor dear to Deleuze and Guattari, this is to think about the spread of rhizomatic roots, the 'lines of flight' that break open seemingly closed structures, including those we call ourselves: 'lines of flight disarticulate, open up the assemblage to its exterior, cutting across and dismantling unity, identity, centers and hierarchies' (qtd. in Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out 58). In this way, bodies can be seen as assemblages: bits of past and present practice, openings, attachments to parts of the social, closings and aversion to other parts. The tongue as it ventures out to taste something new may bring back fond memories, or it may cause us to recoil in disgust. As Jenkins writes, this produces a fascinating 'contradiction -- how the body is both a prison and a vehicle for adventure' (4). It highlights the fact that the 'body is not the same from day to day. Not even from minute to minute ... . Sometimes it seems like home, sometimes more like a cheap motel near Pittsburgh' (7). As we ingest we mutate, we expand and contract, we change, sometimes subtly, sometimes violently. The openings and closings of our bodies constantly rearranges our dealings with others, as Jenkins writes, the body's 'distortions, anxieties, ecstasies and discomforts all influence a person's interaction with the people who service it'. In more theoretical terms, this produces the body as 'an articulated plane whose organisation defines its own relations of power and sites of struggle', which 'points to the existence of another politics, a politics of feeling' (Grossberg, "History" 72). These theoretical considerations illuminate the interest and the complexity of bodies that eat. The mouth machine registers experiences, and then articulates them -- utters them. In eating, we may munch into whole chains of previously established connotations, just as we may disrupt them. For instance, an email arrives, leaving traces of its rhizomatic passage zapping from one part of the world to another, and then to me. Unsolicited, it sets out a statement from a Dr. Johannes Van Vugt in San Francisco who on October 11, 1999, National Coming Out Day in the US, began an ongoing 'Fast for Equal Rights for persons who are gay, lesbian and other sexual orientation minorities'. Yoking his fast with the teachings of Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Dr. Van Vugt says he is fasting to 'call on you to choose love, not fear, and to do something about it'. The statement also reveals that he previously fasted 'to raise awareness and funds for African famine relief for which he received a Congressional commendation'. While personally I don't give much for his chances of getting a second commendation, this is an example of how the mouth machine closed still operates to articulate identities and politics to wildly diverging sites. While there is something of an arboreal logic to fasting for awareness of famine, the connection between not eating and anti-homophobic politics is decidedly rhizomatic. Whether or not it succeeds in its aim, and one of the tenets of a rhizomatic logic is that the points of connection cannot be guaranteed in advance, it does join the mouth with sex with the mouth with homophobic statements that it utters. There is then a sort of 'wild realism' at work here that endeavours to set up new assemblages of bodies, mouths and politics. From fasting to writing, what of the body that writes of the body that eats? In Grossberg's argument, the move to a rhizomatic field of analysis promises to return cultural theory to a consideration of 'the real'. He argues that such a theory must be 'concerned with particular configurations of practices, how they produce effects and how such effects are organized and deployed' (We Gotta Get Out 45). However, it is crucial to remember that these practices do not exist in a pure state in culture, divorced from their representations or those of the body that analyses them. The type of 'wild realism' that Grossberg calls for, as in Deleuze's 'new empiricism' is both a way of seeing the world, and offers it anew, illuminates otherly its structures and individuals' interaction with them. Following the line of the rhizome means that we must 'forcibly work both on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows', Guattari goes on to argue that 'there is no tripartition between a field of reality, the world, a field of representation, the book, and a field of subjectivity, the author. But an arrangement places in connection certain multiplicities taken from each of these orders' (qtd. in Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out 48). In terms of the possibilities offered by eating, these theoretical and conceptual arguments direct us to other ways of thinking about identity as both digestion and as indigestible. Bodies eat into culture. The mouth machine is central to the articulation of different orders, but so too is the tongue that sticks out, that draws in food, objects and people. Analysed along multiple alimentary lines of flight, in eating we constantly take in, chew up and spit out identities. Footnotes 1. As Barbara Santich has recently pointed out, Lévi-Strauss's point was made in relation to taboos on eating totem animals in traditional societies and wasn't a general comment on the connection between eating and thinking (4). 2. The sponsors of the Hunger Site include 0-0.com, a search engine, Proflowers.com, and an assortment of other examples of this new form of altruism (such as GreaterGood.com which advertises itself as a 'shop to benefit your favorite cause'), and 'World-Wide Recipes', which features a 'virtual restaurant'. 3. The pregnant body is of course one of the most policed entities in our culture, and pregnant friends report on the anxieties that are produced about what will go into the future child's body. 4. While Châtelet writes that thinking about the eating body 'throws her into full metaphor ... joining, for example the nutritional mouth and the lover's mouth' (8), I have tried to avoid the tug of metaphor. Of course, the seduction of metaphor is great, and there are copious examples of the metaphorisation of eating in regards to consumption, ingestion, reading and writing. However, as I've argued elsewhere (Probyn, Outside Belongings), I prefer to focus on the 'work' (or as Le Doeuff would say, 'le faire des images') that Deleuze and Guattari's terms accomplish as ways of modelling the social. This is a particularly crucial (if here underdeveloped) point in terms of my present project, where I seek to analyse the ways in which eating may reproduce an awareness of the visceral nature of social relations. That said, and as my valued colleague Melissa Hardie has often pointed out, my text is littered with metaphor. References Brillat-Savarin, Jean-Anthelme. The Physiology of Taste. Trans. Anne Drayton. Penguin, 1974. Châtelet, Noëlle. Le Corps a Corps Culinaire. Paris: Seuil, 1977. Deleuze, Gilles. "Rhizome versus Trees." The Deleuze Reader. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1973. Gatens, Moira, and Genevieve Lloyd. Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. Grossberg, Lawrence. "History, Politics and Postmodernism: Stuart Hall and Cultural Studies." Journal of Communication Inquiry 10.2 (1986): 61-77. ---. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture. New York and London: Routledge,1992. Le Doeuff, Michèle. L'Étude et le Rouet. Paris: Seuil, 1989. Jenkins, Emily. Tongue First: Adventures in Physical Culture. London: Virago, 1999. Probyn, Elspeth. Outside Belongings. New York and London: Routledge, 1996. ---. Sexing the Self. Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies. New York and London: Routledge, 1993. Santich, Barbara. "Research Notes." The Centre for the History of Food and Drink Newsletter. The University of Adelaide, September 1999. Thompson, Sue. Promotional pamphlet for the Dairy Farmers' Association. 1997. Tomlinson, John. Globalization and Culture. Oxford: Polity Press, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Elspeth Probyn. "The Indigestion of Identities." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.7 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/indigestion.php>. Chicago style: Elspeth Probyn, "The Indigestion of Identities," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 7 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/indigestion.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Elspeth Probyn. (1999) The indigestion of identities. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(7). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9910/indigestion.php> ([your date of access]).

Iain Sinclair is a writer who is synonymous with a city. Sinclair’s sustained literary engagement with London from the mid 1960s has produced a singular account of place in that city (Bond; Baker; Seale “Iain Sinclair”). Sinclair is a leading figure in a resurgent and rebranded psychogeographic literature of the 1990s (Coverley) where on-foot wandering through the city brings forth narrative. Sinclair’s wandering, materialised as walking, is central to the claim of intimacy with the city that underpins his authority as a London writer. Furthermore, embodied encounters with the urban landscape through the experience of “getting lost” in urban environments are key to his literary methodology. Through works such as Lights Out for the Territory (2007), Sinclair has been repeatedly cast as a key chronicler of London, a city focused with capitalist determination on the future while redolent, even weighted, with a past that, as Sinclair says himself, is there for the wanderer to uncover (Dirda).In this essay, we examine how Sinclair’s wandering makes place in London. We are interested not only in Sinclair’s wandering as a spatial or cultural “intervention” in the city, as it is frequently positioned in critiques of his writing (Wolfreys). We are also interested in how Sinclair’s literary methodology of wandering undertakes its own work of placemaking in material ways that are often obscured because of how his work is positioned within particular traditions of wandering, including those of psychogeography and the flâneur. It is our contention that Sinclair’s wandering has an ambivalent relationship with place in London. It belongs to the tradition of the wanderer as a radical outsider with an alternative practice and perspective on place, but also contributes to contemporary placemaking in a global, neo-liberal London.Wandering as Literary MethodologyIain Sinclair’s writing about London is considered both “visionary” and “documentary” in its ambitions and has been praised as “giving voice to lost, erased, or forgotten histories or memories” (Baker 63). Sinclair is the “raging prophet” (Kerr) for a transforming and disappearing city. This perspective is promulgated by Sinclair himself, who in interviews refers to his practice as “bearing witness” to the erasures of particular place cultures, communities, and their histories that a rapidly gentrifying city entails (Sinclair quoted in O’Connell). The critical reception of Sinclair’s perambulation mostly follows Michel de Certeau’s observation that walking is a kind of reading/writing practice that “makes the invisible legible” (Baker 28). Sinclair’s wandering, and the encounters it mobilises, are a form of storytelling, which bring into proximity complex and forgotten narratives of place.Sinclair may “dive in” to the city, yet his work writing and rewriting urban space is usually positioned as representational. London is a text, “a system of signs […], the material city becoming the (non-material) map” (Baker 29). Sinclair’s wandering is understood as writing about urban transformation in London, rather than participating in it through making place. The materiality of Sinclair’s wandering in the city—his walking, excavating, encountering—may be acknowledged, but it is effectively dematerialised by the critical focus on his self-conscious literary treatment of place in London. Simon Perril has called Sinclair a “modernist magpie” (312), both because his mode of intertextuality borrows from Modernist experiments in form, style, and allusion, and because the sources of many of his intertexts are Modernist writers. Sinclair mines a rich seam of literature, Modernist and otherwise, that is produced in and about London, as well as genealogies of other legendary London wanderers. The inventory includes: “the rich midden of London’s sub-cultural fiction, terse proletarian narratives of lives on the criminous margin” (Sinclair Lights Out, 312) in the writing of Alexander Baron and Emanuel Litvinoff; the small magazine poetry of the twentieth century British Poetry Revival; and the forgotten suburban writings of David Gascoyne, “a natural psychogeographer, tracking the heat spores of Rimbaud, from the British Museum to Wapping and Limehouse” (Atkins and Sinclair 146). Sinclair’s intertextual “loiterature” (Chambers), his wayward, aleatory wandering through London’s archives, is one of two interconnected types of wandering in Sinclair’s literary methodology. The other is walking through the city. In a 2017 interview, Sinclair argued that the two were necessarily interconnected in writing about place in London:The idea of writing theoretical books about London burgeoned as a genre. At the same time, the coffee table, touristy books about London emerged—the kinds of books that can be written on Google, rather than books that are written by people of the abyss. I’m interested in someone who arrives and takes this journey into the night side of London in the tradition of Mayhew or Dickens, who goes out there and is constantly wandering and finding and having collisions and bringing back stories and shaping a narrative. There are other people who are doing things in a similar way, perhaps with a more journalistic approach, finding people and interviewing them and taking their stories. But many books about London are very conceptual and just done by doing research sitting at a laptop. I don’t think this challenges the city. It’s making a parallel city of the imagination, of literature. (Sinclair quoted in O'Connell)For Sinclair, then, walking is as much a literary methodology as reading, archival research, or intertextuality is.Wandering as Urban InterventionPerhaps one of Sinclair’s most infamous walks is recorded in London Orbital (2003), where he wandered the 127 miles of London’s M25 ring road. London Orbital is Sinclair’s monumental jeremiad against the realpolitik of late twentieth-century neo-liberalism and the politicised spatialisation and striation of London by successive national and local governments. The closed loop of the M25 motorway recommends itself to governmental bodies as a regulated form that functions as “a prophylactic, […] a tourniquet” (1) controlling the flow (with)in and (with)out of London. Travellers’ movements are impeded when the landscape is cut up by the motorway. Walking becomes a marginalised activity it its wake, and the surveillance and distrust to which Sinclair is subject realises the concerns foreshadowed by Walter Benjamin regarding the wanderings of the flâneur. In the Arcades Project, Benjamin quoted a 1936 newspaper article, pessimistically titled “Le dernier flâneur” [The last flâneur]:A man who goes for a walk ought not to have to concern himself with any hazards he may run into, or with the regulations of a city. […] But he cannot do this today without taking a hundred precautions, without asking the advice of the police department, without mixing with a dazed and breathless herd, for whom the way is marked out in advance by bits of shining metal. If he tries to collect the whimsical thoughts that may have come to mind, very possibly occasioned by sights on the street, he is deafened by car horns, [and] stupefied by loud talkers […]. (Jaloux, quoted in Benjamin 435)Susan Buck-Morss remarks that flâneurs are an endangered species in the contemporary city: “like tigers, or pre-industrial tribes, [they] are cordoned off on reservations, preserved within the artificially created environments of pedestrian streets, parks, and underground passages” (344). To wander from these enclosures, or from delineated paths, is to invite suspicion as the following unexceptional anecdote from London Orbital illustrates:NO PUBLIC RITE [sic] OF WAY. Footpaths, breaking towards the forest, have been closed off. You are obliged to stick to the Lee Navigation, the contaminated ash conglomerate of the Grey Way. Enfield has been laid out in grids; long straight roads, railways, fortified blocks. […] In a canalside pub, they deny all knowledge of the old trace. Who walks? “There used to be a road,” they admit. It’s been swallowed up in this new development, Enfield Island Village. […] The hard hat mercenaries of Fairview New Homes […] are suspicious of our cameras. Hands cover faces. Earth-movers rumble straight at us. A call for instruction muttered into their lapels: “Strangers. Travellers.” (69-70)There is an excess to wandering, leading to incontinent ideas, extreme verbiage, compulsive digression, excessive quotation. De Certeau in his study of the correlation between navigating urban and textual space speaks of “the unlimited diversity” of the walk, highlighting its improvised nature, and the infinite possibilities it proposes. Footsteps are equated with thoughts, multiplying unchecked: “They are myriad, but do not compose a series. […] Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities” (97). Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the erratic trajectories, digression, and diversion of Sinclair’s wanderings are aligned with a tradition of the flâneur as homo ludens (Huizinga) or practitioner of the Situationist derive, as theorised by Guy Debord:The dérive entails playful-constructive behaviour and awareness of psychogeographical effects, which completely distinguishes it from the classical notions of the journey or the stroll. In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. The element of chance is less determinant than one might think: from the dérive point of view, cities have a psychogeographical relief, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones. (“Theory of the dérive” 50)Like Charles Baudelaire’s painter of modern life, Sinclair is happily susceptible to distraction. The opening essay of Lights Out is a journey through London with the ostensible purpose of diligently researching and reporting on the language he detects on his travels. However, the map for the walk is only ever half-hearted, and Sinclair admits to “hoping for some accident to bring about a final revision” (5). Sinclair’s walks welcome the random and when he finds the detour to disfigure his route, he is content: “Already the purity of the [walk] has been despoiled. Good” (8). Wandering’s Double Agent: Sinclair’s Placemaking in LondonMuch has been made of the flâneur as he appears in Sinclair’s work (Seale “Eye-Swiping”). Nevertheless, Sinclair echoes Walter Benjamin in declaring the flâneur, as previously stereotyped, to be impossible in the contemporary city. The fugeur is one détournement (Debord “Détournement”) of the flâneur that Sinclair proposes. In London Orbital, Sinclair repeatedly refers to his wandering as a fugue. A fugue is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as a “flight from or loss of the awareness of one’s identity, sometimes involving wandering away from home, and often occurring as a reaction to shock or emotional stress.” As Sinclair explains:I found the term fugueur more attractive than the now overworked flâneur. Fugueur had the smack of a swear word […]. Fugueur was the right job description for our walk, our once-a-month episodes of transient mental illness. Madness as a voyage. […] The fugue is both drift and fracture. (London Orbital, 146)Herbert Marcuse observed that to refuse to comply with capitalist behaviour is to be designated irrational, and thus relegate oneself to the periphery of society (9). The neo-liberal city’s enforcement of particular spatial and temporal modalities that align with the logic of purpose, order, and productivity is antagonistic to wandering. The fugue state, then, can rupture the restrictive logic of capitalism’s signifying chains through regaining forcibly expurgated ideas and memories. The walk around the M25 has an unreason to it: the perversity of wandering a thoroughfare designed for cars. In another, oft-quoted passage from Lights Out, Sinclair proposes another avatar of the flâneur:The concept of “strolling”, aimless urban wandering […] had been superseded. We had moved into the age of the stalker; journeys made with intent—sharp-eyed and unsponsored. The stalker was our role model: purposed hiking, not dawdling, nor browsing. No time for the savouring of reflections in shop windows, admiration for Art Nouveau ironwork, attractive matchboxes rescued from the gutter. This was walking with a thesis. With a prey. […] The stalker is a stroller who sweats, a stroller who knows where he is going, but not why or how. (75)Not only has the flâneur evolved into something far more exacting and purposeful, but as we want to illuminate, the flâneur’s wandering has evolved into something more material than transforming urban experience and encounter into art or literature as Baudelaire described. In a recent interview, Sinclair stated: The walker exists in a long tradition, and, for me, it’s really vital to simply be out there every day—not only because it feels good, but because in doing it you contribute to the microclimate of the city. As you withdraw energy from the city, you are also giving energy back. People are noticing you. You’re doing something, you’re there, the species around you absorb your presence into it, and you become part of this animate entity called the city. (Sinclair quoted in O'Connell)Sinclair’s acknowledgement that he is acting upon the city through his wandering is also an acknowledgement of a material, grounded interplay between what Jonathan Raban has called the “soft” and the “hard” city: “The city as we might imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate in maps and statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture” (quoted in Manley 6). Readers and critics may gravitate to the soft city of Sinclair, but as Donald puts it, “The challenge is to draw the connections between place, archive, and imagination, not only by tracing those links in literary representations of London, but also by observing and describing the social, cultural, and subjective functions of London literature and London imagery” (in Manley, 262).Sinclair’s most recent longform book, The Last London (2017), is bracketed at both beginning and end with the words from the diarist of the Great Fire of 1666, John Evelyn: “London was, but is no more.” Sinclair’s evocation of the disaster that razed seventeenth-century London is a declaration that twenty-first century London, too, has been destroyed. This time by an unsavoury crew of gentrifiers, property developers, politicians, hyper-affluent transplants, and the creative classes. Writers are a sub-category of this latter group. Ambivalence and complicity are always there for Sinclair. On the one hand, his wanderings have attributed cultural value to previously overlooked aspects of London by the very virtue of writing about them. On the other hand, Sinclair argues that the value of these parts of the city hinges on their neglect by the dominant culture, which, of course, is no longer possible when his writing illuminates them. Certainly, wandering the city excavating the secret histories of cities has acquired an elevated cultural currency since Sinclair started writing. In making the East End “so gothically juicy”, Sinclair inaugurated a stream of new imaginings from “young acolyte psychogeographers” (McKay). Moreover, McKay points out that “Sinclair once wryly noted that anywhere he ‘nominated’ soon became an estate agent vision of luxury lifestyle”.Iain Sinclair’s London wanderings, then, call for a recognition that is more-than-literary. They are what we have referred to elsewhere as “worldly texts” (Potter and Seale, forthcoming), texts that have more-than-literary effects and instead are materially entangled in generating transformative conditions of place. Our understanding sits alongside the insights of literary geography, especially Sheila Hones’s concept of the text as a “spatial event”. In this reckoning, texts are spatio-temporal happenings that are neither singular nor have one clear “moment” of emergence. Rather, texts come into being across time and space, and in this sense can be understood as assemblages that include geographical locations, material contexts, and networks of production and reception. Literary effects are materially, collaboratively, and spatially generated in the world and have “territorial consequences”, as Jon Anderson puts it (127). Sinclair’s writings, we contend, can be seen as materialising versions of place that operate outside the assemblage of “literary” production and realise spatial and socio-economic consequence.Sinclair’s work does more than mimetically reproduce a “lost” London, or angrily write against the grain of neo-liberal gentrification. It is, in a sense, a geographic constituent that cannot be disaggregated from the contemporary dynamics of the privileges and exclusions of city. This speaks to the author’s ambivalence about his role as a central figure in London writing. For example, it has been noted that Sinclair is “aware of the charge that he’s been responsible as anyone for the fetishization of London’s decrepitude, contributing to an aesthetic of urban decay that is now ubiquitous” (Day). Walking the East End in what he has claimed to be his “last” London book (2017), Sinclair is horrified by the prevalence of what he calls “poverty chic” at the erstwhile Spitalfields Market: a boutique called “Urban Decay” is selling high-end lipsticks with an optional eye makeover. Next door is the “Brokedown Palace […] offering expensive Patagonia sweaters and pretty colourful rucksacks.” Ironically, the aesthetics of decline and ruin that Sinclair has actively brought to public notice over the last thirty years are contributing to this urban renewal. It could also be argued that Sinclair’s wandering is guilty of “the violence of spokesmanship”, which sublimates the voices of others (Weston 274), and is surely no longer the voice of the wanderer as marginalised outsider. When textual actors become networked with place, there can be extra-textual consequences, such as Sinclair’s implication in the making of place in a globalised and gentrified London. It shifts understanding of Sinclair’s wandering from representational and hermeneutic interpretation towards materialism: from what wandering means to what wandering does. From this perspective, Sinclair’s wandering and writing does not end with the covers of his books. The multiple ontologies of Sinclair’s worldly texts expand and proliferate through the plurality of composing relations, which, in turn, produce continuous and diverse iterations in an actor-network with place in London. Sinclair’s wanderings produce an ongoing archive of the urban that continues to iteratively make place, through multiple texts and narrative engagements, including novels, non-fiction accounts, journalism, interviews, intermedia collaborations, and assembling with the texts of others—from the many other London authors to whom Sinclair refers, to the tour guides who lead Time Out walking tours of “Sinclair’s London”. Place in contemporary London therefore assembles across and through an actor-network in which Sinclair’s wandering participates. Ultimately, Sinclair’s wandering and placemaking affirm Manley’s statement that “the urban environment in which (and in response to which) so much of English literature has been written has itself been constructed in many respects by its representation in that literature—by the ideas, images, and styles created by writers who have experienced or inhabited it” (2).ReferencesAnderson, Jon. “Towards an Assemblage Approach to Literary Geography.” Literary Geographies 1.2 (2015): 120–137.Atkins, Marc and Iain Sinclair. Liquid City. London: Reaktion, 1999.Baker, Brian. Iain Sinclair. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne. London and New York: Phaidon, 1995.Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Ed. Rolf Tiedmann. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002.Bond, Robert. Iain Sinclair. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2005.Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989.Chambers, Russ. Loiterature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.Coverley, Merlin. Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2005.Day, Jon. “The Last London by Iain Sinclair Review—an Elegy for a City Now Lost.” The Guardian 27 Sep. 2017. 7 July 2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/27/last-london-iain-sinclair-review>.Debord, Guy. “Theory of the Dérive.” Situationist International Anthology. Trans. and ed. Ken Knabb. Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981.———. “Détournement as Negation and Prelude.” Situationist International Anthology. Trans. and ed. Ken Knabb. Berkeley, Calif.: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.Dirda, Michael. “Modern Life, as Seen by a Writer without a Smart Phone.” The Washington Post 17 Jan. 2018. 4 July 2018 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/modern-life-as-seen-by-an-artist-without-a-phone/2018/01/17/6d0b779c-fb07-11e7-8f66-2df0b94bb98a_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.9333f36c6212>.Hones, Sheila. “Text as It Happens: Literary Geography.” Geography Compass 2.5 (2008): 301–1307.Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.Kerr, Joe. “The Habit of Hackney: Joe Kerr on Iain Sinclair.” Architects’ Journal 11 Mar. 2009. 8 July 2017 <https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/home/the-habit-of-hackney-joe-kerr-on-iain-sinclair/1995066.article>.Manley, Lawrence, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.McKay, Sinclair. “Is It Time for All Lovers of London to Pack up?” The Spectator 2 Sep. 2017. 6 July 2018 <https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/09/is-it-time-for-all-lovers-of-london-to-pack-up/>.O’Connell, Teresa. “Iain Sinclair: Walking Is a Democracy.” Guernica 16 Nov. 2017. 7 July 2018 <https://www.guernicamag.com/iain-sinclair-walking-democracy/>.Perril, Simon. “A Cartography of Absence: The Work of Iain Sinclair.” Comparative Criticism 19 (1997): 309–339.Potter, Emily, and Kirsten Seale. “The Worldly Text and the Production of More-than-Literary Place: Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip and Melbourne’s ‘Inner North’”. Cultural Geographies (forthcoming 2019).Seale, Kirsten. “‘Eye-Swiping’ London: Iain Sinclair, Photography and the Flâneur.” Literary London 3.2 (2005).———. “Iain Sinclair’s Archive.” Sydney Review of Books. 10 Sep. 2018. 12 July 2019 <https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/sinclair-last-london/>.Sinclair, Iain. Dining on Stones, or, The Middle Ground. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004.———. Lights Out for the Territory. London: Granta, 1997.———. London Orbital. London: Penguin, 2003.———. The Last London: True Fictions from an Unreal City. London: Oneworld Publications, 2017.Weston, Daniel. “‘Against the Grand Project’: Iain Sinclair’s Local London.” Contemporary Literature 56.2 (2015): 255–280. Wolfreys, Julian. Writing London: Materiality, Memory, Spectrality Volume 2. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Introduction For some time now there has been a strong critical framework that identifies a significant shift in the politics of homosexuality in the Anglo-oriented West over the last fifteen to twenty years. In this article I draw on this framework to describe the current moment in the Australian cultural politics of homosexuality. I focus on the issue of same-sex marriage as a key indicator of the currently emerging era. I then turn to two Australian texts about marriage that were produced in “the period before” this time, with the aim of recovering what has been partially lost from current formations of GLBT politics and from available memories of the past. Critical Histories Lisa Duggan’s term “the new homonormativity” is the frame that has gained widest currency among writers who point to the incorporation of certain versions of homosexuality into the neo-liberal (U.S.) mainstream. She identifies a sexual politics that “does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (50). More recently, writing of the period inaugurated by the so-called “war on terror” and following Duggan, Jasbir Puar has introduced the term “homonationalism” to refer to “a collusion between homosexuality and American nationalism that is generated both by national rhetorics of patriotic inclusion and by gay and queer subjects themselves” (39). Damien Riggs adds the claims of Indigenous peoples in ongoing colonial contexts to the ground from which contemporary GLBT political claims can be critiqued. He concludes that while “queer people” will need to continue to struggle for rights, it is likely that cultural intelligibility “as a subject of the nation” will be extended only to those “who are established through the language of the nation (i.e., one that is founded upon the denial of colonial violence)” (97). Most writers who follow these kinds of critical analyses refer to the discursive place of homosexual couples and families, specifically marriage. For Duggan it was the increasing focus on “full gay access to marriage and military service” that defined homonormativity (50). Puar allows for a diversity of meanings of same-sex marriage, but claims that for many it is “a demand for reinstatement of white privileges and rights—rights of property and inheritance in particular” (29; see also Riggs 66–70). Of course not all authors locate the political focus on same-sex marriage and its effects as a conservative affair. British scholar Jeffrey Weeks stresses what “we” have gained and celebrates the rise of the discourse of human rights in relation to sexuality. “The very ordinariness of recognized same-sex unions in a culture which until recently cast homosexuality into secret corners and dark whispers is surely the most extraordinary achievement of all” (198), he writes. Australian historian Graham Willett takes a similar approach in his assessment of recent Australian history. Noting the near achievement of “the legal equality agenda for gay people” (“Homos” 187), he notes that “the gay and lesbian movement went on reshaping Australian values and culture and society through the Howard years” (193). In his account it did this in spite of, and untainted by, the dominance of Howard's values and programs. The Howard period was “littered with episodes of insult and discrimination … [as the] government tried to stem the tide of gay, lesbian and transgender rights that had been flowing so strongly since 1969”, Willett writes (188). My own analysis of the Howard years acknowledges the significant progress made in law reform relating to same-sex couples and lesbian and gay parents but draws attention to its mutual constitution with the dominance of the white, patriarchal, neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideologies which dominated social and political life (2013 forthcoming). I argue that the costs of reform, fought for predominantly by white and middle class lesbians and gay men deploying homonormative discourses, included the creation of new identities—single lesbians and gays whose identity did not fit mainstream notions, non-monogamous couples and bad mothers—which were positioned on the illegitimate side of the newly enfranchised. Further the success of the reforms marginalised critical perspectives that are, for many, necessary tools for survival in socially conservative neoliberal times. Same-Sex Marriage in Australia The focus on same-sex marriage in the Australian context was initiated in April 2004 by then Prime Minister Howard. An election was looming and two same-sex couples were seeking recognition of their Canadian marriages through the courts. With little warning, Howard announced that he would amend the Federal Marriage Act to specify that marriage could only take place between a man and a woman. His amendment also prevented the recognition of same-sex marriages undertaken overseas. Legislation was rushed through the parliament in August of that year. In response, Australian Marriage Equality was formed in 2004 and remains at the centre of the GLBT movement. Since that time political rallies in support of marriage equality have been held regularly and the issue has become the key vehicle through which gay politics is understood. Australians across the board increasingly support same-sex marriage (over 60% in 2012) and a growing majority of gay and lesbian people would marry if they could (54% in 2010) (AME). Carol Johnson et al. note that while there are some critiques, most GLBT people see marriage “as a major equality issue” (Johnson, Maddison and Partridge 37). The degree to which Howard’s move changed the terrain of GLBT politics cannot be underestimated. The idea and practice of (non-legal) homosexual marriage in Australia is not new. And some individuals, publicly and privately, were calling for legal marriage for same-sex couples before 2004 (e.g. Baird, “Kerryn and Jackie”). But before 2004 legal marriage did not inspire great interest among GLBT people nor have great support among them. Only weeks before Howard’s announcement, Victorian legal academic and co-convenor of the Victorian Gay & Lesbian Rights Lobby Miranda Stewart concluded an article about same-sex relationship law reform in Victoria with a call to “begin the debate about gay marriage” (80, emphasis added). She noted that the growing number of Australian couples married overseas would influence thinking about marriage in Australia. She also asked “do we really want to be part of that ‘old edifice’ of marriage?” (80). Late in 2003 the co-convenors of the NSW Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby declared that “many members of our community are not interested in marriage” and argued that there were more pressing, and more practical, issues for the Lobby to be focused on (Cerise and McGrory 5). In 2001 Jenni Millbank and Wayne Morgan, two leading legal academics and activists in the arena of same-sex relationship politics in Australia, wrote that “The notion of ‘same-sex marriage’ is quite alien to Australia” (Millbank and Morgan, 295). They pointed to the then legal recognition of heterosexual de facto relationships as the specific context in Australia, which meant that marriage was not viewed as "paradigmatic" (296). In 1998 a community consultation conducted by the Equal Opportunity Commission in Victoria found that “legalising marriage for same-sex couples did not enjoy broad based support from either the community at large or the gay and lesbian community” (Stewart 76). Alongside this general lack of interest in marriage, from the early-mid 1990s gay and lesbian rights groups in each state and territory began to think about, if not campaign for, law reform to give same-sex couples the same entitlements as heterosexual de facto couples. The eventual campaigns differed from state to state, and included moments of high profile public activity, but were in the main low key affairs that met with broadly sympathetic responses from state and territory ALP governments (Millbank). The previous reforms in every state that accorded heterosexual de facto couples near equality with married couples meant that gay and lesbian couples in Australia could gain most of the privileges available to heterosexual couples without having to encroach on the sacred territory (and federal domain) of marriage. In 2004 when Howard announced his marriage bill only South Australia had not reformed its law. Notwithstanding these reforms, there were matters relating to lesbian and gay parenting that remained in need of reform in nearly every jurisdiction. Further, Howard’s aggressive move in 2004 had been preceded by his dogged refusal to consider any federal legislation to remove discrimination. But in 2008 the new Rudd government enacted legislation to remove all discrimination against same-sex couples in federal law, with marriage and (ironically) the lack of anti-discrimination legislation on the grounds of sexuality the exceptions, and at the time of writing most states have made or will soon implement the reforms that give full lesbian and gay parenting rights. In his comprehensive account of gay politics from the 1950s onwards, published in 2000, Graham Willett does not mention marriage at all, and deals with the moves to recognise same-sex relationships in one sixteen line paragraph (Living 249). Willett’s book concludes with the decriminalisation of sex between men across every state of Australia. It was written just as the demand for relationship reform was becoming the central issue of GLBT politics. In this sense, the book marks the end of one era of homosexual politics and the beginning of the next which, after 2004, became organised around the desire for marriage. This understanding of the recent gay past has become common sense. In a recent article in the Adelaide gay paper blaze a young male journalist wrote of the time since the early 1970s that “the gay rights movement has shifted from the issue of decriminalising homosexuality nationwide to now lobbying for full equal rights for gay people” (Dunkin 3). While this (reductive and male-focused) characterisation is not the only one possible, I simply note that this view of past and future progress has wide currency. The shift of attention in this period to the demand for marriage is an intensification and narrowing of political focus in a period of almost universal turn by state and federal governments to neoliberalism and an uneven turn to neo-conservatism, directions which have detrimental effects on the lives of many people already marginalised by discourses of sexuality, race, class, gender, migration status, (dis)ability and so on. While the shift to the focus on marriage from 2004 might be understood as the logical final step in gaining equal status for gay and lesbian relationships (albeit one with little enthusiasm from the GLBT political communities before 2004), the initiation of this shift by Prime Minister Howard, with little preparatory debate in the LGBT political communities, meant that the issue emerged onto the Australian political agenda in terms defined by the (neo)conservative side of politics. Further, it is an example of identity politics which, as Lisa Duggan has observed in the US case, is “increasingly divorced from any critique of global capitalism” and settles for “a stripped-down equality, paradoxically imagined as compatible with persistent overall inequality” (xx). Brides before Marriage In the last part of this article I turn to two texts produced early in 1994—an activist document and an ephemeral performance during the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade. If we point only to the end of the era of (de)criminalisation, then the year 1997, when the last state, Tasmania, decriminalised male homosex, marks the shift from one era of the regulation of homosexuality to another. But 1994 bore the seeds of the new era too. Of course attempts to identify a single year as the border between one era and the next are rhetorical devices. But some significant events in 1994 make it a year of note. The Australian films Priscilla: Queen of the Desert and The Sum of Us were both released in 1994, marking particular Australian contributions to the growing presence of gay and lesbian characters in Western popular culture (e.g. Hamer and Budge). 1994 was the UN International Year of the Family (IYF) and the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras chose the theme “We are Family” and published endorsement from both Prime Minister Keating and the federal opposition leader John Hewson in their program. In 1994 the ACT became the first Australian jurisdiction to pass legislation that recognised the rights and entitlements of same-sex couples, albeit in a very limited and preliminary form (Millbank 29). The NSW Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby's (GLRL) 1994 discussion paper, The Bride Wore Pink, can be pinpointed as the formal start to community-based activism for the legal recognition of same-sex relationships. It was a revision of an earlier version that had been the basis for discussion among (largely inner Sydney) gay and lesbian communities where there had been lively debate and dissent (Zetlein, Lesbian Bodies 48–57). The 1994 version recommended that the NSW government amend the existing definition of de facto in various pieces of legislation to include lesbian and gay relationships and close non-cohabiting interdependent relationships as well. This was judged to be politically feasible. In 1999 NSW became the first state to implement wide ranging reforms of this nature although these were narrower than called for by the GLRL, “including lesser number of Acts amended and narrower application and definition of the non-couple category” (Millbank 10). My concern here is not with the politics that preceded or followed the 1994 version of The Bride, but with the document itself. Notwithstanding its status for some as a document of limited political vision, The Bride bore clear traces of the feminist and liberationist thinking, the experiences of the AIDS crisis in Sydney, and the disagreements about relationships within lesbian and gay communities that characterised the milieu from which it emerged. Marriage was clearly rejected, for reasons of political impossibility but also in light of a list of criticisms of its implication in patriarchal hierarchies of relationship value (31–2). Feminist analysis of relationships was apparent throughout the consideration of pros and cons of different legislative options. Conflict and differences of opinion were evident. So was humour. The proliferation of lesbian and gay commitment ceremonies was listed as both a pro and a con of marriage. On the one hand "just think about the prezzies” (31); on the other, “what will you wear” (32). As well as recommending change to the definition of de facto, The Bride recommended the allocation of state funds to consider “the appropriateness or otherwise of bestowing entitlements on the basis of relationships,” “the focusing on monogamy, exclusivity and blood relations” and the need for broader definitions of “relationships” in state legislation (3). In a gesture towards a political agenda beyond narrowly defined lesbian and gay interests, The Bride also recommended that “the lesbian and gay community join together with other groups to lobby for the removal of the cohabitation rule in the Social Security Act 1991” (federal legislation) (34). This measure would mean that the payment of benefits and pensions would not be judged in the basis of a person’s relationship status. While these radical recommendations may not have been energetically pursued by the GLRL, their presence in The Bride records their currency at the time. The other text I wish to excavate from 1994 is the “flotilla of lesbian brides” in the 1994 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. These lesbians later appeared in the April 1994 issue of Sydney lesbian magazine Lesbians on the Loose, and they have a public afterlife in a photo by Sydney photographer C Moore Hardy held in the City of Sydney archives (City of Sydney). The group of between a dozen and twenty lesbians (it is hard to tell from the photos) was dressed in waist-to-ankle tulle skirts, white bras and white top hats. Many wore black boots. Unshaven underarm hair is clearly visible. Many wore long necklaces around their necks and the magazine photo makes clear that one bride has a black whip tucked into the band of her skirt. In an article about lesbians and legal recognition of their relationships published in 1995, Sarah Zetlein referred to the brides as “chicks in white satin” (“Chicks”). This chick was a figure that refused the binary distinction between being inside and outside the law, which Zetlein argued characterised thinking about the then emerging possibilities of the legal recognition of lesbian (and gay) relationships. Zetlein wrote that “the chick in white satin”: Represents a politics which moves beyond the concerns of one’s own identity and demands for inclusion to exclusion to a radical reconceptualisation of social relations. She de(con)structs and (re) constructs. … The chick in white satin’s resistance often lies in her exposure and manipulation of her regulation. It is not so much a matter of saying ‘no’ to marriage outright, or arguing only for a ‘piecemeal’ approach to legal relationship regulation, or lobbying for de facto inclusion as was recommended by The Bride Wore Pink, but perverting the understanding of what these legally-sanctioned sexual, social and economic relationships mean, hence undermining their shaky straight foundations.(“Chicks” 56–57) Looking back to 1994 from a time nearly twenty years later when (straight) lesbian brides are celebrated by GLBT culture, incorporated into the mainstream and constitute a market al.ready anticipated by “the wedding industrial complex” (Ingraham), the “flotilla of lesbian brides” can be read as a prescient queer negotiation of their time. It would be a mistake to read the brides only in terms of a nascent interest in legally endorsed same-sex marriage. In my own limited experience, some lesbians have always had a thing for dressing up in wedding garb—as brides or bridesmaids. The lesbian brides marching group gave expression to this desire in queer ways. The brides were not paired into couples. Zetlein writes that “the chick in white satin … [has] a veritable posse of her girlfriends with her (and they are all the brides)” (“Chicks” 63, original emphasis). Their costumes were recognisably bridal but also recognisably parodic and subverting; white but hardly innocent; the tulle and bras were feminine but the top hats were accessories conventionally worn by the groom and his men; the underarm hair a sign of feminist body politics. The whip signalled the lesbian underground sexual culture that flourished in Sydney in the early 1990s (O’Sullivan). The black boots were both lesbian street fashion and sensible shoes for marching! Conclusion It would be incorrect to say that GLBT politics and lesbian and gay couples who desire legal marriage in post-2004 Australia bear no trace of the history of ambivalence, critique and parody of marriage and weddings that have come before. The multiple voices in the 2011 collection of “Australian perspectives on same-sex marriage” (Marsh) put the lie to this claim. But in a climate where our radical pasts are repeatedly forgotten and lesbian and gay couples increasingly desire legal marriage, the political argument is hell-bent on inclusion in the mainstream. There seems to be little interest in a dance around the margins of inclusion/exclusion. I add my voice to the concern with the near exclusive focus on marriage and the terms on which it is sought. It is not a liberationist politics to which I have returned in recalling The Bride Wore Pink and the lesbian brides of the 1994 Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, but rather an attention to the differences in the diverse collective histories of non-heterosexual politics. The examples I elaborate are hardly cases of radical difference. But even these instances might remind us that “we” have never been on a single road to equality: there may be incommensurable differences between “us” as much as commonalities. They also remind that desires for inclusion and recognition by the state should be leavened with a strong dose of laughter as well as with critical political analysis. References Australian Marriage Equality (AME). “Public Opinion Nationally.” 22 Oct. 2012. ‹http://www.australianmarriageequality.com/wp/who-supports-equality/a-majority-of-australians-support-marriage-equality/›. Baird, Barbara. “The Politics of Homosexuality in Howard's Australia.” Acts of Love and Lust: Sexuality in Australia from 1945-2010. Eds. Lisa Featherstone, Rebecca Jennings and Robert Reynolds. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013 (forthcoming). —. “‘Kerryn and Jackie’: Thinking Historically about Lesbian Marriages.” Australian Historical Studies 126 (2005): 253–271. Butler, Judith. “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” Differences 13.1 (2002): 14–44. Cerise, Somali, and Rob McGrory. “Why Marriage Is Not a Priority.” Sydney Star Observer 28 Aug. 2003: 5. City of Sydney Archives [061\061352] (C. Moore Hardy Collection). ‹http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org//image/40440?zoom_highlight=c+moore+hardy›. Duggan Lisa. The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. Dunkin, Alex. “Hunter to Speak at Dr Duncan Memorial.” blaze 290 (August 2012): 3. Hamer, Diane, and Belinda Budege, Eds. The Good Bad And The Gorgeous: Popular Culture's Romance With Lesbianism. London: Pandora, 1994. Ingraham, Chrys. White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2008. Johnson, Carol, and Sarah Maddison, and Emma Partridge. “Australia: Parties, Federalism and Rights Agendas.” The Lesbian and Gay Movement and the State. Ed. Manon Tremblay, David Paternotte and Carol Johnson. Surrey: Ashgate, 2011. 27–42. Lesbian and Gay Legal Rights Service. The Bride Wore Pink, 2nd ed. Sydney: GLRL, 1994. Marsh, Victor, ed. Speak Now: Australian Perspectives on Same-Sex Marriage. Melbourne: Clouds of Mgaellan, 2011. Millbank Jenni, “Recognition of Lesbian and Gay Families in Australian Law—Part one: Couples.” Federal Law Review 34 (2006): 1–44Millbank, Jenni, and Wayne Morgan. “Let Them Eat Cake and Ice Cream: Wanting Something ‘More’ from the Relationship Recognition Menu.” Legal Recognition of Same-Sex Partnerships: A Study of National, European and International Law. Ed. Robert Wintermute and Mads Andenaes. Portland: Hart Publishing, 2001. 295–316. O'Sullivan Kimberley. “Dangerous Desire: Lesbianism as Sex or Politics.” Ed. Jill Julius Matthews. Sex in Public: Australian Sexual Cultures Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1997. 120–23. Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke UP, 2007 Stewart, Miranda, “It’s a Queer Thing: Campaigning for Equality and Social Justice for Lesbians and Gay Men”. Alternative Law Journal 29.2 (April 2004): 75–80. Walker, Kristen. “The Same-Sex Marriage Debate in Australia.” The International Journal of Human Rights 11.1–2 (2007): 109–130. Weeks, Jeffrey. The World We Have Won: The Remaking of Erotic and Intimate Life. Abindgdon: Routledge, 2007. Willett, Graham. Living Out Loud: A History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2000. Willett, Graham. “Howard and the Homos.” Social Movement Studies 9.2 (2010): 187–199. Zetlein, Sarah. Lesbian Bodies Before the Law: Intimate Relations and Regulatory Fictions. Honours Thesis, University of Adelaide, 1994. —. “Lesbian Bodies before the Law: Chicks in White Satin.” Australian Feminist Law Journal 5 (1995): 48–63.

It seems nowadays that any aspect of collecting and displaying tangible or intangible material culture is labeled as curating: shopkeepers curate their wares; DJs curate their musical selections; magazine editors curate media stories; and hipsters curate their coffee tables. Given the increasing ubiquity and complexity of 21st-century notions of curatorship, the current issue of MC Journal, ‘curate’, provides an excellent opportunity to consider some of the changes that have occurred in professional practice since the emergence of the ‘digital turn’. There is no doubt that the internet and interactive media have transformed the way we live our daily lives—and for many cultural commentators it only makes sense that they should also transform our cultural experiences. In this paper, I want to examine the issue of curatorial practice in the postdigital age, looking some of the ways that curating has changed over the last twenty years—and some of the ways it has not. The term postdigital comes from the work of Ross Parry, and is used to references the ‘tipping point’ where the use of digital technologies became normative practice in museums (24). Overall, I contend that although new technologies have substantially facilitated the way that curators do their jobs, core business and values have not changed as the result of the digital turn. While, major paradigm shifts have occurred in the field of professional curatorship over the last twenty years, these shifts have been issue-driven rather than a result of new technologies. Everyone’s a Curator In a 2009 article in the New York Times, journalist Alex Williams commented on the growing trend in American consumer culture of labeling oneself a curator. “The word ‘curate’,’’ he observed, “has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded, who seem to paste it onto any activity that involves culling and selecting” (1). Williams dated the origins of the popular adoption of the term ‘curating’ to a decade earlier; noting the strong association between the uptake and the rise of the internet (2). This association is not surprising. The development of increasingly interactive software such as Web 2.0 has led to a rapid rise in new technologies aimed at connecting people and information in ways that were previously unimaginable. In particular the internet has become a space in which people can collect, store and most importantly share vast quantities of information. This information is often about objects. According to sociologist Jyri Engeström, the most successful social network sites on the internet (such as Pinterest, Flickr, Houzz etc), use discrete objects, rather than educational content or interpersonal relationships, as the basis for social interaction. So objects become the node for inter-personal communication. In these and other sites, internet users can find, collate and display multiple images of objects on the same page, which can in turn be connected at the press of a button to other related sources of information in the form of text, commentary or more images. These sites are often seen as the opportunity to virtually curate mini-exhibitions, as well as to create mood boards or sites of virtual consumption. The idea of curating as selective aesthetic editing is also popular in online markets places such as Etsy where numerous sellers offer ‘curated’ selections from home wares, to prints, to (my personal favorite) a curated selection of cat toys. In all of these exercises there is an emphasis on the idea of connoisseurship. As part of his article on the new breed of ‘curators’, for example, Alex Williams interviewed Tom Kalendrain, the Fashion Director of a leading American department store, which had engaged in a collaboration with Scott Schuman of the fashion blog, the Sartorialist. According to Kalendrain the store had asked Schuman to ‘curate’ a collection of clothes for them to sell. He justified calling Schuman a curator by explaining: “It was precisely his eye that made the store want to work with him; it was about the right shade of blue, about the cut, about the width of a lapel” (cited in Williams 2). The interview reveals much about current popular notions of what it means to be a curator. The central emphasis of Kalendrain’s distinction was on connoisseurship: exerting a privileged authoritative voice based on intimate knowledge of the subject matter and the ability to discern the very best examples from a plethora of choices. Ironically, in terms of contemporary museum practice, this is a model of curating that museums have consciously been trying to move away from for at least the last three decades. We are now witnessing an interesting disconnect in which the extra-museum community (represented in particular by a postdigital generation of cultural bloggers, commentators and entrepreneurs) are re-vivifying an archaic model of curating, based on object-centric connoisseurship, just at the point where professional curators had thought they had successfully moved on. From Being about Something to Being for Somebody The rejection of the object-expert model of curating has been so persuasive that it has transformed the way museums conduct core business across all sectors of the institution. Over the last thirty to forty years museums have witnessed a major pedagogical shift in how curators approach their work and how museums conceptualise their core values. These paradigmatic and pedagogical shifts were best characterised by the museologist Stephen Weil in his seminal article “From being about something to being for somebody.” Weil, writing in the late 1990s, noted that museums had turned away from traditional models in which individual curators (by way of scholarship and connoisseurship) dictated how the rest of the world (the audience) apprehended and understood significant objects of art, science and history—towards an audience centered approach where curators worked collaboratively with a variety of interested communities to create a pluralist forum for social change. In museum parlance these changes are referred to under the general rubric of the ‘new museology’: a paradigm shift, which had its origins in the 1970s; its gestation in the 1980s; and began to substantially manifest by the 1990s. Although no longer ‘new’, these shifts continue to influence museum practices in the 2000s. In her article, “Curatorship as Social Practice’” museologist Christina Kreps outlined some of the developments over recent decades that have challenged the object-centric model. According to Kreps, the ‘new museology’ was a paradigm shift that emerged from a widespread dissatisfaction with conventional interpretations of the museum and its functions and sought to re-orient itself away from strongly method and technique driven object-focused approaches. “The ‘new museum’ was to be people-centered, action-oriented, and devoted to social change and development” (315). An integral contributor to the developing new museology was the subjection of the western museum in the 1980s and ‘90s to representational critique from academics and activists. Such a critique entailed, in the words of Sharon Macdonald, questioning and drawing attention to “how meanings come to be inscribed and by whom, and how some come to be regarded as ‘right’ or taken as given” (3). Macdonald notes that postcolonial and feminist academics were especially engaged in this critique and the growing “identity politics” of the era. A growing engagement with the concept that museological /curatorial work is what Kreps (2003b) calls a ‘social process’, a recognition that; “people’s relationships to objects are primarily social and cultural ones” (154). This shift has particularly impacted on the practice of museum curatorship. By way of illustration we can compare two scholarly definitions of what constitutes a curator; one written in 1984 and one from 2001. The Manual of Curatorship, written in 1994 by Gary Edson and David Dean define a curator as: “a staff member or consultant who is as specialist in a particular field on study and who provides information, does research and oversees the maintenance, use, and enhancement of collections” (290). Cash Cash writing in 2001 defines curatorship instead as “a social practice predicated on the principle of a fixed relation between material objects and the human environment” (140). The shift has been towards increased self-reflexivity and a focus on greater plurality–acknowledging the needs of their diverse audiences and community stakeholders. As part of this internal reflection the role of curator has shifted from sole authority to cultural mediator—from connoisseur to community facilitator as a conduit for greater community-based conversation and audience engagement resulting in new interpretations of what museums are, and what their purpose is. This shift—away from objects and towards audiences—has been so great that it has led some scholars to question the need for museums to have standing collections at all. Do Museums Need Objects? In his provocatively titled work Do Museums Still Need Objects? Historian Steven Conn observes that many contemporary museums are turning away from the authority of the object and towards mass entertainment (1). Conn notes that there has been an increasing retreat from object-based research in the fields of art; science and ethnography; that less object-based research seems to be occurring in museums and fewer objects are being put on display (2). The success of science centers with no standing collections, the reduction in the number of objects put on display in modern museums (23); the increasing phalanx of ‘starchitect’ designed museums where the building is more important than the objects in it (11), and the increase of virtual museums and collections online, all seems to indicate that conventional museum objects have had their day (1-2). Or have they? At the same time that all of the above is occurring, ongoing research suggests that in the digital age, more than ever, people are seeking the authenticity of the real. For example, a 2008 survey of 5,000 visitors to living history sites in the USA, found that those surveyed expressed a strong desire to commune with historically authentic objects: respondents felt that their lives had become so crazy, so complicated, so unreal that they were seeking something real and authentic in their lives by visiting these museums. (Wilkening and Donnis 1) A subsequent research survey aimed specifically at young audiences (in their early twenties) reported that: seeing stuff online only made them want to see the real objects in person even more, [and that] they felt that museums were inherently authentic, largely because they have authentic objects that are unique and wonderful. (Wilkening 2) Adding to the question ‘do museums need objects?’, Rainey Tisdale argues that in the current digital age we need real museum objects more than ever. “Many museum professionals,” she reports “have come to believe that the increase in digital versions of objects actually enhances the value of in-person encounters with tangible, real things” (20). Museums still need objects. Indeed, in any kind of corporate planning, one of the first thing business managers look for in a company is what is unique about it. What can it provide that the competition can’t? Despite the popularity of all sorts of info-tainments, the one thing that museums have (and other institutions don’t) is significant collections. Collections are a museum’s niche resource – in business speak they are the asset that gives them the advantage over their competitors. Despite the increasing importance of technology in delivering information, including collections online, there is still overwhelming evidence to suggest that we should not be too quick to dismiss the traditional preserve of museums – the numinous object. And in fact, this is precisely the final argument that Steven Conn reaches in his above-mentioned publication. Curating in the Postdigital Age While it is reassuring (but not particularly surprising) that generations Y and Z can still differentiate between virtual and real objects, this doesn’t mean that museum curators can bury their heads in the collection room hoping that the digital age will simply go away. The reality is that while digitally savvy audiences continue to feel the need to see and commune with authentic materially-present objects, the ways in which they access information about these objects (prior to, during, and after a museum visit) has changed substantially due to technological advances. In turn, the ways in which curators research and present these objects – and stories about them – has also changed. So what are some of the changes that have occurred in museum operations and visitor behavior due to technological advances over the last twenty years? The most obvious technological advances over the last twenty years have actually been in data management. Since the 1990s a number of specialist data management systems have been developed for use in the museum sector. In theory at least, a curator can now access the entire collections of an institution without leaving their desk. Moreover, the same database that tells the curator how many objects the institution holds from the Torres Strait Islands, can also tell her what they look like (through high quality images); which objects were exhibited in past exhibitions; what their prior labels were; what in-house research has been conducted on them; what the conservation requirements are; where they are stored; and who to contact for copyright clearance for display—to name just a few functions. In addition a curator can get on the internet to search the online collection databases from other museums to find what objects they have from the Torres Strait Islands. Thus, while our curator is at this point conducting the same type of exhibition research that she would have done twenty years ago, the ease in which she can access information is substantially greater. The major difference of course is that today, rather than in the past, the curator would be collaborating with members of the original source community to undertake this project. Despite the rise of the internet, this type of liaison still usually occurs face to face. The development of accessible digital databases through the Internet and capacity to download images and information at a rapid rate has also changed the way non-museum staff can access collections. Audiences can now visit museum websites through which they can easily access information about current and past exhibitions, public programs, and online collections. In many cases visitors can also contribute to general discussion forums and collections provenance data through various means such as ‘tagging’; commenting on blogs; message boards; and virtual ‘talk back’ walls. Again, however, this represents a change in how visitors access museums but not a fundamental shift in what they can access. In the past, museum visitors were still encouraged to access and comment upon the collections; it’s just that doing so took a lot more time and effort. The rise of interactivity and the internet—in particular through Web 2.0—has led many commentators to call for a radical change in the ways museums operate. Museum analyst Lynda Kelly (2009) has commented on the issue that: the demands of the ‘information age’ have raised new questions for museums. It has been argued that museums need to move from being suppliers of information to providing usable knowledge and tools for visitors to explore their own ideas and reach their own conclusions because of increasing access to technologies, such as the internet. Gordon Freedman for example argues that internet technologies such as computers, the World Wide Web, mobile phones and email “… have put the power of communication, information gathering, and analysis in the hands of the individuals of the world” (299). Freedman argued that museums need to “evolve into a new kind of beast” (300) in order to keep up with the changes opening up to the possibility of audiences becoming mediators of information and knowledge. Although we often hear about the possibilities of new technologies in opening up the possibilities of multiple authors for exhibitions, I have yet to hear of an example of this successfully taking place. This doesn’t mean, however, that it will never happen. At present most museums seem to be merely dipping their toes in the waters. A recent example from the Art Gallery of South Australia illustrates this point. In 2013, the Gallery mounted an exhibition that was, in theory at least, curated by the public. Labeled as “the ultimate people’s choice exhibition” the project was hosted in conjunction with ABC Radio Adelaide. The public was encouraged to go online to the gallery website and select from a range of artworks in different categories by voting for their favorites. The ‘winning’ works were to form the basis of the exhibition. While the media spin on the exhibition gave the illusion of a mass curated show, in reality very little actual control was given over to the audience-curators. The public was presented a range of artworks, which had already been pre-selected from the standing collections; the themes for the exhibition had also already been determined as they informed the 120 artworks that were offered up for voting. Thus, in the end the pre-selection of objects and themes, as well as the timing and execution of the exhibition remained entirely in the hand of the professional curators. Another recent innovation did not attempt to harness public authorship, but rather enhanced individual visitor connections to museum collections by harnessing new GPS technologies. The Streetmuseum was a free app program created by the Museum of London to bring geotagged historical street views to hand held or portable mobile devices. The program allowed user to undertake a self-guided tour of London. After programing in their route, users could then point their device at various significant sites along the way. Looking through their viewfinder they would see a 3D historic photograph overlayed on the live site – allowing user not only to see what the area looked like in the past but also to capture an image of the overlay. While many of the available tagging apps simply allow for the opportunity of adding more white noise, allowing viewers to add commentary, pics, links to a particular geo tagged site but with no particular focus, the Streetmuseum had a well-defined purpose to encourage their audience to get out and explore London; to share their archival photograph collection with a broader audience; and to teach people more about London’s unique history. A Second Golden Age? A few years ago the Steven Conn suggested that museums are experiencing an international ‘golden age’ with more museums being built and visited and talked about than ever before (1). In the United States, where Conn is based, there are more than 17,500 accredited museums, and more than two million people visit some sort of museum per day, averaging around 865 million museum visits per year (2). However, at the same time that museums are proliferating, the traditional areas of academic research and theory that feed into museums such as history, cultural studies, anthropology and art history are experiencing a period of intense self reflexivity. Conn writes: At the turn of the twenty-first century, more people are going to more museums than at any time in the past, and simultaneously more scholars, critics, and others are writing and talking about museums. The two phenomena are most certainly related but it does not seem to be a happy relationship. Even as museums enjoy more and more success…many who write about them express varying degrees of foreboding. (1) There is no doubt that the internet and increasingly interactive media has transformed the way we live our daily lives—it only makes sense that it should also transform our cultural experiences. At the same time Museums need to learn to ride the wave without getting dumped into it. The best new media acts as a bridge—connecting people to places and ideas—allowing them to learn more about museum objects and historical spaces, value-adding to museum visits rather than replacing them altogether. As museologust Elaine Gurian, has recently concluded, the core business of museums seems unchanged thus far by the adoption of internet based technology: “the museum field generally, its curators, and those academic departments focused on training curators remain at the core philosophically unchanged despite their new websites and shiny new technological reference centres” (97). Virtual life has not replaced real life and online collections and exhibitions have not replaced real life visitations. Visitors want access to credible information about museum objects and museum exhibitions, they are not looking for Wiki-Museums. Or if they are are, they are looking to the Internet community to provide that service rather than the employees of state and federally funded museums. Both provide legitimate services, but they don’t necessarily need to provide the same service. In the same vein, extra-museum ‘curating’ of object and ideas through social media sites such as Pinterest, Flikr, Instagram and Tumblr provide a valuable source of inspiration and a highly enjoyable form of virtual consumption. But the popular uptake of the term ‘curating’ remains as easily separable from professional practice as the prior uptake of the terms ‘doctor’ and ‘architect’. An individual who doctors an image, or is the architect of their destiny, is still not going to operate on a patient nor construct a building. While major ontological shifts have occurred within museum curatorship over the last thirty years, these changes have resulted from wider social shifts, not directly from technology. This is not to say that technology will not change the museum’s ‘way of being’ in my professional lifetime—it’s just to say it hasn’t happened yet. References Cash Cash, Phillip. “Medicine Bundles: An Indigenous Approach.” Ed. T. Bray. The Future of the Past: Archaeologists, Native Americans and Repatriation. New York and London: Garland Publishing (2001): 139-145. Conn, Steven. Do Museums Still Need Objects? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Edson, Gary, and David Dean. The Handbook for Museums. New York and London: Routledge, 1994. Engeström, Jyri. “Why Some Social Network Services Work and Others Don’t — Or: The Case for Object-Centered Sociality.” Zengestrom Apr. 2005. 17 June 2015 ‹http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2005/04/why-some-social-network-services-work-and-others-dont-or-the-case-for-object-centered-sociality.html›. Freedman, Gordon. “The Changing Nature of Museums”. Curator 43.4 (2000): 295-306. Gurian, Elaine Heumann. “Curator: From Soloist to Impresario.” Eds. Fiona Cameron and Lynda Kelly. Hot Topics, Public Culture, Museums. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010. 95-111. Kelly, Lynda. “Museum Authority.” Blog 12 Nov. 2009. 25 June 2015 ‹http://australianmuseum.net.au/blogpost/museullaneous/museum-authority›. Kreps, Christina. “Curatorship as Social Practice.” Curator: The Museum Journal 46.3 (2003): 311-323. ———, Christina. Liberating Culture: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Museums, Curation, and Heritage Preservation. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Macdonald, Sharon. “Expanding Museum Studies: An Introduction.” Ed. Sharon MacDonald. A Companion to Museum Studies. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2011. Parry, Ross. “The End of the Beginning: Normativity in the Postdigital Museum.” Museum Worlds: Advances in Research 1 (2013): 24-39. Tisdale, Rainey. “Do History Museums Still Need Objects?” History News (2011): 19-24. 18 June 2015 ‹http://aaslhcommunity.org/historynews/files/2011/08/RaineySmr11Links.pdf›. Suchy, Serene. Leading with Passion: Change Management in the Twenty-First Century Museum. Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2004. Weil, Stephen E. “From Being about Something to Being for Somebody: The Ongoing Transformation of the American Museum.” Daedalus, Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 128.3 (1999): 229–258. Wilkening, Susie. “Community Engagement and Objects—Mutually Exclusive?” Museum Audience Insight 27 July 2009. 14 June 2015 ‹http://reachadvisors.typepad.com/museum_audience_insight/2009/07/community-engagement-and-objects-mutually-exclusive.html›. ———, and Erica Donnis. “Authenticity? It Means Everything.” History News (2008) 63:4. Williams, Alex. “On the Tip of Creative Tongues.” New York Times 4 Oct. 2009. 4 June 2015 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/fashion/04curate.html›.

The old “Is the glass half empty or half full?” question does more than just illustrate a person’s proclivity for pessimism or for optimism. It alerts us to the possibility that the same real world phenomena may be interpreted in entirely different ways, with very real consequences. It is this notion that I apply to the way fat sex and thin sex are conceptualised in the larger social consciousness. While sexual, romantic and/or intimate acts between people where at least one individual is fat (Fat Sex) are deemed atypical, abnormal, fetishistic and even abusive (Saguy qtd. in Swami & Tovee 90; Schur qtd. in Prohaska 271; Gailey 119), such encounters between able-bodied individuals who are thin or of average weight (Thin Sex) are deemed normal and desirable. I argue in this article that this discrepancy in how we label and treat fat and thin sexuality is unjustified because the two domains are more similar than distinct. Given their similarity we should treat similar aspects of both domains in the same way, i.e. either as normal, or as fetishistic based on relevant criteria rather than body size. I also argue that fat prejudice and thin privilege underlie this discrepancy in modern western society. I finally conclude that this causes significant personal and social harm to both fat and thin individuals.Fat Sex – The Fetishized NormalHanne Blank, in writing of her foray into publishing body positive material exploring fat sexuality, speaks of the need for spaces that acknowledge the vitality and diversity of fat sex; not in fetishistic and pornographic portrayals of Big Beautiful Women offering themselves up as an object of desire but reflecting the desires and sexual experiences of fat people themselves (10). If there are a 100 million people in America who are obese according to BMI standards, she argues, they represent a whole array of body sizes and a lot of sexual activity, which she describes as follows:Fat people have sex. Sweet, tender, luscious sex. Sweaty, feral, sheet-ripping sex. Shivery, jiggly, gasping sex. Sentimental, slow, face-cradling sex. Even as you read these words, there are fat people out there somewhere joyously getting their freak on. Not only that, but fat people are falling in love, having hook-ups, being crushed-out, putting on sexy lingerie, being the objects of other people’s lust, flirting, primping before hot dates, melting a little as they read romantic notes from their sweeties, seducing and being seduced, and having shuddering, toe-curling orgasms that are as big as they are. It’s only natural. (15)Such normalcy and diverse expression, however, is not usually portrayed in popular media, nor even in much scholarly research. Apart from body positive spaces carved out by the fat acceptance movement online and the research of fat studies scholars, which, contextualises fat sexuality as healthy and exciting, in “the majority of scholarship on this topic, fat women’s sexual behaviors are never the result of women’s agency, are always the result of their objectification, and are never healthy” (Prohaska 271).This interpretation of fat sexuality, the assumptions associated with it and the reinforcement of these attitudes have much to do with the pervasiveness of fat prejudice in society today. One study estimates that the prevalence of weight based discrimination in the US increased by 66% between 1996 and 2006 (Andreyeva, Puhl and Brownell) and is now comparable to gender and race based discrimination (Puhl, Andreyeva and Brownell). This is not an isolated trend. An anthropological study analysing the globalisation of notions of fat being unhealthy and a marker of personal and social failing suggests that we have on our hands a rapidly homogenising global stigma associated with fat (Brewis, Wutich and Rodriguez-Soto), a climate of discrimination leading many fat people to what Goffman describes as a spoiled identity (3).Negative stereotypes affecting fat sexuality are established and perpetuated through a process of discursive constraint (Cordell and Ronai 30-31). “’No man will ever love you,’ Weinstein’s grandmother informs her (Weinstein, prologue), simultaneously offering her a negative category to define herself by and trying to coerce her into losing weight – literally constraining the discourse that Weinstein may apply to herself.Discursive constraint is created not only by individuals reinforcing cultural mores but also by overt and covert messages embedded in social consciousness: “fat people are unattractive”, “fat is ugly”, “fat people are asexual”, “fat sex is a fetish”, “no normal person can be attracted to a fat person”. Portrayals of fat individuals in mainstream media consolidate these beliefs.One of the most loved fat characters of 1990s, Fat Monica from the sitcom Friends is gluttonous, ungainly (rolling around in a bean bag, jolting the sofa as she sits), undesirable (Chandler says to Ross, “I just don’t want to be stuck here all night with your fat sister!”), and desperate for sex, affection and approval from the opposite sex: “the comedic potential of Fat Monica is premised on an understanding that her body is deviant or outside the norm” (Gullage 181).In Shallow Hal, a film in which a shallow guy falls in love with the inner beauty of a fat girl, Hal (Jack Black) is shown to be attracted to Rosemary (Gwyneth Paltrow) only after he can no longer see her real fat body and her “inner beauty” is represented by a thin white blond girl. All the while, the movie draws laughs from the audience at the fat jokes and gags made at the expense of Paltrow’s character.Ashley Madison, a website for married people looking to have an affair, used the image of a scantily clad fat model in an advertisement with the tagline “Did your wife scare you last night?”, implying that infidelity is justified if you’re not attracted to your partner, and fatness precludes attraction. And a columnist from popular magazine Marie Claire wrote about Mike and Molly, a sitcom about two fat people in a relationship:Yes, I think I'd be grossed out if I had to watch two characters with rolls and rolls of fat kissing each other ... because I'd be grossed out if I had to watch them doing anything. (Kelly)It is the prevalence of these beliefs that I call the fetishisation of fat sexuality. When fat bodies are created as asexual and undesirable, it gives rise to the rhetoric that to be sexually attracted to a fat body is unnatural, therefore making any person who is attracted to a fat body a fetishist and the fat person themselves an object of fetish.The internalisation of these beliefs is not only something that actively harms the self-esteem, sexual agency & health and happiness of fat individuals (Satinsky et al.), but also those who are attracted to them. Those who internalise these beliefs about themselves may be unable to view themselves as sexual and engage with their own bodies in a pleasurable manner, or to view themselves as attractive, perhaps discounting any assertions to the contrary. In a study designed to investigate the relationship between body image and sexual health in women of size, one participant revealed:I’ve had my issues with T as far as um, believing that T is attracted to me…because of my weight, my size and the way I look. (Satinsky et al. 717)Another participant speaks of her experience masturbating and her discomfort at touching her own flesh, leading her to use a vibrator and not her hands:Like, I don’t, I don’t look down. I look at the ceiling and I try to – it’s almost like I’m trying to imagine that I was thinner. Like, imagine that my stomach was flatter or something like that, which sounds bizarre, but I guess that’s what I’m trying to do. (Satinsky et al. 719)Others stay in bad marriages because they believe they wouldn’t find anyone else (Joanisse and Synnott 55) or tolerate abuse because of their low self-esteem (Hester qtd. in Prohaska 271).Similarly, men who internalise these attitudes about fat find it easier to dehumanise and objectify fat women, believe that they’d be desperate for sex and hence an easy target for a sexual conquest, and are less deserving of consideration (Prohaska and Gailey 19).On the other hand, many men who find fat women attractive (Fat Admirers or FA’s) remain closeted because their desire is stigmatised. Many do not make their preference known to their peer group and families, nor do they publicly acknowledge the woman they are intimate with. Research suggests that FA’s draw the same amount of stigma for being with fat women and finding them attractive, as they would for themselves being fat (Goode qtd. in Prohaska and Gailey).I do not argue here that all fat individuals have spoiled identities or that all expressions of fat sexuality operate from a place of stigma and shame, but that fat sexuality exists within a wider social fabric of fat phobia, discrimination and stigmatisation. Fulfilling sexual experience must therefore be navigated within this framework. As noted, the fat acceptance movement, body positive spaces online, and fat studies scholarship help to normalise fat sexuality and function as tools for resisting stigma and fetishisation.Resisting Stigma: Creating Counter NarrativesGailey, in interviews with 36 fat-identified women, found that though 34 of them (94%) had ‘experienced a life of ridicule, body shame and numerous attempts to lose weight’ which had an adverse effect on their relationships and sex life, 26 of them reported a positive change after having ‘embodied the size acceptance ideology’ (Gailey 118).Recently, Kristin Chirico, employee of Buzzfeed, released first an article and then a video titled My Boyfriend Loves Fat Women about her relationship with her boyfriend who loves fat women, her own discomfort with her fatness and her journey in embracing size acceptance ideologies: I will let him enjoy the thing he loves without tearing it down. But more importantly, I will work to earn love from me, who is the person who will always play the hardest to get. I will flirt as hard as I can, and I will win myself back.Books such as Wann’s Fat!So?, Blank’s Big Big Love: A Sex and Relationships Guide for People of Size (and Those Who Love Them), Chastain’s Fat: The Owner’s Manual and her blog Dances with Fat, Tovar’s Hot and Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion, as well as Substantia Jones’s fat photography project called The Adipositivity Project are some examples of fat activism, size acceptance and body positive spaces and resources. The description on Jones’s site reads:The Adipositivity Project aims to promote the acceptance of benign human size variation and encourage discussion of body politics, not by listing the merits of big people, or detailing examples of excellence (these things are easily seen all around us), but rather through a visual display of fat physicality. The sort that's normally unseen. When fat individuals create personal narratives to resist stigmatisation of fat sexuality they confront the conundrum of drawing the line between sexual empowerment and glorifying fat fetishism. To see one’s own and other fat bodies as sexual, normal and worthy of pleasure is one way to subvert this fetishism. One would also take seriously any sexual advances, seeing oneself as desirable. The line between normal expression of fat sexuality and the wide spread belief that fat sex is fetishistic is so blurred however, that it becomes difficult to differentiate between them, so it is common to ask if one is being sexual or being an object of fetish. There is also the tension between the heady sense of power in being a sexual agent, and the desire to be wanted for more than just being a fat body.Modern burlesque stage is one arena where fat bodies are being recreated as sexy and desirable, offering a unique resource to ‘fat performers and audience members who want to experience their bodies in new and affirming ways’. Because burlesque is an erotic dance form, fat women on the burlesque stage are marked as ‘sexual, without question or challenge’. The burlesque stage has a great capacity to be a space for transforming sexual identity and driving changes in audience attitudes, creating a powerful social environment that is contrary to mainstream conditions in society (Asbill 300).The founder and creative director of “Big Burlesque” and “Fat-Bottom Revue” the world’s first all-fat burlesque troupe, however, notes that when she started Big Burlesque there were a couple of “bigger” performers on the neo-burlesque circuit, but they did not specifically advocate fat liberation. ‘Fat dance is rare enough; fat exotic/erotic dance is pretty much unheard of outside of “fetish” acts that alienate rather than normalise fat bodies’ (McAllister 305).In another instance, Laura writes that to most men her weight is a problem or a fetish, constraining the potential in relationships. Speaking of BBW (Big Beautiful Women) and BHM (Big Handsome Men) websites that cater to Fat Admirers she writes:As I’ve scrolled through these sites, I’ve felt vindicated at seeing women my size as luscious pinups. But, after a while, I feel reduced to something less than a person: just a gartered thigh and the breast-flesh offered up in a corset. I want to be lusted after. I want to be wanted. But, more than this, I want to love, and be loved. I want everything that love confers: being touched, being valued and being seen.That sexual attraction might rely wholly or partly on physical attributes, however, is hardly unfamiliar, and is an increasing phenomenon in the wider culture and popular media. Of course, what counts there is being thin and maintaining the thin state!Thin Sex: The Normalised FetishUnlike the fat body, the thin body is created as beautiful, sexually attractive, successful and overwhelmingly the norm (van Amsterdam). Ours is a culture fixated on physical beauty and sex, both of which are situated in thin bodies. Sexiness is a social currency that buys popularity, social success, and increasingly wealth itself (Levy). Like fat sex, thin sex operates on the stage set by the wider cultural ideals of beauty and attractiveness and that of the burden of thin privilege. Where stigma situates fat sexuality to abnormality and fetish, thin sexuality has to deal with the pressures of conforming to and maintaining the thin state (vam Amsterdam).Thin individuals also deal with the sexualisation of their bodies, confronting the separation of their personhood from their sexuality, in a sexual objectification of women that has long been identified as harmful. Ramsey and Hoyt explore how being objectified in heterosexual relationships might be related to coercion within those relationships. Their evidence shows that women are routinely objectified, and that this objectification becomes part of the schema of how men relate to women. Such a schema results in a fracturing of women into body parts dissociated from their personhood , making it easier to engage in violence with, and feel less empathy for female partners (in cases of rape or sexual assault). (Ramsey and Hoyt) What is interesting here is the fact that though aspects of thin sexuality are recognised as fetishistic (objectification of women), thin sex is still considered normal.Thin Sex, Fat Sex and 50 Shades of OverlapThe normalisation of sexual objectification -- society for the most part being habituated to the fetishistic aspects of thin sex, can be contrasted with attitudes towards comparable aspects of fat sex. In particular, Feederism, is generally viewed within scholarly discourse (and public attitudes) as ‘a consensual activity, a fetish, a stigmatised behaviour, and abuse’ (Terry & Vassey, Hester, Bestard, Murray as qtd. in Prohaska 281). Prohaska argues that Feederism and Diet Culture are broadly similar phenomena that elicit tellingly opposing judgements. She reports that the culture of feederism (as analysed on online forums) is a mostly consensual activity, where the community vocally dissuades non-consensual activities and any methods that may cause bodily harm (268). It is mostly a community of people who discuss measures of gradual weight gain and support and encourage each other in those goals. This, she argues, is very similar in tone to what appears on weight loss websites and forums (269). She contends, however that despite these parallels ‘the same scrutiny is not given to those who are attempting to lose weight as is placed upon those who do not diet or who try to gain weight’ (269).She notes that whereas in judging feederism emphasis is on fringe behaviours, in evaluating diet culture the focus is on behaviours deemed normal and healthy while only disorders like anorexia, bulimia, and pill using are judged fringe behaviours. This disparity, she claims, is rooted in fat phobia and prejudice (270).In comparing the dating sections of feederism websites with mainstream dating sites she notes that here too the nature of ads is similar, with the only difference being that in mainstream sites the body size preference is assumed. People seeking relationships on both kinds of sites look for partners who are ‘caring, intelligent and funny’ and consider ‘mutual respect’ as key (270).This is similar to what was revealed in an article by Camille Dodero, who interviewed a number of men who identify as fat admirers and delved into the myths and realities of fat admiration. The article covers stories of stigma that FA’s have faced and continue to face because of their sexual preference, and also of internalised self-hatred that makes it difficult for fat women to take their advances seriously. The men also create BBW/BHM dating websites as more than a fetish club. They experience these online spaces as safe spaces where they can openly meet people they would be interested in just as one would on a normal/mainstream dating site. Even if most women fit the type that they are attracted to in such spaces, it does not mean that they would be attracted to all of those women, just as on match.com one would look over prospective candidates for dating and that process would include the way they look and everything else about that person.Attempting to clear up the misconception that loving fat women is a fetish, one of the interviewees says,“Steve, over there, has a type,” gesturing wanly at a stranger in a hockey jersey probably not named Steve. “I have a type, too. Mine’s just bigger. He may like skinny blondes with bangs and long legs. I like pear shapes with brown hair and green eyes. I have a type—it just happens to be fat.” Besides, people aren’t fetish objects, they’re people. “It’s not like having a thing for leather.” (Dodero 3)ConclusionAnalysis of the domains of thin and fat sex shows that both have people engaging in sexual activity and romantic and intimate relationships with each other. Both have a majority of individuals who enjoy consensual, fulfilling sex and relationships, however these practices and desires are celebrated in one domain and stigmatised in the other. Both domains also have a portion of the whole that objectifies relationship partners with immense potential for harm, whether this involves sexualisation and objectification and its related harms in thin sex, objectification of fat bodies in some BBW and BHM circles, and the fringes of feederism communities, or non-body size specific fetish acts that individuals from both domains engage in. Qualitatively, since both domains significantly overlap, it is difficult to find the justification for the fetishisation of one and the normativity of the other. It seems plausible that this can be accounted for by the privilege associated with thin bodies and the prejudice against fat.Our failure to acknowledge such fetishisation of normal fat sex and normalisation of the fetishistic aspects of thin sex creates huge potential for harm for both groups, for it not only causes the fragmentation of effort when it comes to addressing these issues but also allows for the rich vitality and diversity of “normal” fat sex to wallow in obscurity and stigma.References Andreyeva, Tatiana, Rebecca M. Puhl, and Kelly D. Brownell. "Changes in Perceived Weight Discrimination among Americans, 1995–1996 through 2004–2006." Obesity 16 (2008): 1129-1134.Asbill, D. Lacy. "'I’m Allowed to Be a Sexual Being': The Distinctive Social Conditions of the Fat Burlesque Stage." The Fat Studies Reader, eds. Sondra Solovay and Esther Rothblum. New York: New York UP, 2009. 299.Blank, Hanne. Big Big Love, Revised, A Sex and Relationship Guide for People of Size (and Those Who Love Them). New York: Celestial Arts, 2011.Bogart, Laura. Salon 4 Aug. 2014.Brewis, A.A., A. Wutich and I. Rodriguez-Soto. "Body Norms and Fat Stigma in Global Perspective." Current Anthropology 52 (2011): 269-276.Chirico, Kristin. My Boyfriend Loves Fat Women. 25 Feb. 2015.Cordell, Gina, and Carol Rambo Ronai. "Identity Management among Overweight Women: Narrative Resistance to Stigma." Interpreting Weight: The Social Management of Fatness and Thinness, eds. Jeffery Sobal and Donna Maurer. Transaction Publishers, 1999. 29-48. Dodero, Camille. Guys Who Like Fat Chicks. 4 May 2011.Prohaska, Ariane, and Jeannine A. Gailey. "Achieving Masculinity through Sexual Predation: The Case of Hogging." Journal of Gender Studies 19.1 (2010): 13-25.Gailey, Jeannine A. “Fat Shame to Fat Pride: Fat Women’s Sexual and Dating Experiences.” Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society 1.1 (2012). Goffman, Erving. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, 1963.Gullage, Amy. "Fat Monica, Fat Suits and Friends." Feminist Media Studies 14.2 (2012): 178-89. Jacqueline. "I'm The 'Scary' Model in That Awful Ashley Madison Ad." 11 July 2011. Online. 24 May 2015.Jones, Substantia. The Adipositivity Project. n.d. Kelly, M. "Should 'Fatties' Get a Room? (Even on TV?)" 2010.Levy, Ariel. "Raunch Culture." Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. New York: Free Press, 2005. 7-45.McAllister, Heather. "Embodying Fat Liberation." The Fat Studies Reader, eds. Sondra Solovay and Esther Rothblum. New York: New York UP, 2009. 305.Prohaska, Ariane. “Help Me Get Fat! Feederism as Communal Deviance on the Internet.” Deviant Behaviour 35.4 (2014). Puhl, Rebecca M., Tatiana Andreyeva, and Kelly Brownell. "Perceptions of Weight Discrimination: Prevalence and Comparison to Race and Gender Discrimination in America." International Journal of Obesity 32 (2008): 992-1000.Ramsey, Laura R., and Tiffany Hoyt. "The Object of Desire: How Being Objectified Creates Sexual Pressure for Women in Heterosexual Relationships." Psychology of Women Quarterly (2014): 1-20.Satinsky, Sonya, et al. "'Fat Girl Complex': A Preliminary Investigation of Sexual Health and Body Image in Women of Size." Culture, Health and Sexuality: An International Journal for Research, Intervention and Care 15.6 (2013): 710-25.Swami, Viren, and Martin J. Tovee. “Big Beautiful Women: The Body Size Preferences of Male Fat Admirers.” The Journal of Sex Research 46.1 (2009): 89-86.Joanisse, Leanne, and Anthony Synnott. "Fighting Back: Reactions and Resistance to the Stigma of Obesity." Interpreting Weight: The Social Management of Fatness and Thinness, eds. Jeffery Sobal and Donna Maurer. New York: First Transaction Printing, 2013. 49-73.Van Amsterdam, Noortje. "Big Fat Inequalities, Thin Privilege: An Intersectional Perspective on 'Body Size'." European Journal of Women's Studies 20.2 (2013): 155-69.Weinstein, Rebecca Jane. “Fat Sex: The Naked Truth”. EBook, 2012.

There’s no reason to think that Jesus wouldn’t have Facebooked or twittered if he came into the world now. Can you imagine his killer status updates? Reverend Schenck, New York, All Saints Episcopal Church (Mapes) The fundamental problem of religious communication is how best to represent and mediate the sacred. (O’Leary 787) What would Jesus tweet? Historically, the quest for sacred connections has relied on the mediation of faith communication via technological implements, from the use of the drum to mediate the Divine, to the use of the mechanical clock by monks as reminders to observe the canonical hours of prayer (Mumford). Today, religious communication practices increasingly implicate Web 2.0, or interactive, user-generated content like blogs (Cheong, Halavis & Kwon), and microblogs like “tweets” of no more than 140 characters sent via Web-based applications like text messaging, instant messaging, e-mail, or on the Web. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project’s latest report in October 2009, 19% of online adults said that they used a microblogging service to send messages from a computer or mobile device to family and friends who have signed up to receive them (Fox, Zickuhr & Smith). The ascendency of microblogging leads to interesting questions of how new media use alters spatio-temporal dynamics in peoples’ everyday consciousness, including ways in which tweeting facilitates ambient religious interactions. The notion of ambient strikes a particularly resonant chord for religious communication: many faith traditions advocate the practice of sacred mindfulness, and a consistent piety in light of holy devotion to an omnipresent and omniscient Divine being. This paper examines how faith believers appropriate the emergent microblogging practices to create an encompassing cultural surround to include microblogging rituals which promote regular, heightened prayer awareness. Faith tweets help constitute epiphany and a persistent sense of sacred connected presence, which in turn rouses an identification of a higher moral purpose and solidarity with other local and global believers. Amidst ongoing tensions about microblogging, religious organisations and their leadership have also begun to incorporate Twitter into their communication practices and outreach, to encourage the extension of presence beyond the church walls. Faith Tweeting and Mobile Mediated Prayers Twitter’s Website describes itself as a new media service that help users communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to the question, “What are you doing?” Some evangelical Christian groups harness these coincident messaging flows to create meaningful pathways for personal, intercessory and synchronised prayer. Using hashtags in a Twitter post creates a community convention or grouping around faith ideas and allows others to access them. Popular faith related hashtags include #twurch (Twitter + church), #prayer, #JIL (Jesus is Lord) and #pray4 (as in, #pray4 my mother). Just as mobile telephony assists distal family members to build “connected presence” (Christensen), I suggest that faith tweets stimulating mobile mediated prayers help build a sense of closeness and “religious connected presence” amongst the distributed family of faith believers, to recreate and reaffirm Divine and corporeal bonds. Consider the Calvin Institute of Worship’s set up of six different Twitter feeds to “pray the hours”. Praying the hours is an ancient practice of praying set prayers throughout certain times of the day, as marked in the Book of Common Prayer in the Christian tradition. Inspired by the Holy Scripture’s injunction to “pray without ceasing” ( 1 Thessalonians 5:17), users can sign up to receive hourly personal or intercessory prayers sent in brief verses or view a Tweetgrid with prayer feeds, to prompt continuous prayer or help those who are unsure of what words to pray. In this way, contemporary believers may reinvent the century-old practice of constant faith mediation as Twitter use helps to reintegrate scripture into people’s daily lives. Faith tweets that goad personal and intercessory prayer also makes ambient religious life salient, and preserves self-awareness of sanctified moments during normal, everyday activities. Furthermore, while the above “praying the hours” performance promotes a specific integration of scripture or prayer into individuals’ daily rhythms, other faith tweets are more focused on evangelism: to reach others through recurrent prayers or random inspirational messages sent throughout the day. For instance, as BBC News reports, religious leaders such as Cardinal Brady, head of Ireland’s Catholic Church, encourage parishioners to use Twitter to spread “the gift of prayer”, as they microblog their daily prayers for their friends and family. Cardinal Brady commented that, “such a sea of prayer is sure to strengthen our sense of solidarity with one another and remind us those who receive them that others really do care" (emphasis mine). Indeed, Cardinal Brady’s observation is instructive to the “Twitness” of faithful microbloggers who desire to shape the blogosphere, and create new faith connections. “JesusTweeters” is a faith-based social networking site, and a service which allows users to send out messages from any random tweet from the Bible Tweet Library, or their own personal messages on a scheduled basis. The site reports that over 500 members of JesusTweeters, each with an average of 500 followers, have signed up to help “spread the Word” worldwide through Twitter. This is an interesting emergent form of Twitter action, as it translates to more than 2.5 million faith tweets being circulated online daily. Moreover, Twitter encourages ‘connected presence’ whereby the use of microblogging enables online faith believers to enjoy an intimate, ‘always on’ virtual presence with their other congregational members during times of physical absence. In the recently released e-book The Reason Your Church Must Twitter, subtitled Making Your Ministry Contagious, author and self-proclaimed ‘technology evangelist’ Anthony Coppedge advocates churches to adopt Twitter as part of their overall communication strategy to maintain relational connectedness beyond the boundaries of established institutional practices. In his book, Coppedge argues that Twitter can be used as a “megaphone” for updates and announcements or as a “conversation” to spur sharing of ideas and prayer exchanges. In line with education scholars who promote Twitter as a pedagogical tool to enhance free-flowing interactions outside of the classroom (Dunlap & Lowenthal), Coppedge encourages pastors to tweet “life application points” from their sermons to their congregational members throughout the week, to reinforce the theme of their Sunday lesson. Ministry leaders are also encouraged to adopt Twitter to “become highly accessible” to members and communicate with their volunteers, in order to build stronger ecumenical relationships. Communication technology scholar Michele Jackson notes that Twitter is a form of visible “lifelogging” as interactants self-disclose their lived-in moments (731). In the case of faith tweets, co-presence is constructed when instantaneous Twitter updates announce new happenings on the church campus, shares prayer requests, confirms details of new events and gives public commendations to celebrate victories of staff members. In this way, microblogging helps to build a portable church where fellow believers can connect to each-other via the thread of frequent, running commentaries of their everyday lives. To further develop ‘connected presence’, a significant number of Churches have also begun to incorporate real-time Twitter streams during their Sunday services. For example, to stimulate congregational members’ sharing of their spontaneous reactions to the movement of the Holy Spirit, Westwind Church in Michigan has created a dozen “Twitter Sundays” where members are free to tweet at any time and at any worship service (Rochman). At Woodlands Church in Houston, a new service was started in 2009 which encourages parishioners to tweet their thoughts, reflections and questions throughout the service. The tweets are reviewed by church staff and they are posted as scrolling visual messages on a screen behind the pastor while he preaches (Patel). It is interesting to note that recurring faith tweets spatially filling the sanctuary screens blurs the visual hierarchies between the pastor as foreground and congregations as background to the degree that tweet voices from the congregation are blended into the church worship service. The interactive use of Twitter also differs from the forms of personal silent meditation and private devotional prayer that, traditionally, most liturgical church services encourage. In this way, key to new organisational practices within religious organisations is what some social commentators are now calling “ambient intimacy”, an enveloping social awareness of one’s social network (Pontin). Indeed, several pastors have acknowledged that faith tweets have enabled them to know their congregational members’ reflections, struggles and interests better and thus they are able to improve their teaching and caring ministry to meet congregants’ evolving spiritual needs (Mapes).Microblogging Rituals and Tweeting Tensions In many ways, faith tweets can be comprehended as microblogging rituals which have an ambient quality in engendering individuals’ spiritual self and group consciousness. The importance of examining emergent cyber-rituals is underscored by Stephen O’Leary in his 1996 seminal article on Cyberspace as Sacred Space. Writing in an earlier era of digital connections, O’Leary discussed e-mail and discussion forum cyber-rituals and what ritual gains in the virtual environment aside from its conventional physiological interactions. Drawing from Walter Ong’s understanding of the “secondary orality” accompanying the shift to electronic media, he argued that cyber-ritual as performative utterances restructure and reintegrate the minds and emotions of their participants, such that they are more aware of their interior self and a sense of communal group membership. Here, the above illustrative examples show how Twitter functions as the context for contemporary, mediated ritual practices to help believers construct a connected presence and affirm their religious identities within an environment where wired communication is a significant part of everyday life. To draw from Walter Ong’s words, microblogging rituals create a new textual and visual “sensorium” that has insightful implications for communication and media scholars. Faith tweeting by restructuring believers’ consciousness and generating a heightened awareness of relationship between the I, You and the Thou opens up possibilities for community building and revitalised religiosity to counteract claims of secularisation in technologically advanced and developed countries. “Praying the hours” guided by scripturally inspired faith tweets, for example, help seekers and believers experience epiphany and practice their faith in a more holistic way as they de-familarize mundane conditions and redeem a sense of the sacred from their everyday surrounds. Through the intermittent sharing of intercessory prayer tweets, faithful followers enact prayer chains and perceive themselves to be immersed in invariable spiritual battle to ward off evil ideology or atheistic beliefs. Moreover, the erosion of the authority of the church is offset by changed leadership practices within religious organisations which have experimented and actively incorporated Twitter into their daily institutional practices. To the extent that laity are willing to engage, creative practices to encourage congregational members to tweet during and after the service help revivify communal sentiments and a higher moral purpose through identification and solidarity with clergy leaders and other believers. Yet this ambience has its possible drawbacks as some experience tensions in their perception and use of Twitter as new technology within the church. Microblogging rituals may have negative implications for individual believers and religious organisations as they can weaken or pervert the existing relational links. As Pauline Cheong and Jessie Poon have pointed out, use of the Internet within religious organisations may bring about an alternative form of “perverse religious social capital building” as some clergy view that online communication detracts from real time relations and physical rituals. Indeed, some religious leaders have already articulated their concerns about Twitter and new tensions they experience in balancing the need to engage with new media audiences and the need for quiet reflection that spiritual rites such as confession of sins and the Holy Communion entail. According to the critics of faith tweeting, microblogging is time consuming and contributes to cognitive overload by taking away one’s attention to what is noteworthy at the moment. For Pastor Hayes of California for example, Twitter distracts his congregation’s focus on the sermon and thus he only recommends his members to tweet after the service. In an interview with the Houston Chronicle, he said: “If two people are talking at the same time, somebody’s not listening”, and “You cannot do two things at once and expect you’re not going to miss something” (Patel). Furthermore, similar to prior concerns voiced with new technologies, there are concerns over inappropriate tweet content that can comprise of crudity, gossip, malevolent and hate messages, which may be especially corrosive to faith communities that strive to model virtues like love, temperance and truth-telling (Vitello). In turn, some congregational members are also experiencing frustrations as they negotiate church boundaries and other members’ disapproval of their tweeting practices during service and church events. Censure of microblogging has taken the form of official requests for tweeting members to leave the sanctuary, to less formal social critique and the application of peer pressure to halt tweeting during religious proceedings and activities (Mapes). As a result of these connectivity tensions, varying recommendations have been recently published as fresh efforts to manage religious communication taking place in ambience. For instance, Coppedge recommends every tweeting church to include Twitter usage in their “church communications policy” to promote accountability within the organisation. The policy should include guidelines against excessive use of Twitter as spam, and for at least one leader to subscribe and monitor every Twitter account used. Furthermore, the Interpreter magazine of the United Methodist Church worldwide featured recommendations by Rev. Safiyah Fosua who listed eight important attributes for pastors wishing to incorporate Twitter during their worship services (Rice). These attributes are: highly adaptive; not easily distracted; secure in their presentation style; not easily taken aback when people appear to be focused on something other than listenin; into quality rather than volume; not easily rattled by things that are new; secure enough as a preacher to let God work through whatever is tweeted even if it is not the main points of the sermon; and carried on the same current the congregation is travelling on. For the most part, these attributes underscore how successful (read wired) contemporary religious leaders should be tolerant of ambient religious communication and of blurring hierarchies of information control when faced with microblogging and the “inexorable advance of multimodal connectedness” (Schroeder 1). To conclude, the rise of faith tweeting opens up a new portal to investigate accretive changes to culture as microblogging rituals nurture piety expressed in continuous prayer, praise and ecclesial updates. The emergent Twitter sensorium demonstrates the variety of ways in which religious adherents appropriate new media within the ken and tensions of their daily lives. References BBC News. “Twitter Your Prayer says Cardinal.” 27 April 2009. ‹http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/8020285.stm›. Cheong, P.H., A. Halavis and K. Kwon. “The Chronicles of Me: Understanding Blogging as a Religious Practice. Journal of Media and Religion 7 (2008): 107-131. Cheong, P.H., and J.P.H. Poon. “‘WWW.Faith.Org’: (Re)structuring Communication and Social Capital Building among Religious Organizations.” Information, Communication and Society 11.1 (2008): 89-110. Christensen, Toke Haunstrup. “‘Connected Presence’ in Distributed Family Life.” New Media and Society 11 (2009): 433-451. Coppedge, Anthony. “The Reason Your Church Must Twitter: Making Your Ministry Contagious.” 2009. ‹http://www.twitterforchurches.com/›. Dunlap, Joanna, and Patrick Lowenthal. “Tweeting the Night Away: Using Twitter to Enhance Social Presence.” Journal of Information Systems Education 20.2 (2009): 129-135. Fox, Susannah, Kathryn Zickuhr, and Aaron Smith. “Twitter and Status Updating" Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2009. Oct. 2009 ‹http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2009/PIP_Twitter_Fall_2009_web.pdf›. Jackson, Michele. “The Mash-Up: A New Archetype for Communication.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14.3 (2009): 730-734. Mapes, Diane. “Holy Twitter! Tweeting from the Pews.” 2009. 3 June 2009 ‹http://www.nbcwashington.com/.../Holy_Twitter__Tweeting_from_the_pews.html›. Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, 1934. Patel, Purva. “Tweeting during Church Services Gets Blessing of Pastors.” Houston Chronicle (2009). 10 Oct. 2009 ‹http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6662287.html›. O’Leary, Stephen. ”Cyberspace as Sacred Space: Communicating Religion on Computer Networks.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64.4 (1996): 781-808. Pontin, Jason. “Twitter and Ambient Intimacy: How Evan Williams Helped Create the New Social Medium of Microblogging.” MIT Review 2007. 15 Nov. 2009 ‹http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/19713/?a=f›. Rice, Kami. “The New Worship Question: To Tweet or Not to Tweet.” Interpreter Magazine (Nov.-Dec. 2009). ‹http://www.interpretermagazine.org/interior.asp?ptid=43&mid=13871›. Rochman, Bonnie. “Twittering in Church, with the Pastor’s O.K.” Time 3 May 2009. ‹http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1895463,00.html›. Schroeder, Ralph. “Mobile Phones and the Inexorable Advance of Multimodal Connectedness.” New Media and Society 12.1 (2010): 75-90. Vitello, Paul. “Lead Us to Tweet, and Forgive the Trespassers.” New York Times 5 July 2009. ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/technology/internet/05twitter.html›.

Sometimes a particular concept—a simple term—is the spark to a series of ideas. It might be ostentatious and perhaps hubristic that the editors of an issue on persona might imagine that their choice of the term persona has provided this intellectual spark. Fully aware of that risk, we want to announce that it has. The response to the call for papers related to persona was our first sign that something special was being initiated. The sheer number and interdisciplinary breadth of the abstracts and ultimate submissions was evidence that the term ‘persona’ was the catalyst to an explosion of ideas. As the responses flowed into the journal and to us, we became aware of the meme-like qualities of the many interpretations and history of the term, each with its own idiosyncratic coding of patterned similarity. The reality of this development is that it was not entirely unexpected. The editors have been developing the concept of persona and persona studies over the past four years, and persona studies has emerged from a congruence in our collective research interests as an interdisciplinary investigation of the presentation of the self in the contemporary moment. Together, we have been involved in the development of the Persona Celebrity Publics Research Group (PCP) at Deakin University. Within that group, we have concentrated ourselves in the Persona Research cluster, made up of a group of 15 or so academics along with another smaller group from other institutions. Emerging from our work is the forthcoming book entitled Persona Studies: Celebrity, Identity, and the Transformation of Public Culture (forthcoming Wiley 2015). Both the book and the research group are intent on exploring what has been altering in our worlds, our cultures, and our communities that make us think the new intensified play of the personal in public needs closer scrutiny. The impetus for us as a team of scholars is quite clearly linked to the uses of online culture and how greater aspects of our lives are now involved in public displays, mediated displays, and a peculiar new blend of interpersonal and presentational constructions of identities and selves. Persona as a specific area of inquiry has emerged from the close study of the public self. Its immediate intellectual past has its strongest links with research on celebrity. In the Celebrity Studies Reader collection, Marshall began forming the idea that a new public self was emerging through new media (New Media). In subsequent work, Marshall identifies celebrity culture as one of the pedagogic sources for how the wider population presented itself in online culture and social media (Marshall, Promotion). Barbour and Marshall expanded their thinking about the presentation of the self through a closer study of online academic persona and the different strategic ways individuals were managing and building reputations and prestige through these techniques. Terms such as the ‘comprehensive,’ ’networked’, and ‘uncontained’ self, mapped the various kinds of public personalities that were emerging through the most prominent academics (Barbour and Marshall). In a similar vein, Barbour’s research has looked closely at the online and public personas that fringe artists—specifically tattoo artists, craftivists, performance poets and street artists—produce and maintain in the contemporary moment (Hiding; Finding). Her work has advanced the concepts of “registers of performance” (Registers), where a closer analysis of how the personal, the professional, and sometimes the intimate registers are constructed and deployed to produce a public persona that demonstrates ‘artistness’. By analysing persona through registers of performance, Barbour is able to differentiate between the types of identity building activity that occurs online. This provides insight into the ways that impression management occurs in spaces that suffer from context collapse due to the intersection of friends, family, fans, and followers. Moore’s work (Hats; Magic; Invigorating) on the player’s assembly of a networked online ‘gamer’ persona considers the intersection of social media and video game culture and contributes analysis of the affective dimensions of player-oriented game objects and their public curation and display. His recent research visualising Twitter and Flickr data (Screenshots, forthcoming) advances an understanding of the accumulation and online presentation of the self through digital game artefacts, specifically video game screenshots. He is currently researching the interaction of social media activity, reputation management, and everyday identity ‘play’ within public game cultures and the larger dynamics of production and consumption of games and play in the video game industry. Most recently, Marshall called for what he titled a “persona studies manifesto”: the public presentation of the self demands a more extensive analysis of the play and deployment of persona in contemporary culture. Beyond popular culture, the development of reputation and persona and its intersection with online culture especially needs to be explored in those professions, disciplines and activities where this form of investigation has never been attempted (Marshall, Persona Studies). The initiative of persona studies then is in some ways turning the cultural studies’ approach to the study of the audience on its head: it is a study of agency and the processes by which agency has been individualized and assembled across contemporary culture, but highly privileged in online culture (Marshall, Personifying). Persona studies involves a close investigation of the personalized and negotiated presentation of the self. So, what is persona? The articles here assume different, but connected, understandings of the term, each with levels of deference to writers such as Jung, Goffman, Butler, and Foucault, along with some expected allusions to the ancient Greeks and Romans who coined the term. The Greek origins identify that persona is a mask and derived from performance and acting. From Hannah Arendt’s reading of the Greeks this mask of public identity was not seen in a derogatory way; rather it was natural to assume a public/political persona that was quite removed from the private and home sphere. A political persona defined by citizenry was a clearly conscious separation from the household of activity. Jung’s take on persona is that it was designed for collective experience and for the outside world and therapy would lead to an understanding of the individual that delved beneath the persona. The resurgence in interest in Goffman’s dramaturgical analogy allows us to consider persona as an everyday performance, where the purpose of the presentation of self is to convince the audience (and at times, the performer) that the performance is genuine and authentic. All of us know what it is like to act in a role, to wear a uniform or costume, to create a profile. More than a few of us know what it is to suffer through the ‘individualising’ categories of a social networking sign-up survey that do not adequately account for distinctions. Persona is all these things, or rather, through the various everyday activities of our work, social, and online selves we contribute to the accretion of the identity at the base of its structure. Persona functions like the construct or automated script that we assemble to interact with the world with on our behalf. This involves the technologies of computation and mediation and their interfaces that function to automate, produce and filter communication with us; email, blogs, Twitter accounts, and so on. These golems interconnect and can interact on their own in unpredictable ways on our behalf; connecting our Facebook account to a product, brand or petition; using Google as a portal to login into other web enabled services; or authorising an app to record our location. Then there are the traces that we leave scattered across digital networks, intranets, hard drives, and lost USB memory sticks, from scattered collections of digital photos to the contact lists of our mobile devices and the ‘achievements’ in our online gaming profiles. Persona can also be something that happens to us, as friends tag unflattering images via Facebook, or another Twitter user publicly addresses us with a unwanted, or unwarranted commentary, using the ‘@’ and the ‘#’ functions. We have an extensive degree of control over the ways we assemble ourselves online and yet the contemporary experience is one of constant negotiation with forces that seeks to disavow their responsibilities to us, and maximise the limitations under which we can act. Our personas serve as a buffer to these forces. We can strategically assemble our persona to participate in, influence and use to our advantage to transmit messages across the network and communicate a mediated form of ourselves. The many ways to account persona stands as a primary and apparently Sisyphean task for persona studies: no sooner than when we might assemble a complete topology of the many accounts, traditions, domains, methodologies and theories for account of for the self, we will have arrived at possibly entirely new way of conceptualising the presentation of online persona through some post-Facebook, Oculus Rift, or Google Glass augmented reality experience. One of the challenges of persona studies will be to provide a series of methodological and theoretical tools, as well as a common touchstone from which multiple perspectives may converge around the meme-like qualities of this dramatic term. It will be necessary to consider the future of the presentation of the self, as much as the past accounts for the understanding of the self and its compositions. In the contemporary moment we consider a series of common currents and features of the iterations of persona with which we might begin this endeavour. The collective objective of the ‘persona’ theme edition is to coalesce around the emerging significance of the public self, and to map that activity within disciplinary traditions, historical precedents and the cultural and technological predispositions that have made this kind of reading of the contemporary world valuable, important, and ultimately, sensible. This collection of articles on persona is innovative in terms of the diversity of issues it tackles through the term. Given the massive change in public identity that we have identified as an elemental part of online culture, it is not surprising that social media and online constructions of persona figure prominently throughout the issue. However, we are also pleased to include papers that consider fictional performances from both television and film and even character studies of public figures. Marshall’s feature article for the edition continues his theorisation of persona. Seriality is identified as one of the ways that a consistency of persona is developed and the article charts the usefulness in analogizing how the construction of a serial character or ‘personnage’ for an actor/performer provides insights into the relationship between the person and persona in other settings that are emerging in the contemporary moment. In ‘Darkly Dreaming (in) Authenticity: The Self/Persona Opposition in Dexter,’ Glenn D'Cruz uses Dexter Morgan, the novelised serial killer and Showtime TV anti-hero to examine the connections between self and persona and the discourse of authenticity. D’Cruz foresees a series of challenges for persona studies and considers key concerns ahead, in terms of the critical vocabulary and scholarly agenda and addresses the need for critical genealogy of the term ‘persona’. Talia Morag, in ‘Persons and Their Personas: Living with Yourself’, considers the tensions identified in the persona of the private domain, and examines the patterns of social interaction that work to affect an ‘endorsed’ private persona, compared to those patterns classified as ‘hidden’. She frames the negotiation of these tensions as a move to better understand the sphere of the private self, as well as the those strains which arise on the private persona and the grounds from which they come to occupy our time. Together these two approaches predict the convergence of the private, the performed and the public persona which occupies Neil Henderson’s ‘The Contingency of Online Persona and Its Tension with Relationship Development’. Henderson’s engagement with the dimensions of online persona in the short film, Noah, takes a position at the crossroads between Marshall’s celebrity-inscribed approach to persona studies and the application of actor-network theory in order to map the potential pitfalls of identity management through ubiquitous technologies and broader critical questions about the play of our online selves in the everyday. Moving to the multi-user virtual environment of Second Life, Lesley Procter draws on the symbolic interactionist theories of social identity and the role of the avatar in ‘A Mirror without a Tain: Personae, Avatars, and Selves in a Multi-User Virtual Environment’. Procter’s contribution to persona studies highlights the actual and conceptual mirroring involved in the sense of the self involved in the interaction with others online. Taina Bucher’s ‘About a Bot: Hoax, Fake, Performance Art’ is a revealing examination of the Twitter bot phenomenon. Bucher’s case study on ‘bot fakeness’ considers the automation and performance of persona and the interactions and relationships between people and bots. Brady Robards, in ‘Digital Traces of the Persona through Ten Years of Facebook’, offers a critical reading of the Facebook ‘look back’ video creation application made to celebrate the social network’s ten year. As with Bucher and Proctor, Robards is concerned with the ways persona is created through highly mediated social networking platforms, where the agency of the individual is countered by the intervention of the software itself. Robards considers in particular two functions of Facebook: first as a site for the performance of life narratives, and second as a location for reflection on public and private disclosure. Taking a specific element of this idea of disclosure—the sharing of one’s legal name—as a starting point, Ellen Moll’s ‘What’s in a Nym?: Gender, Race, Pseudonymity, and the Imagining of the Online Persona’ is a study of the reactions of feminist and anti-racist bloggers in the ongoing battles over pseudonymity online. Moll’s contribution centres around current concerns with the ‘real name policies’ of social media and web-based platforms and services. What is at stake here in the negotiation between the individuals, technologies and institutions over the rights of self-determination and agency in the digital and online environments. Narrowing the focus to a single case study, Emma Maguire’s study of author website as a site of self-presentation in ‘Home, About, Shop, Contact: Constructing an Authorial Persona via the Author Website’ examines the authorial persona produced for consumption within literary markets. Framing of the authorial website as ‘automedial text’, rather than as direct representations of a pre-existing self, Maguire employs authorship theory to understand the website as a genre of persona performance and textuality. Shifting away from the focus on social media, this issue concludes with a trio of character studies, each of which involves a detailed and critical account of the dimensions of a public assembly of a persona. Nathan Farrell’s ‘From Activist to Entrepreneur: Peace One Day and the Changing Persona of the Social Campaigner’ is the first, and considers the ways that an individual manages his persona for different audiences. Farrell’s focus is Jeremy Gilley, a documentary filmmaker and peace campaigner, and the paper speaks to the dimensions of overlapping audiences connected to an articulation of a socially aware entrepreneurial persona. Sally Totman and Mat Hardy have a very different figure in their contribution as they examine the many different public personas of Libya’s Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. In ‘The Many Personas of Colonel Qaddafi’, Totman and Hardy interrogate the multiple aspects of Qaddafi’s construction as a brotherly revolutionary, philosopher, liberator, leader, and clown. The authors chart the progression of his often conflicted and chaotic legacy, and of this political, ideological and even messianic presentation of the self to the Western and Arab worlds. Anastasia Denisova, completes the triptych of persona case studies for this collection, with ‘How Vladimir Putin's Divorce Story Was Constructed and Received, or When the President Divorced His Wife and Married the Country Instead’. Denisova contends Vladimir Putin’s divorce is representative of the degree to which political and private persona are mediated and merged across often competing channels of communication. The analysis contends with online discourse, images, and texts, which reveal the extensive personification of politics in Putin’s public persona in an environment of reception by an audience which also consider the values and attributes of their own country as a national persona. Conclusion We have structured the narrative flow of articles in this issue on persona from the fictional through to the online transformations of the self and then even further into the analyses of the public and political dimensions that are part of the constitution of public selves. No doubt, you as a reader will see different connections and intersections and will play with what makes the idea of persona so meaningful and valuable in understanding the strategic construction of a public identity and so central to comprehending the contemporary moment. We invite you to engage with this further with the issue editors’ planned 2015 launch of a journal called Persona Studies. Until then, this issue of M/C Journal certainly represents the most comprehensive and, we think, interesting, collection of writing on persona as we explore the implications behind the mask of public identity. We hope the issue stimulates discussion and with that hope, we hope to hear from you.AcknowledgmentsThe editors would like to thank Alison Bennett for creating an original gif for the cover image of this issue. More of Bennett's work, including her augmented reality images of tattoos from the internationally acclaimed exhibition Shifting Skin, can be found at her website, alisonbennett.com.au.Thanks also to Trent Griffiths for his copy-editing assistance. References Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Charles R. Walgreen Foundation Lectures. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Barbour, Kim. “Hiding in Plain Sight: Street Artists Online.” Platform Journal of Media and Communication. 5.1 (2013). Barbour, Kim. “Registers of Performance: Negotiating the professional, personal, and intimate.” MeCCSA 2014. Bournemouth, 8-10 Jan. 2014. Barbour, Kim. “Finding the Edge: Online persona creation by fringe artists.” Contemporary Publics International Symposium. 24-25 Feb. 2014. Barbour, Kim, and P. David Marshall. "The Academic Online: Constructing Persona through the World Wide Web." First Monday 17.9 (2012). ‹http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/3969/3292›. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. USA: Anchor Books, 1959. Jung, Carl Gustav. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Bollingen Series. 2nd ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966. Marshall, P. David. "New Media New Self, the Changing Power of the Celebrity." The Celebrity Culture Reader. Ed. P. David Marshall. London: Routledge, 2006. 634-44. Marshall, P. David. "The Promotion and Presentation of the Self: Celebrity as Marker of Presentational Media." Celebrity Studies 1.1 (2010): 35-48. Marshall, P. David. "Personifying Agency: The Public–Persona–Place–Issue Continuum." Celebrity Studies 4.3 (2013): 369-71.Marshall, P. David. "Persona Studies: Mapping the Proliferation of the Public Self." Journalism 15.2 (2014): 153-70. Marshall, P. David, Chris Moore and Kim Barbour, Persona Studies: Celebrity, Identity and the Transformation of Public Culture. Hoboken NJ: Wiley, forthcoming 2015. Moore, Chris. “Hats of Affect: A Study of Affect, Achievements and Hats in Team Fortress 2.” Game Studies 11 (2011). ‹http://gamestudies.org/1101/articles/moore›. Moore, Chris. “The Magic Circle and the Mobility of Play.” Convergence 17 (2011): 373-387. Moore, Chris. “Invigorating Play: The Role of Affect in Online Multiplayer FPS Game.” Guns, Grenades, and Grunts: First-Person Shooter Games. Ed. Gerald A. Voorhees, Josh Call, and Katie Whitlock. London: Continuum, 2012. 341-363. Moore, Chris. “Screenshots as Virtual Photography: Cybernetics, Remediation and Affect.” Advancing Digital Humanities. Ed. Paul Longley Arthur and Katherine Bode. Palgrave Macmillan. Forthcoming 2014. .

The Alt Right Are Not Alright Academic explorations complicating both the Internet and whiteness have often focussed on the rise of the “alt-right” to examine the co-option of digital technologies to extend white supremacy (Daniels, “Cyber Racism”; Daniels, “Algorithmic Rise”; Nagle). The term “alt-right” refers to media organisations, personalities, and sarcastic Internet users who promote the “alternative right”, understood as extremely conservative, political views online. The alt-right, in all of their online variations and inter-grouping, are infamous for supporting white supremacy online, “characterized by heavy use of social media and online memes. Alt-righters eschew ‘establishment’ conservatism, skew young, and embrace white ethnonationalism as a fundamental value” (Southern Poverty Law Center). Theoretical studies of the alt-right have largely focussed on its growing presence across social media and websites such as Twitter, Reddit, and notoriously “chan” sites 4chan and 8chan, through the political discussions referred to as “threads” on the site (Nagle; Daniels, “Algorithmic Rise”; Hawley). As well, the ability of online users to surpass national boundaries and spread global white supremacy through the Internet has also been studied (Back et al.). The alt-right have found a home on the Internet, using its features to cunningly recruit members and to establish a growing community that mainstream politically extreme views (Daniels, “Cyber Racism”; Daniels, “Algorithmic Rise; Munn). This body of knowledge shows that academics have been able to produce critically relevant literature regarding the alt-right despite the online anonymity of the majority of its members. For example, Conway et al., in their analysis of the history and social media patterns of the alt-right, follow the unique nature of the Christchurch Massacre, encompassing the use and development of message boards, fringe websites, and social media sites to champion white supremacy online. Positioning my research in this literature, I am interested in contributing further knowledge regarding the alt-right, white supremacy, and the Internet by exploring the sinister conducting of Zoom-bombing anti-racist events. Here, I will investigate how white supremacy through the Internet can lead to violence, abuse, and fear that “transcends the virtual world to damage real, live humans beings” via Zoom-bombing, an act that is situated in a larger co-option of the Internet by the alt-right and white supremacists, but has been under theorised as a hate crime (Daniels; “Cyber Racism” 7). Shitposting I want to preface this chapter by acknowledging that while I understand the Internet, through my own external investigations of race, power and the Internet, as a series of entities that produce racial violence both online and offline, I am aware of the use of the Internet to frame, discuss, and share anti-racist activism. Here we can turn to the work of philosopher Michel de Certeau who conceived the idea of a “tactic” as a way to construct a space of agency in opposition to institutional power. This becomes a way that marginalised groups, such as racialised peoples, can utilise the Internet as a tactical material to assert themselves and their non-compliance with the state. Particularly, shitposting, a tactic often associated with the alt-right, has also been co-opted by those who fight for social justice and rally against oppression both online and offline. As Roderick Graham explores, the Internet, and for this exploration, shitposting, can be used to proliferate deviant and racist material but also as a “deviant” byway of oppositional and anti-racist material. Despite this, a lot can be said about the invisible yet present claims and support of whiteness through Internet and digital technologies, as well as the activity of users channelled through these screens, such as the alt-right and their digital tactics. As Vikki Fraser remarks, “the internet assumes whiteness as the norm – whiteness is made visible through what is left unsaid, through the assumption that white need not be said” (120). It is through the lens of white privilege and claims to white supremacy that online irony, by way of shitposting, is co-opted and understood as an inherently alt-right tool, through the deviance it entails. Their sinister co-option of shitposting bolsters audacious claims as to who has the right to exist, in their support of white identity, but also hides behind a veil of mischief that can hide their more insidious intention and political ideologies. The alt-right have used “shitposting”, an online style of posting and interacting with other users, to create a form of online communication for a translocal identity of white nationalist members. Sean McEwan defines shitposting as “a form of Internet interaction predicated upon thwarting established norms of discourse in favour of seemingly anarchic, poor quality contributions” (19). Far from being random, however, I argue that shitposting functions as a discourse that is employed by online communities to discuss, proliferate, and introduce white supremacist ideals among their communities as well as into the mainstream. In the course of this article, I will introduce racist Zoom-bombing as a tactic situated in shitposting which can be used as a means of white supremacist discourse and an attempt to block anti-racist efforts. By this line, the function of discourse as one “to preserve or to reproduce discourse (within) a closed community” is calculatingly met through shitposting, Zoom-bombing, and more overt forms of white supremacy online (Foucault 225-226). Using memes, dehumanisation, and sarcasm, online white supremacists have created a means of both organising and mainstreaming white supremacy through humour that allows insidious themes to be mocked and then spread online. Foucault writes that “in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and danger, to cope with chance events, to evade ponderous, awesome materiality” (216). As Philippe-Joseph Salazar recontextualises to online white supremacists, “the first procedure of control is to define what is prohibited, in essence, to set aside that which cannot be spoken about, and thus to produce strategies to counter it” (137). By this line, the alt-right reorganises these procedures and allocates a checked speech that will allow their ideas to proliferate in like-minded and growing communities. As a result, online white supremacists becoming a “community of discourse” advantages them in two ways: first, ironic language permits the mainstreaming of hate that allows sinister content to enter the public as the severity of their intentions is doubted due to the sarcastic language employed. Second, shitposting is employed as an entry gate to more serious and dangerous participation with white supremacist action, engagement, and ideologies. It is important to note that white privilege is embodied in these discursive practices as despite this exploitation of emerging technologies to further white supremacy, there are approaches that theorise the alt-right as “crazed product(s) of an isolated, extremist milieu with no links to the mainstream” (Moses 201). In this way, it is useful to consider shitposting as an informal approach that mirrors legitimised white sovereignties and authorised white supremacy. The result is that white supremacist online users succeed in “not only in assembling a community of actors and a collective of authors, on the dual territory of digital communication and grass-roots activism”, but also shape an effective fellowship of discourse that audiences react well to online, encouraging its reception and mainstreaming (Salazar 142). Continuing, as McBain writes, “someone who would not dream of donning a white cap and attending a Ku Klux Klan meeting might find themselves laughing along to a video by the alt-right satirist RamZPaul”. This idea is echoed in a leaked stylistic guide by white supremacist website and message board the Daily Stormer that highlights irony as a cultivated mechanism used to draw new audiences to the far right, step by step (Wilson). As showcased in the screen capture below of the stylistic guide, “the reader is at first drawn in by curiosity or the naughty humor and is slowly awakened to reality by repeatedly reading the same points” (Feinburg). The result of this style of writing is used “to immerse recruits in an online movement culture built on memes, racial panic and the worst of Internet culture” (Wilson). Figure 1: A screenshot of the Daily Stormer’s playbook, expanding on the stylistic decisions of alt-right writers. Racist Zoom-Bombing In the timely text “Racist Zoombombing”, Lisa Nakamura et al. write the following: Zoombombing is more than just trolling; though it belongs to a broad category of online behavior meant to produce a negative reaction, it has an intimate connection with online conspiracy theorists and white supremacy … . Zoombombing should not be lumped into the larger category of trolling, both because the word “trolling” has become so broad it is nearly meaningless at times, and because zoombombing is designed to cause intimate harm and terrorize its target in distinct ways. (30) Notwithstanding the seriousness of Zoom-bombing, and to not minimise its insidiousness by understanding it as a form of shitposting, my article seeks to reiterate the seriousness of shitposting, which, in the age of COVID-19, Zoom-bombing has become an example of. I seek to purport the insidiousness of the tactical strategies of the alt-right online in a larger context of white violence online. Therefore, I am proposing a more critical look at the tactical use of the Internet by the alt-right, in theorising shitposting and Zoom-bombing as means of hate crimes wherein they impose upon anti-racist activism and organising. Newlands et al., receiving only limited exposure pre-pandemic, write that “Zoom has become a household name and an essential component for parties (Matyszczyk, 2020), weddings (Pajer, 2020), school and work” (1). However, through this came the strategic use of co-opting the application by the alt-right to digitise terror and ensure a “growing framework of memetic warfare” (Nakamura et al. 31). Kruglanski et al. label this co-opting of online tools to champion white supremacy operations via Zoom-bombing an example of shitposting: Not yet protesting the lockdown orders in front of statehouses, far-right extremists infiltrated Zoom calls and shared their screens, projecting violent and graphic imagery such as swastikas and pornography into the homes of unsuspecting attendees and making it impossible for schools to rely on Zoom for home-based lessons. Such actions, known as “Zoombombing,” were eventually curtailed by Zoom features requiring hosts to admit people into Zoom meetings as a default setting with an option to opt-out. (128) By this, we can draw on existing literature that has theorised white supremacists as innovation opportunists regarding their co-option of the Internet, as supported through Jessie Daniels’s work, “during the shift of the white supremacist movement from print to digital online users exploited emerging technologies to further their ideological goals” (“Algorithmic Rise” 63). Selfe and Selfe write in their description of the computer interface as a “political and ideological boundary land” that may serve larger cultural systems of domination in much the same way that geopolitical borders do (418). Considering these theorisations of white supremacists utilising tools that appear neutral for racialised aims and the political possibilities of whiteness online, we can consider racist Zoom-bombing as an assertion of a battle that seeks to disrupt racial justice online but also assert white supremacy as its own legitimate cause. My first encounter of local Zoom-bombing was during the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) Seminar titled “Intersecting Crises” by Western Sydney University. The event sought to explore the concatenation of deeply inextricable ecological, political, economic, racial, and social crises. An academic involved in the facilitation of the event, Alana Lentin, live tweeted during the Zoom-bombing of the event: Figure 2: Academic Alana Lentin on Twitter live tweeting the Zoom-bombing of the Intersecting Crises event. Upon reflecting on this instance, I wondered, could efforts have been organised to prevent white supremacy? In considering who may or may not be responsible for halting racist shit-posting, we can problematise the work of R David Lankes, who writes that “Zoom-bombing is when inadequate security on the part of the person organizing a video conference allows uninvited users to join and disrupt a meeting. It can be anything from a prankster logging on, yelling, and logging off to uninvited users” (217). However, this beckons two areas to consider in theorising racist Zoom-bombing as a means of isolated trolling. First, this approach to Zoom-bombing minimises the sinister intentions of Zoom-bombing when referring to people as pranksters. Albeit withholding the “mimic trickery and mischief that were already present in spaces such as real-life classrooms and town halls” it may be more useful to consider theorising Zoom-bombing as often racialised harassment and a counter aggression to anti-racist initiatives (Nakamura et al. 30). Due to the live nature of most Zoom meetings, it is increasingly difficult to halt the threat of the alt-right from Zoom-bombing meetings. In “A First Look at Zoom-bombings” a range of preventative strategies are encouraged for Zoom organisers including “unique meeting links for each participant, although we acknowledge that this has usability implications and might not always be feasible” (Ling et al. 1). The alt-right exploit gaps, akin to co-opting the mainstreaming of trolling and shitposting, to put forward their agenda on white supremacy and assert their presence when not welcome. Therefore, utilising the pandemic to instil new forms of terror, it can be said that Zoom-bombing becomes a new means to shitpost, where the alt-right “exploits Zoom’s uniquely liminal space, a space of intimacy generated by users via the relationship between the digital screen and what it can depict, the device’s audio tools and how they can transmit and receive sound, the software that we can see, and the software that we can’t” (Nakamura et al. 29). Second, this definition of Zoom-bombing begs the question, is this a fair assessment to write that reiterates the blame of organisers? Rather, we can consider other gaps that have resulted in the misuse of Zoom co-opted by the alt-right: “two conditions have paved the way for Zoom-bombing: a resurgent fascist movement that has found its legs and best megaphone on the Internet and an often-unwitting public who have been suddenly required to spend many hours a day on this platform” (Nakamura et al. 29). In this way, it is interesting to note that recommendations to halt Zoom-bombing revolve around the energy, resources, and attention of the organisers to practically address possible threats, rather than the onus being placed on those who maintain these systems and those who Zoom-bomb. As Jessie Daniels states, “we should hold the platform accountable for this type of damage that it's facilitated. It's the platform's fault and it shouldn't be left to individual users who are making Zoom millions, if not billions, of dollars right now” (Ruf 8). Brian Friedberg, Gabrielle Lim, and Joan Donovan explore the organised efforts by the alt-right to impose on Zoom events and disturb schedules: “coordinated raids of Zoom meetings have become a social activity traversing the networked terrain of multiple platforms and web spaces. Raiders coordinate by sharing links to Zoom meetings targets and other operational and logistical details regarding the execution of an attack” (14). By encouraging a mass coordination of racist Zoom-bombing, in turn, social justice organisers are made to feel overwhelmed and that their efforts will be counteracted inevitably by a large and organised group, albeit appearing prankster-like. Aligning with the idea that “Zoombombing conceals and contains the terror and psychological harm that targets of active harassment face because it doesn’t leave a trace unless an alert user records the meeting”, it is useful to consider to what extent racist Zoom-bombing becomes a new weapon of the alt-right to entertain and affirm current members, and engage and influence new members (Nakamura et al. 34). I propose that we consider Zoom-bombing through shitposting, which is within “the location of matrix of domination (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism)” to challenge the role of interface design and Internet infrastructure in enabling racial violence online (Costanza-Chock). Conclusion As Nakamura et al. have argued, Zoom-bombing is indeed “part of the lineage or ecosystem of trollish behavior”, yet these new forms of alt-right shitposting “[need] to be critiqued and understood as more than simply trolling because this term emerged during an earlier, less media-rich and interpersonally live Internet” (32). I recommend theorising the alt-right in a way that highlights the larger structures of white power, privilege, and supremacy that maintain their online and offline legacies beyond Zoom, “to view white supremacy not as a static ideology or condition, but to instead focus on its geographic and temporal contingency” that allows acts of hate crime by individuals on politicised bodies (Inwood and Bonds 722). This corresponds with Claire Renzetti’s argument that “criminologists theorise that committing a hate crime is a means of accomplishing a particular type of power, hegemonic masculinity, which is described as white, Christian, able-bodied and heterosexual” – an approach that can be applied to theorisations of the alt-right and online violence (136). This violent white masculinity occupies a hegemonic hold in the formation, reproduction, and extension of white supremacy that is then shared, affirmed, and idolised through a racialised Internet (Donaldson et al.). Therefore, I recommend that we situate Zoom-bombing as a means of shitposting, by reiterating the severity of shitposting with the same intentions and sinister goals of hate crimes and racial violence. References Back, Les, et al. “Racism on the Internet: Mapping Neo-Fascist Subcultures in Cyber-Space.” Nation and Race: The Developing Euro-American Racist Subculture. Eds. Jeffrey Kaplan and Tore Bjørgo. Northeastern UP, 1993. 73-101. Bonds, Anne, and Joshua Inwood. “Beyond White Privilege: Geographies of White Supremacy and Settler Colonialism.” Progress in Human Geography 40 (2015): 715-733. Conway, Maura, et al. “Right-Wing Extremists’ Persistent Online Presence: History and Contemporary Trends.” The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague. Policy Brief, 2019. Costanza-Chock, Sasha. “Design Justice and User Interface Design, 2020.” Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. Association for Computing Machinery, 2020. Daniels, Jessie. “The Algorithmic Rise of the ‘Alt-Right.’” Contexts 17 (2018): 60-65. ———. “Race and Racism in Internet Studies: A Review and Critique.” New Media & Society 15 (2013): 695-719. ———. Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights. Rowman and Littlefield, 2009. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. First ed. U of California P, 1980. Donaldson, Mike. “What Is Hegemonic Masculinity?” Theory and Society 22 (1993): 643-657. Feinburg, Ashley. “This Is The Daily Stormer’s Playbook.” Huffington Post 13 Dec. 2017. <http://www.huffpost.com/entry/daily-stormer-nazi-style-guide_n_5a2ece19e4b0ce3b344492f2>. Foucault, Michel. “The Discourse on Language.” The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Ed. A.M. Sheridan Smith. Pantheon, 1971. 215-237. Fraser, Vicki. “Online Bodies and Sexual Subjectivities: In Whose Image?” The Racial Politics of Bodies, Nations and Knowledges. Eds. Barbara Baird and Damien W. Riggs. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015. 116-132. Friedberg, Brian, Gabrielle Lim, and Joan Donovan. “Space Invaders: The Networked Terrain of Zoom Bombing.” Harvard Shorenstein Center, 2020. Graham, Roderick. “Race, Social Media and Deviance.” The Palgrave Handbook of International Cybercrime and Cyberdeviance. Eds. Thomas J. Holt and Adam M. Bossler, 2019. 67-90. Hawley, George. Making Sense of the Alt-Right. Columbia UP, 2017. Henry, Matthew G., and Lawrence D. Berg. “Geographers Performing Nationalism and Hetero-Masculinity.” Gender, Place & Culture 13 (2006): 629-645. Kruglanski, Arie W., et al. “Terrorism in Time of the Pandemic: Exploiting Mayhem.” Global Security: Health, Science and Policy 5 (2020): 121-132. Lankes, R. David. Forged in War: How a Century of War Created Today's Information Society. Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. Ling, Chen, et al. “A First Look at Zoombombing, 2021.” Proceedings of the 42nd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. Oakland, 2021. McBain, Sophie. “The Alt-Right, and How the Paranoia of White Identity Politics Fuelled Trump’s Rise.” New Statesman 27 Nov. 2017. <http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/11/alt-right-and-how-paranoia-white-identity-politics-fuelled-trump-s-rise>. McEwan, Sean. “Nation of Shitposters: Ironic Engagement with the Facebook Posts of Shannon Noll as Reconfiguration of an Australian National Identity.” Journal of Media and Communication 8 (2017): 19-39. Morgensen, Scott Lauria. “Theorising Gender, Sexuality and Settler Colonialism: An Introduction.” Settler Colonial Studies 2 (2012): 2-22. Moses, A Dirk. “‘White Genocide’ and the Ethics of Public Analysis.” Journal of Genocide Research 21 (2019): 1-13. Munn, Luke. “Algorithmic Hate: Brenton Tarrant and the Dark Social Web.” VoxPol, 3 Apr. 2019. <http://www.voxpol.eu/algorithmic-hate-brenton-tarrant-and-the-dark-social-web>. Nagle, Angela. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. Zero Books, 2017. Nakamura, Lisa, et al. Racist Zoom-Bombing. Routledge, 2021. Newlands, Gemma, et al. “Innovation under Pressure: Implications for Data Privacy during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Big Data & Society July-December (2020): 1-14. Perry, Barbara, and Ryan Scrivens. “White Pride Worldwide: Constructing Global Identities Online.” The Globalisation of Hate: Internationalising Hate Crime. Eds. Jennifer Schweppe and Mark Austin Walters. Oxford UP, 2016. 65-78. Renzetti, Claire. Feminist Criminology. Routledge, 2013. Ruf, Jessica. “‘Spirit-Murdering' Comes to Zoom: Racist Attacks Plague Online Learning.” Issues in Higher Education 37 (2020): 8. Salazar, Philippe-Joseph. “The Alt-Right as a Community of Discourse.” Javnost – The Public 25 (2018): 135-143. Selfe, Cyntia L., and Richard J. Selfe, Jr. “The Politics of the Interface: Power and Its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones.” College Composition and Communication 45 (1994): 480-504. Southern Poverty Law Center. “Alt-Right.” <http://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/alt-right>. Wilson, Jason. “Do the Christchurch Shootings Expose the Murderous Nature of ‘Ironic’ Online Fascism?” The Guardian, 16 Mar. 2019. <http://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2019/mar/15/do-the-christchurch-shootings-expose-the-murderous-nature-of-ironic-online-fascism>.

…love is queered not when we discover it to be resistant to or more than its known forms, but when we see that there is no world that admits how it actually works as a principle of living. Lauren Berlant – “Love, A Queer Feeling” As the sun beats down on a very dusty Musgrave Park, the crowd is hushed in respect for the elder addressing us. It is Pride Fair Day and we are listening to the story of how this place has been a home for queer and black people throughout Brisbane’s history. Like so many others, this park has been a place of refuge in times when Boundary Streets marked the lines aboriginal people couldn’t cross to enter the genteel heart of Brisbane’s commercial district. The street names remain today, and even if movements across territory are somewhat less constrained, a manslaughter trial taking place nearby reminds us of the surveillance aboriginal people still suffer as a result of their refusal to stay off the streets and out of sight in homes they don’t have. In the past few years, Fair Day has grown in size. It now charges an entry fee to fence out unwelcome guests, so that those who normally live here have been effectively uninvited from the party. On this sunny Saturday, we sit and talk about these things, and wonder at the number of spaces still left in this city for spontaneous, non-commercial encounters and alliances. We could hardly have known that in the course of just a few weeks, the distance separating us from others would grow even further. During the course of Brisbane’s month-long Pride celebrations in 2007, two events affected the rights agendas of both queer and black Australians. First, The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Report, Same Sex, Same Entitlements, was tabled in parliament. Second, the Federal government decided to declare a state of emergency in remote indigenous communities in the Northern Territory in response to an inquiry on the state of aboriginal child abuse. (The full title of the report is “Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle”: Little Children are Sacred, and the words are from the Arrandic languages of the Central Desert Region of the Northern Territory. The report’s front cover also explains the title in relation to traditional law of the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land.) While the latter issue has commanded the most media and intellectual attention, and will be discussed later in this piece, the timing of both reports provides an opportunity to consider the varying experiences of two particularly marginalised groups in contemporary Australia. In a period when the Liberal Party has succeeded in pitting minority claims against one another as various manifestations of “special interests” (Brett, Gregg) this essay suggests there is a case to be made for queer and black activists to join forces against wider tendencies that affect both communities. To do this I draw on the work of American critic, Lauren Berlant, who for many years has offered a unique take on debates about citizenship in the United States. Writing from a queer theory perspective, Berlant argues that the conservative political landscape in her country has succeeded in convincing people that “the intimacy of citizenship is something scarce and sacred, private and proper, and only for members of families” (Berlant Queen 2-3). The consequence of this shift is that politics moves from being a conversation conducted in the public sphere about social issues to instead resemble a form of adjudication on the conduct of others in the sphere of private life. In this way, Berlant indicates how heteronormative culture “uses cruel and mundane strategies both to promote change from non-normative populations and to deny them state, federal, and juridical supports because they are deemed morally incompetent to their own citizenship” (Berlant, Queen 19). In relation to the so-called state of emergency in the Northern Territory, coming so soon after attempts to encourage indigenous home-ownership in the same region, the compulsion to promote change from non-normative populations currently affects indigenous Australians in ways that resonate with Berlant’s argument. While her position reacts to an environment where the moral majority has a much firmer hold on the national political spectrum, in Australia these conservative forces have no need to be so eloquent—normativity is already embedded in a particular form of “ordinariness” that is the commonsense basis for public political debate (Allon, Brett and Moran). These issues take on further significance as home-ownership and aspirations towards it have gradually become synonymous with the demonstration of appropriate citizenship under the Coalition government: here, phrases like “an interest rate election” are assumed to encapsulate voter sentiment while “the mortgage belt” has emerged as the demographic most keenly wooed by precariously placed politicians. As Berlant argues elsewhere, the project of normalization that makes heterosexuality hegemonic also entails “material practices that, though not explicitly sexual, are implicated in the hierarchies of property and propriety” that secure heteronormative privilege (Berlant and Warner 548). Inhabitants of remote indigenous communities in Australia are invited to desire and enact normal homes in order to be accepted and rewarded as valuable members of the nation; meanwhile gay and lesbian couples base their claims for recognition on the adequate manifestation of normal homes. In this situation black and queer activists share an interest in elaborating forms of kinship and community that resist the limited varieties of home-building currently sanctioned and celebrated by the State. As such, I will conclude this essay with a model for this alternative process of home-building in the hope of inspiring others. Home Sweet Home Ever since the declaration of terra nullius, white Australia has had a hard time recognising homes it doesn’t consider normal. To the first settlers, indigenous people’s uncultivated land lacked meaning, their seasonal itinerancy challenged established notions of property, while their communal living and wider kinship relations confused nuclear models of procreative responsibility and ancestry. From the homes white people still call “camps” many aboriginal people were moved against their will on to “missions” which even in name invoked the goal of assimilation into mainstream society. So many years later, white people continue to maintain that their version of homemaking is the most superior, the most economically effective, the most functional, with government policy and media commentators both agreeing that “the way out of indigenous disadvantage is home ownership.”(The 1 July broadcast of the esteemed political chat show Insiders provides a representative example of this consensus view among some of the country’s most respected journalists.) In the past few months, low-interest loans have been touted as the surest route out of the shared “squalor” (Weekend Australian, June 30-July1) of communal living and the right path towards economic development in remote aboriginal communities (Karvelas, “New Deal”). As these references suggest, The Australian newspaper has been at the forefront of reporting these government initiatives in a positive light: one story from late May featured a picture of Tiwi Islander Mavis Kerinaiua watering her garden with the pet dog and sporting a Tigers Aussie Rules singlet. The headline, “Home, sweet home, for Mavis” (Wilson) was a striking example of a happy and contented black woman in her own backyard, especially given how regularly mainstream national news coverage of indigenous issues follows a script of failed aboriginal communities. In stories like these, communal land ownership is painted as the cause of dysfunction, and individual homes are crucial to “changing the culture.” Never is it mentioned that communal living arrangements clearly were functional before white settlement, were an intrinsic part of “the culture”; nor is it acknowledged that the option being offered to indigenous people is land that had already been taken away from them in one way or another. That this same land can be given back only on certain conditions—including financially rewarding those who “prove they are doing well” by cultivating their garden in recognisably right ways (Karvelas, “New Deal”)— bolsters Berlant’s claim that government rhetoric succeeds by transforming wider structural questions into matters of individual responsibility. Home ownership is the stunningly selective neoliberal interpretation of “land rights”. The very notion of private property erases the social and cultural underpinnings of communal living as a viable way of life, stigmatising any alternative forms of belonging that might form the basis for another kind of home. Little Children Are Sacred The latest advance in efforts to encourage greater individual responsibility in indigenous communities highlights child abuse as the pivotal consequence of State and Local government inaction. The innocent indigenous child provides the catalyst for a myriad of competing political positions, the most vocal of which welcomes military intervention on behalf of powerless, voiceless kids trapped in horrendous scenarios (Kervalas, “Pearson’s Passion”). In these representations, the potentially abused aboriginal child takes on “supericonicity” in public debate. In her North American context, Berlant uses this concept to explain how the unborn child figures in acrimonious arguments over abortion. The foetus has become the most mobilising image in the US political scene because: it is an image of an American, perhaps the last living American, not yet bruised by history: not yet caught up in the processes of secularisation and centralisation… This national icon is too innocent of knowledge, agency, and accountability and thus has ethical claims on the adult political agents who write laws, make culture, administer resources, control things. (Berlant, Queen 6) In Australia, the indigenous child takes on supericonicity because he or she is too young to formulate a “black armband” view of history, to have a point of view on why their circumstance happens to be so objectionable, to vote out the government that wants to survey and penetrate his or her body. The child’s very lack of agency is used as justification for the military action taken by those who write laws, make the culture that will be recognized as an appropriate performance of indigeneity, administer (at the same time as they cut) essential resources; those who, for the moment, control things. However, and although a government perspective would not recognize this, in Australia the indigenous child is always already bruised by conventional history in the sense that he or she will have trouble accessing the stories of ancestors and therefore the situation that affects his or her entry into the world. Indeed, it is precisely the extent to which the government denies its institutional culpability in inflicting wounds on aboriginal people throughout history that the indigenous child’s supericonicity is now available as a political weapon. Same-Sex: Same Entitlements A situation in which the desire for home ownership is pedagogically enforced while also being economically sanctioned takes on further dimensions when considered next to the fate of other marginalised groups in society—those for whom an appeal for acceptance and equal rights pivots on the basis of successfully performing normal homes. While indigenous Australians are encouraged to aspire for home ownership as the appropriate manifestation of responsible citizenship, the HREOC report represents a group of citizens who crave recognition for already having developed this same aspiration. In the case studies selected for the Same-Sex: Same Entitlements Report, discrimination against same-sex couples is identified in areas such as work and taxation, workers’ compensation, superannuation, social security, veterans’ entitlements and childrearing. It recommends changes to existing laws in these areas to match those that apply to de facto relationships. When launching the report, the commissioner argued that gay people suffer discrimination “simply because of whom they love”, and the report launch quotes a “self-described ‘average suburban family’” who insist “we don’t want special treatment …we just want equality” (HREOC). Such positioning exercises give some insight into Berlant’s statement that “love is a site that has perhaps not yet been queered enough” (Berlant, “Love” 433). A queer response to the report might highlight that by focussing on legal entitlements of the most material kind, little is done to challenge the wider situation in which one’s sexual relationship has the power to determine intimate possessions and decisions—whether this is buying a plane ticket, getting a loan, retiring in some comfort or finding a nice nursing home. An agenda calling for legislative changes to financial entitlement serves to reiterate rather than challenge the extent to which economically sanctioned subjectivities are tied to sexuality and normative models of home-building. A same-sex rights agenda promoting traditional notions of procreative familial attachment (the concerned parents of gay kids cited in the report, the emphasis on the children of gay couples) suggests that this movement for change relies on a heteronormative model—if this is understood as the manner in which the institutions of personal life remain “the privileged institutions of social reproduction, the accumulation and transfer of capital, and self-development” (Berlant and Warner 553). What happens to those who do not seek the same procreative path? Put another way, the same-sex entitlements discourse can be seen to demand “intelligibility” within the hegemonic understanding of love, when love currently stands as the primordial signifier and ultimate suturing device for all forms of safe, reliable and useful citizenly identity (Berlant, “Love”). In its very terminology, same-sex entitlement asks to access the benefits of normativity without challenging the ideological or economic bases for its attachment to particular living arrangements and rewards. The political agenda for same-sex rights taking shape in the Federal arena appears to have chosen its objectives carefully in order to fit existing notions of proper home building and the economic incentives that come with them. While this is understandable in a conservative political environment, a wider agenda for queer activism in and outside the home would acknowledge that safety, security and belonging are universal desires that stretch beyond material acquisitions, financial concerns and procreative activity (however important these things are). It is to the possibilities this perspective might generate that I now turn. One Size Fits Most Urban space is always a host space. The right to the city extends to those who use the city. It is not limited to property owners. (Berlant and Warner, 563) The affective charge and resonance of a concept like home allows an opportunity to consider the intimacies particular to different groups in society, at the same time as it allows contemplation of the kinds of alliances increasingly required to resist neoliberalism’s impact on personal space. On one level, this might entail publicly denouncing representations of indigenous living conditions that describe them as “squalor” as some kind of hygienic short-hand that comes at the expense of advocating infrastructure suited to the very different way of living that aboriginal kinship relations typically require. Further, as alternative cultural understandings of home face ongoing pressure to fit normative ideals, a key project for contemporary queer activism is to archive, document and publicise the varied ways people choose to live at this point in history in defiance of sanctioned arrangements (eg Gorman-Murray 2007). Rights for gay and lesbian couples and parents need not be called for in the name of equality if to do so means reproducing a logic that feeds the worst stereotypes around non-procreating queers. Such a perspective fares poorly for the many literally unproductive citizens, queer and straight alike, whose treacherous refusal to breed banishes them from the respectable suburban politics to which the current government caters. Which takes me back to the park. Later that afternoon on Fair Day, we’ve been entertained by a range of performers, including the best Tina Turner impersonator I’ll ever see. But the highlight is the festival’s special guest, Vanessa Wagner who decides to end her show with a special ceremony. Taking the role of celebrant, Vanessa invites three men on to the stage who she explains are in an ongoing, committed three-way relationship. Looking a little closer, I remember meeting these blokes at a friend’s party last Christmas Eve: I was the only girl in an apartment full of gay men in the midst of some serious partying (and who could blame them, on the eve of an event that holds dubious relevance for their preferred forms of intimacy and celebration?). The wedding takes place in front of an increasingly boisterous crowd that cannot fail to appreciate the gesture as farcically mocking the sacred bastion of gay activism—same-sex marriage. But clearly, the ceremony plays a role in consecrating the obvious desire these men have for each other, in a safe space that feels something like a home. Their relationship might be a long way from many people’s definition of normal, but it clearly operates with care, love and a will for some kind of longevity. For queer subjects, faced with a history of persecution, shame and an unequal share of a pernicious illness, this most banal of possible definitions of home has been a luxury difficult to afford. Understood in this way, queer experience is hard to compare with that of indigenous people: “The queer world is a space of entrances, exits, unsystematised lines of acquaintance, projected horizons, typifying examples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies” (Berlant and Warner 558). In many instances, it has “required the development of kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation” (ibid) in liminal and fleeting zones of improvisation like parties, parks and public toilets. In contrast, indigenous Australians’ distinct lines of ancestry, geography, and story continue through generations of kin in spite of the efforts of a colonising power to reproduce others in its own image. But in this sense, what queer and black Australians now share is the fight to live and love in more than one way, with more than one person: to extend relationships of care beyond the procreative imperative and to include land that is beyond the scope of one’s own backyard. Both indigenous and queer Australians stand to benefit from a shared project “to support forms of affective, erotic and personal living that are public in the sense of accessible, available to memory, and sustained through collective activity” (Berlant and Warner 562). To build this history is to generate an archive that is “not simply a repository” but “is also a theory of cultural relevance” (Halberstam 163). A queer politics of home respects and learns from different ways of organising love, care, affinity and responsibility to a community. This essay has been an attempt to document other ways of living that take place in the pockets of one city, to show that homes often exist where others see empty space, and that love regularly survives beyond the confines of the couple. In learning from the history of oppression experienced in the immediate territories I inhabit, I also hope it captures what it means to reckon with the ongoing knowledge of being an uninvited guest in the home of another culture, one which, through shared activism, will continue to survive much longer than this, or any other archive. References Allon, Fiona. “Home as Cultural Translation: John Howard’s Earlwood.” Communal/Plural 5 (1997): 1-25. Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. ———. “Love, A Queer Feeling.” Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis. Eds. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001. 432-51. ———, and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24.2 (1998): 547-566. Brett, Judith. Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ———, and Anthony Moran. Ordinary People’s Politics: Australians Talk About Politics, Life and the Future of Their Country. Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2006. Gorman-Murray, Andrew. “Contesting Domestic Ideals: Queering the Australian Home.” Australian Geographer 38.2 (2007): 195-213. Gregg, Melissa. “The Importance of Being Ordinary.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 10.1 (2007): 95-104. Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York and London: NYU Press, 2005 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. Same-Sex: Same Entitlements Report. 2007. 21 Aug. 2007 http://www.hreoc.gov.au/human_rights/samesex/report/index.html>. ———. Launch of Final Report of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s Same-Sex: Same Entitlements Inquiry (transcript). 2007. 5 July 2007 . Insiders. ABC TV. 1 July 2007. 5 July 2007 http://www.abc.net.au/insiders/content/2007/s1966728.htm>. Karvelas, Patricia. “It’s New Deal or Despair: Pearson.” The Weekend Australian 12-13 May 2007: 7. ———. “How Pearson’s Passion Moved Howard to Act.” The Australian. 23 June 2007. 5 July 2007 http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21952951-5013172,00.html>. Northern Territory Government Inquiry Report into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse. Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle: Little Children Are Sacred. 2007. 5 July 2007 http://www.nt.gov.au/dcm/inquirysaac/pdf/bipacsa_final_report.pdf>. Wilson, Ashleigh. “Home, Sweet Home, for Mavis.” The Weekend Australian 12-13 May 2007: 7. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Gregg, Melissa. "Normal Homes." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/02-gregg.php>. APA Style Gregg, M. (Aug. 2007) "Normal Homes," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/02-gregg.php>.

Introduction What French food is would seem to be an unproblematic idea. Depending on one’s taste and familiarity, a croissant, or snails, might spring to mind. Those who are a little more intimate with French cuisine might suggest the taste of a coq au vin or ratatouille, and fewer still might suggest tarte flambée or cancoillotte. Whatever the relative popularity of the dish or food, the French culinary tradition is arguably so familiar and, indeed, loved around the world that almost everyone could name one or two French culinary objects. Moreover, as the (self-proclaimed) leader of Western cuisine, the style and taste epitomised by French cuisine and the associated dining experience are also arguably some of the most attractive aspects of French gastronomy. From this perspective, where French cuisine appears to be so familiar to the non-French, seeking to define what constitutes a French meal could seem to be an inane exercise. Nonetheless, in 2010, the Mission Française du Patrimoine et des Cultures Alimentaires (not officially translated), under the aegis of the French Ministry of Culture and Communication, put forward the nomination file “The Gastronomic Meal of the French” to UNESCO, defining in clear terms a particular image of French taste, in a bid to have the meal recognised as part of the Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage. With the number of specifically culinary elements protected by UNESCO more than doubling with the 2013 session of the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, and with a further two in line for protection in the 2014 session, it would seem that an examination of these protected culinary traditions is in order. Rather than focusing on the problems associated with creating an intangible heritage list (Kurin; Smith and Akagawa), this article proposes an analysis of one nomination file, “The Gastronomic Meal of the French,” and the ideas which structure it. More specifically, this article will investigate how the idea of taste is deployed in the document from two different yet interconnected points of view. That is, taste as the faculty of discerning what is aesthetically excellent, and taste in its more literal gustative sense. This study will demonstrate how these two ideas of taste are used to create a problematic notion of French culinary identity, which by focusing on the framework of local (terroir) taste seeks to define national taste. By specifically citing local food stuffs (produits du terroir) and practices as well as French Republicanism in the formation of this identity, I argue that the nomination file eschews problems of cultural difference. As a result, “non-French food” and the associated identities it embodies, inherent in contemporary multicultural societies such as France with its large immigrant population, are incorporated into a cohesive, singular, culinary identity. French taste, then, is represented as uniform and embodied by the shared love of the French “art of good eating and drinking”. “Intangible” Versus “Tangible” Cultural Heritage: A Brief Overview The Intangible Cultural Heritage list was created to compliment UNESCO’s Tangible Cultural Heritage, that is, the famous World Heritage, list, which focuses on places of unique heritage. The Intangible Cultural Heritage list, for its part, concentrates on: traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants, such as oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe or the knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts (“What is Intangible Cultural Heritage?”) An examination of the elements which have been admitted to UNESCO’s Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage shows that there is a clear preference for traditional dances and songs. The culinary plays a very small role in the almost 300 elements currently protected by UNESCO. With the recent inscription of several additional, specifically culinary elements in December 2013, the number has more doubled but still remains low at ten elements. Out of the ten, only two of them seek to protect a cooking style: the “Mediterranean Diet” and “Traditional Mexican cuisine—ancestral, ongoing community culture, the Michoacán paradigm.” The other elements are specific culinary objects, such as Gingerbread from Northern Croatia, or culinary events, for instance the “Commemoration feast of the finding of the True Holy Cross of Christ in Ethiopia.” “The Gastronomic Meal of the French” belongs to the latter category, however is somewhat different since it is not an annual event and can take place at any time of the year as it is not related to a season or historical event. What really distinguishes the French document from the others on the list, however, is its emphasis on the idea of taste, which connects it to a long history of writing about taste in French cuisine, including of course Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste. In order to describe exactly what constitutes “The Gastronomic Meal of the French,” the authors refer frequently to two coextensive conceptions of taste, proposing that the taste of the meal is both a question of flavor and the aesthetic qualities of the diner as a whole. Whilst these ideas concerning the place of taste in French gastronomy appear to share numerous similarities to those elaborated in Brillat-Savarin’s work, I will focus on the way the conceptions of taste discussed in the dossier are used to formulate French identity. Taste: An Aesthetic Judgment, An Art When considering “The Gastronomic Meal of the French,” the closeness of the two ideas of aesthetic taste and gustative taste is perhaps clearer in French: the French verb dresser can be used to describe setting the table, an important aspect of the gastronomic meal, and arranging food on a plate. This link to aesthetics is important and in the nomination file the Gastronomic Meal of the French is taken as representative of the height of the French “art of good eating and drinking.” In the terms of the document the authors define the meal as “a festive meal bringing people together for an occasion to enjoy the art of good eating and drinking” (“Nomination file” 3). In evoking art here, they stress the importance that aesthetics play in the design of this meal. For them, the culinary art of the gastronomic meal involves both aesthetic and gustative concerns, since in order for the guests to savour the meal, the hosts must think as much about the delectability of their dishes as the classic French taste they must demonstrate in their table decoration and discussion about the food which they prepare. The participants’ conversation about the food during the meal and their comportment at the table are important elements of this taste, since they reinforce and aestheticize the dining experience. Moreover, both the host and guests must use “codified gestures” and certain expressions to discuss what they are eating and drinking so as to display by means of specific vocabulary that they are enjoying the meal (5). The art of conversation, then, is important in accomplishing one of the goals of the gastronomic meal, that being to share “the pleasure of taste” (8). The nomination file lists the gastronomic meal’s specific rites as involving the “setting [of] a beautiful table, the order of courses, food and wine pairing, [and] conversation about the dishes” (3). By listing these elements in this order, the authors highlight that aesthetic and gustative concerns are interrelated and equally important. What is more, just as the decoration of a table and conversing about the dishes could be seen to be arts in the largest sense of the term, so too should “the order of the courses” and the “food and wine pairing” be understood to be a question of aesthetic judgment. In other words, the role of these rites in the gastronomic meal is as much to reinforce the sophisticated aesthetics of the hosts’ meal as to delight the taste buds of the guests. The prominent role of the aestheticization of taste in the gastronomic meal is made even clearer elsewhere in the document when the authors specify how the table should be laid for a gastronomic meal. They write that this should be done according to the: classic French taste, based on symmetry that fans out from the centre and including a tablecloth, artistically folded napkins, objects whose shapes are appropriate for each course and designed to enhance tastes; and, depending on the circumstance, between two and five glasses, several plates and utensils, and sometimes a written menu. (5) Here the aesthetics of the table are not simply meant to be appreciated visually, but supposed to support and “enhance tastes”. The two forms of taste, then, are clearly complementary ingredients in the successful hosting of a gastronomic meal and hosts should pay equal attention to both. The authors state that the extra care paid to the aesthetics of the meal is meant to honour the guests and differentiate the meal from a standard, everyday meal (5). Since the two ideas of taste intersect, it naturally follows that the choice of the culinary products for the meal also contributes to the goal of creating a special dining experience. Taste as Gustative Experience, The Terroir For the authors, the French palate is not unified by a canon of specific dishes, but a shared “vision of eating well” (3). This collective vision encompasses several different ideas, including the structure of the meal, the recipes used and the choice of products. Just as with the aesthetic concerns above regarding table arrangements, the authors are quite particular about the configuration of the meal. For them, the gastronomic meal must respect the same structure: beginning with the apéritif (drinks before the meal) and ending with liqueurs, containing in between at least four successive courses, namely a starter, fish and/or meat with vegetables, cheese and dessert, the courses possibly numbering five or six depending on the occasion. (5) The structure of the meal is supposed to highlight the quality of the good products that the host has obtained and exhibit how their flavours go well together (5). In terms of the exact recipes used in the meal, the host might call upon a “repertoire of codified recipes” (3) in order to honour the shared “vision of eating well”. So deeply ingrained is this shared vision in the French psyche that the authors do not need to specify what the recipes are, and even go so far as to claim that the unknown list is “constantly growing” (5). This undefined catalogue of recipes and shared “vision of eating well,” then, arguably represent a banal form of national culinary identity, since these culinary practices constitute a “form of life, which is daily lived” (Billig 69) by the nation without being specified. More important than the recipes, however, is the “search for good products” (3). The hunt for good products begins with seeking out “local food products available at markets […] since they have a high cultural value” (6). The authors argue that the importance attached to these products symbolises the French commitment to non-standardised food products and “quality in terms of taste, nutrition and food safety” (6). The height of gustative taste is represented by the use of these local food products (produits du terroir) since they provide evidence of the hosts’ “knowledge of the characteristics of local production areas” (2). Just as above with the aesthetic concerns of the meal, when discussing one idea of taste, the other is never far away. In this case, the hosts’ knowledge of the local products, used in crafting the gustative experience, is meant to contribute the art of conversation which takes place during the meal. The hosts’ gustative and aesthetic tastes are on display and under analysis at every point in the meal. For the authors of the nomination file, then, French gustative taste is ruled by the idea of terroir. Successfully holding a gastronomic meal means that the hosts must be intimately familiar with France’s geography and the local products of France and use this knowledge to choose the right products. All of these very specific ideas concerning the aesthetic and gustative tastes illustrated in the document, then, raise interesting questions about inclusion and exclusion in the notion of French culinary identity they embody. Whose Taste Is It? So far I have argued that taste is the central preoccupation of the nomination file, which governs both aesthetic and gustative choices a host makes when organizing and holding a gastronomic meal. This discussion has elided some of the questions raised by the document’s definitions of taste, most notably the problem of whose taste is defined by the document. One possible response to this question is provided in quite clear terms by the document itself, when the authors talk about the antecedent of the current meal. For them, the meal evolved out of the values exemplified by “the high-society meal, transmitted through revolutionary France [and which] inspired working-class practices” (5). This reference to revolutionary French values reveals how the authors’ arguments about taste are informed by the values of the French Republic, a powerful notion in discussions about French national identity. As numerous critics have contended, the status of France as a republic significantly impacts on how national identity is constructed (McCaffrey), since it is conceived of through the idea of citizenship. Put simply, being a French citizen means that, for the state, one’s position as a citizen takes precedence over any cultural particularisms or clan and family solidarities (Jennings). To put it another way, whilst the individual person displays specificities, the citizen demonstrates the universal values held by all citizens of the French state (Schnapper). Citizenship is a political matter and any aspect of one’s private life is irrelevant to the state’s treatment of its citizens. In ignoring any particularisms that a citizen may have, French Republicanism seeks to universalise all values held by its citizens, simultaneously providing a common shared identity and a means to exclude anyone who fails to commit to these ideals. As Jennings has pointed out elsewhere, these Republican ideals have an interesting effect on how one considers French national identity in the contemporary diverse society that is France, since “despite an astonishing level of cultural and ethnic diversity, France has seen itself as and has sought to become a monocultural society” (575). In terms of the French culinary practices discussed here the associated problems with French Republicanism are clear, for such a “mono-culinary” representation of French foodways would potentially lead to significant portions of the population being left out of any such definition. Given the document’s reference to the Republic, the universalizing force displayed in the nomination file cannot simply be considered the result of the structure of UNESCO’s bureaucratic file, but should instead be understood as the expression of French Republican ideas of identity. Here it is the quality of local ingredients (produits du terroir) which characterise the universal pleasure of taste and the appreciation of local farming practices (terroirs) that the authors seek to elevate in the face of any imported tastes concurrently practised in France. The fact that the universal claims made in the French document are specific to it, and not inherent of UNESCO’s form, is evident when examining other nomination files, such as the traditional Mexican cuisine dossier. Whilst the Mexican dossier argues that the cuisine offers a “comprehensive cultural model” (4), its authors talk instead of communities whose identities display “distinct yet shared features, all of them together [making] for a flourishing cuisine throughout the country” (12). The Mexican file, thus, recognises that diversity is an integral part of its culinary model. For the French dossier, on the other hand, the Republican ideas are made patent by the authors’ insistence upon the homogenous nature of these culinary practices and tastes. They assert, for instance, that the meal is a “very popular practice, with which all French people are familiar” (3); that it displays a “homogeneity in the whole community” (3); that it embodies a “social practice […] associated with a shared vision of eating well” (3); and that it is part of a “shared history and that it carries the values on which French culture is based” (5). The authors also reference a small survey to support this supposition in which an incredible 95.7 per cent of respondents consider “the gastronomic meal to be part of their heritage and identity” (10). Furthermore they claim that the gastronomic meal transcends local customs, generations, social class and opinions, and adapts to religious and philosophical beliefs. Its values take in diversity and strengthen feelings of belonging for participants in the gastronomic meal. (5) This quotation demonstrates the Republic’s ability to transform the particular into the general, the individual into citizen. Here this transformative ability is seen in the authors’ assertion that the Gastronomic Meal of the French cuts across “local customs” and “social classes” to bring people together and reinforce the sense of a united nation. With this insistent discourse that the meal is unanimously accepted, understood, and practised by the entire nation, despite one’s particularisms, the authors of the file demonstrate how they seek to universalise the meal. The meal should no longer be considered as an object, for the authors seek to promote it to the status of a national myth which is deeply rooted in the national psyche, echoing the nation’s motto of “One Republic/cuisine united and indivisible for everyone.” The Republican nature of the universal tastes represented in the document is further reinforced when the authors emphasise the role of the State and its education system in ensuring that the right taste prevails. Just as many critics discussing the Republic regard the French education system’s role as one which constructs citizens (Janey), equipping them with the appropriate national values, the authors of nomination file argue that good taste is of national significance and ought to be taught in the education system. For them, this taste should be imparted to students in primary schools by regularly preparing and consuming meals so as to instruct them in “the rites of the gastronomic meal, including the choice of the right products” (8). The idea of the right taste is further impressed upon students through the annual “Taste Week” in which “educational activities on nutrition and the development of taste […] essential to maintaining the rites of the element [take place in schools]” (7). These activities include instruction in “the combining of flavours, pleasure of taste, choice of the right product, conversation and gastronomic discourse” (7). For those not at school, the “choice of the right product” (14) mentioned here is facilitated through yet another state sanctioned source of taste, the Inventory of Traditional Food and Agricultural Know-how. Conclusion The “Gastronomic Meal of the French” defines national culinary identity by combining several different ideas together. On one level, the authors draw together Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities” and Michael Billig’s notion of “banal nationalism.” They argue that there exists a state approved, written form this identity which is intimately linked to the French Republic and its history (Anderson), whilst also contending that the food practices are so well-known that they are banal facets of everyday lived experience (Billig). On another level, they draw these assertions regarding national identity together through the notion of taste, which the authors stress is integral to French culinary identity. In terms of gustative taste, the preference for terroir in the document points to how the local is used as a “conduit toward national self-understanding” (Gerson 215). Yet this approach leads to a problematic relationship between local and national concerns, which ought to be seen as part of a larger issue concerning the link between Republican values and the disciplining of French culinary identity and space. What it is tempting to ask—and the present paper is just the beginning—is how do state sanctioned bodies, like the Mission Française du Patrimoine et des Cultures Alimentaires combined with brotherhoods (confréries) and local organisations mentioned in the nomination file as well as the system of Appellations d’Origine Contrôlée, come together to discipline French culinary identity and taste? The examination of the present document seems to suggest that Republican Universalism is one key ingredient in this act of discipline. The hesitation between asserting a cohesive, national culinary identity whilst at the same time recognising the “diversity of traditions foods and cuisines” (5), appears to be representative of the hesitation in political discourse apparent in the modern Republic. The tensions exposed in this document are being played out in the policies concerning decentralisation and recognition to a certain extent of regional minorities in France. As Schnapper puts it, the great problem which the Republic currently faces is how can the state reconcile “the absolute of citizenship—the Republic—with the legitimate expression of particularistic allegiances in conformity with democratic values” (quoted, Jennings 152). Ultimately, what “The Gastronomic Meal of the French” shows is how pertinent Republican ideas still are in France, since, despite claims of a crisis in Republican values and the current debates in French parliament, they remain important in any consideration of French identity, not only in the political spectrum, but also in everyday cultural objects like food. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Billig, Michael. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage, 1995. Gerson, Stéphane. “The Local.” The French Republic: History, Values, Debate. Eds. Edward Berensen, Vincent Duclert, and Christophe Prochasson. London: Cornell UP, 2011. 213–20. Janey, Brigitte. “Frenchness in Perspective(s).” Hexagonal Varitations: Diversity, Plurality and Reinvention in Contemporary France. Eds Jo McCormack, Murray Pratt, and Alistair Rolls. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2011. 57–78. Jennings, Jeremy. “Citizenship, Republicanism and Multiculturalism in Contemporary France.” British Journal of Political Science 30 (2000): 575–98. Jennings, Jeremy. “Universalism.” The French Republic: History, Values, Debate. Eds. Edward Berensen, Vincent Duclert, and Christophe Prochasson. London: Cornell UP, 2011. Kurin, Richard, “Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage in the 2003 UNESCO Convention: A Critical Appraisal.” Museum International 56.1/2 (2004): 66–77. McCaffrey, Edna. The Gay Republic: Sexuality, Citizenship and Subversion in France. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Schnapper, Domonique. La Communauté des Citoyens. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Smith, Laurajane, and Natsuko Akagawa. Intangible Heritage. New York: Routledge, 2008. UNESCO. “Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage.” UNESCO, Culture Section 17 Oct. 2003. 12 Jun. 2013 ‹http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/convention›. UNESCO. “Dossier de Candidature : Le Repas Gastronomique des Français.” UNESCO, Culture Section. Nov. 2010. 12 Jun 2013 ‹http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/RL/00437›. UNESCO. “Nomination File: The Gastronomic Meal of the French.” UNESCO, Culture Section Nov. 2010. 12 Jun. 2013 ‹http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/RL/00437›. UNESCO. “Nomination File: Traditional Mexican Cuisine—Ancestral, Ongoing Community Culture, the Michoacán Paradigm.” UNESCO, Culture Section Nov. 2010. 12 Jun. 2013 ‹http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/en/RL/00400›. UNESCO. “What is Intangible Cultural Heritage?” UNESCO, Culture Section n.d. 12 Jun. 2013 ‹http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=en&pg=00002›.

The autobiographical documentary film “18q – a valuable life”, is one attempt to redefine the place of disability in contemporary western society. My work presents some key moments in my life and that of my family since the birth of my youngest child, Allycia in 1995. Allycia was born with a rare genetic condition affecting the 18th chromosome resulting in her experiencing the world somewhat differently to the rest of the family. The condition, which manifests in a myriad of ways with varying levels of severity, affects individuals’ physical and intellectual development (Chromosome 18, n. pag.). While the film outlines the condition and Allycia’s medical history, the work is primarily concerned with the experiences of the family and offering an alternate story of disability as “other”. Drawing on Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s notion of shape structuring story ("Shape") and Margrit Shildrick’s discussion of becoming vulnerable as theoretical foundations, I reflect on how the making of the film has challenged my previously held views about disability and ultimately about myself. The Film & Disability “18q – a valuable life” introduces a new, previously “invisible” shape in the form of bodies coded as Chromosome 18 to the screen. The initial impulse to make the film was driven by a need to provide a media presence for a rare genetic condition known collectively as Chromosome 18 (Chromosome 18, n. pag.) where previously there was none. This impulse was fuelled by a desire to tell a different story, our story; a story about what life can be like when a child with intellectual and physical impairment is born into one’s family. This different story is, in Garland Thompson’s terms, one that “insists that shape structures story” (114) and endeavours to contribute to recasting disability “as an occasion for exuberant flourishing” (Garland Thompson 114). The categorisation and depiction of people with disability in western society’s media have been scrutinised by many writers including Mitchell and Snyder ("Representations"; "Visual"), Oliver and Norden who point out that negatively charged stereotypical representations of the disabled continue to proliferate in the mediasphere. Englandkennedy for example examines the portrayal of the new disability classification Attention Deficit Disorder and is highly critical of its representation in programs such as The Simpsons (1989-2008) and films such as Pecker (1998). She asserts, “few media representations of ADD exist and most are inaccurate; they reflect and reinforce social concerns and negative stereotypes” (117) to the detriment of the condition being better understood by their audiences. However, Englandkennedy also identifies the positive possibilities for informed media representations that offer new models and stories about disability, citing works such as Children of a Lesser God (1986) and The Bone Collector (1999) as examples of shifts in fictional story telling modes. There are also shifts in recent documentary films such as My Flesh and Blood (2004), Tarnation (2003) and Murderball (2005) which provide insightful, powerful and engaging stories about disability. I suggest however that they still rely upon the stereotypical modes identified by numerous disability studies scholars. For example, Darke’s (n. pag.) heroic mother figure and disabled outsider and victim are depicted in the extreme in My Flesh and Blood and Tarnation respectively, whilst Murderball, as powerful as it is, still constructs disability as “something” to be overcome and is celebrated via the character construction of the “super-crip” (Englandkennedy 99). These stories are vital and insightful developments in challenging and re-shaping the many stigmas associated with disability, but they remain, for the most part, inaccessible to me in terms of my place in the world as a person parenting a little girl with physical and intellectual impairment. Able to Live The opening of the film features footage of my two older children Adam and Kristina, as “normal”, active children. These idyllic images are interrupted by an image of me by Allycia’s bedside where, as an infant, she is attached to life saving machines. She is at once “othered” to her active, healthy siblings. Her survival was reliant, and remains so, albeit to a much lesser extent, upon the intrusion of machines, administering of medication and the intervention of strangers. The prospect of her dying rendered me powerless, vulnerable; I lacked the means to sustain her life. To hand over my child to strangers, knowing they would carve her tiny chest open, suspend the beating of her already frail heart and attempt to repair it, was to surrender to the unknown without guarantees; the only surety being she would cease to be if I did not. Allycia survived surgery. This triumph however, was recast in the shadow of abnormality as outlined in the film when genetic screening of her DNA revealed she had been born with a rare genetic abnormality coded as 18q23 deletion. This information meant she was missing a part of her eighteenth chromosome and the literature available at that time (in 1997) gave little cause for hope – she was physically and intellectually retarded. This news, delivered to me by a genetic counsellor, was coupled with advice to ensure my daughter enjoyed “quality of life”. The words, “rare genetic abnormality” and “retarded” succeeded in effectively “othering” Allycia to me, to my other two children and the general population. My knowledge and experience with people with genetic abnormalities was minimal and synonymous with loss, sadness, suffering and sacrifice and had little to do with quality of life. She was frail and I was confronted with the loss of a “normal” child that would surely result in the “loss” of my own life when framed within this bleak, imagined life that lay before me; her disability, her otherness, her vulnerability signalled my own. As unpalatable as it is for me to use the word monstrous with reference to my daughter, Shildrick’s work, aligning the disabled experience with the monstrous and the possibility of becoming via a refiguring of vulnerability, resonates somewhat with my encounter with my vulnerable self. Schildrick proposes that “any being who traverses the liminal spaces that evade classification takes on the potential to confound normative identity” (6). As Allycia’s mother, I find Shildrick’s assertion that the monstrous “remains excessive of any category, it always claims us, always touches us and implicates us in its own becoming” (6) is particularly pertinent. This is not to say that Schildrick’s notion of the monstrous is an unproblematic one. Indeed Kaul reminds us that: to identify disabled bodies too closely with the monstrous seems to risk leaving us out of universal, as well as particular, experience, entirely in the figurative. (11) Schildrick’s notion of the universality of vulnerability however is implicit in her reference to that which confounds and disturbs us, and it is an important one. Clearly Allycia’s arrival has claimed me, touched me; I am intimately implicated in her becoming. I could not have anticipated however the degree to which she has been intertwined with my own becoming. Her arrival, in retrospect crystallised for me Shildrick’s proposition that “we are already without boundaries, already vulnerable” (6). The film does not shy away from the difficulties confronting Allycia and my family and other members of the chromosome 18 community. I have attempted however to portray our environment and culture as contributing factors and challenge the myth of medicine as a perfect science or answer to the myriad of challenges of navigating life with a disability in contemporary society. This was a difficult undertaking as I did not want the work to degenerate into one that was reliant on blame or continued in the construction of people with disability as victims. I have been mindful of balancing the sometimes painful reality of our lives with those moments that have brought us a sense of accomplishment or delight. Part of the delight of our lives is exemplified when my sister Julie articulates the difference in Allycia’s experiences as compared to her own nine year old daughter, Lydia. Julie succeeds in valorising Allycia’s freedom to be herself by juxtaposing her own daughter’s preoccupation with “what others think” and her level of self consciousness in social contexts. Julie also highlights Lydia’s awareness of Allycia’s difference, via narration over footage of Lydia assisting Allycia, and asserts that this role of becoming a helper is a positive attribute for Lydia’s development. Able to Laugh Including humour in the film was a vital ingredient in the reframing of disability in our lives and is employed as a device to enhance the accessibility of the text to an audience. The film is quite dialogue driven in furnishing background knowledge and runs the risk at times, when characters reveal some of their more painful experiences, of degenerating into a tale of despair. Humour acts as device to lift the overall mood of the film. The humour is in part structured by my failures and incompetence – particularly in reference to my command (or rather lack) of public transport both in Australia and overseas. While the events depicted did occur – my missing a ferry and losing our way in the United States – their inclusion in the film is used as a device to show me, as the able bodied person; the adult ‘able’ mother, with flaws and all. This deliberate act endeavours to re-shape the “heroic mother” stereotype. A wistful form of humour also emerges when my vulnerability becomes apparent in a sequence where I break down and cry, feeling the burden in that moment of the first eleven years of Allycia’s life. Here Allycia as carer emerges as she uses our favourite toy to interrupt my crying, succeeding in turning my tears into a gentle smile. Her maturity and ability to connect with my sadness and the need to make me feel better are apparent and serve to challenge the status of intellectual impairment as burden. This sequence also served to help me laugh at myself in quite a different way after spending many hours confronted with the many faces that are mine during the editing process. I experienced a great deal of discomfort in front of the camera due to feelings of self-consciousness and being on display. That discomfort paled into insignificance when I then had to watch myself on the monitor and triggered a parallel journey alongside the making of the film as I continued to view myself over time. Those images showing my distress, my face contorted with tears as I struggled to maintain control made me cry for quite a while afterwards. I felt a strange empathy for myself – as if viewing someone else’s pain although it was mine, simultaneously the same and other. Chris Sarra’s “notion of a common core otherness as constituting the essence of human being” is one that resonates closely with these aspects. Sarra reinterprets Bhaskar (5) arguing that “we should regard the same as a tiny ripple on the sea of otherness”, enabling us “to enshrine the right to be other” capturing “something of the wonder and strangeness of being” (5). Over time I have become used to seeing these images and have laughed at myself. I believe becoming accustomed to seeing myself, aging as I have during these years, has been a useful process. I have become "more" comfortable with seeing that face, my face in another time. In essence I have been required to sit with my own vulnerabilities and have gained a deeper acceptance of my own fragility and in a sense, my own mortality. This idea of becoming “used to”, and more accepting of the images I was previously uncomfortable with has given me a renewed hope for our community in particular, the disability community in general. My experience I believe indicates the potential for us, as we become more visible, to be accepted in our difference. Critical to this is the need for us to be seen in the fullness of human experience, including our capacity to experience laughter and love and the delight these experiences bring to our lives and those around us. These experiences are captured exquisitely when Allycia sees her newfound chromosome 18 friends, Martin and Kathryn kissing one another. She reacts in much the same way I expect other little girls might in a similar situation. She is simultaneously “grossed out” and intrigued, much to our delight. It is a lovely spontaneous moment that says much in the space of a minute about Martin and Kathryn, and about Allycia’s and my relationship. For me there is a beauty, there is honesty and there is transparency. Able to Love My desire for this film is similar to Garland Thomson’s desire for her writing to “provide access to some elements of my community to both disabled and non disabled audiences alike” (122). I felt part of the key to making the film “work” was ensuring it remained accessible to as wide an audience as possible and began with a naive optimism that the film could defy stereotypical story lines. I discovered this accessibility I desired was reliant upon the traditions of storytelling; language, the construction of character and the telling of a journey demanded an engagement in ways we collectively identify and understand (Campbell). I found our lives at times, became stereotypical. I had moments of feeling like a victim; Allycia as a dancer could well be perceived as a “supercrip” and the very act of making a film about my daughter could be viewed as a heroic one. The process resulted in my surrendering to working within a framework that relies upon, all too often, character construction that is stereotypical. I felt despondent many times upon realising the emergence of these in the work, but held onto the belief that something new could be shown by exposing “two narrative currents which are seldom included in the usual stories we tell about disability: sexuality and community” (Garland Thompson 114). The take on sexuality is a gentle one, concerned with emerging ideologies surrounding sexuality in our community. This is a new phenomenon in terms of the “place” of sexuality and intimacy within our community. One of our parents featured in the film makes this clear when he explains that the community is watching a new romance blossom “with interest” (18q) and that this is a new experience for us as a whole. In focussing on sexuality, my intention is to provoke discussion about perceptions surrounding people categorised as intellectually impaired and their capacity to love and build intimate relationships and the possibilities this presents for the chromosome 18 community. The theme of community features significantly in the film as audiences become privy to conferences attended by, in one instance, 300 people. My intention here is to “make our mark”. There has been no significant filmic presence of Chromosome 18. The condition is rare, but when those affected by it are gathered together, a significantly “bigger picture” of is presented where previously there was none. The community is a significant support network for families and is concerned with becoming empowered by knowledge, care and advocacy. The transcendence of global and cultural boundaries becomes apparent in the film as these differences become diminished in light of our greater need to connect with each others’ experiences in life as, or with, people born with genetic difference. The film highlights the supportive, educated and joyful “shape” of our community. In presenting our community I hope too that western society’s preoccupation with normativity and ableism (Goggin) is effectively challenged. In presenting a version of life that “destabilises the system and points up its inadequacy as a model of existential relations”, I am also demonstrating what Shildrick calls “unreflected excess, that which is other than the same” (105). The most significant shift for me has been to refigure my ideas about Allycia as an adult. When I was given her medical prognosis I believed she would be my responsibility for the rest of my life. I did not hold a lot of hope for the future and could not have possibly entertained the idea that she may live independently or heaven forbid, she may enter into an intimate adult relationship; such was my experience with the physically and intellectually impaired. Thankfully I have progressed. This progression has been, in part, due to attending a Chromosome 18 conference in Boston in 2007 where we met Kathryn and Martin, a young couple in the early stages of building a relationship. This is a new phenomenon in our community. Kathryn and Martin were born with chromosome 18 deletions. Meeting them and their families has signalled new possibilities for our children and their opportunities and their right to explore intimate adult relationships. Their relationship has given me confidence to proceed with an open mind regarding Allycia’s adulthood and sexuality. Conclusion The very act of making the film was one that would inevitably render me vulnerable. Placing myself before the camera has given me a new perspective on vulnerability as a state that simultaneously disempowers and empowers me. I could argue this process has given me a better understanding of Allycia’s place in the world, but to do this is to deny our differences. Instead I believe the experience has given me a renewed perspective in embracing our differences and has also enabled me to see how much we are alike. My understanding of myself as both “able” and “othered”, and the ensuing recognition of, and encounter with, my vulnerable self have in some measure, come as a result of being continually confronted with images of myself in the editing process. But more than this, reflecting upon the years since Allycia’s birth I have come to a more intimate understanding and acceptance of myself as a consequence of knowing Allycia. Whereas my experience has been a matter of will, Allycia’s contribution is in the fact that she simply is. These experiences have given me renewed hope of acceptance of people of difference - that over time we as a society may become used to seeing the different face and the different behaviours that often accompany the experience of people living with genetic difference. References Bhaskar, R. Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. London: Verso, 1993. Campbell, J. The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work. California: New World Library, 2003 Caouette, J. Tarnation. Dir. J. Caouette. DVD. 2004. Chromosome 18. "Chromosome 18 Research & Registry Society." 2008. 3 March 2008 ‹http://www.chromosome18.org/›. Darke, P. "The Cinematic Construction of Physical Disability as Identified through the Application of the Social Model of Disability to Six Indicative Films Made since 1970: A Day In The Death of Joe Egg (1970), The Raging Moon (1970), The Elephant Man (1980), Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1981), Duet for One (1987) and My Left Foot (1989)." 1999. 10 Feb. 2006 ‹http://www.darke.info/›. Englandkennedy, E. “Media Representations of Attention Deficit Disorder: Portrayals of Cultural Skepticism in Popular Media.” Journal of Popular Culture 41.1 (2008): 91-118. Garland Thomson, R. “Shape Structures Story: Fresh and Feisty Stories about Disability.” Narrative 15.1 (2007): 113-123. –––. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997. Goggin, G. Division One: Bodies of Knowledge. 2002. 10 Feb. 2006 ‹http://adt.library.qut.edu.au/adt-qut/uploads/approved/adt-QUT20041123.160628/public/02whole.pdf›. Groening, M. The Simpsons. 20th Century Fox Television. 1989-2008. Iacone, J. The Bone Collector. Dir. P. Noyce. DVD. Columbia Pictures Corporation, 1999. Karsh, J. My Flesh and Blood. DVD. San Francisco: Chaiken Films, 2004. Kaul, K. Figuring Disability in Disability Studies: Theory, Policy and Practice. Toronto: York University, 2003. Medoff, M. Children of a Lesser God. Dir. R. Haines. Paramount Pictures, 1986. Mitchell, D. T., and S. L. Snyder. "Representation and Its Discontents: The Uneasy Home of Disability in Literature and Film." In Handbook of Disability Studies, eds. G. L. Albrecht, K. D. Seelman, and M. Bury. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001. 195-218. –––. “The Visual Foucauldian: Institutional Coercion and Surveillance in Frederick Wiseman's Multi-Handicapped Documentary Series.” Journal of Medical Humanities 24.3 (2003): 291. Norden, M.F. The Cinema of Isolation. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994 Oliver, M. The Politics of Disablement. The Disability Archive UK. University of Leeds, 1990. 3 April 2005 ‹http://www.leeds.ac.uk/disability-studies/archiveuk/Oliver/p%20of%20d%20oliver4.pdf›. Rubin, H. A., and D. A. Shapiro. Murderball. DVD. Paramount Pictures, 2005. Sarra, C. Chris Sarra & The Other. Unpublished manuscript, 2005. Shildrick, M. Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self. London: Sage, 2002.Wain, Veronica. 18q – A Valuable Life. Prod. V. Wain. 2008. Waters, J. Pecker. Videocassette. Polar Entertainment, 1998.

Introduction Australia’s mobile communications industry has been slower to embrace the convergence of digital communication technology compared to other areas of the Asia-Pacific region, in particular Japan. However, the introduction of new mobile networks and spread of broadband (albeit still limited in some areas) has given Australians opportunities to experience the new technosocial communications. As a result mobile communication resources have become embedded within a sociocultural infrastructure that is at once mobile, personalised and consumerist. This paper examines how the iGeneration (or ‘Internet Generation’, those born in the first half of the 1980s and who were the first to grow up in a networked and communications media driven society) of young Australians have taken up and embraced the mobile technologies as part of their everyday sociability. This journal issue is concerned to understand the significance of the convergence of mobile media. In this paper ‘mobile’ is taken to refer to the range of digital media that are owned and used by the iGeneration. These can include mobile phones, laptops, computers alongside an array of other digital social software and Web 2.0 resources such as email, Social Networking Systems (SNS), e.g. Facebook, that enable individuals to situate themselves and communicate across their social networks. The discussion that follows will touch on all of these mobile communication resources. It is argued that these should be seen as more than technical tools, as they offer a constant ‘tether’ to personalised and intimate connections (Ito et al, 2005). This in itself is significant because the emphasis is on a digitally mobile and connected sociability rather than any single device or piece of software. It will be concluded that this connected sociability means that for the iGeneration there is a seamless movement across what has been previously depicted as an off/online and disembodied dichotomy. Researching the iGeneration The paper draws on the data from 40 in-depth and open-ended interviews with undergraduate students who were in the last term of their first year at University in Australia in 2006. The conventions of anonymity have been followed to ensure that no individual may be identified. All interviews were digitally recorded (with permission) and detailed analysis undertaken utilising AtlasTi. The analysis involved identifying themes and issues as they emerged from reading and re-reading of the data. This group was chosen as they had established non-university social networks and new connections amongst university peers. The focus on what constitutes one of the more privileged sections of young people in terms of education, if not material resources, is appropriate in a study that seeks to explore those who are likely to be able to take advantage of innovative communications technology. Extracts from the interview data for this paper, are not intended to be representative, but rather are used for illustrative purposes. Mobile Life The diffusion of communications media has become ubiquitous amongst the iGeneration who are socially, temporally and spatially mobile and likely to immerse themselves in their social connections. This is a generation that has been said to “inhabit a different world” (Muller), where seemingly unregulated flows of information and methods of staying in touch with others ‘situate’ social lives as part of mobile sociability. Part of this more mobile sociability is the crossover between global and localised connections. Indeed, globalisation theorists have emphasised how the world is characterised by the flows of such information. Urry has paid particular attention to the forms of mobility that take place in a society characterised by the exchange and sharing of information and communication practices. This paper has a narrower focus and is concerned with what might be thought of as ‘local’ communicative practices between people situated in the same city and at the same, but dispersed, institutions. Mobile communications technology takes on an increasingly ‘invisible’ sociotechnological power that underlies the structure and shapes the experience of everyday sociability and relationships (Graham). Identified as “Digital Natives” by Prensky these individuals ‘thrive’ on their constant connectivity to one another. The following quote reflects the sentiments of many of the students interviewed: I would never be without my phone, or at least having some way of being in touch with my friends. People tend to have ties everywhere now and I find that I am always in touch at the click of a button anytime. (Jon) Key to social interaction for the iGeneration is to be constantly ‘switched on’ and available to others. Significantly, the mediated aspects of mobile technology means that social connections are valued for their ‘liveness’, whereby interactions are expected to take place in ‘real time’. In this way the iGeneration have become both the producers and consumers of ‘live’ content where personal engagements are ‘active’. This ensures that individuals are (and are seen to be) socially and digitally engaged. The new social practices that form part of an ‘on-the-go’ and ‘ever-current’ lifestyle means that to be ‘in touch’ has taken on a new symbolic and social form. All 40 of the students interviewed mentioned that they could not ‘imagine’ being detached from their social networks, or without some form of communication device on their person. The relationship between previously defined on and offline lives, or ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ situations are not separate entities in this context. Instead they are inextricably linked together as the individual is continually socially connected. Individuals are part of a constant present-ness and engagement to what is experienced as a lived or ‘worldspace’, rather than static ‘real’/’virtual’ world duality (Steinberg cited by White). As a result members of the iGeneration have to maintain two active and dynamic social presences, one that is ‘real’ world and the other that is virtual. They are always ‘situated’ in both their embodied and disembodied digital lives, and yet this is a duality that many do not consciously recognise as they move ‘seamlessly’ across different venues for sociability. In order to remain ‘up-to-date’ communication strategies are employed, as one student explained: Things are changing so fast, like you go away for just one day and you are just so out of the loop, things change continually and it’s nice to be part of that. It’s hard if you miss a message because then you are behind and don’t know what’s going on… you have to continue to make the effort if you want to stay in touch. (Kim) In Goffman’s classic analysis of face-to-face interaction he revealed the complexity of social communication and the nuanced use of ‘props’ and ‘backstage work’. In a similar fashion the mediated and real time interaction amongst the iGeneration is full of symbolic meanings and rituals. Ironically in what is often thought of as a disembodied sociability, where time and place cease to matter, it is the immediacy or live presence that is valued. Thus social life rotates around the emergence of a set of continually updated communications between individuals. Social relationships are ‘reworked’ as mobile communications introduces a new layer of social connectiveness. The process of communicating with someone is not just about what is expressed, but includes a set of subjective meanings as to the ‘whom’ an individual is and value of a relationship. Successful communication and development of relations through technology require the engagement of the self with shared social conventions and representations. Mobile technology has enabled a whole generation to mobilise relationships and connections whilst ‘on the move’ in a way that strengthen social bonds and facilitates a sense of social connectedness (Wei and Lo). Getting to Know Each Other For members of the iGeneration traditional forms of social meetings, and indeed settings, have become modified to take into account constant social connectivity. Students employ technologies to provide new ways of ‘getting-to-know’ others and to develop relationships. In particular, SNS is used to find out about potential new friends by drawing on the profiles and connections that are displayed on resources such as Facebook. Profiles involve the creation of a virtual ‘identity’ that represents an individual and may include digital photographs, music, a detailed self-description, lists of interests and of other ‘friends’ etc. Sites such as Facebook are popular because (at the time the research was undertaken) they require an email address from an academic institution in order to join. Consequently, users trusted the information displayed on these sites and rarely questioned whether the descriptions that they read were accurate (Jones and Soltren). Not only would it be seen as breaking communicative norms to, for example fabricate an identity on Facebook, it would also be a fabrication that would be difficult to maintain across the various media that are in use. Indeed it would be ultimately pointless in terms of a sociability that moves across media and between the virtual and non-virtual domains. Such sites are geared to the student population and it is often taken-for-granted that amongst students that they will have a Facebook profile. Reflecting this university clubs and societies distribute notices of events and so forth through Facebook. Individual profiles may also display mobile phone numbers and other points of contact so that the online descriptions of the self are linked to other forms of connection. As this Melbourne student explains, these resources provide new means of ‘getting to know’ others. The way in is different now if you are getting to know someone, before maybe you went out a few times and got to know their circle of friends, but now you can check out their MySpace profile, or send them a message on Facebook BEFORE you meet up. Just by messaging each other you know that there’s no awkwardness or danger of gaps in conversation before you get together. (Tom) In effect the individual is digitally represented in a range of digital spaces so that a stranger can imagine or construct a sense of the ‘real’ person without ‘knowing’ or engaging with them. Such imaginings represent an important means of being on familiar terms with others and the ‘social value’ or individuals ‘place’ within a social network (Gotved). In the early stages of becoming acquainted with someone the status of the individual was related to the how frequently they were contacted and the form of interaction that took place. As noted earlier Goffman’s (1978 [1959]) work is useful as social ceremonies and rules for interaction can be detected although these are often taken-for-granted unless people are prompted to talk about how they communicate with others. They are perhaps best exemplified by the following descriptions from students talking about how they ‘got-to-know’ one another at the beginning of the university term: When you are getting to know someone it’s interesting to see if they’ll message you or call, then your like ‘oh he’s a caller’ and can go from there. (Emma) If I don’t know the person well I like to text, I am not good on the phone and so it creates a way to say ‘hi’ without the danger of awkward gaps. Then you find yourself messaging back and forth and can meet up later… (Katie) You have to play to their agenda otherwise you never hook up. (Stu) Instant messaging like on MSN or texts or whatever totally helps with getting to know someone. Before you meet up you can find out whether you’ll get on or not and whether it’s worth you while meeting up. Kind of like a filtering process. (Dan) This mediated process may involve text messages, emails and mobile calls before individuals meet offline. Members of the iGeneration therefore use an integrated set of devices and software resources to initiate and maintain friendship networks. In effect the often-rich descriptions created in SNS reflect a visualisation of what Bourdieu has described as ‘habitus’. This notion of habitus, that can basically be seen as set of acquired dispositions is appropriate, as “when habitus encounters a social world of which it is the product, it is like a “fish in water” ... it takes the world about itself for granted” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 127). This neatly describes how the iGeneration incorporates mobile communications technology into their everyday lives. An Etiquette for Mobility The ‘rules’, attitudes and expectations, that come into play as part of these new mobile communication practices continue to remain tied to a recognised and preconceived social ordering. Indeed, one of the most important aspects of this kind of mobile communication is the adherence to a set of social rules through which individuals continually control the process of interaction itself. This includes for example, the pace of communication, when to text, to make a voice call, or to email, and so forth. Galloway has argued that there is a “decidedly playful” aspect to mobile interaction. However, a range of communicative strategies underwrites this ‘play’ as periods of non-contactability have to be ‘justified’ or explained. If such episodes are not explained these can become problematic, generate misunderstandings or cause anxieties within networks and emergent relationships. Indeed, the “simple fact of carrying a mobile phone generates in the carrier the expectation of being immediately available” (Licoppe and Heurtin 100). For this reason a sense of disappointment, or cause for concern, may be experienced if an individual receives for example no text messages for a period of time. Amongst those students who were in regular contact with one other a set of what can be thought of as ‘communicative regimes’ is negotiated. These arise out of social practices for connectivity that are part of virtual and face-to-face meetings. Such negotiations may be largely implicit but occur out of a shared sense of ‘knowing’ the other. Actions or non-actions such as not answering a voice call or responding to a message straight away can be seen as a social distancing. For example, a student talked about how he always immediately returned a text message to his housemate because “it was expected” and to delay a response without an explanation would not be seen as an appropriate response to a “close mate” (Riley). Consequently communication regimes are developed around relationships and may be layered in terms of status within a peer group. For the iGeneration such practices reflect what in pervious times would have been thought of as etiquette. It is interesting to note that at the time of writing this paper there were 11 global groups with some 2,870 members on Facebook dedicated to what is described as ‘Facebook etiquette’. Conclusion A purpose of this paper is to suggest that recent changes in the provision of information and communications services in Australia have created new opportunities for an iGeneration to incorporate the technologies within their everyday lives. There are similarities here with the practices found amongst young people in Japan, South Korea and other counties that have some of the most advanced publicly available communications infrastructures (Ito et al). It is worth noting that 3rd Generation mobile phones, and video technologies are less common in Australia, hence future convergence remains open to speculation and dependent upon improved network infrastructures and marketing. The emphasis in Australia is on the seamless use of different mobile communications technologies and the embedding of these within broader social practices. The convenience and ‘pocketability’ of communications devices has become one of the most important innovations for an iGeneration that desires communication, information and entertainment accessible in the palm of their hand, a first step “towards a digital paradise” (Standage). However, care has to be taken to differentiate between media and marketing hype and actual social practices. Commentaries and research in the early days of the Internet tended to focus on the possibilities it offered to escape the fleshy body through the screen into new identities, genders and bodily forms (Turkle; Haraway). While there are resources such as Second Life that provide a means to escape form the embodied self the main concern of the iGeneration is to promote sociability across the digital and real worlds. One reinforces and reflects the other so that the virtual self is always anchored in the embodied self. It is the convergence of the self through such representations that whilst not exactly embodied in a physical sense refer to a ‘real’ physicality and presence. This suggest that in terms of social practices for the iGeneration the virtual/place dichotomy is unhelpful and as Daniel Miller and Don Slater note “we need to treat Internet media as continuous with and embedded in other social spaces” (5). The convergence of mobile communicative resources highlighted in this paper and their embodiment into social practices suggests that users may have little more to gain in terms of sociability from, for example, streaming video on mobile phones. The emotive experience of being ‘in touch’ with one another remains a fundamental amongst the iGeneration who draw upon a range of mobile media and social software to form and sustain interactions. Such connections are conducted through a more or less nuanced set of communicative regimes that move across what for them is a seamless landscape of mediated and off line resources and relationships. References Bourdieu, Pierre, and L. Wacquant. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978 [1959]. Gotved, S. “Time and Space in Cyber Social Reality.” New Media and Society 8.3 (2006): 467-486. Graham, S. “Beyond the ‘Dazzling Light’: From Dreams of Transcendence to the ‘Remediation’.” New Media Society 6 (2004): 16-25. Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Ito, Mizuko, Daisuke Okabe, and Misa Matsuda. Personal, Portable Pedestrian. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005. Harvey Jones, H., and J.H. Soltren. “Facebook: Threats to Privacy.” MIT, Dec. 2005. 6 Feb. 2007 http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/6.805/student-papers/fall05-papers/ facebook.pdf>. Licoppe, Christian, and J.P. Heurtin. “Managing One’s Availability to Telephone Communication through Mobile Phones.” Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 5 (201): 99-108. Miller, Daniel, and Don Slater. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Muller, D. “Y Bother? This Generation Inhabits a Different World.” Sydney Morning Herald 3 Oct. 2006. Prensky, M. “The Emerging Online Life of the Digital Native.” Marcprensky.com 2004. 2 Jan. 2007 http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/default.asp>. Standage, T. “Your Television Is Ringing.” The Economist: A Special Report on the Future of Telecoms. 14-20 Oct. 2006. Turkle, S. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Urry, John. “Mobile Sociology.” British Journal of Sociology 51.1 (2000): 185-203. White, M. “Television and Internet Differences by Design.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 12.3 (2006): 341-355. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hardey, Mariann. "Going Live: Converging Mobile Technology and the Sociability of the iGeneration." M/C Journal 10.1 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0703/09-hardey.php>. APA Style Hardey, M. (Mar. 2007) "Going Live: Converging Mobile Technology and the Sociability of the iGeneration," M/C Journal, 10(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0703/09-hardey.php>.

The plausibility of a ‘celebrity-artist’ is met with scepticism, suspicion and/or outright disdain amongst those who guard the traditions surrounding the exclusionary world of ‘High Art’. As a construct unique to the advent of media culture, the vapid and transient nature associated with contemporary celebrity negates the high-minded notion of genius retrospectively applied to a ‘hero-artist’ such as Michelangelo or Rembrandt. (Chris Rojek’s categories are useful in illustrating this difference. While the celebrity of earlier artists was based on talent, and thus, ‘achieved celebrity’, current media-generated celebrity, or what Rojek terms ‘celetoid’, is transient and artificially generated.) For media-celebrity is an immediately accessible veneer, a stopgap in our moments of boredom, and a point of ‘other’ against which we situate our desires, not expected to provide anything more or less significant than mass-entertainment. This contradicts or otherwise undermines the anticipation that Art express the ‘profound’, possess ‘essence’ if not ‘beauty’, or be part of the politically-motivated avant-garde. The two-dimensional world of ‘media-ted culture’ (a term I use to describe the manner in which the media mediates culture, as opposed to mass culture which presupposes a top-down construction of culture denying the free-play of signs and free-will of cultural consumption), with its attribute capitalist underpinnings, complicates the depth and emancipatory potential of Art, and, by extension, appears to threaten the entire elitist infrastructure of the Artworld by association to or blending with ‘mass culture’. In addition to a general malaise fuelled by the troublesome notion of a ‘Culture Industry’, these ideological Artworld constants maintain their position in the post-postmodern Nineties as the curmudgeonly core of criticism, particularly that scripted within the realm of the ‘popular’ media, aimed at contemporary art and its celebrity occupants. In his text Art and Celebrity, John Walker discusses the career trajectory of British-born artist Damien Hirst remarking that some critics “regard him as a frivolous clown whose showmanship robs art of its dignity” and further, “think his work has contributed to the dumbing down, coarsening and vulgarisation of British culture” (Walker 247). The relationship of the character of the artist to the form of his artworks, I will assert, is not an organic occurrence but a media-ted one. As an artist whose media-persona appeared to be driven by fame and the excesses and lifestyle it afforded, and who created work which seemed to reflect a rather disinterested, dispirited and dismissive attitude similar to that persona, Hirst finds himself in the conundrum of having become an artist whose financial success and art historical dilemma is his relationship to those self-same processes he utilized to achieve success at the start of his career. I will briefly sketch the mechanisms which led to Hirst’s definition within the purview of the popular, and follow by suggesting an art historical repositioning of his work. Damien Hirst currently enjoys a peaceful, rural existence as the third highest-paid British artist alive today, having sky-rocketed to success in the Nineties as the ‘founder’ of the loose-knit group known as ‘young British art’. A product of the can-do attitude associated with Thatcherism and encouraged by his teachers, particularly the American-born Conceptualist Michael Craig-Martin, Hirst actively participated within the endorsement of his works and those of his London-based Goldsmith College classmates. Freeze, his first attempt at curation, has taken on mythic status in defining the group, and its professional gloss — particularly within its marketing strategy — is viewed as the precursor to an artistic disposition far more interested in fame and fortune, than form. (For a full discussion of Freeze, from a particularly Marxist perspective, see Stallabrass. His rebranding of ‘young British art’ into ‘High Art Lite’ sums up his position quite precisely. For a more light-hearted approach, see Collings.) As he progressed in his career during the early Nineties, and in conjunction with the promotional savvy of his dealer Jay Jopling, Hirst received frequent mention in specialist and popular media alike, quickly becoming known as young British art’s enfant-terrible. His lewd public behaviour, when collapsed as a single performance with his Art, was construed as a media-friendly spectacle which actively sought to attract the voyeuristic gaze of popular culture. This ploy appeared to work. Due to the familiarity granted by extensive media coverage, his images were subsequently co-opted within a number of marketplaces, ranging from film to advertising. For the first time in Britain an unusual cultural twist placed the world of High Art, embodied within the media-ted-performance-installation piece ‘Damien Hirst’, squarely within the realm of everyday experience. The ubiquity of his forms prompted friend/author Gordon Burn to pronounce that Britain was now under the influence of “a new intangible poetry becoming part of modern life” (Burn 10), or, in other words, had entered ‘Hirstworld’. Although the collapsing of work and artist within the realm of ‘modern life’ has art historical precedents, most obviously within the oeuvre of Andy Warhol, Hirst created a juxtaposition within his personality which largely undermined notions of what constituted the ‘Artist’. In contrast with Warhol’s eclectic ‘artsy’ public persona, Hirst presented himself as an average ‘Northern lad’: rowdy, temperamental, beer-swilling. His antics were part of the common cultural vernacular and when viewed in conjunction with the supposed media-friendly nature of his works, as Rosie Millard reflects, “Even if they hated it, people felt like they could have an opinion, because they understood what was going on” (Millard 21). Yet what did the public really understand, and how did they come to understand it? While a higher than normal attendance at the Sensation exhibit was regarded as an indicator of the success of young British art, the vast majority of the non-specialist audience commenting on these works based their assessment and interpretation of them on the exposure granted them by the mass media. The media-tion of yBa, particularly in the flagrant reporting of the artists’ statements and antics, flattened complexities or intertextual meanings into a by-line, which was meant to capture the imagination of a new audience for contemporary art in an easily consumable form. Although specialist criticism predictably ran the gambit, popular criticism was quite often disparaging or otherwise derogatory, and almost always took a biographical approach to describing the objects. Thus, what the public appeared to ‘understand’ was related much more to the hype and celebrity surrounding the artists, particularly the main protagonist Hirst, than of any issue related to form, appreciation or the history of art. Even more detrimentally, this conflation of art with biography led to many misunderstandings related to form, particularly in the assumption of its intention as ‘shock-art’ (as in Sister Wendy’s statement – see Wroe). An editorial letter printed in The Times points to this problem: “I am sure I am speaking for the general public when I say that these exhibits are not challenging, not clever, not funny and certainly not art” (Taylor 5; italics are mine). Outside of the media attention it garnered, young British art was as incomprehensible to its public as contemporary Art ever had been, even if the personalities of the artists and their motifs were easily recognizable. The notoriously fickle British were suspect of the equation: shark in formaldehyde = art. As Andrew Graham-Dixon notes, “They distrust the modern artist for old-fashioned puritanical reasons, being suspicious of any work of art which appears, to them, to have involved little work. They also suspect modern art of trying to fool them with a spurious jiggery-pokery” (Graham-Dixon 202). And perhaps more significantly, a class system which remained highly stratified continued to be firmly in place in the Nineties and was intensely critical regarding the allotment of government funds. (A well-documented incidence of this is the public outcry that occurred after the Tate purchased a work by Carl Andrew consisting solely of a line of firebrick.) The only thing that seemed shocking to the public was the promotion of the decadent young British artists with their spurious forms and high-fashion lifestyle. Exposure to the allegory of yBa led to the over-riding sentiment: ‘I could make that too, now give me my fame!’ (Incidences of this were rampant in the papers, i.e. members of the ‘working-class’ were shown displaying fish and chips in the gallery, other papers suggested ways to make-your-own Hirst; for one example, see Independent.) Not only did media-ted biography influence public opinion, but it infiltrated specialist art writing as well. Creating a direct link between biography and subject, Burn conflates objects which could be read as expressing an element of alienation with Hirst’s ‘predicament’ as a celebrity figure: “Celebrity is about control and distance; it is about adding space to the space that inevitably exists between human beings and remaining apart from the flock” (Burn 10; clearly co-opting Hirst’s vitrine sculpture of a lamb caught in mid-leap Away From The Flock to highlight this sentiment.) This sort of psychoanalytical approach edges, at best, slightly out of the realm of persona and into that of the personal. Either type of reading is regarded by Julian Stallabrass as possible only because of an intentional ambiguity on the part of the artist which allows the art object to posture as Art. For instance, Hirst provides sweeping generalizations regarding his objects, often associating them to the ‘grand narratives’ of life and death, and is at times even contradictory, employing a vague multi-referentiality which Stallabrass feels heightens the sense of ‘something important going on’. (Stallabrass suggests this is accomplished by utilizing theory without either acknowledgement or political/emancipatory intent in order to provide an illusion of sophistication. Hirst thus presents ‘The Death of the Author’, an art which appears to speak to intertextuality, only to make effectual use of it.) While Stallabrass’s own critique of yBa also conflates the persona of the artist with the artworks, he feels the media-tion of the artists has worked in their favour: “…behaviour and object-making together, fosters a feeling that it must be authentic because of its intimate link with the artist’s self, no matter how sham that self may be” (Stallabrass 247). The success of yBa is, therefore, based on a mythology regarding the persona of the artist, and a misreading of works that are otherwise “[a] combination of Hammer-style schlock and high-art minimalist rigour” (Stallabrass 26). Both of these critiques point to the central issue in an assessment of yBa (and a perennial problem for contemporary art in general): the possibilities of interpretation. In yBa in particular, interpretation has become a problem based on the conflation of the persona of the artist with their works, which I would attest is part of a larger problem regarding the confusion surrounding the relationship between the aesthetic and the spectacle, and the difficulties each term represents in popular and academic discourse alike. In the instance of Damien Hirst, the outcome of this confusion is an inability to accurately historicize the objects which comprise his oeuvre, additionally denying its aesthetic potential and dismissing the climate in which it was created. Unarguably, Hirst’s art contemplates the experience of life: as a cultural phenomenon in its contemplation of spectacular society, and as a tenuous state of embodiment, of the conditions in which we experience a state of ‘alive’. His objects (as signs or texts) provide a means to consider the dynamics in which human beings experience aesthetics, as well as providing an experience of that experience: systems which emphasize the sentient experience of phenomenology. The significance of the legacy of Hirst’s art (and of yBa generally) has already begun to be written in relation to its interaction with the media: as “conceptual work in visually accessible and spectacular form” (Stallabrass 4). While it would be disingenuous to suggest that Hirst has not capitalized or intentionally pandered to the media attention he received, it would be equally naïve to presume that his effort is purely a charade, or a mass-manipulation. The conflation of a media-ted biography with form negates the more significant aspects of Hirst’s work and its various dialogues with visual culture, the viewers in that culture and otherwise, and the history of visual objects, while simultaneously undermining the relative value of the image within contemporary society generally by association to capitalism and art-as-production. Perhaps there is a middle-ground between the Death of the Author, and Obsession with the Author? In reconsidering the aesthetic as a dialectical and culturally-bound sentient response resulting from interaction with an art object and experienced beyond the constraints of the beautiful, the importance of the first-hand interaction with art returns, shifting would-be viewers away from the water-cooler and back to the wonder of the art-experience in its many spectacular guises. References Burn, Gordon. “Hirstworld.” The Guardian 31 Aug. 1996: 10. Collings, Matthew. Blimey! From Bohemia to Britpop: The London Artworld from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst. London: 21 Publishing Ltd., 1997. Graham-Dixon, Andrew. A History of British Art. Los Angeles: U of California P, 202. The Independent. “Review: Damien Hirst: DIY for Enthusiasts.” 18 Sep. 1997: 9. Millard, Rosie. The Tastemakers: UK Art Now. London: Thames and Hudson, 2001. Rojek, Chris. Celebrity. London: Reaktion Books, 2001. Stallabrass, Julian. High Art Lite. London: Verso, 1999. Taylor, Grace. “Unpleasant Sensation.” Magazine Letter. The Times 27 Sep. 1997: 5. Walker, John A. Art and Celebrity. London: Pluto Press, 2003. Wroe, Martin. “Sister Wendy Puts Boot into Damien.” The Guardian 12 May 1996. Citation reference for this article MLA Style LeBlanc, Carrie. "Stop Press!: Sister Wendy Refers to the Work of Celebrity-Artist Damien Hirst as 'Gossip Shock-Horror Art'!." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/13-leblanc.php>. APA Style LeBlanc, C. (Nov. 2004) "Stop Press!: Sister Wendy Refers to the Work of Celebrity-Artist Damien Hirst as 'Gossip Shock-Horror Art'!," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/13-leblanc.php>.

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

This article investigates the prosthesis of identity through the process of branding. It examines cross-cultural manifestations of this phenomena from sixth millennium BCE Syria to twelfth century Japan and Britain. From the Neolithic Era, humanity has sort to extend their identities using pictorial signs that were characteristically simple. Designed to be distinctive and instantly recognisable, the totemic symbols served to signal the origin of the bearer. Subsequently, the development of branding coincided with periods of increased in mobility both in respect to geography and social strata. This includes fifth millennium Mesopotamia, nineteenth century Britain, and America during the 1920s.There are fewer articles of greater influence on contemporary culture than A Theory of Human Motivation written by Abraham Maslow in 1943. Nearly seventy-five years later, his theories about the societal need for “belongingness” and “esteem” remain a mainstay of advertising campaigns (Maslow). Although the principles are used to sell a broad range of products from shampoo to breakfast cereal they are epitomised by apparel. This is with refence to garments and accessories bearing corporation logos. Whereas other purchased items, imbued with abstract products, are intended for personal consumption the public display of these symbols may be interpreted as a form of signalling. The intention of the wearers is to literally seek the fulfilment of the aforementioned social needs. This article investigates the use of brands as prosthesis.Coats and Crests: Identity Garnered on Garments in the Middle Ages and the Muromachi PeriodA logo, at its most basic, is a pictorial sign. In his essay, The Visual Language, Ernest Gombrich described the principle as reducing images to “distinctive features” (Gombrich 46). They represent a “simplification of code,” the meaning of which we are conditioned to recognise (Gombrich 46). Logos may also be interpreted as a manifestation of totemism. According to anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, the principle exists in all civilisations and reflects an effort to evoke the power of nature (71-127). Totemism is also a method of population distribution (Levi-Strauss 166).This principle, in a form garnered on garments, is manifested in Mon Kiri. The practice of cutting out family crests evolved into a form of corporate branding in Japan during the Meiji Period (1868-1912) (Christensen 14). During the Muromachi period (1336-1573) the crests provided an integral means of identification on the battlefield (Christensen 13). The adorning of crests on armour was also exercised in Europe during the twelfth century, when the faces of knights were similarly obscured by helmets (Family Crests of Japan 8). Both Mon Kiri and “Coat[s] of Arms” utilised totemic symbols (Family Crests of Japan 8; Elven 14; Christensen 13). The mon for the imperial family (figs. 1 & 2) during the Muromachi Period featured chrysanthemum and paulownia flowers (Goin’ Japaneque). “Coat[s] of Arms” in Britain featured a menagerie of animals including lions (fig. 3), horses and eagles (Elven).The prothesis of identity through garnering symbols on the battlefield provided “safety” through demonstrating “belongingness”. This constituted a conflation of two separate “needs” in the “hierarchy of prepotency” propositioned by Maslow. Fig. 1. The mon symbolising the Imperial Family during the Muromachi Period featured chrysanthemum and paulownia. "Kamon (Japanese Family Crests): Ancient Key to Samurai Culture." Goin' Japaneque! 15 Nov. 2015. 27 July 2019 <http://goinjapanesque.com/05983/>.Fig. 2. An example of the crest being utilised on a garment can be found in this portrait of samurai Oda Nobunaga. "Japan's 12 Most Famous Samurai." All About Japan. 27 Aug. 2018. 27 July 2019 <https://allabout-japan.com/en/article/5818/>.Fig. 3. A detail from the “Index of Subjects of Crests.” Elven, John Peter. The Book of Family Crests: Comprising Nearly Every Family Bearing, Properly Blazoned and Explained, Accompanied by Upwards of Four Thousand Engravings. Henry Washbourne, 1847.The Pursuit of Prestige: Prosthetic Pedigree from the Late Georgian to the Victorian Eras In 1817, the seal engraver to Prince Regent, Alexander Deuchar, described the function of family crests in British Crests: Containing The Crest and Mottos of The Families of Great Britain and Ireland; Together with Those of The Principal Cities and Heraldic Terms as follows: The first approach to civilization is the distinction of ranks. So necessary is this to the welfare and existence of society, that, without it, anarchy and confusion must prevail… In an early stage, heraldic emblems were characteristic of the bearer… Certain ordinances were made, regulating the mode of bearing arms, and who were entitled to bear them. (i-v)The partitioning of social classes in Britain had deteriorated by the time this compendium was published, with displays of “conspicuous consumption” displacing “heraldic emblems” as a primary method of status signalling (Deuchar 2; Han et al. 18). A consumerism born of newfound affluence, and the desire to signify this wealth through luxury goods, was as integral to the Industrial Revolution as technological development. In Rebels against the Future, published in 1996, Kirkpatrick Sale described the phenomenon:A substantial part of the new population, though still a distinct minority, was made modestly affluent, in some places quite wealthy, by privatization of of the countryside and the industrialization of the cities, and by the sorts of commercial and other services that this called forth. The new money stimulated the consumer demand… that allowed a market economy of a scope not known before. (40)This also reflected improvements in the provision of “health, food [and] education” (Maslow; Snow 25-28). With their “physiological needs” accommodated, this ”substantial part” of the population were able to prioritised their “esteem needs” including the pursuit for prestige (Sale 40; Maslow).In Britain during the Middle Ages laws “specified in minute detail” what each class was permitted to wear (Han et al. 15). A groom, for example, was not able to wear clothing that exceeded two marks in value (Han et al. 15). In a distinct departure during the Industrial Era, it was common for the “middling and lower classes” to “ape” the “fashionable vices of their superiors” (Sale 41). Although mon-like labels that were “simplified so as to be conspicuous and instantly recognisable” emerged in Europe during the nineteenth century their application on garments remained discrete up until the early twentieth century (Christensen 13-14; Moore and Reid 24). During the 1920s, the French companies Hermes and Coco Chanel were amongst the clothing manufacturers to pioneer this principle (Chaney; Icon).During the 1860s, Lincolnshire-born Charles Frederick Worth affixed gold stamped labels to the insides of his garments (Polan et al. 9; Press). Operating from Paris, the innovation was consistent with the introduction of trademark laws in France in 1857 (Lopes et al.). He would become known as the “Father of Haute Couture”, creating dresses for royalty and celebrities including Empress Eugene from Constantinople, French actress Sarah Bernhardt and Australian Opera Singer Nellie Melba (Lopes et al.; Krick). The clothing labels proved and ineffective deterrent to counterfeit, and by the 1890s the House of Worth implemented other measures to authenticate their products (Press). The legitimisation of the origin of a product is, arguably, the primary function of branding. This principle is also applicable to subjects. The prothesis of brands, as totemic symbols, assisted consumers to relocate themselves within a new system of population distribution (Levi-Strauss 166). It was one born of commerce as opposed to heraldry.Selling of Self: Conferring Identity from the Neolithic to Modern ErasIn his 1817 compendium on family crests, Deuchar elaborated on heraldry by writing:Ignoble birth was considered as a stain almost indelible… Illustrious parentage, on the other hand, constituted the very basis of honour: it communicated peculiar rights and privileges, to which the meaner born man might not aspire. (v-vi)The Twinings Logo (fig. 4) has remained unchanged since the design was commissioned by the grandson of the company founder Richard Twining in 1787 (Twining). In addition to reflecting the heritage of the family-owned company, the brand indicated the origin of the tea. This became pertinent during the nineteenth century. Plantations began to operate from Assam to Ceylon (Jones 267-269). Amidst the rampant diversification of tea sources in the Victorian era, concerns about the “unhygienic practices” of Chinese producers were proliferated (Wengrow 11). Subsequently, the brand also offered consumers assurance in quality. Fig. 4. The Twinings Logo reproduced from "History of Twinings." Twinings. 24 July 2019 <https://www.twinings.co.uk/about-twinings/history-of-twinings>.The term ‘brand’, adapted from the Norse “brandr”, was introduced into the English language during the sixteenth century (Starcevic 179). At its most literal, it translates as to “burn down” (Starcevic 179). Using hot elements to singe markings onto animals been recorded as early as 2700 BCE in Egypt (Starcevic 182). However, archaeologists concur that the modern principle of branding predates this practice. The implementation of carved seals or stamps to make indelible impressions of handcrafted objects dates back to Prehistoric Mesopotamia (Starcevic 183; Wengrow 13). Similar traditions developed during the Bronze Age in both China and the Indus Valley (Starcevic 185). In all three civilisations branding facilitated both commerce and aspects of Totemism. In the sixth millennium BCE in “Prehistoric” Mesopotamia, referred to as the Halaf period, stone seals were carved to emulate organic form such as animal teeth (Wengrow 13-14). They were used to safeguard objects by “confer[ring] part of the bearer’s personality” (Wengrow 14). They were concurrently applied to secure the contents of vessels containing “exotic goods” used in transactions (Wengrow 15). Worn as amulets (figs. 5 & 6) the seals, and the symbols they produced, were a physical extension of their owners (Wengrow 14).Fig. 5. Recreation of stamp seal amulets from Neolithic Mesopotamia during the sixth millennium BCE. Wengrow, David. "Prehistories of Commodity Branding." Current Anthropology 49.1 (2008): 14.Fig. 6. “Lot 25Y: Rare Syrian Steatite Amulet – Fertility God 5000 BCE.” The Salesroom. 27 July 2019 <https://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/auction-catalogues/artemis-gallery-ancient-art/catalogue-id-srartem10006/lot-a850d229-a303-4bae-b68c-a6130005c48a>. Fig. 7. Recreation of stamp seal designs from Mesopotamia from the late fifth to fourth millennium BCE. Wengrow, David. "Prehistories of Commodity Branding." Current Anthropology 49. 1 (2008): 16.In the following millennia, the seals would increase exponentially in application and aesthetic complexity (fig. 7) to support the development of household cum cottage industries (Wengrow 15). In addition to handcrafts, sealed vessels would transport consumables such as wine, aromatic oils and animal fats (Wengrow 18). The illustrations on the seals included depictions of rituals undertaken by human figures and/or allegories using animals. It can be ascertained that the transition in the Victorian Era from heraldry to commerce, from family to corporation, had precedence. By extension, consumers were able to participate in this process of value attribution using brands as signifiers. The principle remained prevalent during the modern and post-modern eras and can be respectively interpreted using structuralist and post-structuralist theory.Totemism to Simulacrum: The Evolution of Advertising from the Modern to Post-Modern Eras In 2011, Lisa Chaney wrote of the inception of the Coco Chanel logo (fig. 8) in her biography Chanel: An Intimate Life: A crucial element in the signature design of the Chanel No.5 bottle is the small black ‘C’ within a black circle set as the seal at the neck. On the top of the lid are two more ‘C’s, intertwined back to back… from at least 1924, the No5 bottles sported the unmistakable logo… these two ‘C’s referred to Gabrielle, – in other words Coco Chanel herself, and would become the logo for the House of Chanel. Chaney continued by describing Chanel’s fascination of totemic symbols as expressed through her use of tarot cards. She also “surrounded herself with objects ripe with meaning” such as representations of wheat and lions in reference prosperity and to her zodiac symbol ‘Leo’ respectively. Fig. 8. No5 Chanel Perfume, released in 1924, featured a seal-like logo attached to the bottle neck. “No5.” Chanel. 25 July 2019 <https://www.chanel.com/us/fragrance/p/120450/n5-parfum-grand-extrait/>.Fig. 9. This illustration of the bottle by Georges Goursat was published in a women’s magazine circa 1920s. “1921 Chanel No5.” Inside Chanel. 26 July 2019 <http://inside.chanel.com/en/timeline/1921_no5>; “La 4éme Fête de l’Histoire Samedi 16 et dimache 17 juin.” Ville de Perigueux. Musée d’art et d’archéologie du Périgord. 28 Mar. 2018. 26 July 2019 <https://www.perigueux-maap.fr/category/archives/page/5/>. This product was considered the “financial basis” of the Chanel “empire” which emerged during the second and third decades of the twentieth century (Tikkanen). Chanel is credited for revolutionising Haute Couture by introducing chic modern designs that emphasised “simplicity and comfort.” This was as opposed to the corseted highly embellished fashion that characterised the Victorian Era (Tikkanen). The lavish designs released by the House of Worth were, in and of themselves, “conspicuous” displays of “consumption” (Veblen 17). In contrast, the prestige and status associated with the “poor girl” look introduced by Chanel was invested in the story of the designer (Tikkanen). A primary example is her marinière or sailor’s blouse with a Breton stripe that epitomised her ascension from café singer to couturier (Tikkanen; Burstein 8). This signifier might have gone unobserved by less discerning consumers of fashion if it were not for branding. Not unlike the Prehistoric Mesopotamians, this iteration of branding is a process which “confer[s]” the “personality” of the designer into the garment (Wengrow 13 -14). The wearer of the garment is, in turn, is imbued by extension. Advertisers in the post-structuralist era embraced Levi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropological theories (Williamson 50). This is with particular reference to “bricolage” or the “preconditioning” of totemic symbols (Williamson 173; Pool 50). Subsequently, advertising creatives cum “bricoleur” employed his principles to imbue the brands with symbolic power. This symbolic capital was, arguably, transferable to the product and, ultimately, to its consumer (Williamson 173).Post-structuralist and semiotician Jean Baudrillard “exhaustively” critiqued brands and the advertising, or simulacrum, that embellished them between the late 1960s and early 1980s (Wengrow 10-11). In Simulacra and Simulation he wrote,it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum. (6)The symbolic power of the Chanel brand resonates in the ‘profound reality’ of her story. It is efficiently ‘denatured’ through becoming simplified, conspicuous and instantly recognisable. It is, as a logo, physically juxtaposed as simulacra onto apparel. This simulacrum, in turn, effects the ‘profound reality’ of the consumer. In 1899, economist Thorstein Veblen wrote in The Theory of the Leisure Class:Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods it the means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure… costly entertainments, such as potlatch or the ball, are peculiarly adapted to serve this end… he consumes vicariously for his host at the same time that he is witness to the consumption… he is also made to witness his host’s facility in etiquette. (47)Therefore, according to Veblen, it was the witnessing of “wasteful” consumption that “confers status” as opposed the primary conspicuous act (Han et al. 18). Despite television being in its experimental infancy advertising was at “the height of its powers” during the 1920s (Clark et al. 18; Hill 30). Post-World War I consumers, in America, experienced an unaccustomed level of prosperity and were unsuspecting of the motives of the newly formed advertising agencies (Clark et al. 18). Subsequently, the ‘witnessing’ of consumption could be constructed across a plethora of media from the newly emerged commercial radio to billboards (Hill viii–25). The resulting ‘status’ was ‘conferred’ onto brand logos. Women’s magazines, with a legacy dating back to 1828, were a primary locus (Hill 10).Belonging in a Post-Structuralist WorldIt is significant to note that, in a post-structuralist world, consumers do not exclusively seek upward mobility in their selection of brands. The establishment of counter-culture icon Levi-Strauss and Co. was concurrent to the emergence of both The House of Worth and Coco Chanel. The Bavarian-born Levi Strauss commenced selling apparel in San Francisco in 1853 (Levi’s). Two decades later, in partnership with Nevada born tailor Jacob Davis, he patented the “riveted-for-strength” workwear using blue denim (Levi’s). Although the ontology of ‘jeans’ is contested, references to “Jene Fustyan” date back the sixteenth century (Snyder 139). It involved the combining cotton, wool and linen to create “vestments” for Geonese sailors (Snyder 138). The Two Horse Logo (fig. 10), depicting them unable to pull apart a pair of jeans to symbolise strength, has been in continuous use by Levi Strauss & Co. company since its design in 1886 (Levi’s). Fig. 10. The Two Horse Logo by Levi Strauss & Co. has been in continuous use since 1886. Staff Unzipped. "Two Horses. One Message." Heritage. Levi Strauss & Co. 1 July 2011. 25 July 2019 <https://www.levistrauss.com/2011/07/01/two-horses-many-versions-one-message/>.The “rugged wear” would become the favoured apparel amongst miners at American Gold Rush (Muthu 6). Subsequently, between the 1930s – 1960s Hollywood films cultivated jeans as a symbol of “defiance” from Stage Coach staring John Wayne in 1939 to Rebel without A Cause staring James Dean in 1955 (Muthu 6; Edgar). Consequently, during the 1960s college students protesting in America (fig. 11) against the draft chose the attire to symbolise their solidarity with the working class (Hedarty). Notwithstanding a 1990s fashion revision of denim into a diversity of garments ranging from jackets to skirts, jeans have remained a wardrobe mainstay for the past half century (Hedarty; Muthu 10). Fig. 11. Although the brand label is not visible, jeans as initially introduced to the American Goldfields in the nineteenth century by Levi Strauss & Co. were cultivated as a symbol of defiance from the 1930s – 1960s. It documents an anti-war protest that occurred at the Pentagon in 1967. Cox, Savannah. "The Anti-Vietnam War Movement." ATI. 14 Dec. 2016. 16 July 2019 <https://allthatsinteresting.com/vietnam-war-protests#7>.In 2003, the journal Science published an article “Does Rejection Hurt? An Fmri Study of Social Exclusion” (Eisenberger et al.). The cross-institutional study demonstrated that the neurological reaction to rejection is indistinguishable to physical pain. Whereas during the 1940s Maslow classified the desire for “belonging” as secondary to “physiological needs,” early twenty-first century psychologists would suggest “[social] acceptance is a mechanism for survival” (Weir 50). In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard wrote: Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal… (1)In the intervening thirty-eight years since this document was published the artifice of our interactions has increased exponentially. In order to locate ‘belongness’ in this hyperreality, the identities of the seekers require a level of encoding. Brands, as signifiers, provide a vehicle.Whereas in Prehistoric Mesopotamia carved seals, worn as amulets, were used to extend the identity of a person, in post-digital China WeChat QR codes (fig. 12), stored in mobile phones, are used to facilitate transactions from exchanging contact details to commerce. Like other totems, they provide access to information such as locations, preferences, beliefs, marital status and financial circumstances. These individualised brands are the most recent incarnation of a technology that has developed over the past eight thousand years. The intermediary iteration, emblems affixed to garments, has remained prevalent since the twelfth century. Their continued salience is due to their visibility and, subsequent, accessibility as signifiers. Fig. 12. It may be posited that Wechat QR codes are a form individualised branding. Like other totems, they store information pertaining to the owner’s location, beliefs, preferences, marital status and financial circumstances. “Join Wechat groups using QR code on 2019.” Techwebsites. 26 July 2019 <https://techwebsites.net/join-wechat-group-qr-code/>.Fig. 13. Brands function effectively as signifiers is due to the international distribution of multinational corporations. This is the shopfront of Chanel in Dubai, which offers customers apparel bearing consistent insignia as the Parisian outlet at on Rue Cambon. Customers of Chanel can signify to each other with the confidence that their products will be recognised. “Chanel.” The Dubai Mall. 26 July 2019 <https://thedubaimall.com/en/shop/chanel>.Navigating a post-structuralist world of increasing mobility necessitates a rudimental understanding of these symbols. Whereas in the nineteenth century status was conveyed through consumption and witnessing consumption, from the twentieth century onwards the garnering of brands made this transaction immediate (Veblen 47; Han et al. 18). The bricolage of the brands is constructed by bricoleurs working in any number of contemporary creative fields such as advertising, filmmaking or song writing. They provide a system by which individuals can convey and recognise identities at prima facie. They enable the prosthesis of identity.ReferencesBaudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. United States: University of Michigan Press, 1994.Burstein, Jessica. Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art. United States: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012.Chaney, Lisa. Chanel: An Intimate Life. United Kingdom: Penguin Books Limited, 2011.Christensen, J.A. Cut-Art: An Introduction to Chung-Hua and Kiri-E. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1989. Clark, Eddie M., Timothy C. Brock, David E. Stewart, David W. Stewart. Attention, Attitude, and Affect in Response to Advertising. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis Group, 1994.Deuchar, Alexander. British Crests: Containing the Crests and Mottos of the Families of Great Britain and Ireland Together with Those of the Principal Cities – Primary So. London: Kirkwood & Sons, 1817.Ebert, Robert. “Great Movie: Stage Coach.” Robert Ebert.com. 1 Aug. 2011. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-stagecoach-1939>.Elven, John Peter. The Book of Family Crests: Comprising Nearly Every Family Bearing, Properly Blazoned and Explained, Accompanied by Upwards of Four Thousand Engravings. London: Henry Washbourne, 1847.Eisenberger, Naomi I., Matthew D. Lieberman, and Kipling D. Williams. "Does Rejection Hurt? An Fmri Study of Social Exclusion." Science 302.5643 (2003): 290-92.Family Crests of Japan. California: Stone Bridge Press, 2007.Gombrich, Ernst. "The Visual Image: Its Place in Communication." Scientific American 272 (1972): 82-96.Hedarty, Stephanie. "How Jeans Conquered the World." BBC World Service. 28 Feb. 2012. 26 July 2019 <https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17101768>. Han, Young Jee, Joseph C. Nunes, and Xavier Drèze. "Signaling Status with Luxury Goods: The Role of Brand Prominence." Journal of Marketing 74.4 (2010): 15-30.Hill, Daniel Delis. Advertising to the American Woman, 1900-1999. United States of Ame: Ohio State University Press, 2002."History of Twinings." Twinings. 24 July 2019 <https://www.twinings.co.uk/about-twinings/history-of-twinings>. icon-icon: Telling You More about Icons. 18 Dec. 2016. 26 July 2019 <http://www.icon-icon.com/en/hermes-logo-the-horse-drawn-carriage/>. Jones, Geoffrey. Merchants to Multinationals: British Trading Companies in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.Kamon (Japanese Family Crests): Ancient Key to Samurai Culture." Goin' Japaneque! 15 Nov. 2015. 27 July 2019 <http://goinjapanesque.com/05983/>. Krick, Jessa. "Charles Frederick Worth (1825-1895) and the House of Worth." Heilburnn Timeline of Art History. The Met. Oct. 2004. 23 July 2019 <https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/wrth/hd_wrth.htm>. Levi’s. "About Levis Strauss & Co." 25 July 2019 <https://www.levis.com.au/about-us.html>. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Totemism. London: Penguin, 1969.Lopes, Teresa de Silva, and Paul Duguid. Trademarks, Brands, and Competitiveness. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010.Maslow, Abraham. "A Theory of Human Motivation." British Journal of Psychiatry 208.4 (1942): 313-13.Moore, Karl, and Susan Reid. "The Birth of Brand: 4000 Years of Branding History." Business History 4.4 (2008).Muthu, Subramanian Senthikannan. Sustainability in Denim. Cambridge Woodhead Publishing, 2017.Polan, Brenda, and Roger Tredre. The Great Fashion Designers. Oxford: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009.Pool, Roger C. Introduction. Totemism. New ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Press, Claire. Wardrobe Crisis: How We Went from Sunday Best to Fast Fashion. 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Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. Ideas in Progress. London: Boyars, 1978.

On 12 March 2020, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte announced a lockdown of Manila to stop the spread of COVID-19. The cities, provinces, and islands of the Philippines remained under various levels of community quarantine for the remainder of the year. Under the strictest lockdown measures, known as Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ), no one aged below 21 or over 60 years was allowed out, a curfew was implemented between 10pm and 5am, and only one person per household, carrying a quarantine pass, was allowed to go out for essential items (Bainbridge & Vimonsuknopparat; Ratcliffe & Fonbuena). The policing of these measures was strict, with a heavy reliance on police and military to enforce health protocols (Hapal). In early April, Duterte warned that violators of the lockdown who caused trouble could be shot (Reuters). Criticisms concerning the dissemination of information about the pandemic were exacerbated when on 5 May, 2020, Filipinos lost an important source of news and entertainment as the country’s largest media network ABS-CBN was shut down after the government denied the renewal of its broadcast franchise (Gutierrez; “ABS-CBN”; “Independent Broadcaster”). The handling of the pandemic by the Duterte government has been characterised by inaction, scapegoating, and framed as a war on an existential threat (Hapal). This has led to feelings of frustration, anger, and despair that has impacted and been incorporated into the artistic expression of some Filipino creatives (Esguerra, “Reflecting”). As they did in the rest of the world, social media platforms became a vital source of entertainment for many facing these harsh lockdown measures in the Philippines in 2020. Viral forms included the sharing of videos of recipes for whipped Dalgona coffee and ube-pandesal on TikTok, binge-watching KDramas like Crash Landing on You on Netflix, playing Animal Crossing on Nintendo Switch, and watching Thailand’s Boys’ Love genre web series 2Gether: The Series on YouTube. Around the world, many arts and cultural organisations turned to online platforms to continue their events during the COVID-19 pandemic. #RomanceClass, a Filipino community of authors, artists, and actors who consume, produce, and enact mostly self-published English-language romance fiction in the Philippines, also turned to these platforms to hold their community’s live literature events. This article analyses this shift by #RomanceClass. It contends that, due to their nature as an independent, born-digital literary organisation, they were able to adapt swiftly and effectively to online-only events in response to the harshness of the Filipino lockdown, creating new forms of artistic innovation by adopting the aesthetics of Zoom into their creative practice (for example, name tags and gallery camera view). This aesthetic swiftly became familiar to people all over the world in 2020, and adopting digital platforms encodes within it the possibility for a global audience. However, while #RomanceClass are and have been open to a global audience, and their creative innovations during the pandemic have clearly been informed by transcultural online trends, this article argues that their adoption of digital platforms and creative innovations represented a continuation of their existing ethos, producing material explicitly intended for a Filipino audience, and more specifically, their existing community, prioritising community connection over any more expansive marketing efforts (McAlister et al.). The Live Literature of #RomanceClass The term #RomanceClass refers to a biblio-community of authors, readers, artists, and actors, all involved in the production and consumption of English-language romance novels in the Philippines. #RomanceClass began online in 2013 via a free writing class run predominantly on Facebook by author Mina V. Esguerra (for more on this, see McAlister et al.). As the community has developed, in-person events have become a major part of the community’s activities. However, as a born-digital social formation, #RomanceClass has always existed, to some extent, online. Their comfort in digital spaces was key to their ability to pivot swiftly to the circumstances in the Philippines during the lockdowns in 2020. One of the most distinctive practices of #RomanceClass is their live reading events. Prior to 2020, community members would gather in April for April Feels Day, and in October for Feels Fest for events where local actors would read curated passages from community-authored romance novels, and audiences’ verbal and physical responses became part of the performance. The live readings represent a distinctive form of live literature – that is, events where literature is the dominant art form presented or performed (Wiles), a field which encompasses phenomena like storytelling festivals, author readings, and literary festivals (Dane; Harvey; Weber; Wilson). In October 2019, we interviewed several #RomanceClass community members and attended one of these live reading events, Feels Fest, where we observed that the nature of the event very clearly reflected the way the community functions: they are “highly professionalised, but also tightly bound on an affective level, regularly describing [themselves] as a found family” (McAlister et al. 404). Attendance at live readings is capped (50 people, for the event we attended). The events are thus less about audience-building than they are community-sustaining, something which they do by providing community comforts. In particular, this includes kilig, a Filipino term referring to a kind of affective romantic excitement, usually demonstrated by the audience members in reaction to the actors’ readings. While the in-person component is very important to the live reading events, they have always spanned online and offline contexts – the events are usually live-tweeted by participants, and the readings are recorded and posted to YouTube by an official community videographer, with the explicit acknowledgment that if you attended the event, you are more than welcome to relive it as many times as you want. (Readings which contain a high degree of sexual content are not searchable on YouTube so as not to cause any harm to the actors, but the links are made privately available to attendees.) However, the lockdown measures implemented in the Philippines in 2020 meant that only the online context was available to the community – and so, like so many other arts communities around the world, they were forced to adapt. We tend to think of platforms like Zoom as encoded with the potential to allow people into a space who might not have been able to access it before. However, in their transition to an online-only context, #RomanceClass clearly sought to prioritise the community-sustaining practices of their existing events rather than trying in any major way to court new, potentially global, audiences. This prioritisation of community, rather than marketing, provided a space for #RomanceClass authors to engage cathartically with their experiences of lockdown in the Philippines (Esguerra, “Reflecting”). Embracing the Zoom Aesthetic: #RomanceClass in 2020 #RomanceClass’s first online event in 2020 was April Feels Day 2020, which occurred not long after lockdown began in the Philippines. Its production reflects the quick transition to an online-only co-presence space. It featured six books recently published by community authors. For each, the author introduced the book, and then an actor read an excerpt – a different approach to that hitherto taken in live events, where two actors, playing the roles of the romantic protagonists, would perform the readings together. Like the in-person live readings, April Feels Day 2020 was a synchronous event with a digital afterlife. It was streamed via Twitch, and participants could log on to watch and join the real-time conversations occurring in the chat. Those who did not sign up for a Twitch account could still watch the stream and post about the event on Twitter under the hashtag #AprilFeelsDay2020. After the event, videos featuring each book were posted to YouTube, as they had been for previous in-person live reading events, allowing participants to relive the experience if they so desired, and for authors to use as workshopping tools to allow them to hear how their prose and characters’ voices sounded (something which several authors reported doing with recordings of live readings in our interviews with them in 2019). April Feels Day 2020 represented a speedy pivot to working and socialising from home by the #RomanceClass community, something enabled by the existing digital architecture they had built up around their pre-pandemic live reading events, and their willingness to experiment with platforms like Twitch. However, it also represented a learning experience, a place to begin to think about how they might adapt creatively to the circumstances provoked by the global pandemic. They innovated in several ways. For instance, they adopted mukbang – a South Korean internet phenomenon which has become popular worldwide, wherein a host consumes a large amount of food while interacting with their audience in an online audiovisual broadcast – in their Mukbang Nights videos, where a few members of #RomanceClass would eat food and discuss their books (Anjani et al.). Food is a beloved part of both #RomanceClass events and books (“there’s lots of food, always. At some point someone always describes what the characters are eating. No exceptions”, author Carla de Guzman told us when we interviewed her in 2019), and so their adoption of mukbang shows the ways in which their 2020 digital events sought to recreate established forms of communal cohesion in a virtual co-presence space. An even more pointed example of this is their Hello, Ever After web series, which drew on the growing popularity of born-digital web series in Southeast Asia and other virtual performances around the globe. Hello, Ever After was both a natural extension of and significantly differed from #RomanceClass in-person live events. Usually, April Feels Day and October Feels Fest feature actors reading and performing passages from already published community books. By contrast, Hello, Ever After featured original short scripts written by community authors. These scripts took established characters from these authors’ novels and served as epilogues, where viewers could see how these characters and their romances fared during the pandemic. Like in-person live reading events – and unlike the digital April Feels Day 2020 – it featured two actors playing virtually side-by-side, reinforcing that one of the key pleasures derived from the reading events is the kilig produced through the interaction between the actors playing against each other (something we also observed in our 2019 fieldwork: the community has developed hashtags to refer specifically to the live reading performance interactions of some of their actors, such as #gahoates, in reference to actors Gio Gahol and Rachel Coates). The scenes are purposefully written as video chats, which allows not only for the fact that the actors were unable to physically interact with each other because of the lockdowns, but also tapped into the Zoom communication aesthetic that commandeered many people’s personal and professional communications during COVID-19 restrictions. Although the web series used a different video conferencing technology, community member Tania Arpa, who directed the web series episodes, adapted the nameplate feature that displayed the characters’ names to more closely align with the Zoom format, demonstrating #RomanceClass’s close attentiveness to developments in the global media environment. Zoom and other virtual co-presence platforms became essentially universal in 2020. One of their affordances was that people could virtually attend events from anywhere in the world, which encodes in it the possibility of reaching a broader, more global audience base. However, #RomanceClass maintained their high sensitivity to the local Filipino context through Hello, Ever After. By setting episodes during the Philippines’ lockdown, emphasised by the video chat mise en scène, Hello, Ever After captures the nuances of the sociopolitical and sometimes mundane aspects of the local pandemic response. Moreover, the series features characters known to and beloved by the community, as the episodes function as epilogues to #RomanceClass books, taking place in what An Goris calls the “post-HEA” [happily ever after] space. #RomanceClass books are available digitally – and have a readership – outside the Philippines, and so the Hello, Ever After web series is theoretically a text that can be enjoyed by many. However, the community was not necessarily seeking to broaden their audience base through Hello, Ever After; it was community-sustaining, rather than community-expanding. It built on the extant repository of community knowledge and affect by using characters that #RomanceClass members know intimately and have emotional connections to, who are not as familiar and legible to those outside the community, intended for an audience with a level of genre knowledge (McAlister et al.; Fletcher et al.). While the pandemic experience these characters were going through was global, as the almost universal familiarity with the Zoom aesthetic shows, Hello, Ever After was highly attentive to the local context. Almost all the episodes featured “Easter eggs” and dialogues that pointed to local situations that only members of the targeted Filipino audience would understand and be familiar with, echoing the pandemic challenges of the country’s present reality. Episodes featured recurrent themes like dissatisfaction with the government’s slow response and misaligned priorities, anger towards politicians exacerbating the impact of the pandemic with poor health and transportation policies, and recognition of voluntary service and aid rendered by private individuals. For example, the first episode, Make Good Days, an epilogue to Mina V. Esguerra’s novel What Kind of Day, focusses on the challenges “essential worker” hero Ben (played by Raphael Robes) faces as a local politician’s speechwriter, who has been tasked to draft a memorial speech for his boss to deliver in honour of an acquaintance who has succumbed to COVID-19. He has developed a “3:00 habit” of a Zoom call with his partner Naya (Rachel Coates), mirroring the “3:00 habit” or “3:00 Prayer to the Divine Mercy” many Catholic Filipino devotees pray and recite daily at that specific hour, a habit reinforced through schools, churches, and media, where entertainment shows allow time for the prayer to be televised. Ben and Naya’s conversation in this particular 3:00 call dwells on what they think Filipino citizens deserve, especially from local government officials who repeatedly fail them (Baizas; Torres). They also discuss the impact that the pandemic has had on Naya’s work life. She runs a tourism and travel business – which is the way that the two characters met in What Kind of Day – which she has been forced to close because of the pandemic. Naya grieves not just for the dream job she has had to give up, but also sympathises with the enormous number of Filipinos who suddenly became unemployed because of the economy closing down (Tirona). Hello, Ever After draws together the political realities of living in the Philippines during the pandemic with the personal, by showing the effects of these realities on characters like Ben and Naya, who are well-known to the #RomanceClass community. #RomanceClass books encompass a wide variety of protagonists, and so the episodes of Hello, Ever After were able to explore how the lives of health workers, actors, single parents, students, scientists, office workers, development workers, CEOs and more could be impacted by the pandemic and the lockdowns in the Philippines. They also allowed the authors to express some of their personal frustrations with living through quarantine, something they admit fueled some parts of the scripts (“Behind the Scenes: Hello, Ever After”). #RomanceClass novels like What Kind of Day all end happily, with the romantic protagonists together (in contrast to a lot of other Filipino media, which ends unhappily – for more on this, see McAlister et al.). Make Good Days and the other episodes of Hello, Ever After reflect the grim realities of pandemic life in the Philippines; however, they do not undercut this happy ending, and instead seek to reinforce it. Through Hello, Ever After, the community literally seeks to “make good days” for themselves by creating opportunities to access the familiar comfort and warmth of kilig scenes. Kilig refers to a kind of affective romantic emotion that usually has a physical manifestation (Trinidad, “Shipping”; “Kilig”). It does not have an equivalent word or phrase in English, but can be used as a noun to denote a thrilling state of excitement or as an adjective to describe moments or scenes that evoke this feeling. Creating and becoming immersed in kilig is central to #RomanceClass texts and events: authors attempt to produce kilig through their writing, and actors attempt to provoke it during live reading performances (something which, as mentioned above, was probably made more difficult in the one-actor live readings of the fully online Aprils Feels Day 2020, as much of the kilig is generated by the interactions between the actors). Kilig scenes are plentiful in Hello, Ever After. For instance, in Make Good Days, Naya asks Ben to name a thing he hated before the pandemic that he now misses. He replies that he misses being stuck in traffic with her – that he still hates traffic, but he misses spending that time with her. Escapism was a high priority for many people and communities creating art during the 2020 lockdowns. Given this, it is interesting that #RomanceClass chose to create kilig in their web series by leaning into the temporal moment and creating material specifically revolving around the lockdown in the Philippines, showing couples like Ben and Naya supporting each other and sharing their pandemic-caused burdens. Hello, Ever After both reflected the harsh reality in which the community found themselves but also gave them something to cling to in the hardest days of lockdown, showing that kilig could be found even in the toughest of circumstances when both characters and community members found themselves separated. Conclusion As a community which began in a digital space, #RomanceClass was well-positioned to pivot to an online-only environment during the pandemic, even though in-person events had become such a distinctive part of their community outputs. They experimented and innovated significantly in 2020, producing a range of digital outputs, including the Hello, Ever After web series. On the surface, this does not seem especially unusual: many arts organisations innovated digitally during the pandemic. What was particularly notable about #RomanceClass’s digital outputs, however, was that they were not designed to be marketing tools. They were not actively courting a new audience; rather, outputs like Hello, Ever After were designed to be community-sustaining, providing the existing audience comfort, familiarity, and kilig in a situation (local and global) that was not in any way comfortable or familiar. We Will Be Okay is the title of the second Hello, Ever After video, an epilogue to Celestine Trinidad’s Ghost of a Feeling: a neat summary of the message the episodes offered to the #RomanceClass audience through these revisitings of beloved characters and relationships. As we have discussed elsewhere, #RomanceClass is a professionalised community, but their affective ties are very strong (McAlister et al.). Their digital outputs during the pandemic showed this, and demonstrated again the way their community bonds are reinforced through their repeated re-engagement with their texts, just as their pre-pandemic forms of live literature did. There was kilig to be found in revisiting well-known couples, even in depressing circumstances. As the community engage together with these new epilogues and share their affective reactions, their social ties are reinforced – even when they are forced to be separated. References “ABS-CBN: Philippines’ Biggest Broadcaster Forced Off Air.” BBC, 5 May 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52548703>. Anjani, Laurensia, et al. “Why Do People Watch Others Eat Food? An Empirical Study on the Motivations and Practices of Mukbang Viewers.” Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. April 2020. DOI: 10.1145/3313831.3376567. Bainbridge, Amy, and Supattra Vimonsuknopparat. “This Is What Life Is Like in the Philippines amid One of the World’s Toughest Coronavirus Lockdowns.” ABC News, 29 Apr. 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-29/philippines-social-volcano-threatening-to-erupt-amid-covid-19/12193188>. Baizas, Gaby. “‘Law Is Law Unless Friends Kayo’: Netizens Slam Gov’t Double Standards.” Rappler, 13 May 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.rappler.com/nation/netizens-reaction-law-is-law-double-standards-government-ecq-guidelines>. “Behind the Scenes: Hello, Ever After.” Facilitated by Mina V. Esguerra. RomanceClass, 7 Aug. 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-9FuCSX08M>. Dane, Alexandra. “Cultural Capital as Performance: Tote Bags and Contemporary Literary Festivals.” Mémoires du Livre 11.2 (2020). <http://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/memoires/2020-v11-n2-memoires05373/1070270ar.pdf>. Esguerra, Mina V. What Kind of Day. Self-published, 2018. ———. “Reflecting on Hello, Ever After.” Mina V. Esguerra, 23 April 2021. 17 May 2021 <http://minavesguerra.com/news/reflecting-on-hello-ever-after/>. Fletcher, Lisa, Beth Driscoll, and Kim Wilkins. “Genre Worlds and Popular Fiction: The Case of Twenty-First Century Australian Romance.” Journal of Popular Culture 51.4 (2018): 997-1015. Goris, An. “Happily Ever After… and After: Serialisation and the Popular Romance Novel.” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture 12.1 (2013). 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/spring_2013/goris.htm>. Gutierrez, Jason. “Philippine Congress Officially Shuts Down Leading Broadcaster.” New York Times, 10 July 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/world/asia/philippines-congress-media-duterte-abs-cbn.html>. Hapal, Karl. “The Philippines’ COVID-19 Response: Securitising the Pandemic and Disciplining the Pasaway.” Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs (2021). <http://doi.org/10.1177/1868103421994261>. Harvey, Hannah. “On the Edge of the Storytelling World: The Festival Circuit and the Fringe.” Storytelling, Self, Society 4.2 (2008): 134-151. “Independent Broadcaster ABS-CBN Shut Down by Philippines Government in ‘Crushing Blow’ to Press Freedom.” ABC News, 6 May 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-06/philippines-news-outlet-closure-abs-cbn-duterte/12218416>. “Make Good Days.” Dir. Tania Arpa. RomanceClass, 26 June 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqpij-S7DU&t=5s>. McAlister, Jodi, Claire Parnell, and Andrea Anne Trinidad. “#RomanceClass: Genre World, Intimate Public, Found Family.” Publishing Research Quarterly 36 (2020): 403-417. Ratcliffe, Rebecca, and Carmela Fonbuena. “Millions in Manila Back in Lockdown as Duterte Loses Control of Coronavirus Spread.” The Guardian, 4 Aug. 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/04/millions-in-manila-philippines-back-in-lockdown-as-duterte-loses-control-of-coronavirus-spread>. Reuters. “‘Shoot Them Dead’ – Philippine Leader Says Won’t Tolerate Lockdown Violators.” CNBC, 2 April 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/02/philippines-duterte-threatens-to-shoot-lockdown-violators.html>. Tirona, Ana Olivia A. “Unemployment Rate Hits Record High in 2020.” Business World, 9 Mar. 2021. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.bworldonline.com/unemployment-rate-hits-record-high-in-2020/>. Torres, Thets. “5 Times the Government Disobeyed and Ignored Their Own Laws.” NoliSoli, 13 May 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://nolisoli.ph/80192/ph-government-disobeyed-and-ignored-their-own-laws-ttorres-20200513/>. Trinidad, Andrea Anne. “‘Kilig to the Bones!’: Kilig as the Backbone of the Filipino Romance Experience.” Paper presented at the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance conference, 2020. ———. “‘Shipping’ Larry Stylinson: What Makes Pairing Appealing Boys Romantic?” Paper presented at the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance conference, 2018. Trinidad, Celestine. Ghost of a Feeling. Self-published, 2018. Weber, Millicent. Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture. Cham: Palgrave, 2018. “We Will Be Okay.” Dir. Tania Arpa. RomanceClass, 3 July 2020. 22 Mar. 2021 <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed2SamGU3Tk>. Wiles, Ellen. “Live Literature and Cultural Value: Explorations in Experiential Literary Ethnography.” PhD thesis. University of Stirling, 2019. Wilson, Michael. Storytelling and Theatre: Contemporary Professional Storytellers and Their Art. Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2005.

This issue of M/C Journal explores the notion of "impact" and the capacity of contemporary research work to influence not only academia but the direction of current debates in the public sphere surrounding social, political and cultural agendas. The nine papers selected cover a broad range of topics: experimental research methodologies which confront the problem of 'measuring' research impact in the world of work; the creative industries and documentary films; identity politics debates address queer, migrant, racial issues; as well as investigations into the use of storytelling and autoethnography to promote cultural understanding and social inclusion. "Impact" for the vast majority of these contemporary cultural and social researchers is a moot term, especially the idea that the impact of research outcomes is a measurable quantity. However measuring and assessing the affect and applicability of research outcomes is an all too familiar reality, particularly since the majority of funding applications expect such a consideration. Even at the very early stages in a researcher's career, the doctoral Confirmation of Candidature demands a discussion of the proposed study's significance and potential wider cultural and social purpose. The comments of UK-based academic Ananya Kabir support this concern for the "state of research" that resonates far beyond the UK context: Academics cannot afford not to want to be impactful, or their work to be 'applicable'. On every application for funding we make to any Research Council, a 'statement of impact' is not merely desirable; it is very much a demand. This is certainly true of the situation in Australia with the previous government's 2005 planned Research Quality Framework (RQF) which advocated a strong focus on impact and the measuring of it, and the subsequent establishment in 2007 of the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative (McDonald). While ERA's main aim is the assessment of research quality with no specific reference to "impact" as such, one of ERA's evaluation indicator categories—research application—requires such a consideration (ERA 2). Moreover, the very recent publication Measuring the Impact of Research by the Group of Eight illustrates the Australian academia's concern with the term, stressing that impact measures would greatly complement ERA's assessment (Rymer 3). However, there is substantial debate and questions raised concerning these government policy developments. Notwithstanding the difficulties of finding reliable measurement methods and differing perspectives on the evaluation of findings (cf. Group of Eight); will a single regime of measurement suit all disciplines equally? As Stefano Harney stresses impact will "subject the humanities to the same pressure as knowledge transfer did engineering and science. And meanwhile the professional schools, business, law, medicine, use their regulative status to prove impact easily, putting yet more pressure on the humanities." Stephen Shapiro paints an even darker picture: "The lesson is clear: 'impact' is the Trojan horse designed to institutionalize entrepreneurial interests that will be the 'invisible hand' policing the British academy." However, does measuring impact really restrict us to a particular definition of the term? It is impact that should be at the heart of these types of discussions not the obsession with measurement. Perhaps the challenge is to encourage high impact research without the constraint of a specific metrics. As Rick Rylance puts it: For me, thinking about impact as a challenge and not as a threat is part of this recognition. This is because impact encourages us to conceive of the disparate kinds of benefit research produces which are of many kinds. Sometimes the outcomes are of direct practical advantage. What is needed then is a greater flexibility with the term and a clearer distinction between impact and impact evaluation or measurement. Although, to some extent, we have to acknowledge the significance of impact evaluation as a necessity in demonstrating that research funding is fairly distributed and spent. Like government funding for the arts for example, it is difficult to demonstrate the value of research aside from the ability to attract financial support. Paula Gilligan observes: "The defence of the Humanities is invariably linked to the defence of the 'Arts'. We are seen to have common cause, united against the scientists, who are 'winning'. We need to start questioning this assumption." In particular, Hadley and Gattenhof's paper in this issue of M/C Journal engages a number of discourses surrounding these concerns, with their response to the Australian Government's "National Cultural Policy Discussion Paper", suggesting an approach for measuring and assessing the impact of the work of artsworkers. Central to their model is the demands of policy requirements for progress to be 'measurable' and therefore the necessity to train arts, cultural and creative workers to conduct such an assessment and to make the impact of this work evident to stakeholders. This investigation also raises questions for scholars, educators and employers about what artsworkers actually do, the worth of their work and how it could be improved upon. Two other papers propose diverse methodologies for addressing the problematic area of measurement and assessment. Humphrey's unique approach to the often neglected area of contemporary work and media, introduces the term "officing" (the daily use of information and communication technology) to explore new ways to approach the identification and measurement of the space, time and technology in everyday work practices. Drawing on the ideas of Anselm Strauss to analyse the office workplace as a "contingent and provisional arrangement or process", the author highlights the benefits of this investigation and its impact on productivity and work-life balance, with the ultimate aim to "contribute to the design of more sustainable work environments". Karlin and Johnson, on the other hand, explore another under-researched area where assessment is required: measuring the impact of films on individual attitudes and cultural narratives and evaluating its importance for documentary film campaigns. The authors argue that though it is increasingly necessary for "issue-based" films to provide information on their social investment returns to justify production costs, of equal importance is that the questions asked and the methods used to answer such queries are "valid and respectful." The paper proposes an "emerging research agenda" for the examination of documentary film which allows investigation of the importance of such evaluations and the key issues relevant to assessing their impact. The power of personal narratives is explored when Hummel investigates the tension between culture and autoethnographic performance. The author questions the "capacity of gender identification to justify the crisis of representation" and the impact of autoethnography with its "resistance to traditional culture and power divisions through its emphasis on shared experience, emotion and subjectivity." This researcher presents a highly personal narrative of her experience as a woman in Bangladesh to highlight the potential of autoethnography to promote alternate ways of understanding and transcend cultural boundaries. Hancox also examines the potential and capacity of storytelling and personal narratives to contribute to cultural research and social inclusion. Through a 2009 digital storytelling project conducted with a group of Forgotten Australians prior to the public apology in the Australian Parliament, the paper explores how the "endemic, institutionalised abuse of a group of people was translated to the broader community and galvanised support through the impact of their personal stories." This approach is advocated as a way of enhancing broader issues, such as public understanding of the needs of marginalized groups, which can result in changes to social inclusion through policy and community based solutions as "personal narratives energise public narratives and shape our ways of thinking and collective understandings" (Harter et al. 4). The effect of Government policy on citizenship and its impact on individuals and communities is examined by two writers: Chisari and Raj. Through a Foucaultian genealogical analysis of Becoming an Australian Citizen, (the resource booklet that prepares a potential new Australian for the citizenship test), Chisari explores Australian identity and how subjects are shaped by the operations of governance and the interrelationship of truth, power and knowledge. In an attempt to move beyond the History Wars, the author problematises the notion of historical "objective truths," endeavouring to influence policy-making surrounding issues of civil education for the Australian migrant. Chisari argues that such an approach has the potential to impact upon historical narratives and promote the inclusion of multiple, alternate stories of Australia and Australian identity. Raj's paper tackles the hot topic of gay marriage in policy and activist debates. With reference to the writings of Judith Butler and Michael Warner, Raj explores neo-liberal political arguments, queer theory and community politics to critique issues such as intimacy, citizenship and equality. Advocating the belief that by "understanding cultural difference(s) rather than conforming to a norm," this paper proposes a critical framework for "intimate citizenship" that provides a platform for further policy and activist dialogues. Another arena of contemporary debate is explored by Malatzky's article which examines representations surrounding what Western women should "look like as mothers," and the importance of cultural research projects for the broader community in terms of their potential to inform and direct discussions. Utilising qualitative feminist methodologies', this researcher investigates the media's role in shaping contemporary expectations surrounding the postnatal body, arguing that such investigations can influence the "creation of alternate mothering discourses, and can direct current debates that have a direct impact on, and relevance for, everyday Australian women and men." Identity is also an issue for our last early career researcher's paper. Al-Natour uses his personal experiences as a researcher investigating the controversy over a proposed Islamic school in Sydney to examine the ways a researcher's identity can affect their participants, and whether this relationship impacts data collection processes. As an outcome of these field work experiences, Al-Natour proposes a series of suggestions for fellow cultural studies researchers in dealing with such dilemmas. An exploration of the impact of cultural and social researchers in this issue of M/C Journal has ranged from the problems of measuring research outcomes to debates surrounding citizenship and identity and the power of narratives to transcend cultural boundaries. A shared belief that emerges from these explorations and proposals is that though the measurement of impact is problematic, by introducing new discourses, perspectives and paradigms which have the capacity to sway policy making, cultural researchers can position themselves as intermediaries to inform societal groups and various communities. The outcomes of these research projects can then address this concern about the affect and applicability of their findings which have the potential to present accessible, transparent and practicable forms of cultural understanding and genuine solutions to social and cultural problems. ReferencesERA. Excellence in Research for Australia – National Report. Canberra: Australian Research Council, 2010.Gilligan, Paula. "'Creative' Functionalism and Continental Philosophy at Middlesex." SocialText - Periscope (Aug. 2010). 12 Dec. 2011 ‹http://www.socialtextjournal.org/periscope/2010/08/impact-innovation-and-creative-functionalism-in-the-uk-the-case-of-the-department-of-philosophy-at-m.php›.Harney, Stefano. "The Real Knowledge Transfer." SocialText - Periscope (Aug. 2010). 12 Dec. 2011 ‹http://www.socialtextjournal.org/periscope/2010/08/the-real-knowledge-transfer.php›.Kabir, Ananya. "The Impact of 'Impact'." SocialText - Periscope (Aug. 2010). 12 Dec. 2011 ‹http://www.socialtextjournal.org/periscope/2010/08/the-impact-of-impact.php›.McDonald, Kate. "New ERA for Research Quality - Science Minister Kim Carr Announces Replacement for Dumped RQF." LifeScientist 27 Feb. 2008. 12 Dec. 2011 ‹http://www.lifescientist.com.au/article/207244/new_era_research_quality/›.Rymer, Les. "Measuring the Impact of Research – The Context for Metric Development." Go8 Backgrounder 23 (2011).RQF. Assessing the Quality and Impact of Research in Australia - Issues Paper. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2005.Rylance, Rick. "The Impact Effect." SocialText - Periscope (Aug. 2010). 12 Dec. 2011 ‹http://www.socialtextjournal.org/periscope/2010/08/the-impact-effect.php›.Shapiro, Stephen. "Deepwater Impact." SocialText - Periscope (Aug. 2010). 12 Dec. 2011 ‹http://www.socialtextjournal.org/periscope/2010/08/deepwater-impact.php›.

Troubled visions of white ash and concrete-grey powder water-logged my mind. Just as I had ‘understood’ and ‘contextualised’ the events of September 11, I witnessed Jules and Gedeon Naudet’s 9/11, the documentary of the events, as they followed the firefighters into Tower One. Their cameras witness death, dense panic and ashen fear. I did not need to see this – it was too intimate and shocking. But it was the drained, grey visage – where the New York streets and people appeared like injured ghosts walking through the falling ruins of a paper mill – that will always stay with me. Not surprisingly I was drawn (safely?) back in time, away from the grey-stained New York streets, when another series of images seismically shifted by memory palate. Aberfan was the archetypal coal mining town, but what made it distinct was tragedy. On the hill above the village, coal waste from the mining process was dumped on water-filled slurry. Heavy rain on October 20, 1966 made way for a better day to follow. The dense rain dislodged the coal tip, and at 9:15, the slurry became a black tidal wave, overwhelming people and buildings in the past. There have been worse tragedies than Aberfan, if there are degrees of suffering. In the stark grey iconography of September 11, there was an odd photocopy of Aberfan, but in the negative. Coal replaced paper. My short piece explores the notion of shared tragedy and media-ted grief, utilising the Welsh mining disaster as a bloodied gauze through which to theorise collective memory and social change. Tragedy on the television A disaster, by definition, is a tragic, unexpected circumstance. Its etymology ties it to astrology and fate. Too often, free flowing emotions of sympathy dissipate with the initial fascination, without confronting the long-term consequences of misfortune. When coal slurry engulfed the school and houses in Aberfan, a small working class community gleaned attention from the London-based media. The Prime Minister and royalty all traveled to Aberfan. Through the medium of television, grief and confusion were conveyed to a viewing public. For the first time, cameras gathered live footage of the trauma as it overwhelmed the Taff Valley. The sludge propelled from the Valley and into the newspapers of the day. A rescue worker remembers, “I was helping to dig the children out when I heard a photographer tell a kiddie to cry for her dear friends, so that he could get a good picture – that taught me silence.” (“The last day before half-term.”) Similarly, a bereaved father remembers that, during that period the only thing I didn’t like was the press. If you told them something, when the paper came out your words were all the wrong way round. (“The last day before half-term.”) When analyzed as a whole, the concerns of the journalists – about intense emotion and (alternatively) censorship of emotion - blocked a discussion of the reasons and meaning of the tragedy, instead concentrating on the form of the news broadcasts. Debates about censorship and journalistic ethics prevented an interpretative, critical investigation of the disaster. The events in Aberfan were not created by a natural catastrophe or an unpredictable or blameless ‘act of God.’ Aberfan’s disaster was preventable, but it became explainable within a coal industry village accustomed to unemployment and work-related ‘accidents.’ Aberfan was not merely a disaster that cost life. It represented a two-fold decline of Britain: industrially and socially. Coal built the industrial matrix of Britain. Perhaps this cost has created what Dean MacCannell described as “the collective guilt of modernised people” (23). Aberfan was distinct from the other great national tragedies in the manner the public perceived the events unfolding in the village. It was the disaster where cameras recorded the unerring screams of grief, the desperate search for a lost – presumed dead – child, and the building anger of a community suffering through a completely preventable ‘accident.’ The cameras – in true A Current Affair style – intruded on grief and privacy. A bereaved father stated that “I’ve got to say this again, if the papers and the press and the television were to leave us alone in the very beginning I think we could have settled down a lot quicker than what we did” (“The last day before half-term.”). This breach of grieving space also allowed those outside the community to share a memory, create a unifying historical bond, and raised some sympathy-triggered money. To actually ‘share’ death and grief at Aberfan through the medium of television led to a reappraisal, however temporary, about the value and costs of industrialisation. The long-term consequences of these revelations are more difficult to monitor. A question I have always asked – and the events of September 11, Bali and the second Gulf War have not helped me – is if a community or nation personally untouched by tragic events experience grief. Sympathy and perhaps empathy are obvious, as is voyeurism and curiosity. But when the bodies are simply unidentified corpses and a saddened community as indistinguishable from any other town, then viewers needs to ponder the rationale and depth of personal feelings. Through the window of television, onlookers become Peeping Toms, perhaps saturated with sympathy and tears, but still Peeping Toms. How has this semiotic synergy continued through popular memory? Too often we sap the feelings of disasters at a distance, and then withdraw when it is no longer fashionable, relevant or in the news. Notions about Wales, the working class and coal mining communities existed in journalists’ minds before they arrived in the village, opened their notebook or spoke to camera. They mobilised ‘the facts’ that suited a pre-existing interpretation. Bereaved parents digging into the dirt for lost children, provide great photographs and footage. This material was ideologically shaped to infantilise the community of Aberfan and, indirectly, the working class. They were exoticised and othered. It is clear from testimony recorded since the event that the pain felt by parents was compounded by television and newspaper reportage. Television allowed “a collective witnessing” (McLean and Johnes, “Remembering Aberfan”) of the disaster. Whether these televisual bystanders actually contributed anything to the healing of the tragedy, or forged an understanding of the brutal work involved in extracting coal, is less clear. There is not a natural, intrinsic sense of community created through television. Actually, it can establish boundaries of difference. Television has provided a record of exploitation, dissent and struggle. Whether an event or programme is read as an expression of unequal power relations or justifiable treatment of the ‘unworthy poor’ is in the hands of the viewer. Class-based inequalities and consciousness are not blinked out with the operation of a remote control. Intervention When I first researched Aberfan in the 1980s, the story was patchy and incomplete. The initial events left journalistic traces of the horror and – later – boredom with the Aberfan tragedy. Because of the thirty year rule on the release of government documents, the cause, motivation and rationale of many decisions from the Aberfan disaster appeared illogical or without context. When searching for new material and interpretations on Aberfan between 1968 and 1996, little exists. The release of documents in January 1997 triggered a wave of changing interpretations. Two committed and outstanding scholars, upon the release of governmental materials, uncovered the excesses and inequalities, demonstrating how historical research can overcome past injustice, and the necessity for recompense in the present. Iain McLean and Martin Johnes claimed a media profile and role in influencing public opinion and changing the earlier interpretations of the tragedy. On BBC radio, Professor McLean stated I think people in the government, people in the Coal Board were extremely insensitive. They treated the people of Aberfan as trouble makers. They had no conception of the depth of trauma suffered (“Aberfan”). McLean and Johnes also created from 1997-2001 a remarkable, well structured and comprehensive website featuring interview material, a database of archival collections and interpretations of the newly-released governmental documents. The Website possessed an agenda of conservation, cataloguing the sources held at the Merthyr Tydfil and Dowlais libraries. These documents hold a crucial function: to ensure that the community of Aberfan is rarely bothered for interviews or morbid tourists returning to the site. The Aberfan disaster has been included in the UK School curriculum and to avoid the small libraries and the Community Centre being overstretched, the Website possesses a gatekeepping function. The cataloguing work by the project’s research officer Martin Johnes has produced something important. He has aligned scholarly, political and social goals with care and success. Iain McLean’s proactive political work also took another direction. While the new governmental papers were released in January 1997, he wrote an article based on the Press Preview of December 1996. This article appeared in The Observer on January 5, 1997. From this strong and timely intervention, The Times Higher Education Supplement commissioned another article on January 17, 1997. Through both the articles and the Web work, McLean and Johnes did not name the individual victims or their parents, and testimony appears anonymously in the Website and their publications. They – unlike the journalists of the time – respected the community of Aberfan, their privacy and their grief. These scholars intervened in the easy ‘sharing’ of the tragedy. They built the first academic study of the Aberfan Disaster, released on the anniversary of the landslide: Aberfan, Government and Disasters. Through this book and their wide-ranging research, it becomes clear that the Labour Government failed to protect the citizens of a safe Labour seat. A bereaved husband and parent stated that I was tormented by the fact that the people I was seeking justice from were my people – a Labour Government, a Labour council, a Labour-nationalised Coal Board (“The last day before half-term”). There is a rationale for this attitude towards the tragedy. The Harold Wilson Labour Governments of 1964-70 were faced with severe balance of payments difficulties. Also, they only held a majority in the house of five, which they were to build to 96 in the 1966 election. While the Welfare State was a construction ‘for’ the working class after the war, the ‘permissive society’ – and resultant social reforms – of the 1960s was ‘for’ middle class consumers. It appeared that the industrial working class was paying for the new white heat of technology. This paradox not only provides a context for the Aberfan disaster but a space for media and cultural studies commentary. Perhaps the most difficult task for those of us working in cultural and media studies is to understand the citizens of history, not only as consumers, spectators or an audience, but how they behave and what they may feel. We need to ask what values and ideas do we share with the ‘audiences,’ ‘citizens’ and ‘spectators’ in our theoretical matrix. At times we do hide behind our Foucaults and Kristevas, our epistemologies and etymology. Raw, jagged emotion is difficult to theorise, and even more complex to commit to the page. To summon any mode of resistive or progressivist politics, requires capturing tone, texture and feeling. This type of writing is hard to achieve from a survey of records. A public intellectual role is rare these days. The conservative media invariably summon pundits with whom they can either agree or pillory. The dissenting intellectual, the diffident voice, is far more difficult to find. Edward Said is one contemporary example. But for every Said, there is a Kissinger. McLean and Johnes, during a time of the Blair Government, reminded a liberal-leaning Labour of earlier mistakes in the handling of a working-class community. In finding origins, causes and effects, the politicisation of history is at its most overt. Path of the slag The coal slurry rolled onto the Welsh village nearly thirty-seven years ago. Aberfan represents more than a symbol of decline or of burgeoning televisual literacy. It demonstrates how we accept mediated death. A ‘disaster’ exposes a moment of insight, a transitory glimpse into other people’s lives. It composes a mobile, dynamic photograph: the viewer is aware that life has existed before the tragedy and will continue after it. The link between popular and collective memory is not as obvious as it appears. All memory is mediated – there is a limit to the sharing. Collective memory seems more organic, connected with an authentic experience of events. Popular memory is not necessarily contextually grounded in social, historical or economic formations but networks diverse times and spaces without an origin or ending. This is a post-authentic memory that is not tethered to the intentions, ideologies or origins of a sender, town or community. To argue that all who have seen photographs or televisual footage of Aberfan ‘share’ an equivalent collective memory to those directly touched by the event, place, family or industry is not only naïve, but initiates a troubling humanism which suggests that we all ‘share’ a common bank of experience. The literacy of tragedy and its reportage was different after October 1966. When reading the historical material from the disaster, it appears that grieving parents are simply devastated puppets lashing out at their puppeteers. Their arguments and interpretation were molded for other agendas. Big business, big government and big unions colluded to displace the voices of citizens (McLean and Johnes “Summary”). Harold Wilson came to office in 1964 with the slogan “13 wasted years.” He promised that – through economic growth – consensus could be established. Affluence through consumer goods was to signal the end of a polarisation between worker and management. These new world symbols, fed by skilled scientific workers and a new ‘technological revolution,’ were – like the industrial revolution – uneven in its application. The Aberfan disaster is situated on the fault line of this transformation. A Welsh working class community seemed out of time and space in 1960s Britain. The scarved women and stocky, strong men appeared to emerge from a different period. The television nation did not share a unified grief, but performed the gulf between England and Wales, centre and periphery, middle and working class, white collar and black collar. Politics saturates television, so that it is no longer possible to see the join. Aberfan’s television coverage is important, because the mend scar was still visible. Literacy in televisual grief was being formed through the event. But if Aberfan did change the ‘national consciousness’ of coal then why did so few southern English citizens support the miners trying to keep open the Welsh pits? The few industries currently operating in this region outside of Cardiff means that the economic clock has stopped. The Beveridge Report in 1943 declared that the great achievement of the Second World War was the sharing of experience, a unity that would achieve victory. The People’s War would create a People’s Peace. Aberfan, mining closures and economic decline destroyed this New Jerusalem. The green and pleasant land was built on black coal. Aberfan is an historical translator of these iconographies. 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