Journal articles on the topic 'Food additives Victoria Public opinion'

Food additives play an important role in the food supply, and it has been a food safety topic of great concern to the public. There has been no systematic research on Chinese consumers’ concerns, attitudes, feelings, or opinions on supervision and media coverage of food additives in the past decade, which is an area worth exploring. This study was carried out to deeply understand consumers’ cognition of food additives and formulate food safety risk communication strategies of food additives in China. Big data of consumers’ online public opinion of China on food additives from 2011 to 2020 was collected and cleaned up using Haina Network Public Opinion Monitoring System version 2.0 (HNPOMS V2.0), followed by data analysis and visual display with the Ansi Food Safety Risk Communication System version 2.0 (AFSRCS V2.0). The results showed that the types of food additives of concern to the public have changed from 2011 to 2020, but the amount of food additives has always been of concern. The type of incident that the public is most concerned about is the illegal addition or abuse of additives. The public’s confidence in food production enterprises has been insufficient, but the functions of market supervision are becoming clearer and clearer, and their expectations are constantly increasing. Consumers’ cognition level increases with the strengthening of publicity and popular science, but the influence of “self-media” on public cognition is increasing day by day, and there is cognitive deviation, making it easy to mislead the public. Consumers’ cognition of food additives is the basis of risk communication. Combined with the research results, this paper puts forward corresponding suggestions on the market and social supervision measures, network media guidance strategy and risk communication strategy of China, respectively.

This study examines the influential factors posited by the Spiral of Silence Theory (SoS) in shaping people’s perceptions of the overall public opinion towards food safety issues in China and their willingness to speak out. Two highly controversial issues, including genetically modified (GM) food and food additives, are examined. Using an online opt-in panel in China, we collected survey responses from a total of 1089 respondents, with a comparable age distribution to that of Chinese netizens, as indicated in the most recent census. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regressions were conducted to make statistical inferences about the proposed research questions and hypotheses. Findings suggest that perceived opinion incongruence, self-relevance, and self-influence significantly affected the extent to which people were willing to express their opinions on social media for the genetically modified food issue, but not the use of food additive issue. The study provides evidence of the silencing effect on publicly expressing opinions about the food safety related issues in China and clarifies the potential boundary conditions of the SoS mechanism in the context of Chinese social media where the majority of public opinions come into formation.

The study is aimed at studying the indices of the digestibility of nutrients in broiler chickens' diet and morphohistological changes in the duodenum and pancreas with additional administration and when replacing the feed antibiotic in the feed for a complex preparation, including phytoextracts, essential oils and protected organic acids. The study is based on the methods of industrial testing of the effectiveness of feed and commercial products in accordance with the methods of the Federal Research Center "VNITIP" RAS (2013). For calculations, the method of variation statistics is used with the use of the PC “Microsoft Excel”. The assessment of the statistical significance of differences between groups was carried out using the Student's t-test. Results. It was found that the tested feed additive, which includes essential oils, protected organic acids, and hot pepper extract, promoted an increase in the digestion of fiber and fat by broiler chickens. The morphohistological study has shown that the processes of food digestion during the active work of the pancreas create conditions for the normal life of the bird without the manifestation of pathological processes. Scientific novelty of the work. Recently, the use of antibiotic drugs has been widely discussed in scientific circles and in the general press, shaping public opinion. There has been a significant increase in the number of publications dealing with the use of alternative antibiotics additives that promote the growth of poultry, enhance the immune response. Under these conditions, for the first time in a comparative study, the reserves of increasing the productive qualities of poultry were substantiated due to the use in the composition of compound feed in addition and instead of feed antibiotics additives, including phytoextracts, essential oils and protected organic acids. Namely, new data were obtained on the influence of the studied feed factor on the digestibility and use of nutrients of feed, the morphohistological state of the duodenum and pancreas.

Aims: We aimed to measure the prevalence of Jeddah residents’ knowledge and their awareness of these ingredients. Study Design: A cross-sectional study. Place and Duration of Study: The study conducted in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, during 2019. Methodology: This study was cross-sectional via an electronic survey that was handed out, and 676 of 868 respondents fit the inclusion criteria: all individuals were eighteen and above in addition to residing in Jeddah in 2019. Statistical analysis was performed using SPSS version 21. Pearson's chi-square was used to test association. Results: The results showed that 63.5% of consumers needed more information about food additives. About 80.5% were familiar with preservatives which, in their opinion, were the most disconcerting food additives. Moreover, 37.2% desired easier and accurate labels to gain a better understanding of this topic, while 43.6% said that the most acceptable idea for disseminating information about food additives to the public was by animation in independent display areas. Conclusion: The study’s findings are examined in terms of the implications for future research and for the development of concrete communication materials to improve food additive awareness in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The level of knowledge was low. Further studies are needed to be done in Saudi Arabia about this topic.

As misinformation is common in the digital media environment, it has become more important to understand risk communication in the context of communicative behaviors of publics that affect public opinion and policymaking. Focusing on food safety issues such as genetically modified food and food additives in China, this study aims to understand the communicative action of publics and the role of organizational trust in the conspiratorial thinking of publics and their perceptions of food safety issues. Using a national sample of 1,089 citizens living in China, this study examines situational theory of problem solving (STOPS) to understand when and how publics become active in communicative actions to take, select, and transmit information regarding food safety issues. In addition, this study tests the role of organizational trust in the food industry between conspiratorial thinking of publics and their situational perceptions, which are antecedent variables to increase communicative action of publics in problem solving. The results demonstrate that STOPS can be applied to the food safety issue to predict communicative actions of publics, and organizational trust plays a vital role in reducing individuals’ concerns about the food safety issue.

Background: Many health problems encountered today arising from consumption of unsafe food. Contamination of food and feeds arising from naturally occurring toxicants, microbiological contaminants, chemical contaminants such as additives used above the permitted levels, pesticide and veterinary residues in food or as toxic components from food processing could have deleterious effects in humans and animals. Food control measures are critical in fostering food safety management of a nation. Methods: In depth review of the existing legislation on food safety and hygiene and the food control system was done. International literature and reports were reviewed to compare the current global situation and the Sri Lankan situation. In depth interviews were conducted among the Public Health Inspectors who comprise the majority of authorized officers Results: The food control legislation which was enacted in 1980 has been amended only twice in 1991 and 2011. There are over 50 Regulations brough in time to time under the Food Act of 1980. The food control system is mainly centralized and the implementation is done mainly at the level of the Medical Officer of Health (MOH). Many provisions of the legislation are outdated and needs revisions. The perception of the Public Health Inspectors reveled that a vast majority are not satisfied with the current food control system and are the opinion that the improvements should be made in all areas related to the food control system. Conclusion: The food control system in Sri Lanka should be revisited and be improved and updated to be in line with the current global trends. The capacities of the analytical system as well as the authorized officers should be improved in order to ensure effective implementation of the food control system.

Abstract This letter is in response to a recent paper by Millstone and Dawson (2019) in which the authors criticise the re-evaluation of the high intensity sweetener aspartame in 2013 by the former EFSA’s Panel on Food Additives and Nutrient Sources added to Food, on the grounds that EFSA did not follow its own procedures for its risk assessment. Moreover, the authors claim that the appraisal of the available studies was asymmetrically more alert to putative false positives than to possible false negatives. In this letter it is shown that the methodology for collection and selection of the scientific information used as a basis for the aspartame risk assessment, and the inclusion/exclusion criteria applied were defined a priori and documented in the published opinion. Furthermore, the Panel applied a Weight-of-Evidence approach combined with an analysis of the biological relevance of the appraised and validated evidence for its analysis, integration and interpretation, followed by an uncertainty analysis. Finally, an analysis of the distribution of negative versus positive outcome of the studies in the context of reliability showed that the claim of bias in the scientific risk assessment of aspartame is not substantiated.

In preparation for a legal implementation of EU-regulation 1829/2003, the Norwegian Environment Agency (former Norwegian Directorate for Nature Management) has requested the Norwegian Food Safety Authority (NFSA) to give final opinions on all genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and products containing or consisting of GMOs that are authorized in the European Union under Directive 2001/18/EC or Regulation 1829/2003/EC within the Authority’s sectoral responsibility. The Norwegian Food Safety Authority has therefore, by letter dated 13 February 2013 (ref. 2012/150202), requested the Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety (VKM) to carry out scientific risk assessments of 39 GMOs and products containing or consisting of GMOs that are authorized in the European Union. The request covers scope(s) relevant to the Gene Technology Act. The request does not cover GMOs that VKM already has conducted its final risk assessments on. However, the Agency requests VKM to consider whether updates or other changes to earlier submitted assessments are necessary. The assignment includes a scientific risk assessment of oilseed rape T45 from Bayer Crop Science (Unique Identfier ACS-BNØØ8-2) for food and feed uses, import and processing. Food additives produced from T45 oilseed rape were notified in the EU as existing food additives within the meaning of Article 8 (1) (b) of Regulation 1829/2003, authorized under Directive 89/10/EEC (Community Register 2005). Feed materials produced from T45 were also notified as existing feed products containing, consisting of or produced from T45 according to Articles 8 and 20 of Regulation (EC) No 1829/2003 in 2003. A notification for placing on the market of T45 according to the Directive 2001/18/EC was submitted in March 2004 (C/GB/04/M5/4), covering import and processing of T45 into food and feed. The application was further transferred into Regulation (EC) No 1829/2003 in November 2005 (EFSA/GMO/UK/2005/25). An application for renewal of authorisation for continued marketing of food additives and feed materials produced from T45 oilseed rape was submitted under Regulation (EC) No 1829/2003 in 2007 (EFSA/GMO/RX/T45). The EFSA GMO Panel performed one single comprehensive risk assessment for all intended uses of genetically modified oilseed rape T45 and issued a comprehensive scientific opinion for both applications submitted under Regulation (EC) No 1829/2003. The scientific opinion was published in January 30 2008 (EFSA 2008), and food and feed products containing or produced from oilseed rape T45 was approved by Commission Decision 26 March 2009 (Commission Decision 2009/184/EC). The oilseed rape T45 is however currently being phased out (EU-COM 2009). The commercialisation of T45 oilseed rape seeds in third countries was stopped after the 2005 planting season and stocks of all oilseed rape T45 lines have been recalled from distribution and destroyed. The applicant commits not to commercialize the event in the future and the import will therefore be restricted to adventitious levels in oilseed rape commodity. Thus the incidence of oilseed rape T45 in the EU is expected to be limited. Oilseed rape T45 has previously been risk assessed by the VKM Panel on Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO), commissioned by the NFSA related to the EFSAs public hearing in 2007 (VKM 2007a). The risk assessment of the oilseed rape T45 is based on information provided by the notifier in the application EFSA/GMO/UK/2005/25 and EFSA/GMO/RX/T45, and scientific comments from EFSA and other member states made available on the EFSA website GMO Extranet. The risk assessment also considered other peer-reviewed scientific literature as relevant. The VKM GMO Panel has evaluated T45 with reference to its intended uses in the European Economic Area (EEA) and according to the principles described in the Norwegian Food Act, the Norwegian Gene Technology Act and regulations relating to impact assessment pursuant to the Gene Technology Act, Directive 2001/18/EC on the deliberate release into the environment of genetically modified organisms, and Regulation (EC) No 1829/2003 on genetically modified food and feed. The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety has also decided to take account of the appropriate principles described in the EFSA guidelines for the risk assessment of GM plants and derived food and feed (EFSA 2006, 2011a), the environmental risk assessment of GM plants (EFSA 2010) and the selection of comparators for the risk assessment of GM plants (EFSA 2011b). The scientific risk assessment of oilseed rape T45 include molecular characterisation of the inserted DNA and expression of novel proteins, comparative assessment of agronomic and phenotypic characteristics, comparative compositional analysis, food/feed safety assessments and environmental assessment. It is emphasized that the VKM mandate does not include assessments of contribution to sustainable development, societal utility and ethical considerations, according to the Norwegian Gene Technology Act and Regulations relating to impact assessment pursuant to the Gene Technology Act. These considerations are therefore not part of the risk assessment provided by the VKM Panel on Genetically Modified Organisms. The glufosinate ammonium-tolerant oilseed rape transformation event T45 was developed by Agrobacterium-mediated transformation of protoplast from the conventional oilseed rape cultivar “AC Excel”. T45 contains a synthetic version of the native pat gene isolated from the bacteria Streptomyces viridochromogenes, strain Tü 494. The inserted gene encodes the enzyme phosphinothricin acetyltransferase (PAT), which confers tolerance to the herbical active substance glufosinate ammonium. The PAT enzyme detoxifies glufosinate-ammonium by acetylation of the L-isomer into N-acetyl-L-glufosinate ammonium (NAG) which does not inhibit glutamine synthetase and, therefore, confers tolerance to the herbicide. Glufosinate ammonium-tolerant oilseed rape transformation event T45 has been conventionally bred into an array of spring-type oilseed rape varieties. Molecular characterization: The molecular characterisation data established that only one copy of the gene cassette is integrated in the oilseed rape genomic DNA. Appropriate analysis of the integration site including sequence determination of the inserted DNA and flanking regions, and bioinformatics analysis have been performed. Bioinformatics analyses of junction regions demonstrated the absence of any potential new ORFs coding for known toxins or allergens. The genetic stability of transformation event T45 was demonstrated at the genomic level over multiple generations by Southern analysis. Segregation analysis shows that event T45 is inherited as dominant, single locus trait. Phenotypic stability has been confirmed by stable tolerance to the herbicide for T45 lines and varieties derived from the event grown in Canada since 1993. Oilseed rape transformation event T45 and the physical, chemical and functional characteristics of the proteins have previously been evaluated by The VKM Panel on Genetically Modified Organisms, and considered satisfactory (VKM 2007a). Comparative assessment: For compositional analysis seeds were harvested from three field trials performed in Canada (1995, 2000 and 2004). These field trials were conducted using agronomic practices and field conditions typical of commercial oilseed rape cultivation and provided environmental situations representative of the geographical regions oilseed rape will be grown. The analytical data were statistically evaluated by analysis of difference between T45 oilseed rape and its non-transgenic parent variety AC Excel or to other comparators, derived from AC Excel. Several of the components listed in OECDs consensus document (OECD 2011) concerning oilseed rape have not been analyzed in seed, oil or meal such as vitamin K and the antinutrient sinapine. Compositional analysis was carried out with respect to proximates, fibers, amino acids, vitamin E (alfa-, beta, gamma- and delta tocopherol, total tocopherol, minerals (phosphorus, iron, calcium, sodium, copper, magnesium, manganese, potassium and zinc), fatty acids, phytic acid and glucosinolates (alken glucosin, MSGL glucosin and indole glucosinolates). The PAT protein was detected by ELISA only in trace amounts in toasted meal from T45 oilseed rape and not detected in blended, degummed, refined, bleached and deodorized oil. The compositional analysis showed statistical differences for some of the analyzed components. However, this is not considered biological relevant because it is within the reference range from the literature. Based on results from comparative analyses of data from field trials located at representative sites and environments in Canada in 1995-1997, it is concluded that oilseed rape T45 is agronomically and phenotypically equivalent to the conventional counterpart and commercial available reference varieties, with the exception of maturity and the herbicide tolerance conferred by the PAT protein. The field evaluations support a conclusion of no phenotypic changes indicative of increased plant weed/pest potential of event T45 compared to conventional oilseed rape. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that in-crop applications of glufosinate herbicide do not alter the phenotypic and agronomic characteristics of event T45 compared to conventional oilseed rape. Food and feed safety assessment: The total amino acid sequence of the PAT protein was compared to that of known toxins and allergens listed in public databases. Based on these results, no evidence for any similarity to known toxic or allergenic proteins was found. An animal feeding study was performed in broiler chickens. This study showed no indications that neither the event T45 treated with glufosinate ammonium nor untreated, has adverse effects on feeding, growth or general health. To test the case of an acute exposure of the PAT protein to the circulatory system, an acute intravenous study was conducted in mice with highly purified (>95%) PAT protein, encoded by the pat gene (produced in E. coli). PAT protein, aprotinin (negative control) or melittin (positive control) were administered at dose levels of 1 and 10 mg/kg body weight. After 15 days the animals treated with the PAT protein and aprotinin at 10 mg/kg had no visible signs of systemic toxicity, in contrast to melittin which induced 100% mortality within 5 minutes at the same dose. Macroscopic examination of internal organs showed no signs of acute toxicity following treatment with PAT protein. Environmental risk: According to the applicant, the event T45 has been phased out, and stocks of all oilseed rape T45 lines have been recalled from distribution and destroyed since 2005. However, since future cultivation and import of oilseed rape T45 into the EU/EEA area cannot be entirely ruled out, the environmental risk assessment consider exposure of viable seeds of T45 through accidental spillage into the environment during transportation, storage, handling, processing and use of derived products. Oilseed rape is mainly a self-pollinating species, but has entomophilous flowers capable of both self- and cross-pollinating. Normally the level of outcrossing is about 30%, but outcrossing frequencies up to 55% are reported. Several plant species related to oilseed rape that are either cultivated, occurs as weeds of cultivated and disturbed lands, or grow outside cultivation areas to which gene introgression from oilseed rape could be of concern. These are found both in the Brassica species complex and in related genera. A series of controlled crosses between oilseed rape and related taxa have been reported in the scientific literature. Because of a mismatch in the chromosome numbers most hybrids have a severely reduced fertility. Exceptions are hybrids obtained from crosses between oilseed rape and wild turnip (B. rapa ssp. campestris) and to a lesser extent, mustard greens (B. juncea), where spontaneously hybridising and transgene introgression under field conditions have been confirmed. Wild turnip is native to Norway and a common weed in arable lowlands. There is no evidence that the herbicide tolerant trait results in enhanced fitness, persistence or invasiveness of oilseed rape T45, or hybridizing wild relatives, compared to conventional oilseed rape varieties, unless the plants are exposed to herbicides with the active substance glufosinate ammonium. Glufosinate ammonium-containing herbicides have been withdrawn from the Norwegian market since 2008, and the substance will be phased out in the EU in 2017 for reasons of reproductive toxicity. Accidental spillage and loss of viable seeds of T45 during transport, storage, handling in the environment and processing into derived products is, however, likely to take place over time and the establishment of small populations of oilseed rape T45 cannot be excluded. Feral oilseed rape T45 arising from spilled seed could theoretically pollinate conventional crop plants if the escaped populations are immediately adjacent to field crops and shed seeds from cross-pollinated crop plants could emerge as GM volunteers in subsequent crops. However, both the occurrence of feral oilseed rape resulting from seed import spills and the introgression of genetic material from feral oilseed rape populations to wild populations are likely to be low in an import scenario. Apart from the glufosinate tolerance trait, the resulting progeny will not possess a higher fitness and will not be different from progeny arising from cross-fertilisation with conventional oilseed rape varieties. The VKM GMO Panel The occurrence of feral oilseed rape resulting from seed import spills and the introgression of genetic material from feral oilseed rape populations to wild populations are likely to be low in an import scenario in Norway. Overall conclusion: The VKM GMO Panel concludes that T45 oilseed rape, based on current knowledge, is comparable to conventional oilseed rape varieties concerning health risks with the intended usage. The GMO Panel likewise concludes that T45 is unlikely to have any adverse effect on the environment and agriculture in Norway in the context of its intended usage.

In preparation for a legal implementation of EU-regulation 1829/2003, the Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety (VKM) has been requested by the Norwegian Directorate for Nature Management to conduct final environmental risk assessments for all genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and products containing or consisting of GMOs that are authorized in the European Union under Directive 2001/18/EC or Regulation 1829/2003/EC. The assignment includes a scientific environmental risk assessment of oilseed rape T45 (Reference EFSA/GMO/UK/2005/25) from Bayer CropScience for food and feed uses, import and processing. Oilseed rape T45 has previously been risk assessed by the VKM Panel on Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO), commissioned by the Norwegian Food Safety Authority related to the EFSAs public hearing in 2007 (VKM 2007a). Food additives produced from T45 oilseed rape were notified in the EU as existing food additives within the meaning of Article 8 (1)(b) of Regulation 1829/2003, authorized under Directive 89/10/EEC (Community Register 2005). Feed materials produced from T45 were also notified as existing feed products containing, consisting of or produced from T45 according to Articles 8 and 20 of Regulation (EC) No 1829/2003 in 2003. A notification for placing on the market of T45 according to the Directive 2001/18/EC was submitted in March 2004 (C/GB/04/M5/4), covering import and processing of T45 into food and feed. The application was further transferred into Regulation (EC) No 1829/2003 in November 2005 (EFSA/GMO/UK/2005/25). An application for renewal of authorisation for continued marketing of food additives and feed materials produced from T45 oilseed rape was submitted under Regulation (EC) No 1829/2003 in 2007 (EFSA/GMO/RX/T45). The EFSA GMO Panel performed one single comprehensive risk assessment for all intended uses of genetically modified oilseed rape T45, and issued a comprehensive scientific opinion for both applications submitted under Regulation (EC) No 1829/2003. The scientific opinion was published in January 30 2008 (EFSA 2008), and food and feed products containing or produced from oilseed rape T45 was approved by Commission Decision 26 March 2009 (Commission Decision 2009/184/EC). The oilseed rape T45 is however currently being phased out (EU-COM 2009). The commercialisation of T45 oilseed rape seeds in third countries was stopped after the 2005 planting season and stocks of all oilseed rape T45 lines have been recalled from distribution and destroyed. The applicant commits not to commercialize the event in the future and the import will therefore be restricted to adventitious levels in oilseed rape commodity. Thus the incidence of oilseed rape T45 in the EU is expected to be limited. The environmental risk assessment of the oilseed rape T45 is based on information provided by the notifier in the application EFSA/GMO/UK/2005/25 and EFSA/GMO/RX/T45, and scientific comments from EFSA and other member states made available on the EFSA website GMO Extranet. The risk assessment also considered other peer-reviewed scientific literature as relevant. The VKM GMO Panel has evaluated T45 with reference to its intended uses in the European Economic Area (EEA), and according to the principles described in the Norwegian Food Act, the Norwegian Gene Technology Act and regulations relating to impact assessment pursuant to the Gene Technology Act, Directive 2001/18/EC on the deliberate release into the environment of genetically modified organisms, and Regulation (EC) No 1829/2003 on genetically modified food and feed. The Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food Safety has also decided to take account of the appropriate principles described in the EFSA guidelines for the risk assessment of GM plants and derived food and feed (EFSA 2006, 2011a), the environmental risk assessment of GM plants (EFSA 2010), the selection of comparators for the risk assessment of GM plants (EFSA 2011b), and for the post-market environmental monitoring of GM plants (EFSA 2006, 2011c). The scientific risk assessment of oilseed rape T45 include molecular characterisation of the inserted DNA and expression of target proteins, comparative assessment of agronomic and phenotypic characteristics, unintended effects on plant fitness, potential for horizontal and vertical gene transfer, and evaluations of the post-market environmental plan. In line with its mandate, VKM emphasised that assessments of sustainable development, societal utility and ethical considerations, according to the Norwegian Gene Technology Act and Regulations relating to impact assessment pursuant to the Gene Technology Act, shall not be carried out by the Panel on Genetically Modified Organisms. The glufosinate ammonium-tolerant oilseed rape transformation event T45 (Unique Identfier ACSBNØØ8-2) was developed by Agrobacterium-mediated transformation of protoplast from the conventional oilseed rape cultivar “AC Excel”. T45 contains a synthetic version of the native pat gene isolated from the bacteria Streptomyces viridochromogenes, strain Tü 494. The inserted gene encodes the enzyme phosphinothricin acetyltransferase (PAT), which confers tolerance to the herbical active substance glufosinate ammonium. The PAT enzyme detoxifies glufosinate-ammonium by acetylation of the L-isomer into N-acetyl-L-glufosinate ammonium (NAG) which does not inhibit glutamine synthetase and therefore confers tolerance to the herbicide. Glufosinate ammonium-tolerant oilseed rape transformation event T45 has been conventionally bred into an array of spring-type oilseed rape varieties. Molecular characterization: The molecular characterisation data established that only one copy of the gene cassette is integrated in the oilseed rape genomic DNA. Appropriate analysis of the integration site including sequence determination of the inserted DNA and flanking regions and bioinformatics analysis have been performed. Bioinformatics analyses of junction regions demonstrated the absence of any potential new ORFs coding for known toxins or allergens. The genetic stability of transformation event T45 was demonstrated at the genomic level over multiple generations by Southern analysis. Segregation analysis shows that event T45 is inherited as dominant, single locus trait. Phenotypic stability has been confirmed by stable tolerance to the herbicide for T45 lines and varieties derived from the event grown in Canada since 1993. Oilseed rape transformation event T45 and the physical, chemical and functional characteristics of the proteins have previously been evaluated by The VKM Panel on Genetically Modified Organisms, and considered satisfactory (VKM 2007a). Comparative assessment: Based on results from comparative analyses of data from field trials located at representative sites and environments in Canada in 1995-1997, it is concluded that oilseed rape T45 is agronomically and phenotypically equivalent to the conventional counterpart and commercial available reference varieties, with the exception of maturity and the herbicide tolerance conferred by the PAT protein. The field evaluations support a conclusion of no phenotypic changes indicative of increased plant weed/pest potential of event T45 compared to conventional oilseed rape. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that in-crop applications of glufosinate herbicide do not alter the phenotypic and agronomic characteristics of event T45 compared to conventional oilseed rape. Environmental risk: According to the applicant, the event T45 has been phased out, and stocks of all oilseed rape T45 lines have been recalled from distribution and destroyed since 2005. However, since future cultivation and import of oilseed rape T45 into the EU/EEA area cannot be entirely ruled out, the environmental risk assessment consider exposure of viable seeds of T45 through accidental spillage into the environment during transportation, storage, handling, processing and use of derived products. Oilseed rape is mainly a self-pollinating species, but has entomophilous flowers capable of both self- and cross-pollinating. Normally the level of outcrossing is about 30%, but outcrossing frequencies up to 55% are reported. Several plant species related to oilseed rape that are either cultivated, occurs as weeds of cultivated and disturbed lands, or grow outside cultivation areas to which gene introgression from oilseed rape could be of concern. These are found both in the Brassica species complex and in related genera. A series of controlled crosses between oilseed rape and related taxa have been reported in the scientific literature. Because of a mismatch in the chromosome numbers most hybrids have a severely reduced fertility. Exceptions are hybrids obtained from crosses between oilseed rape and wild turnip (B. rapa ssp. campestris) and to a lesser extent, mustard greens (B. juncea), where spontaneously hybridising and transgene introgression under field conditions have been confirmed. Wild turnip is native to Norway and a common weed in arable lowlands. There is no evidence that the herbicide tolerant trait results in enhanced fitness, persistence or invasiveness of oilseed rape T45, or hybridizing wild relatives, compared to conventional oilseed rape varieties, unless the plants are exposed to herbicides with the active substance glufosinate ammonium. Glufosinate ammonium-containing herbicides have been withdrawn from the Norwegian market since 2008, and the substance will be phased out in the EU in 2017 for reasons of reproductive toxicity. Accidental spillage and loss of viable seeds of T45 during transport, storage, handling in the environment and processing into derived products is, however, likely to take place over time, and the establishment of small populations of oilseed rape T45 cannot be excluded. Feral oilseed rape T45 arising from spilled seed could theoretically pollinate conventional crop plants if the escaped populations are immediately adjacent to field crops, and shed seeds from cross-pollinated crop plants could emerge as GM volunteers in subsequent crops. However, both the occurrence of feral oilseed rape resulting from seed import spills and the introgression of genetic material from feral oilseed rape populations to wild populations are likely to be low in an import scenario. Apart from the glufosinate tolerance trait, the resulting progeny will not possess a higher fitness and will not be different from progeny arising from cross-fertilisation with conventional oilseed rape varieties. The occurrence of feral oilseed rape resulting from seed import spills and the introgression of genetic material from feral oilseed rape populations to wild populations are likely to be low in an import scenario in Norway. Overall conclusion: Taking into account the expected limited import of oilseed rape T45 (EU COM 2009), the VKM GMO Panel considers that the routes of gene flow from T45 would not introduce significant numbers of transgenic plants into agricultural areas or result in any environmental consequences in Norway. The VKM GMO Panel concludes that oilseed rape T45 is unlikely to have any adverse effect on the environment in Norway in the context of its intended usage.

“There is nothing more public than privacy.” (Berlant and Warner, Sex) How did it come to this? How did it happen that a one-off, two-hour event at a public swimming pool in a suburb of outer Melbourne ignited international hate mail and generated media-fanned political anguish and debate about the proper use of public spaces? In 2010, women who attend a women’s only swim session on Sunday evenings at the Dandenong Oasis public swimming pool asked the pool management and the local council for permission to celebrate the end of Ramadan at the pool during the time of their regular swim session. The request was supported by the pool managers and the council and promoted by both as an opportunity for family and friends to get together in a spirit of multicultural learning and understanding. Responding to criticisms of the event as an unreasonable claim on public facilities by one group, the Mayor of the City of Greater Dandenong, Jim Memeti, rejected claims that this event discriminates against non-Muslim residents of the suburb. But here’s the rub. The event, to be held after hours at the pool, requires all participants older than ten years of age to follow a dress code of knee-length shorts and T-shirts. This is a suburban moment that is borne of but exceeds the local. It reflects and responds to a contemporary global conundrum of great political and theoretical significance—how to negotiate and govern the relations between multiculturalism, religion, gender, sexual freedom, and democracy. Specifically this event speaks to how multicultural democracy in the public sphere negotiates the public presence and expression of different cultural and religious frameworks related to gender and sexuality. This is demanding political stuff. Situated in the messy political and theoretical terrains of the relation between public space and the public sphere, this local moment called for political judgement about how cultural differences should be allowed to manifest in and through public space, giving consideration to the potential effects of these decisions on an inclusive multicultural democracy. The local authorities in Dandenong engaged in an admirable process of democratic labour as they puzzled over how to make decisions that were responsible and equitable, in the absence of a rulebook or precedents for success. Ultimately however this mode of experimental decision-making, which will become increasingly necessary to manage such predicaments in the future, was foreclosed by unwarranted and unhelpful media outrage. "Foreclosed" here stresses the preemptive nature of the loss; a lost opportunity for trialing approaches to governing cultural diversity that may fail, but might then be modified. It was condemned in advance of either success or failure. The role of the media rather than the discomfort of the local publics has been decisive in this event.This Multicultural SuburbDandenong is approximately 30 kilometres southeast of central Melbourne. Originally home to the Bunorong People of the Kulin nation, it was settled by pastoralists by the 1800s, heavily industrialised during the twentieth century, and now combines cultural diversity with significant social disadvantage. The City of Greater Dandenong is proud of its reputation as the most culturally and linguistically diverse municipality in Australia. Its population of approximately 138,000 comprises residents from 156 different language groups. More than half (56%) of its population was born overseas, with 51% from nations where English is not the main spoken language. These include Vietnam, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, India, China, Italy, Greece, Bosnia and Afghanistan. It is also a place of significant religious diversity with residents identifying as Buddhist (15 per cent) Muslim (8 per cent), Hindu (2 per cent) and Christian (52 per cent) [CGD]. Its city logo, “Great Place, Great People” evokes its twin pride in the placemaking power of its diverse population. It is also a brazen act of civic branding to counter its reputation as a derelict and dangerous suburb. In his recent book The Bogan Delusion, David Nichols cites a "bogan" website that names Dandenong as one of Victoria’s two most bogan areas. The other was Moe. (p72). The Sunday Age newspaper had already depicted Dandenong as one of two excessively dangerous suburbs “where locals fear to tread” (Elder and Pierik). The other suburb of peril was identified as Footscray.Central Dandenong is currently the site of Australia’s largest ever state sponsored Urban Revitalisation program with a budget of more than $290 million to upgrade infrastructure, that aims to attract $1billion in private investment to provide housing and future employment.The Cover UpIn September 2010, the Victorian and Civil and Administrative Appeals Tribunal (VCAT) granted the YMCA an exemption from the Equal Opportunity Act to allow a dress code for the Ramadan event at the Oasis swimming pool that it manages. The "Y" sees the event as “an opportunity for the broader community to learn more about Ramadan and the Muslim faith, and encourages all members of Dandenong’s diverse community to participate” (YMCA Ramadan). While pool management and the municipal council refer to the event as an "opening up" of the closed swimming session, the media offer a different reading of the VCAT decision. The trope of the "the cover up" has framed most reports and commentaries (Murphy; Szego). The major focus of the commentaries has not been the event per se, but the call to dress "appropriately." Dress codes however are a cultural familiar. They exist for workplaces, schools, nightclubs, weddings, racing and sporting clubs and restaurants, to name but a few. While some of these codes or restrictions are normatively imposed rather than legally required, they are not alien to cultural life in Australia. Moreover, there are laws that prohibit people from being meagerly dressed or naked in public, including at beaches, swimming pools and so on. The dress code for this particular swimming pool event was, however, perceived to be unusual and, in a short space of time, "unusual" converted to "social threat."Responses to media polls about the dress code reveal concerns related to the symbolic dimensions of the code. The vast majority of those who opposed the Equal Opportunity exemption saw it as the thin edge of the multicultural wedge, a privatisation of public facilities, or a denial of the public’s right to choose how to dress. Tabloid newspapers reported on growing fears of Islamisation, while the more temperate opposition situated the decision as a crisis of human rights associated with tolerating illiberal cultural practices. Julie Szego reflects this view in an opinion piece in The Age newspaper:the Dandenong pool episode is neither trivial nor insignificant. It is but one example of human rights laws producing outcomes that restrict rights. It raises tough questions about how far public authorities ought to go in accommodating cultural practices that sit uneasily with mainstream Western values. (Szego)Without enquiring into the women’s request and in the absence of the women’s views about what meaning the event held for them, most media commentators and their electronically wired audiences treated the announcement as yet another alarming piece of evidence of multicultural failure and the potential Islamisation of Australia. The event raised specific concerns about the double intrusion of cultural difference and religion. While the Murdoch tabloid Herald Sun focused on the event as “a plan to force families to cover up to avoid offending Muslims at a public event” (Murphy) the liberal Age newspaper took a more circumspect approach, reporting on its small vox pop at the Dandenong pool. Some people here referred to the need to respect religions and seemed unfazed by the exemption and the event. Those who disagreed thought it was important not to enforce these (dress) practices on other people (Carey).It is, I believe, significant that several employees of the local council informed me that most of the opposition has come from the media, people outside of Dandenong and international groups who oppose the incursion of Islam into non-Islamic settings. Opposition to the event did not appear to derive from local concern or opposition.The overwhelming majority of Herald Sun comments expressed emphatic opposition to the dress code, citing it variously as unAustralian, segregationist, arrogant, intolerant and sexist. The Herald Sun polled readers (in a self-selecting and of course highly unrepresentative on-line poll) asking them to vote on whether or not they agreed with the VCAT exemption. While 5.52 per cent (512 voters) agreed with the ruling, 94.48 per cent (8,760) recorded disagreement. In addition, the local council has, for the first time in memory, received a stream of hate-mail from international anti-Islam groups. Muslim women’s groups, feminists, the Equal Opportunity Commissioner and academics have also weighed in. According to local reports, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, Shahram Akbarzadeh, considered the exemption was “nonsense” and would “backfire and the people who will pay for it will be the Muslim community themselves” (Haberfield). He repudiated it as an example of inclusion and tolerance, labeling it “an effort of imposing a value system (sic)” (Haberfield). He went so far as to suggest that, “If Tony Abbott wanted to participate in his swimwear he wouldn’t be allowed in. That’s wrong.” Tasneem Chopra, chairwoman of the Islamic Women’s Welfare Council and Sherene Hassan from the Islamic Council of Victoria, both expressed sensitivity to the group’s attempt to establish an inclusive event but would have preferred the dress code to be a matter of choice rather coercion (Haberfield, "Mayor Defends Dandenong Pool Cover Up Order"). Helen Szoke, the Commissioner of the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission, defended the pool’s exemption from the Law that she oversees. “Matters such as this are not easy to resolve and require a balance to be achieved between competing rights and obligations. Dress codes are not uncommon: e.g., singlets, jeans, thongs etc in pubs/hotels” (in Murphy). The civil liberties organisation, Liberty Victoria, supported the ban because the event was to be held after hours (Murphy). With astonishing speed this single event not only transformed the suburban swimming pool to a theatre of extra-local disputes about who and what is entitled to make claims on public space and publically funded facilities, but also fed into charged debates about the future of multiculturalism and the vulnerability of the nation to the corrosive effects of cultural and religious difference. In this sense suburbs like Dandenong are presented as sites that not only generate fear about physical safety but whose suburban sensitivities to its culturally diverse population represent a threat to the safety of the nation. Thus the event both reflects and produces an antipathy to cultural difference and to the place where difference resides. This aversion is triggered by and mediated in this case through the figure, rather than the (corpo)reality, of the Muslim woman. In this imagining, the figure of the Muslim woman is assigned the curious symbolic role of "cultural creep." The debates around the pool event is not about the wellbeing or interests of the Muslim women themselves, nor are broader debates about the perceived, culturally-derived restrictions imposed on Muslim women living in Australia or other western countries. The figure of the Muslim woman is, I would argue, simply the ground on which the debates are held. The first debate relates to social and public space, access to which is considered fundamental to freedom and participatory democracy, and in current times is addressed in terms of promoting inclusion, preventing exclusion and finding opportunities for cross cultural encounters. The second relates not to public space per se, but to the public sphere or the “sphere of private people coming together as a public” for political deliberation (Habermas 21). The literature and discussions dealing with these two terrains have remained relatively disconnected (Low and Smith) with public space referring largely to activities and opportunities in the socio-cultural domain and the public sphere addressing issues of politics, rights and democracy. This moment in Dandenong offers some modest leeway for situating "the suburb" as an ideal site for coalescing these disparate discussions. In this regard I consider Iveson’s provocative and productive question about whether some forms of exclusions from suburban public space may actually deepen the democratic ideals of the public sphere. Exclusions may in such cases be “consistent with visions of a democratically inclusive city” (216). He makes his case in relation to a dispute about the exclusion of men exclusion from a women’s only swimming pool in the Sydney suburb of Coogee. The Dandenong case is similarly exclusive with an added sense of exclusion generated by an "inclusion with restrictions."Diversity, Difference, Public Space and the Public SphereAs a prelude to this discussion of exclusion as democracy, I return to the question that opened this article: how did it come to this? How is it that Australia has moved from its renowned celebration and pride in its multiculturalism so much in evidence at the suburban level through what Ghassan Hage calls an “unproblematic” multiculturalism (233) and what others have termed “everyday multiculturalism” (Wise and Velayutham). Local cosmopolitanisms are often evinced through the daily rituals of people enjoying the ethnic cuisines of their co-residents’ pasts, and via moments of intercultural encounter. People uneventfully rub up against and greet each other or engage in everyday acts of kindness that typify life in multicultural suburbs, generating "reservoirs of hope" for democratic and cosmopolitan cities (Thrift 147). In today’s suburbs, however, the “Imperilled Muslim women” who need protection from “dangerous Muslim men” (Razack 129) have a higher discursive profile than ethnic cuisine as the exemplar of multiculturalism. Have we moved from pleasure to hostility or was the suburban pleasure in racial difference always about a kind of “eating the other” (bell hooks 378). That is to ask whether our capacity to experience diversity positively has been based on consumption, consuming the other for our own enrichment, whereas living with difference entails a commitment not to consumption but to democracy. This democratic multicultural commitment is a form of labour rather than pleasure, and its outcome is not enrichment but transformation (although this labour can be pleasurable and transformation might be enriching). Dandenong’s prized cultural precincts, "Little India" and the "Afghan bazaar" are showcases of food, artefacts and the diversity of the suburb. They are centres of pleasurable and exotic consumption. The pool session, however, requires one to confront difference. In simple terms we can think about ethnic food, festivals and handicrafts as cultural diversity, and the Muslim woman as cultural difference.This distinction between diversity and difference is useful for thinking through the relation between multiculturalism in public space and multicultural democracy of the public sphere. According to the anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, while a neoliberal sensibility supports cultural diversity in the public space, cultural difference is seen as a major cause of social problems associated with immigrants, and has a diminishing effect on the public sphere (14). According to Eriksen, diversity is understood as aesthetic, or politically and morally neutral expressions of culture that are enriching (Hage 118) or digestible. Difference, however, refers to morally objectionable cultural practices. In short, diversity is enriching. Difference is corrosive. Eriksen argues that differences that emerge from distinct cultural ideas and practices are deemed to create conflicts with majority cultures, weaken social solidarity and lead to unacceptable violations of human rights in minority groups. The suburban swimming pool exists here at the boundary of diversity and difference, where the "presence" of diverse bodies may enrich, but their different practices deplete and damage existing culture. The imperilled Muslim woman of the suburbs carries a heavy symbolic load. She stands for major global contests at the border of difference and diversity in three significant domains, multiculturalism, religion and feminism. These three areas are positioned simultaneously in public space and of the public sphere and she embodies a specific version of each in this suburban setting. First, there a global retreat from multiculturalism evidenced in contemporary narratives that describe multiculturalism (both as official policy and unofficial sensibility) as failed and increasingly ineffective at accommodating or otherwise dealing with religious, cultural and ethnic differences (Cantle; Goodhart; Joppke; Poynting and Mason). In the UK, Europe, the US and Australia, popular media sources and political discourses speak of "parallel lives,"immigrant enclaves, ghettoes, a lack of integration, the clash of values, and illiberal cultural practices. The covered body of the Muslim woman, and more particularly the Muslim veil, are now read as visual signs of this clash of values and of the refusal to integrate. Second, religion has re-emerged in the public domain, with religious groups and individuals making particular claims on public space both on the basis of their religious identity and in accord with secular society’s respect for religious freedom. This is most evident in controversies in France, Belgium and Netherlands associated with banning niqab in public and other religious symbols in schools, and in Australia in court. In this sense the covered Muslim woman raises concerns and indignation about the rightful place of religion in the public sphere and in social space. Third, feminism is increasingly invoked as the ground from which claims about the imperilled Muslim woman are made, particularly those about protecting women from their dangerous men. The infiltration of the Muslim presence into public space is seen as a threat to the hard won gains of women’s freedom enjoyed by the majority population. This newfound feminism of the public sphere, posited by those who might otherwise disavow feminism, requires some serious consideration. This public discourse rarely addresses the discrimination, violation and lack of freedom experienced systematically on an everyday basis by women of majority cultural backgrounds in western societies (such as Australia). However, the sexism of racially and religiously different men is readily identified and decried. This represents a significant shift to a dubious feminist register of the public sphere such that: “[w]omen of foreign origin, ...more specifically Muslim women…have replaced the traditional housewife as the symbol of female subservience” (Tissot 41–42).The three issues—multiculturalism, religion and feminism—are, in the Dandenong pool context, contests about human rights, democracy and the proper use of public space. Szego’s opinion piece sees the Dandenong pool "cover up" as an example of the conundrum of how human rights for some may curtail the human rights of others and lead us into a problematic entanglement of universal "rights," with claims of difference. In her view the combination of human rights and multiculturalism in the case of the Dandenong Pool accommodates illiberal practices that put the rights of "the general public" at risk, or as she puts it, on a “slippery slope” that results in a “watering down of our human rights.” Ideas that entail women making a claim for private time in public space are ultimately not good for "us."Such ideas run counter to the West's more than 500-year struggle for individual freedom—including both freedom of religion and freedom from religion—and for gender equality. Our public authorities ought to be pushing back hardest when these values are under threat. Yet this is precisely where they've been buckling under pressure (Szego)But a different reading of the relation between public and private space, human rights, democracy and gender freedom is readily identifiable in the Dandenong event—if one looks for it. Living with difference, I have already suggested, is a problem of democracy and the public sphere and does not so easily correspond to consuming diversity, as it demands engagement with cultural difference. In what remains, I explore how multicultural democracy in the public sphere and women’s rights in public and private realms relate, firstly, to the burgeoning promise of democracy and civility that might emerge in public space through encounter and exchange. I also point out how this moment in Dandenong might be read as a singular contribution to dealing with this global problematic of living with difference; of democracy in the public sphere. Public urban space has become a focus for speculation among geographers and sociologists in particular, about the prospects for an enhanced civic appreciation of living with difference through encountering strangers. Random and repetitious encounters with people from all cultures typify contemporary urban life. It remains an open question however as to whether these encounters open up or close down possibilities for conviviality and understanding, and whether they undo or harden peoples’ fears and prejudices. There is, however, at least in some academic and urban planning circles, some hope that the "throwntogetherness" (Massey) and the "doing" of togetherness (Laurier and Philo) found in the multicultural city may generate some lessons and opportunities for developing a civic culture and political commitment to living with difference. Alongside the optimism of those who celebrate the city, the suburb, and public spaces as forging new ways of living with difference, there are those such as Gill Valentine who wonder how this might be achieved in practice (324). Ash Amin similarly notes that city or suburban public spaces are not necessarily “the natural servants of multicultural engagement” (Ethnicity 967). Amin and Valentine point to the limited or fleeting opportunities for real engagement in these spaces. Moreover Valentine‘s research in the UK revealed that the spatial proximity found in multicultural spaces did not so much give rise to greater mutual respect and engagement, but to a frustrated “white self-segregation in the suburbs.” She suggests therefore that civility and polite exchange should not be mistaken for respect (324). Amin contends that it is the “micro-publics” of social encounters found in workplaces, schools, gardens, sports clubs [and perhaps swimming pools] rather than the fleeting encounters of the street or park, that offer better opportunities for meaningful intercultural exchange. The Ramadan celebration at the pool, with its dress code and all, might be seen more fruitfully as a purposeful event engaging a micro-public in which people are able to “break out of fixed relations and fixed notions” and “learn to become different” (Amin, Ethnicity 970) without that generating discord and resentment.Micropublics, Subaltern Publics and a Democracy of (Temporary) ExclusionsIs this as an opportunity to bring the global and local together in an experiment of forging new democratic spaces for gender, sexuality, culture and for living with difference? More provocatively, can we see exclusion and an invitation to share in this exclusion as a precursor to and measure of, actually existing democracy? Painter and Philo have argued that democratic citizenship is questionable if “people cannot be present in public spaces (streets, squares, parks, cinemas, churches, town halls) without feeling uncomfortable, victimized and basically ‘out of place’…" (Iveson 216). Feminists have long argued that distinctions between public and private space are neither straightforward nor gender neutral. For Nancy Fraser the terms are “cultural classifications and rhetorical labels” that are powerful because they are “frequently deployed to delegitimate some interests, views and topics and to valorize others” (73). In relation to women and other subordinated minorities, the "rhetoric of privacy" has been historically used to restrict the domain of legitimate public contestation. In fact the notion of what is public and particularly notions of the "public interest" and the "public good" solidify forms of subordination. Fraser suggests the concept of "subaltern counterpublics" as an alternative to notions of "the public." These are discursive spaces where groups articulate their needs, and demands are circulated formulating their own public sphere. This challenges the very meaning and foundational premises of ‘the public’ rather than simply positing strategies of inclusion or exclusion. The twinning of Amin’s notion of "micro-publics" and Fraser’s "counterpublics" is, I suggest, a fruitful approach to interpreting the Dandenong pool issue. It invites a reading of this singular suburban moment as an experiment, a trial of sorts, in newly imaginable ways of living democratically with difference. It enables us to imagine moments when a limited democratic right to exclude might create the sorts of cultural exchanges that give rise to a more authentic and workable recognition of cultural difference. I am drawn to think that this is precisely the kind of democratic experimentation that the YMCA and Dandenong Council embarked upon when they applied for the Equal Opportunity exemption. I suggest that by trialing, rather than fixing forever a "critically exclusive" access to the suburban swimming pool for two hours per year, they were in fact working on the practical problem of how to contribute in small but meaningful ways to a more profoundly free democracy and a reworked public sphere. In relation to the similar but distinct example of the McIver pool for women and children in Coogee, New South Wales, Kurt Iveson makes the point that such spaces of exclusion or withdrawal, “do not necessarily serve simply as spaces where people ‘can be themselves’, or as sites through which reified identities are recognised—in existing conditions of inequality, they can also serve as protected spaces where people can take the risk of exploring who they might become with relative safety from attack and abuse” (226). These are necessary risks to take if we are to avoid entrenching fear of difference in a world where difference is itself deeply, and permanently, entrenched.ReferencesAmin, Ash. “Ethnicity and the Multicultural City: Living with Diversity.” Environment and Planning A 34 (2002): 959–80.———. “The Good City.” Urban Studies 43 (2006): 1009–23.Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 547–66.Cantle, Ted. Community Cohesion: A Report of the Independent Review Team. London, UK Home Office, 2001.Carey, Adam. “Backing for Pool Cover Up Directive.” The Age 17 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/backing-for-pool-coverup-directive-20100916-15enz.html›.Elder, John, and Jon Pierick. “The Mean Streets: Where the Locals Fear to Tread.” The Sunday Age 10 Jan. 2010. ‹http://www.theage.com.au/national/the-mean-streets-where-the-locals-fear-to-tread-20100109-m00l.html?skin=text-only›.Eriksen, Thomas Hyland. “Diversity versus Difference: Neoliberalism in the Minority Debate." The Making and Unmaking of Difference. Ed. Richard Rottenburg, Burkhard Schnepel, and Shingo Shimada. Bielefeld: Transaction, 2006. 13–36.Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25/26 (1990): 56–80.Goodhart, David. “Too Diverse.” Prospect 95 (2004): 30-37.Haberfield, Georgie, and Gilbert Gardner. “Mayor Defends Pool Cover-up Order.” Dandenong Leader 16 Sep. 2010 ‹http://dandenong-leader.whereilive.com.au/news/story/dandenong-oasis-tells-swimmers-to-cover-up/›.Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2001.Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Sydney: Pluto, 1998.hooks, bell. "Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance." Media and Cultural Studies Keyworks. Eds. Meenakshi Gigi and Douglas Kellner. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001. 366-380.Iveson, Kurt. "Justifying Exclusion: The Politics of Public Space and the Dispute over Access to McIvers Ladies' Baths, Sydney.” Gender, Place and Culture 10.3 (2003): 215–28.Joppke, Christian. “The Retreat of Multiculturalism in the Liberal State: Theory and Policy.” The British Journal of Sociology 55.2 (2004): 237–57.Laurier, Chris, and Eric Philo. “Cold Shoulders and Napkins Handed: Gestures of Responsibility.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 31 (2006): 193–207.Low, Setha, and Neil Smith, eds. The Politics of Public Space. London: Routledge, 2006.Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005.Murphy, Padraic. "Cover Up for Pool Even at Next Year's Ramadan.” Herald Sun 23 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/cover-up-for-pool-event-during-next-years-ramadan/story-e6frf7kx-1225924291675›.Nichols, David. The Bogan Delusion. Melbourne: Affirm Press, 2011.Poynting, Scott, and Victoria Mason. "The New Integrationism, the State and Islamophobia: Retreat from Multiculturalism in Australia." International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 36 (2008): 230–46.Razack, Sherene H. “Imperilled Muslim Women, Dangerous Muslim Men and Civilised Europeans: Legal and Social Responses to Forced Marriages.” Feminist Legal Studies 12.2 (2004): 129–74.Szego, Julie. “Under the Cover Up." The Age 9 Oct. 2010. < http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/under-the-coverup-20101008-16c1v.html >.Thrift, Nigel. “But Malice Afterthought: Cities and the Natural History of Hatred.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (2005): 133–50.Tissot, Sylvie. “Excluding Muslim Women: From Hijab to Niqab, from School to Public Space." Public Culture 23.1 (2011): 39–46.Valentine, Gill. “Living with Difference: Reflections on Geographies of Encounter.” Progress in Human Geography 32.3 (2008): 323–37.Wise, Amanda, and Selveraj Velayutham, eds. Everyday Multiculturalism. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.YMCA. “VCAT Ruling on Swim Sessions at Dandenong Oasis to Open Up to Community During Ramadan Next Year.” 16 Sep. 2010. ‹http://www.victoria.ymca.org.au/cpa/htm/htm_news_detail.asp?page_id=13&news_id=360›.

This article explores how fat women protesting challenges norms of womanhood, the place of women in society, and who has the power to have their say in public spaces. We use the term fat as a political reclamation; Fat Studies scholars and fat activists prefer the term fat, over the normative term “overweight” and the pathologising term “obese/obesity” (Lee and Pausé para 3). Who is and who isn’t fat, we suggest, is best left to self-determination, although it is generally accepted by fat activists that the term is most appropriately adopted by individuals who are unable to buy clothes in any store they choose. Using a tweet from conservative commentator Ann Coulter as a leaping-off point, we examine the narratives around women in the public sphere and explore how fat bodies might transgress further the norms set by society. The public representations of women in politics and protest are then are set in the context of ‘activist wisdom’ (Maddison and Scalmer) from two sides of the globe. Activist wisdom gives preference to the lived knowledge and experience of activists as tools to understand social movements. It seeks to draw theoretical implications from the practical actions of those on the ground. In centring the experiences of ourselves and other activists, we hope to expand existing understandings of body politics, gender, and political power in this piece. It is important in researching social movements to look both at the representations of protest and protestors in all forms of media as this is the ‘public face’ of movements, but also to examine the reflections of the individuals who collectively put their weight behind bringing social change.A few days after the 45th President of the United States was elected, people around the world spilled into the streets and participated in protests; precursors to the Women’s March which would take place the following January. Pictures of such marches were shared via social media, demonstrating the worldwide protest against the racism, misogyny, and overall oppressiveness, of the newly elected leader. Not everyone was supportive of these protests though; one such conservative commentator, Ann Coulter, shared this tweet: Image1: A tweet from Ann Coulter; the tweet contains a picture of a group of protestors, holding signs protesting Trump, white supremacy, and for the rights of immigrants. In front of the group, holding a megaphone is a woman. Below the picture, the text reads, “Without fat girls, there would be no protests”.Coulter continued on with two more tweets, sharing pictures of other girls protesting and suggesting that the protestors needed a diet programme. Kivan Bay (“Without Fat Girls”) suggested that perhaps Coulter was implying that skinny girls do not have time to protest because they are too busy doing skinny girl things, like buying jackets or trying on sweaters. Or perhaps Coulter was arguing that fat girls are too visible, too loud, and too big, to be taken seriously in their protests. These tweets provide a point of illustration for how fat women protesting challenge norms of womanhood, the place of women in society, and who has the power to have their say in public spaces While Coulter’s tweet was most likely intended as a hostile personal attack on political grounds, we find it useful in its foregrounding of gender, bodies and protest which we consider in this article, beginning with a review of fat girls’ role in social justice movements.Across the world, we can point to fat women who engage in activism related to body politics and more. Australian fat filmmaker and activist Kelli Jean Drinkwater makes documentaries, such as Aquaporko! and Nothing to Lose, that queer fat embodiment and confronts body norms. Newly elected Ontario MPP Jill Andrew has been fighting for equal rights for queer people and fat people in Canada for decades. Nigerian Latasha Ngwube founded About That Curvy Life, Africa’s leading body positive and empowerment site, and has organised plus-size fashion show events at Heineken Lagos Fashion and Design Week in Nigeria in 2016 and the Glitz Africa Fashion Week in Ghana in 2017. Fat women have been putting their bodies on the line for the rights of others to live, work, and love. American Heather Heyer was protesting the hate that white nationalists represent and the danger they posed to her friends, family, and neighbours when she died at a rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina in late 2017 (Caron). When Heyer was killed by one of those white nationalists, they declared that she was fat, and therefore her body size was lauded loudly as justification for her death (Bay, “How Nazis Use”; Spangler).Fat women protesting is not new. For example, the Fat Underground was a group of “radical fat feminist women”, who split off from the more conservative NAAFA (National Association to Aid Fat Americans) in the 1970s (Simic 18). The group educated the public about weight science, harassed weight-loss companies, and disrupted academic seminars on obesity. The Fat Underground made their first public appearance at a Women’s Equality Day in Los Angeles, taking over the stage at the public event to accuse the medical profession of murdering Cass Elliot, the lead singer of the folk music group, The Mamas and the Papas (Dean and Buss). In 1973, the Fat Underground produced the Fat Liberation Manifesto. This Manifesto began by declaring that they believed “that fat people are full entitled to human respect and recognition” (Freespirit and Aldebaran 341).Women have long been disavowed, or discouraged, from participating in the public sphere (Ginzberg; van Acker) or seen as “intruders or outsiders to the tough world of politics” (van Acker 118). The feminist slogan the personal is political was intended to shed light on the role that women needed to play in the public spheres of education, employment, and government (Caha 22). Across the world, the acceptance of women within the public sphere has been varied due to cultural, political, and religious, preferences and restrictions (Agenda Feminist Media Collective). Limited acceptance of women in the public sphere has historically been granted by those ‘anointed’ by a male family member or patron (Fountaine 47).Anti-feminists are quick to disavow women being in public spaces, preferring to assign them the role as helpmeet to male political elite. As Schlafly (in Rowland 30) notes: “A Positive Woman cannot defeat a man in a wrestling or boxing match, but she can motivate him, inspire him, encourage him, teach him, restrain him, reward him, and have power over him that he can never achieve over her with all his muscle.” This idea of women working behind the scenes has been very strong in New Zealand where the ‘sternly worded’ letter is favoured over street protest. An acceptable route for women’s activism was working within existing political institutions (Grey), with activity being ‘hidden’ inside government offices such as the Ministry of Women’s Affairs (Schuster, 23). But women’s movement organisations that engage in even the mildest form of disruptive protest are decried (Grey; van Acker).One way women have been accepted into public space is as the moral guardians or change agents of the entire political realm (Bliss; Ginzberg; van Acker; Ledwith). From the early suffrage movements both political actors and media representations highlighted women were more principled and conciliatory than men, and in many cases had a moral compass based on restraint. Cartoons showed women in the suffrage movement ‘sweeping up’ and ‘cleaning house’ (Sheppard 123). Groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union were celebrated for protesting against the demon drink and anti-pornography campaigners like Patricia Bartlett were seen as acceptable voices of moral reason (Moynihan). And as Cunnison and Stageman (in Ledwith 193) note, women bring a “culture of femininity to trade unions … an alternative culture, derived from the particularity of their lives as women and experiences of caring and subordination”. This role of moral guardian often derived from women as ‘mothers’, responsible for the physical and moral well-being of the nation.The body itself has been a sight of protest for women including fights for bodily autonomy in their medical decisions, reproductive justice, and to live lives free from physical and sexual abuse, have long been met with criticisms of being unladylike or inappropriate. Early examples decried in NZ include the women’s clothing movement which formed part of the suffrage movement. In the second half of the 20th century it was the freedom trash can protests that started the myth of ‘women burning their bras’ which defied acceptable feminine norms (Sawer and Grey). Recent examples of women protesting for body rights include #MeToo and Time’s Up. Both movements protest the lack of bodily autonomy women can assert when men believe they are entitled to women’s bodies for their entertainment, enjoyment, and pleasure. And both movements have received considerable backlash by those who suggest it is a witch hunt that might ensnare otherwise innocent men, or those who are worried that the real victims are white men who are being left behind (see Garber; Haussegger). Women who advocate for bodily autonomy, including access to contraception and abortion, are often held up as morally irresponsible. As Archdeacon Bullock (cited in Smyth 55) asserted, “A woman should pay for her fun.”Many individuals believe that the stigma and discrimination fat people face are the consequences they sow from their own behaviours (Crandall 892); that fat people are fat because they have made poor decisions, being too indulgent with food and too lazy to exercise (Crandall 883). Therefore, fat people, like women, should have to pay for their fun. Fat women find themselves at this intersection, and are often judged more harshly for their weight than fat men (Tiggemann and Rothblum). Examining Coulter’s tweet with this perspective in mind, it can easily be read as an attempt to put fat girl protestors back into their place. It can also be read as a warning. Don’t go making too much noise or you may be labelled as fat. Presenting troublesome women as fat has a long history within political art and depictions. Marianne (the symbol of the French Republic) was depicted as fat and ugly; she also reinforced an anti-suffragist position (Chenut 441). These images are effective because of our societal views on fatness (Kyrölä). Fatness is undesirable, unworthy of love and attention, and a representation of poor character, lack of willpower, and an absence of discipline (Murray 14; Pausé, “Rebel Heart” para 1).Fat women who protest transgress rules around body size, gender norms, and the appropriate place for women in society. Take as an example the experiences of one of the authors of this piece, Sandra Grey, who was thrust in to political limelight nationally with the Campaign for MMP (Grey and Fitzsimmons) and when elected as the President of the New Zealand Tertiary Education Union in 2011. Sandra is a trade union activist who breaches too many norms set for the “good woman protestor,” as well as the norms for being a “good fat woman”. She looms large on a stage – literally – and holds enough power in public protest to make a crowd of 7,000 people “jump to left”, chant, sing, and march. In response, some perceive Sandra less as a tactical and strategic leader of the union movement, and more as the “jolly fat woman” who entertains, MCs, and leads public events. Though even in this role, she has been criticised for being too loud, too much, too big.These criticisms are loudest when Sandra is alongside other fat female bodies. When posting on social media photos with fellow trade union members the comments often note the need of the group to “go on a diet”. The collective fatness also brings comments about “not wanting to fuck any of that group of fat cows”. There is something politically and socially dangerous about fat women en masse. This was behind the responses to Sandra’s first public appearance as the President of TEU when one of the male union members remarked “Clearly you have to be a fat dyke to run this union.” The four top elected and appointed positions in the TEU have been women for eight years now and both their fatness and perceived sexuality present as a threat in a once male-dominated space. Even when not numerically dominant, unions are public spaces dominated by a “masculine culture … underpinned by the undervaluation of ‘women’s worth’ and notions of womanhood ‘defined in domesticity’” (Cockburn in Kirton 273-4). Sandra’s experiences in public space show that the derision and methods of putting fat girls back in their place varies dependent on whether the challenge to power is posed by a single fat body with positional power and a group of fat bodies with collective power.Fat Girls Are the FutureOn the other side of the world, Tara Vilhjálmsdóttir is protesting to change the law in Iceland. Tara believes that fat people should be protected against discrimination in public and private settings. Using social media such as Facebook and Instagram, Tara takes her message, and her activism, to her thousands of followers (Keller, 434; Pausé, “Rebel Heart”). And through mainstream media, she pushes back on fatphobia rhetoric and applies pressure on the government to classify weight as a protected status under the law.After a lifetime of living “under the oppression of diet culture,” Tara began her activism in 2010 (Vilhjálmsdóttir). She had suffered real harm from diet culture, developing an eating disorder as a teen and being told through her treatment for it that her fears as a fat woman – that she had no future, that fat people experienced discrimination and stigma – were unfounded. But Tara’s lived experiences demonstrated fat stigma and discrimination were real.In 2012, she co-founded the Icelandic Association for Body Respect, which promotes body positivity and fights weight stigma in Iceland. The group uses a mixture of real life and online tools; organising petitions, running campaigns against the Icelandic version of The Biggest Loser, and campaigning for weight to be a protected class in the Icelandic constitution. The Association has increased the visibility of the dangers of diet culture and the harm of fat stigma. They laid the groundwork that led to changing the human rights policy for the city of Reykjavík; fat people cannot be discriminated against in employment settings within government jobs. As the city is one of the largest employers in the country, this was a large step forward for fat rights.Tara does receive her fair share of hate messages; she’s shared that she’s amazed at the lengths people will go to misunderstand what she is saying (Vilhjálmsdóttir). “This isn’t about hurt feelings; I’m not insulted [by fat stigma]. It’s about [fat stigma] affecting the livelihood of fat people and the structural discrimination they face” (Vilhjálmsdóttir). She collects the hateful comments she receives online through screenshots and shares them in an album on her page. She believes it is important to keep a repository to demonstrate to others that the hatred towards fat people is real. But the hate she receives only fuels her work more. As does the encouragement she receives from people, both in Iceland and abroad. And she is not alone; fat activists across the world are using Web 2.0 tools to change the conversation around fatness and demand civil rights for fat people (Pausé, “Rebel Heart”; Pausé, “Live to Tell").Using Web 2.0 tools as a way to protest and engage in activism is an example of oppositional technologics; a “political praxis of resistance being woven into low-tech, amateur, hybrid, alternative subcultural feminist networks” (Garrison 151). Fat activists use social media to engage in anti-assimilationist activism and build communities of practice online in ways that would not be possible in real life (Pausé, “Express Yourself” 1). This is especially useful for those whose protests sit at the intersections of oppressions (Keller 435; Pausé, “Rebel Heart” para 19). Online protests have the ability to travel the globe quickly, providing opportunities for connections between protests and spreading protests across the globe, such as SlutWalks in 2011-2012 (Schuster 19). And online spaces open up unlimited venues for women to participate more freely in protest than other forms (Harris 479; Schuster 16; Garrison 162).Whether online or offline, women are represented as dangerous in the political sphere when they act without male champions breaching norms of femininity, when their involvement challenges the role of woman as moral guardians, and when they make the body the site of protest. Women must ‘do politics’ politely, with utmost control, and of course caringly; that is they must play their ‘designated roles’. Whether or not you fit the gendered norms of political life affects how your protest is perceived through the media (van Acker). Coulter’s tweet loudly proclaimed that the fat ‘girls’ protesting the election of the 45th President of the United States were unworthy, out of control, and not worthy of attention (ironic, then, as her tweet caused considerable conversation about protest, fatness, and the reasons not to like the President-Elect). What the Coulter tweet demonstrates is that fat women are perceived as doubly-problematic in public space, both as fat and as women. They do not do politics in a way that is befitting womanhood – they are too visible and loud; they are not moral guardians of conservative values; and, their bodies challenge masculine power.ReferencesAgenda Feminist Media Collective. “Women in Society: Public Debate.” Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity 10 (1991): 31-44.Bay, Kivan. “How Nazis Use Fat to Excuse Violence.” Medium, 7 Feb. 2018. 1 May 2018 <https://medium.com/@kivabay/how-nazis-use-fat-to-excuse-violence-b7da7d18fea8>.———. “Without Fat Girls, There Would Be No Protests.” Bullshit.ist, 13 Nov. 2016. 16 May 2018 <https://bullshit.ist/without-fat-girls-there-would-be-no-protests-e66690de539a>.Bliss, Katherine Elaine. Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City. Penn State Press, 2010.Caha, Omer. Women and Civil Society in Turkey: Women’s Movements in a Muslim Society. London: Ashgate, 2013.Caron, Christina. “Heather Heyer, Charlottesville Victim, Is Recalled as ‘a Strong Woman’.” New York Times, 13 Aug. 2017. 1 May 2018 <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/13/us/heather-heyer-charlottesville-victim.html>.Chenut, Helen. “Anti-Feminist Caricature in France: Politics, Satire and Public Opinion, 1890-1914.” Modern & Contemporary France 20.4 (2012): 437-452.Crandall, Christian S. "Prejudice against Fat People: Ideology and Self-Interest." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 66.5 (1994): 882-894.Damousi, Joy. “Representations of the Body and Sexuality in Communist Iconography, 1920-1955.” Australian Feminist Studies 12.25 (1997): 59-75.Dean, Marge, and Shirl Buss. “Fat Underground.” YouTube, 11 Aug. 2016 [1975]. 1 May 2018 <https://youtu.be/UPYRZCXjoRo>.Fountaine, Susan. “Women, Politics and the Media: The 1999 New Zealand General Election.” PhD thesis. Palmerston North, NZ: Massey University, 2002.Freespirit, Judy, and Aldebaran. “Fat Liberation Manifesto November 1973.” The Fat Studies Reader. Eds. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay. New York: NYU P, 2009. 341-342.Garber, Megan. “The Selective Empathy of #MeToo Backlash.” The Atlantic, 11 Feb 2018. 5 Apr. 2018 <https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/02/the-selective-empathy-of-metoo-backlash/553022/>.Garrison, Edith. “US Feminism – Grrrl Style! Youth (Sub)Cultures and the Technologics of the Third Wave.” Feminist Studies 26.1 (2000): 141-170.Garvey, Nicola. “Violence against Women: Beyond Gender Neutrality.” Looking Back, Moving Forward: The Janus Women’s Convention 2005. Ed. Dale Spender. Masterton: Janus Trust, 2005. 114-120.Ginzberg, Lori D. Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Yale UP, 1992.Grey, Sandra. “Women, Politics, and Protest: Rethinking Women's Liberation Activism in New Zealand.” Rethinking Women and Politics: New Zealand and Comparative Perspectives. Eds. John Leslie, Elizabeth McLeay, and Kate McMillan. Victoria UP, 2009. 34-61.———, and Matthew Fitzsimons. “Defending Democracy: ‘Keep MMP’ and the 2011 Electoral Referendum.” Kicking the Tyres: The New Zealand General Election and Electoral Referendum of 2011. Eds. Jon Johansson and Stephen Levine. Victoria UP, 2012. 285-304.———, and Marian Sawer, eds. Women’s Movements: Flourishing or in Abeyance? London: Routledge, 2008.Harris, Anita. “Mind the Gap: Attitudes and Emergent Feminist Politics since the Third Wave.” Australian Feminist Studies 25.66 (2010): 475-484.Haussegger, Virginia. “#MeToo: Beware the Brewing Whiff of Backlash.” Sydney Morning Herald, 7 Mar. 2018. 1 Apr. 2018 <https://www.smh.com.au/national/metoo-beware-the-brewing-whiff-of-backlash-20180306-p4z33s.html>.Keller, Jessalynn. “Virtual Feminisms.” Information, Communication and Society 15.3(2011): 429-447.Kirston, Gill. “From ‘a Woman’s Place Is in Her Union’ to ‘Strong Unions Need Women’: Changing Gender Discourses, Policies and Realities in the Union Movement.” Labour & Industry: A Journal of the Social and Economic Relations of Work 27.4 (2017): 270-283.Kyrölä, Katariina. The Weight of Images. London: Routledge, 2014.Ledwith, Sue. “Gender Politics in Trade Unions: The Representation of Women between Exclusion and Inclusion.” European Review of Labour and Research 18.2 (2012): 185-199.Lyndsey, Susan. Women, Politics, and the Media: The 1999 New Zealand General Election. Dissertation. Massey University, 2002.Maddison, Sarah, and Sean Scalmer. Activist Wisdom: Practical Knowledge and Creative Tension in Social Movements. Sydney: UNSW P, 2006. Moynihan, Carolyn. A Stand for Decency: Patricia Bartlett & the Society for Promotion of Community Standards, 1970-1995. Wellington: The Society, 1995.Murray, Samantha. "Pathologizing 'Fatness': Medical Authority and Popular Culture." Sociology of Sport Journal 25.1 (2008): 7-21.Pausé, Cat. “Live to Tell: Coming Out as Fat.” Somatechnics 21 (2012): 42-56.———. “Express Yourself: Fat Activism in the Web 2.0 Age.” The Politics of Size: Perspectives from the Fat-Acceptance Movement. Ed. Ragen Chastain. Praeger, 2015. 1-8.———. “Rebel Heart: Performing Fatness Wrong Online.” M/C Journal 18.3 (2015).Rowland, Robyn, ed. Women Who Do and Women Who Don’t Join the Women’s Movement. London: Routledge, 1984.Schuster, Julia. “Invisible Feminists? Social Media and Young Women’s Political Participation.” Political Science 65.1 (2013): 8-24.Sheppard, Alice. "Suffrage Art and Feminism." Hypatia 5.2 (1990): 122-136.Simic, Zora. “Fat as a Feminist Issue: A History.” Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism. Eds. Helen Hester and Caroline Walters. London: Ashgate, 2015. 15-36.Spangler, Todd. “White-Supremacist Site Daily Stormer Booted by Hosting Provider.” Variety, 13 Aug. 2017. 1 May 2018 <https://variety.com/2017/digital/news/daily-stormer-heather-heyer-white-supremacist-neo-nazi-hosting-provider-1202526544/>.Smyth, Helen. Rocking the Cradle: Contraception, Sex, and Politics in New Zealand. Steele Roberts, 2000.Tiggemann, Marika, and Esther D. Rothblum. "Gender Differences in Social Consequences of Perceived Overweight in the United States and Australia." Sex Roles 18.1-2 (1988): 75-86.Van Acker, Elizabeth. “Media Representations of Women Politicians in Australia and New Zealand: High Expectations, Hostility or Stardom.” Policy and Society 22.1 (2003): 116-136.Vilhjálmsdóttir, Tara. Personal interview. 1 June 2018.

IntroductionMusically-inclined people often speak about the soundtrack of their life, with certain songs indelibly linked to a specific moment. When hearing a particular song, it can “easily evoke a whole time and place, distant feelings and emotions, and memories of where we were, and with whom” (Lewis 135). Music has the ability to provide maps to real and imagined spaces, positioning people within a larger social environment where songs “are never just a song, but a connection, a ticket, a pass, an invitation, a node in a complex network” (Kun 3). When someone is lost in the music, they can find themselves transported somewhere else entirely without physically moving. This can be a blessing in some situations, for example, while living in a disaster zone, when almost any other time or place can seem better than the here and now. The city of Christchurch, New Zealand was hit by a succession of damaging earthquakes beginning with a magnitude 7.1 earthquake in the early hours of 4 September 2010. The magnitude 6.3 earthquake of 22 February 2011, although technically an aftershock of the September earthquake, was closer and shallower, with intense ground acceleration that caused much greater damage to the city and its people (“Scientists”). It was this February earthquake that caused the total or partial collapse of many inner city buildings, and claimed the lives of 185 people. Everybody in Christchurch lost someone or something that day: their house or job; family members, friends, or colleagues; the city as they knew it; or their normal way of life. The broken central city was quickly cordoned off behind fences, with the few entry points guarded by local and international police and armed military personnel.In the aftermath of a disaster, circumstances and personal attributes will influence how people react, think and feel about the experience. Surviving a disaster is more than not dying, “survival is to do with quality of life [and] involves progressing from the event and its aftermath, and transforming the experience” (Hodgkinson and Stewart 2). In these times of heightened stress, music can be a catalyst for sharing and expressing emotions, connecting people and communities, and helping them make sense of what has happened (Carr 38; Webb 437). This article looks at some of the ways that popular songs and musical memories helped residents of a broken city remember the past and come to terms with the present.BackgroundExisting songs can take on new significance after a catastrophic event, even without any alteration. Songs such as Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? and Prayer for New Orleans have been given new emotional layers by those who were displaced or affected by Hurricane Katrina (Cooper 265; Sullivan 15). A thirty year-old song by Randy Newman, Louisiana, 1927, became something of “a contemporary anthem, its chorus – ‘Louisiana, they’re trying to wash us away’ – bearing new relevance” (Blumenfeld 166). Contemporary popular songs have also been re-mixed or revised after catastrophic events, either by the original artist or by others. Elton John’s Candle in the Wind and Beyonce’s Halo have each been revised twice by the artist after tragedy and disaster (Doyle; McAlister), while radio stations in the United States have produced commemorative versions of popular songs to mark tragedies and their anniversaries (Beaumont-Thomas; Cantrell). The use and appreciation of music after disaster is a reminder that popular music is fluid, in that it “refuses to provide a uniform or static text” (Connell and Gibson 3), and can simultaneously carry many different meanings.Music provides a soundtrack to daily life, creating a map of meaning to the world around us, or presenting a reminder of the world as it once was. Tia DeNora explains that when people hear a song that was once heard in, and remains associated with, a particular time and place, it “provides a device for unfolding, for replaying, the temporal structure of that moment, [which] is why, for so many people, the past ‘comes alive’ to its soundtrack” (67). When a community is frequently and collectively casting their minds back to a time before a catastrophic change, a sense of community identity can be seen in the use of, and reaction to, particular songs. Music allows people to “locate themselves in different imaginary geographics at one and the same time” (Cohen 93), creating spaces for people to retreat into, small ‘audiotopias’ that are “built, imagined, and sustained through sound, noise, and music” (Kun 21). The use of musical escape holes is prevalent after disaster, as many once-familiar spaces that have changed beyond recognition or are no longer able to be physically visited, can be easily imagined or remembered through music. There is a particular type of longing expressed by those who are still at home and yet cannot return to the home they knew. Whereas nostalgia is often experienced by people far from home who wish to return or those enjoying memories of a bygone era, people after disaster often encounter a similar nostalgic feeling but with no change in time or place: a loss without leaving. Glenn Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia’ to represent “the form of homesickness one experiences when one is still at home” (35). This sense of being unable to find solace in one’s home environment can be brought on by natural disasters such as fire, flood, earthquakes or hurricanes, or by other means like war, mining, climate change or gentrification. Solastalgia is often felt most keenly when people experience the change first-hand and then have to adjust to life in a totally changed environment. This can create “chronic distress of a solastalgic kind [that] would persist well after the acute phase of post-traumatic distress” (Albrecht 36). Just as the visible, physical effects of disaster last for years, so too do the emotional effects, but there have been many examples of how the nostalgia inherent in a shared popular music soundtrack has eased the pain of solastalgia for a community that is hurting.Pop Songs and Nostalgia in ChristchurchIn September 2011, one year after the initial earthquake, the Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) announced a collaboration with Christchurch hip hop artist, Scribe, to remake his smash hit, Not Many, for charity. Back in 2003, Not Many debuted at number five on the New Zealand music charts, where it spent twelve weeks at number one and was crowned ‘Single of the Year’ (Sweetman, On Song 164). The punchy chorus heralded Scribe as a force to be reckoned with, and created a massive imprint on New Zealand popular culture with the line: “How many dudes you know roll like this? Not many, if any” (Scribe, Not Many). Music critic, Simon Sweetman, explains how “the hook line of the chorus [is now] a conversational aside that is practically unavoidable when discussing amounts… The words ‘not many’ are now truck-and-trailered with ‘if any’. If you do not say them, you are thinking them” (On Song 167). The strong links between artist and hometown – and the fact it is an enduringly catchy song – made it ideal for a charity remake. Reworded and reworked as Not Many Cities, the chorus now asks: “How many cities you know roll like this?” to which the answer is, of course, “not many, if any” (Scribe/BNZ, Not Many Cities). The remade song entered the New Zealand music charts at number 36 and the video was widely shared through social media but not all reception was positive. Parts of the video were shot in the city’s Red Zone, the central business district that was cordoned off from public access due to safety concerns. The granting of special access outraged some residents, with letters to the editor and online commentary expressing frustration that celebrities were allowed into the Red Zone to shoot a music video while those directly affected were not allowed in to retrieve essential items from residences and business premises. However, it is not just the Red Zone that features: the video switches between Scribe travelling around the broken inner city on the back of a small truck and lingering shots of carefully selected people, businesses, and groups – all with ties to the BNZ as either clients or beneficiaries of sponsorship. In some ways, Not Many Cities comes across like just another corporate promotional video for the BNZ, albeit with more emotion and a better soundtrack than usual. But what it has bequeathed is a snapshot of the city as it was in that liminal time: a landscape featuring familiar buildings, spaces and places which, although damaged, was still a recognisable version of the city that existed before the earthquakes.Before Scribe burst onto the music scene in the early 2000s, the best-known song about Christchurch was probably Christchurch (in Cashel St. I wait), an early hit from the Exponents (Mitchell 189). Initially known as the Dance Exponents, the group formed in Christchurch in the early 1980s and remained local and national favourites thanks to a string of hits Sweetman refers to as “the question-mark songs,” such as Who Loves Who the Most?, Why Does Love Do This to Me?, and What Ever Happened to Tracey? (Best Songwriter). Despite disbanding in 1999, the group re-formed to be the headline act of ‘Band Together’—a multi-artist, outdoor music event organised for the benefit of Christchurch residents by local musician, Jason Kerrison, formerly of the band OpShop. Attended by over 140,000 people (Anderson, Band Together), this nine-hour event brought joy and distraction to a shaken and stressed populace who, at that point in time (October 2010), probably thought the worst was over.The Exponents took the stage last, and chose Christchurch (in Cashel St. I Wait) as their final number. Every musician involved in the gig joined them on stage and the crowd rose to their feet, singing along with gusto. A local favourite since its release in 1985, the verses may have been a bit of a mumble for some, but the chorus rang out loud and clear across the park: Christchurch, In Cashel Street I wait,Together we will be,Together, together, together, One day, one day, one day,One day, one day, one daaaaaay! (Exponents, “Christchurch (in Cashel St. I Wait)”; lyrics written as sung)At that moment, forming an impromptu community choir of over 100,000 people, the audience was filled with hope and faith that those words would come true. Life would go on and people would gather together in Cashel Street and wait for normality to return, one day. Later the following year, the opening of the Re:Start container mall added an extra layer of poignancy to the song lyrics. Denied access to most of the city’s CBD, that one small part of Cashel Street now populated with colourful shipping containers was almost the only place in central Christchurch where people could wait. There are many music videos that capture the central city of Christchurch as it was in decades past. There are some local classics, like The Bats’ Block of Wood and Claudine; The Shallows’ Suzanne Said; Moana and the Moahunters’ Rebel in Me; and All Fall Down’s Black Gratten, which were all filmed in the 1980s or early 1990s (Goodsort, Re-Live and More Music). These videos provide many flashback moments to the city as it was twenty or thirty years ago. However, one post-earthquake release became an accidental musical time capsule. The song, Space and Place, was released in February 2013, but both song and video had been recorded not long before the earthquakes occurred. The song was inspired by the feelings experienced when returning home after a long absence, and celebrates the importance of the home town as “a place that knows you as well as you know it” (Anderson, Letter). The chorus features the line, “streets of common ground, I remember, I remember” (Franklin, Mayes, and Roberts, Space and Place), but it is the video, showcasing many of the Christchurch places and spaces only recently lost to the earthquakes, that tugs at people’s heartstrings. The video for Space and Place sweeps through the central city at night, with key heritage buildings like the Christ Church Cathedral, and the Catholic Basilica lit up against the night sky (both are still damaged and inaccessible). Producer and engineer, Rob Mayes, describes the video as “a love letter to something we all lost [with] the song and its lyrics [becoming] even more potent, poignant, and unexpectedly prescient post quake” (“Songs in the Key”). The Arts Centre features prominently in the footage, including the back alleys and archways that hosted all manner of night-time activities – sanctioned or otherwise – as well as many people’s favourite hangout, the Dux de Lux (the Dux). Operating from the corner of the Arts Centre site since the 1970s, the Dux has been described as “the city’s common room” and “Christchurch’s beating heart” by musicians mourning its loss (Anderson, Musicians). While the repair and restoration of some parts of the Arts Centre is currently well advanced, the Student Union building that once housed this inner-city social institution is not slated for reopening until 2019 (“Rebuild and Restore”), and whether the Dux will be welcomed back remains to be seen. Empty Spaces, Missing PlacesA Facebook group, ‘Save Our Dux,’ was created in early March 2011, and quickly filled with messages and memories from around the world. People wandered down memory lane together as they reminisced about their favourite gigs and memorable occasions, like the ‘Big Snow’ of 1992 when the Dux served up mulled wine and looked more like a ski chalet. Memories were shared about the time when the music video for the Dance Exponents’ song, Victoria, was filmed at the Dux and the Art Deco-style apartment building across the street. The reminiscing continued, establishing and strengthening connections, with music providing a stepping stone to shared experience and a sense of community. Physically restricted from visiting a favourite social space, people were converging in virtual hangouts to relive moments and remember places now cut off by the passing of time, the falling of bricks, and the rise of barrier fences.While waiting to find out whether the original Dux site can be re-occupied, the business owners opened new venues that housed different parts of the Dux business (live music, vegetarian food, and the bars/brewery). Although the fit-out of the restaurant and bars capture a sense of the history and charm that people associate with the Dux brand, the empty wasteland and building sites that surround the new Dux Central quickly destroy any illusion of permanence or familiarity. Now that most of the quake-damaged buildings have been demolished, the freshly-scarred earth of the central city is like a child’s gap-toothed smile. Wandering around the city and forgetting what used to occupy an empty space, wanting to visit a shop or bar before remembering it is no longer there, being at the Dux but not at the Dux – these are the kind of things that contributed to a feeling that local music writer, Vicki Anderson, describes as “lost city syndrome” (“Lost City”). Although initially worried she might be alone in mourning places lost, other residents have shared similar experiences. In an online comment on the article, one local resident explained how there are two different cities fighting for dominance in their head: “the new keeps trying to overlay the old [but] when I’m not looking at pictures, or in seeing it as it is, it’s the old city that pushes its way to the front” (Juniper). Others expressed relief that they were not the only ones feeling strangely homesick in their own town, homesick for a place they never left but that had somehow left them.There are a variety of methods available to fill the gaps in both memories and cityscape. The Human Interface Technology Laboratory New Zealand (HITLab), produced a technological solution: interactive augmented reality software called CityViewAR, using GPS data and 3D models to show parts of the city as they were prior to the earthquakes (“CityViewAR”). However, not everybody needed computerised help to remember buildings and other details. Many people found that, just by listening to a certain song or remembering particular gigs, it was not just an image of a building that appeared but a multi-sensory event complete with sound, movement, smell, and emotion. In online spaces like the Save Our Dux group, memories of favourite bands and songs, crowded gigs, old friends, good times, great food, and long nights were shared and discussed, embroidering a rich and colourful tapestry about a favourite part of Christchurch’s social scene. ConclusionMusic is strongly interwoven with memory, and can recreate a particular moment in time and place through the associations carried in lyrics, melody, and imagery. Songs can spark vivid memories of what was happening – when, where, and with whom. A song shared is a connection made: between people; between moments; between good times and bad; between the past and the present. Music provides a soundtrack to people’s lives, and during times of stress it can also provide many benefits. The lyrics and video imagery of songs made in years gone by have been shown to take on new significance and meaning after disaster, offering snapshots of times, people and places that are no longer with us. Even without relying on the accompanying imagery of a video, music has the ability to recreate spaces or relocate the listener somewhere other than the physical location they currently occupy. This small act of musical magic can provide a great deal of comfort when suffering solastalgia, the feeling of homesickness one experiences when the familiar landscapes of home suddenly change or disappear, when one has not left home but that home has nonetheless gone from sight. The earthquakes (and the demolition crews that followed) have created a lot of empty land in Christchurch but the sound of popular music has filled many gaps – not just on the ground, but also in the hearts and lives of the city’s residents. ReferencesAlbrecht, Glenn. “Solastalgia.” Alternatives Journal 32.4/5 (2006): 34-36.Anderson, Vicki. “A Love Letter to Christchurch.” Stuff 22 Feb. 2013. <http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/christchurch-life/art-and-stage/christchurch-music/8335491/A-love-letter-to-Christchurch>.———. “Band Together.” Supplemental. The Press. 25 Oct. 2010: 1. ———. “Lost City Syndrome.” Stuff 19 Mar. 2012. <http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/opinion/blogs/rock-and-roll-mother/6600468/Lost-city-syndrome>.———. “Musicians Sing Praises in Call for ‘Vital Common Room’ to Reopen.” The Press 7 Jun. 2011: A8. Beaumont-Thomas, Ben. “Exploring Musical Responses to 9/11.” Guardian 9 Sep. 2011. <https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2011/sep/09/musical-responses-9-11>. Blumenfeld, Larry. “Since the Flood: Scenes from the Fight for New Orleans Jazz Culture.” Pop When the World Falls Apart. Ed. Eric Weisbard. Durham: Duke UP, 2012. 145-175.Cantrell, Rebecca. “These Emotional Musical Tributes Are Still Powerful 20 Years after Oklahoma City Bombing.” KFOR 18 Apr. 2015. <http://kfor.com/2015/04/18/these-emotional-musical-tributes-are-still-powerful-20-years-after-oklahoma-city-bombing/>.Carr, Revell. ““We Never Will Forget”: Disaster in American Folksong from the Nineteenth Century to September 11, 2011.” Voices 30.3/4 (2004): 36-41. “CityViewAR.” HITLab NZ, ca. 2011. <http://www.hitlabnz.org/index.php/products/cityviewar>. Cohen, Sara. Decline, Renewal and the City in Popular Music Culture: Beyond the Beatles. Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007. Connell, John, and Chris Gibson. Soundtracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place. London: Routledge, 2003.Cooper, B. Lee. “Right Place, Wrong Time: Discography of a Disaster.” Popular Music and Society 31.2 (2008): 263-4. DeNora, Tia. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Doyle, Jack. “Candle in the Wind, 1973 & 1997.” Pop History Dig 26 Apr. 2008. <http://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/candle-in-the-wind1973-1997/>. Goodsort, Paul. “More Music Videos Set in Pre-Quake(s) Christchurch.” Mostly within Human Hearing Range. 3 Dec. 2011. <http://humanhearingrange.blogspot.co.nz/2011/12/more-music-videos-set-in-pre-quakes.html>.———. “Re-Live the ‘Old’ Christchurch in Music Videos.” Mostly within Human Hearing Range. 7 Nov. 2011. <http://humanhearingrange.blogspot.co.nz/2011/11/re-live-old-christchurch-in-music.html>. Hodgkinson, Peter, and Michael Stewart. Coping with Catastrophe: A Handbook of Disaster Management. London: Routledge, 1991. Juniper. “Lost City Syndrome.” Comment. Stuff 19 Mar. 2012. <http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/opinion/blogs/rock-and-roll-mother/6600468/Lost-city-syndrome>.Kun, Josh. Audiotopia. Berkeley: U of California P, 2005. Lewis, George H. “Who Do You Love? The Dimensions of Musical Taste.” Popular Music and Communication. Ed. James Lull. London: Sage, 1992. 134-151. Mayes, Rob. “Songs in the Key-Space and Place.” Failsafe Records. Mar. 2013. <http://www.failsaferecords.com/>.McAlister, Elizabeth. “Soundscapes of Disaster and Humanitarianism.” Small Axe 16.3 (2012): 22-38. Mitchell, Tony. “Flat City Sounds Redux: A Musical ‘Countercartography’ of Christchurch.” Home, Land and Sea: Situating Music in Aotearoa New Zealand. Eds. Glenda Keam and Tony Mitchell. Auckland: Pearson, 2011. 176-194.“Rebuild and Restore.” Arts Centre, ca. 2016. <http://www.artscentre.org.nz/rebuild---restore.html>.“Scientists Find Rare Mix of Factors Exacerbated the Christchurch Quake.” GNS [Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences Limited] Science 16 Mar. 2011. <http://www.gns.cri.nz/Home/News-and-Events/Media-Releases/Multiple-factors>. Sullivan, Jack. “In New Orleans, Did the Music Die?” Chronicle of Higher Education 53.3 (2006): 14-15. Sweetman, Simon. “New Zealand’s Best Songwriter.” Stuff 18 Feb. 2011. <http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/blogs/blog-on-the-tracks/4672532/New-Zealands-best-songwriter>.———. On Song. Auckland: Penguin, 2012.Webb, Gary. “The Popular Culture of Disaster: Exploring a New Dimension of Disaster Research.” Handbook of Disaster Research. Eds. Havidan Rodriguez, Enrico Quarantelli and Russell Dynes. New York: Springer, 2006. 430-440. MusicAll Fall Down. “Black Gratten.” Wallpaper Coat [EP]. New Zealand: Flying Nun, 1987.Bats. “Block of Wood” [single]. New Zealand: Flying Nun, 1987. ———. “Claudine.” And Here’s Music for the Fireside [EP]. New Zealand: Flying Nun, 1985. Beyonce. “Halo.” I Am Sacha Fierce. USA: Columbia, 2008.Charlie Miller. “Prayer for New Orleans.” Our New Orleans. USA: Nonesuch, 2005. (Dance) Exponents. “Christchurch (in Cashel St. I Wait).” Expectations. New Zealand: Mushroom Records, 1985.———. “Victoria.” Prayers Be Answered. New Zealand: Mushroom, 1982. ———. “What Ever Happened to Tracy?” Something Beginning with C. New Zealand: PolyGram, 1992.———. “Who Loves Who the Most?” Something Beginning with C. New Zealand: PolyGram, 1992.———. “Why Does Love Do This to Me?” Something Beginning with C. New Zealand: PolyGram, 1992.Elton John. “Candle in the Wind.” Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. United Kingdom: MCA, 1973.Franklin, Leigh, Rob Mayes, and Mark Roberts. “Space and Place.” Songs in the Key. New Zealand: Failsafe, 2013. Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans.” New Orleans Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. USA: Giants of Jazz, 1983 (originally recorded 1947). Moana and the Moahunters. “Rebel in Me.” Tahi. New Zealand: Southside, 1993.Randy Newman. “Louisiana 1927.” Good Old Boys. USA: Reprise, 1974.Scribe. “Not Many.” The Crusader. New Zealand: Dirty Records/Festival Mushroom, 2003.Scribe/BNZ. “Not Many Cities.” [charity single]. New Zealand, 2011. The Shallows. “Suzanne Said.” [single]. New Zealand: self-released, 1985.

IntroductionIn 1802 George Howe (1769-1821), the recently appointed Government Printer, published Australia’s first book. The following year he established Australia’s first newspaper; an enterprise that ran counter to all the environmental factors of the day, including: 1) issues of logistics and a lack of appropriate equipment and basic materials to produce a regularly issued newspaper; 2) issues resulting from the very close supervision of production and the routine censorship by the Governor; and 3) issues associated with the colony’s primary purposes as a military outpost and as a penal settlement, creating conflicts between very different readerships. The Sydney Gazette was, critically for Howe, the only newspaper in the infant city for over two decades. Alternative voices would not enter the field of printed media until the 1820s and 1830s. This article briefly explores the birth of an Australian industry and looks at how a very modest newspaper overcame a range of serious challenges to ignite imaginations and lay a foundation for media empires.Government Printer The first book published in Australia was the New South Wales General Standing Orders and General Orders (1802), authorised by Governor Philip Gidley King for the purposes of providing a convenient, single-volume compilation of all Government Orders, issued in New South Wales, between 1791 and 1802. (As the Australian character has been described as “egalitarian, anti-authoritarian and irreverent” [D. Jones 690], it is fascinating that the nation’s first published book was a set of rules.) Prescribing law, order and regulation for the colony the index reveals the desires of those charged with the colony’s care and development, to contain various types of activities. The rules for convicts were, predictably, many. There were also multiple orders surrounding administration, animal husbandry as well as food stuffs and other stores. Some of the most striking headings in the index relate to crime. For example, in addition to headings pertaining to courts there are also headings for a broad range of offences from: “BAD Characters” to “OFFENSIVE Weapons – Again[s]t concealing” (i-xii). The young colony, still in its teenage years, was, for the short-term, very much working on survival and for the long-term developing ambitious plans for expansion and trade. It was clear though, through this volume, that there was no forgetting the colony of New South Wales was first, and foremost, a penal settlement which also served as a military outpost. Clear, too, was the fact that not all of those who were shipped out to the new colony were prepared to abandon their criminal careers which “did not necessarily stop with transportation” (Foyster 10). Containment and recidivism were matters of constant concern for the colony’s authorities. Colonial priorities could be seen in the fact that, when “Governor Arthur Phillip brought the first convicts (548 males and 188 females) to Port Jackson on 26 January 1788, he also brought a small press for printing orders, rules, and regulations” (Goff 103). The device lay dormant on arrival, a result of more immediate concerns to feed and house all those who made up the First Fleet. It would be several years before the press was pushed into sporadic service by the convict George Hughes for printing miscellaneous items including broadsides and playbills as well as for Government Orders (“Hughes, George” online). It was another convict (another man named George), convicted at the Warwick Assizes on March 1799 (Ferguson vi) then imprisoned and ultimately transported for shoplifting (Robb 15), who would transform the small hand press into an industry. Once under the hand of George Howe, who had served as a printer with several London newspapers including The Times (Sydney Gazette, “Never” 2) – the printing press was put to much more regular use. In these very humble circumstances, Australia’s great media tradition was born. Howe, as the Government Printer, transformed the press from a device dedicated to ephemera as well as various administrative matters into a crucial piece of equipment that produced the new colony’s first newspaper. Logistical Challenges Governor King, in the year following the appearance of the Standing Orders, authorised the publishing of Australia’s first newspaper, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser. The publication history of The Sydney Gazette, in a reflection of some of the challenges faced by the printer, is erratic. First published on a Saturday from 5 March 1803, it quickly changed to a Sunday paper from 10 April 1803. Interestingly, Sunday “was not an approved day for the publication of newspapers, and although some English publishers had been doing so since about 1789, Sunday papers were generally frowned upon” (Robb 58). Yet, as argued by Howe a Sunday print run allowed for the inclusion of “the whole of the Ship News, and other Incidental Matter, for the preceeding week” (Sydney Gazette, “To the Public” 1).The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser Vol. 1, No. 1, 5 March 1803 (Front Page)Call Number DL F8/50, Digital ID a345001, State Library of New South WalesPublished weekly until 1825, then bi-weekly until 1827 before coming out tri-weekly until 20 October 1842 (Holden 14) there were some notable pauses in production. These included one in 1807 (Issue 214, 19 April-Issue 215, 7 June) and one in 1808-1809 (Issue 227, 30 August-Issue 228, 15 May) due to a lack of paper, with the latter pause coinciding with the Rum Rebellion and the end of William Bligh’s term as Governor of New South Wales (see: Karskens 186-88; Mundle 323-37). There was, too, a brief attempt at publishing as a daily from 1 January 1827 which lasted only until 10 February of that year when the title began to appear tri-weekly (Kirkpatrick online; Holden 14). There would be other pauses, including one of two weeks, shortly before the final issue was produced on 20 October 1842. There were many problems that beset The Sydney Gazette with paper shortages being especially challenging. Howe regularly advertised for: “any quantity” of Spanish paper (e.g.: Sydney Gazette, “Wanted to Purchase” 4) and needing to be satisfied “with a variety of size and colour” (P.M. Jones 39). In addition, the procurement of ink was so difficult in the colony, that Howe often resorted to making his own out of “charcoal, gum and shark oil” (P.M. Jones 39).The work itself was physically demanding and papers printed during this period, by hand, required a great deal of effort with approximately “250 sheets per hour … [the maximum] produced by a printer and his assistant” (Robb 8). The printing press itself was inadequate and the subject of occasional repairs (Sydney Gazette, “We Have” 2). Type was also a difficulty. As Gwenda Robb explains, traditionally six sets of an alphabet were supplied to a printer with extras for ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘r’ and ‘t’ as well as ‘s’. Without ample type Howe was required to improvise as can be seen in using a double ‘v’ to create a ‘w’ and an inverted ‘V’ to represent a capital ‘A’ (50, 106). These quirky work arounds, combined with the use of the long-form ‘s’ (‘∫’) for almost a full decade, can make The Sydney Gazette a difficult publication for modern readers to consume. Howe also “carried the financial burden” of the paper, dependent, as were London papers of the late eighteenth century, on advertising (Robb 68, 8). Howe also relied upon subscriptions for survival, with the collection of payments often difficult as seen in some subscribers being two years, or more, in arrears (e.g.: Sydney Gazette, “Sydney Gazette” 1; Ferguson viii; P.M. Jones 38). Governor Lachlan Macquarie granted Howe an annual salary, in 1811, of £60 (Byrnes 557-559) offering some relief, and stability, for the beleaguered printer.Gubernatorial Supervision Governor King wrote to Lord Hobart (then Secretary of State for War and the Colonies), on 9 May 1803: it being desirable that the settlers and inhabitants at large should be benefitted by useful information being dispersed among them, I considered that a weekly publication would greatly facilitate that design, for which purpose I gave permission to an ingenious man, who manages the Government printing press, to collect materials weekly, which, being inspected by an officer, is published in the form of a weekly newspaper, copies of which, as far as they have been published, I have the honor to enclose. (85)In the same letter, King wrote: “to the list of wants I have added a new fount of letters which may be procured for eight or ten pounds, sufficient for our purpose, if approved of” (85). King’s motivations were not purely altruistic. The population of the colony was growing in Sydney Cove and in the outlying districts, thus: “there was an increasing administrative need for information to be disseminated in a more accessible form than the printed handbills of government orders” (Robb 49). There was, however, a need for the administration to maintain control and the words “Published By Authority”, appearing on the paper’s masthead, were a constant reminder to the printer that The Sydney Gazette was “under the censorship of the Secretary to the Governor, who examined all proofs” (Ferguson viii). The high level of supervision, worked in concert with the logistical difficulties described above, ensured the newspaper was a source of great strain and stress. All for the meagre reward of “6d per copy” (Ferguson viii). This does not diminish Howe’s achievement in establishing a newspaper, an accomplishment outlined, with some pride, in an address printed on the first page of the first issue:innumerable as the Obstacles were which threatened to oppose our Undertaking, yet we are happy to affirm that they were not insurmountable, however difficult the task before us.The utility of a PAPER in the COLONY, as it must open a source of solid information, will, we hope, be universally felt and acknowledged. (Sydney Gazette, “Address” 1)Howe carefully kept his word and he “wrote nothing like a signature editorial column, nor did he venture his personal opinions, conscious always of the powers of colonial officials” (Robb 72). An approach to reportage he passed to his eldest son and long-term assistant, Robert (1795-1829), who later claimed The Sydney Gazette “reconciled in one sheet the merits of the London Gazette in upholding the Government and the London Times in defending the people” (Walker 10). The censorship imposed on The Sydney Gazette, by the Governor, was lifted in 1824 (P.M. Jones 40), when the Australian was first published without permission: Governor Thomas Brisbane did not intervene in the new enterprise. The appearance of unauthorised competition allowed Robert Howe to lobby for the removal of all censorship restrictions on The Sydney Gazette, though he was careful to cite “greater dispatch and earlier publication, not greater freedom of expression, as the expected benefit” (Walker 6). The sudden freedom was celebrated, and still appreciated many years after it was given:the Freedom of the Press has now been in existence amongst us on the verge of four years. In October 1824, we addressed a letter to the Colonial Government, fervently entreating that those shackles, under which the Press had long laboured, might be removed. Our prayer was attended to, and the Sydney Gazette, feeling itself suddenly introduced to a new state of existence, demonstrated to the Colonists the capabilities that ever must flow from the spontaneous exertions of Constitutional Liberty. (Sydney Gazette, “Freedom” 2)Early Readerships From the outset, George Howe presented a professional publication. The Sydney Gazette was formatted into three columns with the front page displaying a formal masthead featuring a scene of Sydney and the motto “Thus We Hope to Prosper”. Gwenda Robb argues the woodcut, the first produced in the colony, was carved by John W. Lewin who “had plenty of engraving skills” and had “returned to Sydney [from a voyage to Tahiti] in December 1802” (51) while Roger Butler has suggested that “circumstances point to John Austin who arrived in Sydney in 1800” as being the engraver (91). The printed text was as vital as the visual supports and every effort was made to present full accounts of colonial activities. “As well as shipping and court news, there were agricultural reports, religious homilies, literary extracts and even original poetry written by Howe himself” (Blair 450). These items, of course, sitting alongside key Government communications including General Orders and Proclamations.Howe’s language has been referred to as “florid” (Robb 52), “authoritative and yet filled with deference for all authority, pompous in a stiff, affected eighteenth century fashion” (Green 10) and so “some of Howe’s readers found the Sydney Gazette rather dull” (Blair 450). Regardless of any feelings towards authorial style, circulation – without an alternative – steadily increased with the first print run in 1802 being around 100 copies but by “the early 1820s, the newspaper’s production had grown to 300 or 400 copies” (Blair 450).In a reflection of the increasing sophistication of the Sydney-based reader, George Howe, and Robert Howe, would also publish some significant, stand-alone, texts. These included several firsts: the first natural history book printed in the colony, Birds of New South Wales with their Natural History (1813) by John W. Lewin (praised as a text “printed with an elegant and classical simplicity which makes it the highest typographical achievement of George Howe” [Wantrup 278]); the first collection of poetry published in the colony First Fruits of Australian Poetry (1819) by Barron Field; the first collection of poetry written by a Australian-born author, Wild Notes from the Lyre of a Native Minstrel (1826) by Charles Tompson; and the first children’s book A Mother’s Offering to Her Children: By a Lady, Long Resident in New South Wales (1841) by Charlotte Barton. The small concern also published mundane items such as almanacs and receipt books for the Bank of New South Wales (Robb 63, 72). All against the backdrop of printing a newspaper.New Voices The Sydney Gazette was Australia’s first newspaper and, critically for Howe, the only newspaper for over two decades. (A second paper appeared in 1810 but the Derwent Star and Van Diemen’s Land Intelligencer, which only managed twelve issues, presented no threat to The Sydney Gazette.) No genuine, local rival entered the field until 1824, when the Australian was founded by barristers William Charles Wentworth and Robert Wardell. The Monitor debuted in 1826, followed the Sydney Herald in 1831 and the Colonist in 1835 (P.M. Jones 38). It was the second title, the Australian, with a policy that asserted articles to be: “Independent, yet consistent – free, yet not licentious – equally unmoved by favours and by fear” (Walker 6), radically changed the newspaper landscape. The new paper made “a strong point of its independence from government control” triggering a period in which colonial newspapers “became enmeshed with local politics” (Blair 451). This new age of opinion reflected how fast the colony was evolving from an antipodean gaol into a complex society. Also, two papers, without censorship restrictions, without registration, stamp duties or advertisement duties meant, as pointed out by R.B. Walker, that “in point of law the Press in the remote gaol of exile was now freer than in the country of origin” (6). An outcome George Howe could not have predicted as he made the long journey, as a convict, to New South Wales. Of the early competitors, the only one that survives is the Sydney Herald (The Sydney Morning Herald from 1842), which – founded by immigrants Alfred Stephens, Frederick Stokes and William McGarvie – claims the title of Australia’s oldest continuously published newspaper (Isaacs and Kirkpatrick 4-5). That such a small population, with so many pressing issues, factions and political machinations, could support a first newspaper, then competitors, is a testament to the high regard, with which newspaper reportage was held. Another intruder would be The Government Gazette. Containing only orders and notices in the style of the London Gazette (McLeay 1), lacking any news items or private advertisements (Walker 19), it was first issued on 7 March 1832 (and continues, in an online format, today). Of course, Government orders and other notices had news value and newspaper proprietors could bid for exclusive rights to produce these notices until a new Government Printer was appointed in 1841 (Walker 20).Conclusion George Howe, an advocate of “reason and common sense” died in 1821 placing The Sydney Gazette in the hands of his son who “fostered religion” (Byrnes 557-559). Robert Howe, served as editor, experiencing firsthand the perils and stresses of publishing, until he drowned in a boating accident in Sydney Harbour, in 1829 leaving the paper to his widow Ann Howe (Blair 450-51). The newspaper would become increasingly political leading to controversy and financial instability; after more changes in ownership and in editorial responsibility, The Sydney Gazette, after almost four decades of delivering the news – as a sole voice and then as one of several alternative voices – ceased publication in 1842. During a life littered with personal tragedy, George Howe laid the foundation stone for Australia’s media empires. His efforts, in extraordinary circumstances and against all environmental indicators, serve as inspiration to newspapers editors, proprietors and readers across the country. He established the Australian press, an institution that has been described asa profession, an art, a craft, a business, a quasi-public, privately owned institution. It is full of grandeurs and faults, sublimities and pettinesses. It is courageous and timid. It is fallible. It is indispensable to the successful on-going of a free people. (Holden 15)George Howe also created an artefact of great beauty. The attributes of The Sydney Gazette are listed, in a perfunctory manner, in most discussions of the newspaper’s history. The size of the paper. The number of columns. The masthead. The changes seen across 4,503 issues. Yet, consistently overlooked, is how, as an object, the newspaper is an exquisite example of the printed word. There is a physicality to the paper that is in sharp contrast to contemporary examples of broadsides, tabloids and online publications. Concurrently fragile and robust: its translucent sheets and mottled print revealing, starkly, the problems with paper and ink; yet it survives, in several collections, over two centuries since the first issue was produced. The elegant layout, the glow of the paper, the subtle crackling sound as the pages are turned. The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser is an astonishing example of innovation and perseverance. It provides essential insights into Australia’s colonial era. It is a metonym for making words matter. AcknowledgementsThe author offers her sincere thanks to Geoff Barker, Simon Dwyer and Peter Kirkpatrick for their comments on an early draft of this paper. The author is also grateful to Bridget Griffen-Foley for engaging in many conversations about Australian newspapers. ReferencesBlair, S.J. “Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser.” A Companion to the Australian Media. Ed. Bridget Griffen-Foley. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2014.Butler, Roger. Printed Images in Colonial Australia 1801-1901. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2007.Byrnes, J.V. “Howe, George (1769–1821).” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography: 1788–1850, A–H. Canberra: Australian National University, 1966. 557-559. Ferguson, J.A. “Introduction.” The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser: A Facsimile Reproduction of Volume One, March 5, 1803 to February 26, 1804. Sydney: The Trustees of the Public Library of New South Wales in Association with Angus & Robertson, 1963. v-x. Foyster, Elizabeth. “Introduction: Newspaper Reporting of Crime and Justice.” Continuity and Change 22.1 (2007): 9-12.Goff, Victoria. “Convicts and Clerics: Their Roles in the Infancy of the Press in Sydney, 1803-1840.” Media History 4.2 (1998): 101-120.Green, H.M. “Australia’s First Newspaper.” Sydney Morning Herald, 11 Apr. 1935: 10.Holden, W. Sprague. Australia Goes to Press. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1961. “Hughes, George (?–?).” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography: 1788–1850, A–H. Canberra: Australian National University, 1966. 562. Isaacs, Victor, and Rod Kirkpatrick. Two Hundred Years of Sydney Newspapers. Richmond: Rural Press, 2003. Jones, Dorothy. “Humour and Satire (Australia).” Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English. 2nd ed. Eds. Eugene Benson and L.W. Conolly. London: Routledge, 2005. 690-692.Jones, Phyllis Mander. “Australia’s First Newspaper.” Meanjin 12.1 (1953): 35-46. Karskens, Grace. The Colony: A History of Early Sydney. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010. King, Philip Gidley. “Letter to Lord Hobart, 9 May 1803.” Historical Records of Australia, Series 1, Governors’ Despatches to and from England, Volume IV, 1803-1804. Ed. Frederick Watson. Sydney: Library Committee of the Commonwealth Parliament, 1915.Kirkpatrick, Rod. Press Timeline: 1802 – 1850. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2011. 6 Jan. 2017 <https://www.nla.gov.au/content/press-timeline-1802-1850>. McLeay, Alexander. “Government Notice.” The New South Wales Government Gazette 1 (1832): 1. Mundle, R. Bligh: Master Mariner. Sydney: Hachette, 2016.New South Wales General Standing Orders and General Orders: Selected from the General Orders Issued by Former Governors, from the 16th of February, 1791, to the 6th of September, 1800. Also, General Orders Issued by Governor King, from the 28th of September, 1800, to the 30th of September, 1802. Sydney: Government Press, 1802. Robb, Gwenda. George Howe: Australia’s First Publisher. Kew: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2003.Spalding, D.A. Collecting Australian Books: Notes for Beginners. 1981. Mawson: D.A. Spalding, 1982. The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser. “Address.” 5 Mar. 1803: 1.———. “To the Public.” 2 Apr. 1803: 1.———. “Wanted to Purchase.” 26 June 1803: 4.———. “We Have the Satisfaction to Inform Our Readers.” 3 Nov. 1810: 2. ———. “Sydney Gazette.” 25 Dec. 1819: 1. ———. “The Freedom of the Press.” 29 Feb. 1828: 2.———. “Never Did a More Painful Task Devolve upon a Public Writer.” 3 Feb. 1829: 2. Walker, R.B. The Newspaper Press in New South Wales, 1803-1920. Sydney: Sydney UP, 1976.Wantrup, Johnathan. Australian Rare Books: 1788-1900. Sydney: Hordern House, 1987.

In recent years, the US television landscape has been flooded with reboots, remakes, and revivals of “classic” nineties television series, such as Full/er House (1987-1995, 2016-present), Will & Grace (1998-2006, 2017-present), Roseanne (1988-1977, 2018), and Charmed (1998-2006, 2018-present). The term “reboot” is often used as a catchall for different kinds of revivals and remakes. “Remakes” are derivations or reimaginings of known properties with new characters, cast, and stories (Loock; Lavigne). “Revivals” bring back an existing property in the form of a continuation with the same cast and/or setting. “Revivals” and “remakes” both seek to capitalise on nostalgia for a specific notion of the past and access the (presumed) existing audience of the earlier series (Mittell; Rebecca Williams; Johnson).Reboots operate around two key pleasures. First, there is the pleasure of revisiting and/or reimagining characters that are “known” to audiences. Whether continuations or remakes, reboots are invested in the audience’s desire to see familiar characters. Second, there is the desire to “fix” and/or recuperate an earlier series. Some reboots, such as the Charmed remake attempt to recuperate the whiteness of the original series, whereas others such as Gilmore Girls: A Life in the Year (2017) set out to fix the ending of the original series by giving audiences a new “official” conclusion.The Roseanne reboot is invested in both these pleasures. It reunites the original cast for a short-lived, but impactful nine-episode tenth season. There is pleasure in seeing Roseanne (Roseanne Barr), Dan (John Goodman), Jackie (Laurie Metcalf), Becky (Lecy Goranson [seasons one to six, ten], Sarah Chalke [seasons six to nine]), Darlene (Sara Gilbert), and DJ (Michael Fishman) back in the Conner house with the same well-worn couch and afghan. The (attempted) recuperation is of author-star Barr, whose recent politics are in stark contrast to the working-class second-wave feminist politics of her nineties’ persona. This article is particularly interested in the second pleasure, because both the original series and the reboot situate the voice of Barr as central to the series’ narrative and politics.Despite achieving the highest ratings of any US sitcom in the past three years (O’Connell), on 29 May 2018, ABC announced that it was cancelling the Roseanne reboot. This decision came about in the wake of a racist tweet, where Barr compared a black woman (high-ranking Obama aide Valerie Jarrett) to an ape. Barr’s tweet and the cancellation of Roseanne, highlight the limits of nostalgia and Roseanne/Barr’s particular brand of white feminism. While whiteness and a lack of racial awareness are (and always have been) at the centre of Barr’s performance of feminism, the political landscape has shifted since the 1990s, with the rise of third and fourth-wave feminisms and intersectional activism. As such in the contemporary landscape, there is the expectation that white feminist figures take on and endorse anti-racist stances.This article argues that the reboot’s attempt to capitalise on nineties nostalgia exposes the limits of Roseanne/Barr’s feminism, as well as the limits of nostalgia. The feminist legacy of nineties-era Roseanne cannot and does not recuperate Barr’s star-persona. Also, the reboot and its subsequent cancellation highlight how the feminism of the series is embodied by Barr and her whiteness. This article will situate Roseanne and Barr within a feminist tradition on US television, before exploring how the reboot operates and circulates differently to the original series.From Roseanne (1988-1997) to Roseanne (2018)In its original form, Roseanne holds the distinction of being one of the most highly discussed and canonised feminist-leaning television series of all time, alongside The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977), Cagney and Lacey (1981-1988), and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2004). Roseanne also enabled and informed many popular feminist-leaning contemporary series, including Girls (2012-2017), Mom (2013-present), Better Things (2016-present), and Dietland (2018). Although it may seem anachronistic today, Roseanne and Barr helped define what it means to be a feminist and speak feminist politics on US television.Roseanne depicts the lives of the Conner family, headed by parents Roseanne and Dan. They live in the fictional blue-collar town of Lanford, Illinois with their three children Becky, Darlene, and DJ. Both Roseanne and Dan experience precarious employment and embark on numerous (mostly failed) business ventures throughout the series’ run. The reboot catches up with the Conner family in 2018, after Roseanne has experienced a health scare and single mom Darlene has moved into her parents’ house with her two children Harris (Emma Kenney) and Mark (Ames McNamara). In the new season, Roseanne and Dan’s children are experiencing similar working conditions to their parents in the 1990s. Becky works at a Mexican restaurant and is eager to act as surrogate mother to earn $50,000, Darlene is recently unemployed and looking for work, and DJ has just returned from military service.A stated objective of reviving Roseanne was to address the contentious US political landscape after the election of President Donald J. Trump (VanDerWerff). Barr is a vocal supporter of President Trump, as is her character in the reboot. The election plays a key role in the new season’s premise. The first episode of season 10 establishes that the titular Roseanne has not spoken to her sister Jackie (who is a Hillary Clinton supporter) in over a year. In both its nineties and 2018 incarnations, Roseanne makes apparent the extent to which feminist politics are indebted to and spoken through the author-star. The series is based on a character that Barr created and is grounded in her life experience. Barr and her character Roseanne are icons of nineties televisual feminism. While the other members of the Conner family are richly drawn and compelling, Roseanne is the centre of the series. It is her voice and perspective that drives the series and gives it its political resonance. Roseanne’s power in the text is authorised by Barr’s stardom. As Melissa Williams writes: “For nearly a decade, Barr was one of the most powerful women in Hollywood” (180).In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Roseanne (and Barr) represented a new kind of feminist voice on US television, which at that stage (and still today) was dominated by middle-class women. Unlike Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore), Claire Huxtable (Phylicia Rashad), or Murphy Brown (Candice Bergen), Roseanne did not have a stable job and her family’s economic situation was often precarious. Roseanne/Barr adopted and used a feminism of personality popularised on television by Mary Tyler Moore and Lucille Ball. Unlike her foremothers, though, Roseanne/Barr was not slender, feminine, or interested in being likeable to men. Roseanne did not choose to work outside of the home, which marked her as different from many of US television’s other second-wave feminists and/or mothers. As Rachael Horowitz writes: “Roseanne’s feminism was for women who have to work because bills must get paid, who assert their role as head of the house despite the degrading work they often do during the day to pay for their kids’ food and clothes” (9).According to Kathleen Rowe, Barr is part of a long line of “female grotesques” whose defining features are excess and looseness (2-3). Rowe links Barr’s fatness or physical excess with her refusal to shut up and subversive speech. The feminism of Roseanne is contained within and expressed through Barr’s unruly white body (and voice). Barr’s unruliness and her unwillingness to follow the social conventions of politeness and decorum are tied to her (perceived) feminist politics.Understandings of Barr’s stardom, however, have shifted considerably in the years since the publication of Rowe’s analysis. While Barr is still “unruly,” her unruliness is no longer located in her body (which has been transformed to meet more conventional standards of western beauty), but rather in her Twitter presence, which is pro-Israel, pro-Trump, and anti-immigration. As Roxane Gay writes of the reboot: “Whatever charm and intelligence she [Barr] brought to the first nine seasons of her show, a show I very much loved, are absolutely absent in her current persona, particularly as it manifests on Twitter.”Feminist Voice and Stardom on US TVRoseanne performs what Julie D’Acci calls “explicit general feminism,” which is defined by “dialogue and scenes that straightforwardly addressed discrimination against women in both public and private spheres, stories structured around topical feminist causes, and the use of unequivocal feminist language and slogans” (147). However, the feminist politics of Roseanne and Barr are (and never were) straightforward or uncomplicated.Studies of feminism on US television have primarily focused on comedies that feature female television stars who function as advocates for feminism and women’s issues (Spigel; Rabinovitz; D’Acci). Much of the critical discussion of feminist voice in US female-led television identifies the feminist intervention as taking place at the level of performance (Dow; Spigel; Spangler). Comedic series such as I Love Lucy (1951-1957), Murphy Brown (1988-1998, 2018-present), and Grace Under Fire (1993-1998), and dramatic series’, such as Cagney and Lacey and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, privilege the articulation of feminist ideas through performance and character.Roseanne is not a series that derives its comedy from a clash of different perspectives or a series where politics are debated and explored in a nuanced a complex way. Roseanne promotes a distinct singular perspective – that of Roseanne Barr. In seasons one to nine, the character Roseanne is rarely persuaded to think differently about an issue or situation or depicted as “wrong.” The series centres Roseanne’s pain and distress when Becky elopes with Mark (Glenn Quinn), or when Jackie is abused by her boyfriend Fisher (Matt Roth), or when Darlene accidently gets pregnant. Although those storylines are about other characters, Roseanne’s emotions are central. Roseanne/Barr’s perspective (as fictional character and media personality) informs the narrative, sensibility, and tone. Roseanne is not designed to contain multiple perspectives.Roseanne is acutely aware of its place in the history of feminist voice and representations of women on US television. Television is central to the series’ articulation of feminism and feminist voice. In season seven episode “All About Rosey,” the series breaks the fourth wall (as it does many times throughout its run), taking the audience behind the scenes where some of US television’s most well-known (and traditional) mothers are cleaning the Conner’s kitchen. June Cleaver (Barbara Billingsley) from Leave It to Beaver (1957-1963), Joan Nash (Pat Crowley) from Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1965-1967), Ruth Martin (June Lockhart) from Lassie (1958-1964), Norma Arnold (Alley Mills) from The Wonder Years (1988-1993), and Louise Jefferson (Isabel Sanford) from The Jeffersons (1975-1985) at first sit in judgment of Barr and her character Roseanne, claiming she presents “wrong image” for a TV mother. However, Roseanne/Barr eventually wins over the TV mothers, declaring “the important thing is on my show, I’m the boss and father knows squat” (7.19). It is in contrast to more traditional television mothers that Roseanne/Barr’s feminist voice comes into focus.In the ninth and final season of Roseanne’s initial run, the series (arguably) becomes a parody of its former self. By this point in the series, “Barr was seen as the sole cause of the show’s demise, as a woman who was ‘imploding,’ ‘losing the plot,’ or ‘out of control’” (White 234). White argues that depicting the working-class Conners’ social and economic ascension to upper-class diminishes the distinction between Barr and her character (243). White writes that in the series’ finale, the “line between performer and character is irrevocably blurred; it is unclear whether the voice we are hearing is that of Roseanne Conner or Roseanne Barr” (244). This blurring between Roseanne and Barr becomes particularly contentious in season 10.Rebooting Roseanne: Season 10Season 10 redacts and erases most of the events of season nine, which itself was a fantasy, as revealed in the season nine finale. As such, the reboot is not a simple continuation, because in the season nine finale it is revealed that Dan suffered a fatal heart attack a year earlier. The final monologue (delivered in voice-over by Barr) “reveals” that Roseanne has been writing and editing her experiences into a digestible story. The “Conners winning the lottery” storyline that dominated season nine was imagined by Roseanne as an elaborate coping strategy after Dan’s death. Yet in the season 10 reboot, Dan is revealed to be alive, as is Darlene and David’s (Johnny Galecki) daughter Harris, who was born during the events of season nine.The limits of Roseanne/Barr’s feminism within the contemporary political landscape come into focus around issues of race. This is partly because the incident that incited ABC to cancel the reboot of Roseanne was racially motivated, and partly because Roseanne/Barr’s feminism has always relied on whiteness. Between 1997 and 2018, Barr’s unruliness has become less associated with empowering working-class women and more with railing against minorities and immigrants. In redacting and erasing the events of season nine, the reboot attempts to step back the conflation between Roseanne and Barr with little success.In the first episode of season 10, “Twenty Years to Life”, Roseanne is positioned as the loud-mouthed victim of circumstance and systemic inequality – similar to her nineties-persona. Yet in 2018, Roseanne mocks same things that nineties’ Roseanne took seriously, including collective action, community building, and labour conditions. Roseanne claims: “It is not my fault that I just happen to be a charismatic person that’s right about everything” (10.01). Here, the series attempts to make light of a now-outdated understanding of Barr’s persona, but it comes off as tone-deaf and lacking self-awareness.Roseanne has bigoted tendencies in both the 1990s and in 2018, but the political resonance of those tendencies and their relationships to feminisms and nostalgia differs greatly from the original series to the reboot. This is best illustrated by comparing season seven episode “White Men Can’t Kiss” and season 10 episode “Go Cubs.” In the former, Roseanne is appalled that she may have raised a racist son and insists DJ must kiss his black classmate Geena (Rae’Ven Larrymore Kelly) in the school play. Towards the end of this episode, Geena’s father comes by the restaurant where Roseanne and Jackie are closing up. When the tall black man knocks on the locked door, Roseanne refuses to let him inside. She appears visibly afraid. Once Roseanne knows he is Geena’s father, she lets him in and he confronts her about her racist attitude. Roseanne (and the audience) is forced to sit in the discomfort of having her bigotry exposed. While there are no material consequences for Roseanne or DJ’s racism, within the context of the less intersectional 1990s, this interaction does not call into question Roseanne or Barr’s feminist credentials.In season 10, Roseanne tackles similar issues around race, ignorance, and bigotry, but it plays out very differently. In the reboot’s seventh episode, Roseanne suspects her Muslim refugee neighbours Fatima (Anne Bedian) and Samir (Alain Washnevky) are terrorists. Although Roseanne is proven wrong, she is not forced to reckon with her bigotry. Instead, she is positioned as a “hero” later in the episode, when she berates a supermarket cashier for her racist treatment of Fatima. Given what audiences know about Barr’s off-screen politics, this does not counteract the impression of racism, but compounds it. It also highlights the whiteness of the politics embodied by Roseanne/Barr both on-screen and off. Although these are two very different racial configurations (anti-blackness and Islamophobia), these episodes underline the shifting reception and resonance of the feminism Roseanne/Barr embodies.ConclusionIn June 2018, shortly after the cancellation of the Roseanne reboot, ABC announced that it was developing a spin-off without Barr called The Conners (2018-present). In the spin-off Roseanne is dead and her family is dealing with life after Roseanne/Roseanne (Crucchiola). Here, Roseanne suffers the same fate as Dan in season nine (she dies off-screen), but now it is Barr who is fictionally buried. While The Conners attempts to rewrite the story of the Conner family by rejecting Barr’s racist views and removing her financial and creative stake in their stories, Barr cannot be erased or redacted from Roseanne or the story of the Conner family, because it is her story.The reboot and its cancellation illuminate how Barr and Roseanne’s feminist voice has not evolved past its white second-wave roots. The feminism of Roseanne is embodied by Barr in all her unruliness and whiteness. Roseanne/Barr/Roseanne has not taken on the third and fourth-wave critiques of second-wave feminisms, which emphasise the limits of white feminisms. The failure of the Roseanne reboot reveals that the pleasure and nostalgia of seeing the Conner family back together is not enough. Ultimately, Roseanne is without intersectionality, and thus cannot (and should not) be recognised as feminist in the contemporary political landscape.ReferencesBetter Things. Cr. Pamela Adlon and Louis C.K. FX, 2016 to present.Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Cr. Joss Whedon. Mutant Enemy Productions, 1997-2004.Cagney and Lacey. Cr. Barbara Avedon and Barbara Corday. Orion Television, 1981-1988.Charmed. Cr. Constance M. Burge. Spelling Television, 1998-2006.Charmed. Cr. Jessica O’Toole, Amy Rardin, and Jennie Snyder Urman. CBS Television, 2018 to present.Conners, The. Cr. Bruce Helford and Matt Williams. Werner Entertainment, 2018 to present.Crucchiola, Jordan. “Roseanne Might Have Just Spoiled Her Own Death in The Conners.” Vulture, 17 Sep. 2018. <https://www.vulture.com/2018/09/roseanne-may-have-just-spoiled-her-own-death-in-the-conners.html>.D’Acci, Julie. Defining Women: Television and the Case of Cagney and Lacey. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1994.Dietland. Cr. Marti Noxon. Skydance Television, 2018.Dow, Bonnie J. Prime-Time Feminism: Television, Media Culture, and the Women’s Movement since 1970. Philadelphia, PA: U of Pennsylvania P, 1996.Full House. Cr. Jeff Franklin, Warner Bros. Television, 1987-1995.Fuller House. Cr. Jeff Franklin. Warner Horizon Television, 2016 to present.Gay, Roxane. “The ‘Roseanne’ Reboot Is Funny. I’m Not Going to Keep Watching.” New York Times, 29 Mar. 2018. 2 Dec. 2018 <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/29/opinion/roseanne-reboot-trump.html>.Gilmore Girls: A Life in the Year. Cr. Amy Sherman-Palladino. Netflix, 2017.Girls. Cr. Lena Dunham. Apatow Productions, 2012-2017.Grace under Fire. Cr. Chuck Lorre. Carsey-Werner, 1993-1998.Horowitz, Rachael. “Mary, Roseanne, and Carrie: Television and Fictional Feminism.” Michigan Journal of History 2.2 (2005). 24 Sep. 2018 <https://michiganjournalhistory.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/horowitz_rachel.pdf>.I Love Lucy. Desilu Productions, 1951-1957.Jeffersons, The. Cr. Don Nicholl, Michael Ross, and Bernie West. CBS, 1975-1985Johnson, Derek. “Party like It’s 1999: Another Wave of Network Nostalgia.” Flow Journal (2015). 2 Oct. 2018 <https://www.flowjournal.org/2015/04/party-like-it%E2%80%99s-1999/>.Lavigne, Carlen, ed. Remake Television: Reboot, Re-Use, Recycle. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014.Lassie. Cr. Robert Maxwell. CBS, 1958-1964.Leave It to Beaver. Cr. Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher. MCA TV, 1957-1963.Loock, Kathleen. “American TV Series Revivals: Introduction.” Television & New Media 19.4 (2018): 299-309.Mary Tyler Moore Show, The. Cr. James L. Brooks and Allan Burns. MTM Enterprises, 1970-1977.Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York, NY: New York UP, 2015.Mom. Cr. Chuck Lorre, Eddie Gorodetsky, and Gemma Baker. Warner Bros. Television, 2013 to present.Murphy Brown. Cr. Diane English. Warner Bros. Television, 1988-1998, 2018.O’Connell, Michael. “TV Ratings: 'Roseanne' Revival Skyrockets with Stunning Premiere.” The Hollywood Reporter. 28 Mar. 2018. 2 Dec. 2018 <https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/tv-ratings-roseanne-revival-skyrockets-stunning-premiere-1097943>.Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. Warner Bros. Television, 1965-1967Rabinovitz, Lauren. “Ms.-Representation: The Politics of Feminist Sitcoms.” Television, History, and American Culture: Feminist Critical Essays. Eds. Mary Beth Haralovich and Lauren Rabinovitz. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999. 144-167.Roseanne. Cr. Matt Williams. Carsey-Werner, 1988-1997, 2018.Rowe, Kathleen. The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter. Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 1995.Spigel, Lynn. Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and the Postwar Suburbs. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001.Spangler, Lynn C. Television Women from Lucy to Friends: Fifty Years of Sitcoms and Feminism. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.VanDerWerff, Todd. “The Roseanne Revival, and the Argument over How TV Depicts Trump Supporters, Explained.” Vox. 30 Mar. 2018. 2 Dec. 2018 <https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/3/30/17174720/roseanne-2018-reboot-controversy-trump-explained-review>.Will and Grace. Cr. Max Mutchnick and David Kohan. Warner Bros. Television, 1998-2006, 2017 to present.Williams, Melissa. “‘Excuse the Mess, But We Live Here:’ Roseanne Barr’s Stardom and the Politics of Class.” Film and Television Stardom. Ed. Kylo-Patrick R. Hart, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. 180-204.Williams, Rebecca. Post-Object Fandom: Television, Identity and Self-Narrative. New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2015.White, Rosie. “Roseanne Barr: Remembering Roseanne.” Hysterical: Women in American Comedy. Eds. Linda Mizejewski and Victoria Sturtevant. Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 2017. 233-250.Wonder Years, The. Cr. Neal Marlens and Carol Black. ABC, 1988-1993.

Introduction: Bubbles and Sport The ephemeral materiality of bubbles – beautiful, spectacular, and distracting but ultimately fragile – when applied to protect or conserve in the interests of sport-media profit, creates conditions that exacerbate existing inequalities in sport and society. Bubbles are usually something to watch, admire, and chase after in their brief yet shiny lives. There is supposed to be, technically, nothing inside them other than one or more gasses, and yet we constantly refer to people and objects being inside bubbles. The metaphor of the bubble has been used to describe the life of celebrities, politicians in purpose-built capital cities like Canberra, and even leftist, environmentally activist urban dwellers. The metaphorical and material qualities of bubbles are aligned—they cannot be easily captured and are liable to change at any time. In this article we address the metaphorical sporting bubble, which is often evoked in describing life in professional sport. This is a vernacular term used to capture and condemn the conditions of life of elite sportspeople (usually men), most commonly after there has been a sport-related scandal, especially of a sexual nature (Rowe). It is frequently paired with connotatively loaded adjectives like pampered and indulged. The sporting bubble is rarely interrogated in academic literature, the concept largely being left to the media and moral entrepreneurs. It is represented as involving a highly privileged but also pressurised life for those who live inside it. A sporting bubble is a world constructed for its most prized inhabitants that enables them to be protected from insurgents and to set the terms of their encounters with others, especially sport fans and disciplinary agents of the state. The Covid-19 pandemic both reinforced and reconfigured the operational concept of the bubble, re-arranging tensions between safety (protecting athletes) and fragility (short careers, risks of injury, etc.) for those within, while safeguarding those without from bubble contagion. Privilege and Precarity Bubble-induced social isolation, critics argue, encourages a loss of perspective among those under its protection, an entitled disconnection from the usual rules and responsibilities of everyday life. For this reason, the denizens of the sporting bubble are seen as being at risk to themselves and, more troublingly, to those allowed temporarily to penetrate it, especially young women who are first exploited by and then ejected from it (Benedict). There are many well-documented cases of professional male athletes “behaving badly” and trying to rely on institutional status and various versions of the sporting bubble for shelter (Flood and Dyson; Reel and Crouch; Wade). In the age of mobile and social media, it is increasingly difficult to keep misbehaviour in-house, resulting in a slew of media stories about, for example, drunkenness and sexual misconduct, such as when then-Sydney Roosters co-captain Mitchell Pearce was suspended and fined in 2016 after being filmed trying to force an unwanted kiss on a woman and then simulating a lewd act with her dog while drunk. There is contestation between those who condemn such behaviour as aberrant and those who regard it as the conventional expression of youthful masculinity as part of the familiar “boys will be boys” dictum. The latter naturalise an inequitable gender order, frequently treating sportsmen as victims of predatory women, and ignoring asymmetries of power between men and women, especially in homosocial environments (Toffoletti). For those in the sporting bubble (predominantly elite sportsmen and highly paid executives, also mostly men, with an array of service staff of both sexes moving in and out of it), life is reflected for those being protected via an array of screens (small screens in homes and indoor places of entertainment, and even smaller screens on theirs and others’ phones, as well as huge screens at sport events). These male sport stars are paid handsomely to use their skill and strength to perform for the sporting codes, their every facial expression and bodily action watched by the media and relayed to audiences. This is often a precarious existence, the usually brief career of an athlete worker being dependent on health, luck, age, successful competition with rivals, networks, and club and coach preferences. There is a large, aspirational reserve army of athletes vying to play at the elite level, despite risks of injury and invasive, life-changing medical interventions. Responsibility for avoiding performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs) also weighs heavily on their shoulders (Connor). Professional sportspeople, in their more reflective moments, know that their time in the limelight will soon be up, meaning that getting a ticket to the sporting bubble, even for a short time, can make all the difference to their post-sport lives and those of their families. The most vulnerable of the small minority of participants in sport who make a good, short-term living from it are those for whom, in the absence of quality education and prior social status, it is their sole likely means of upward social mobility (Spaaij). Elite sport performers are surrounded by minders, doctors, fitness instructors, therapists, coaches, advisors and other service personnel, all supporting athletes to stay focussed on and maximise performance quality to satisfy co-present crowds, broadcasters, sponsors, sports bodies and mass media audiences. The shield offered by the sporting bubble supports the teleological win-at-all-costs mentality of professional sport. The stakes are high, with athlete and executive salaries, sponsorships and broadcasting deals entangled in a complex web of investments in keeping the “talent” pivotal to the “attention economy” (Davenport and Beck)—the players that provide the content for sale—in top form. Yet, the bubble cannot be entirely secured and poor behaviour or performance can have devastating effects, including permanent injury or disability, mental illness and loss of reputation (Rowe, “Scandals and Sport”). Given this fragile materiality of the sporting bubble, it is striking that, in response to the sudden shutdown following the economic and health crisis caused by the 2020 global pandemic, the leaders of professional sport decided to create more of them and seek to seal the metaphorical and material space with unprecedented efficiency. The outcome was a multi-sided tale of mobility, confinement, capital, labour, and the gendering of sport and society. The Covid-19 Gilded Cage Sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman and John Urry have analysed the socio-politics of mobilities, whereby some people in the world, such as tourists, can traverse the globe at their leisure, while others remain fixed in geographical space because they lack the means to be mobile or, in contrast, are involuntarily displaced by war, so-called “ethnic cleansing”, famine, poverty or environmental degradation. The Covid-19 global pandemic re-framed these matters of mobilities (Rowe, “Subjecting Pandemic Sport”), with conventional moving around—between houses, businesses, cities, regions and countries—suddenly subjected to the imperative to be static and, in perniciously unreflective technocratic discourse, “socially distanced” (when what was actually meant was to be “physically distanced”). The late-twentieth century analysis of the “risk society” by Ulrich Beck, in which the mysterious consequences of humans’ predation on their environment are visited upon them with terrifying force, was dramatically realised with the coming of Covid-19. In another iteration of the metaphor, it burst the bubble of twenty-first century global sport. What we today call sport was formed through the process of sportisation (Maguire), whereby hyper-local, folk physical play was reconfigured as multi-spatial industrialised sport in modernity, becoming increasingly reliant on individual athletes and teams travelling across the landscape and well over the horizon. Co-present crowds were, in turn, overshadowed in the sport economy when sport events were taken to much larger, dispersed audiences via the media, especially in broadcast mode (Nicholson, Kerr, and Sherwood). This lucrative mediation of professional sport, though, came with an unforgiving obligation to generate an uninterrupted supply of spectacular live sport content. The pandemic closed down most sports events and those that did take place lacked the crucial participation of the co-present crowd to provide the requisite event atmosphere demanded by those viewers accustomed to a sense of occasion. Instead, they received a strange spectacle of sport performers operating in empty “cathedrals”, often with a “faked” crowd presence. The mediated sport spectacle under the pandemic involved cardboard cut-out and sex doll spectators, Zoom images of fans on large screens, and sampled sounds of the crowd recycled from sport video games. Confected co-presence produced simulacra of the “real” as Baudrillardian visions came to life. The sporting bubble had become even more remote. For elite sportspeople routinely isolated from the “common people”, the live sport encounter offered some sensory experience of the social – the sounds, sights and even smells of the crowd. Now the sporting bubble closed in on an already insulated and insular existence. It exposed the irony of the bubble as a sign of both privileged mobility and incarcerated athlete work, both refuge and prison. Its logic of contagion also turned a structure intended to protect those inside from those outside into, as already observed, a mechanism to manage the threat of insiders to outsiders. In Australia, as in many other countries, the populace was enjoined by governments and health authorities to help prevent the spread of Covid-19 through isolation and immobility. There were various exceptions, principally those classified as essential workers, a heterogeneous cohort ranging from supermarket shelf stackers to pharmacists. People in the cultural, leisure and sports industries, including musicians, actors, and athletes, were not counted among this crucial labour force. Indeed, the performing arts (including dance, theatre and music) were put on ice with quite devastating effects on the livelihoods and wellbeing of those involved. So, with all major sports shut down (the exception being horse racing, which received the benefit both of government subsidies and expanding online gambling revenue), sport organisations began to represent themselves as essential services that could help sustain collective mental and even spiritual wellbeing. This case was made most aggressively by Australian Rugby League Commission Chairman, Peter V’landys, in contending that “an Australia without rugby league is not Australia”. In similar vein, prominent sport and media figure Phil Gould insisted, when describing rugby league fans in Western Sydney’s Penrith, “they’re lost, because the football’s not on … . It holds their families together. People don’t understand that … . Their life begins in the second week of March, and it ends in October”. Despite misgivings about public safety and equality before the pandemic regime, sporting bubbles were allowed to form, re-form and circulate. The indefinite shutdown of the National Rugby League (NRL) on 23 March 2020 was followed after negotiation between multiple entities by its reopening on 28 May 2020. The competition included a team from another nation-state (the Warriors from Aotearoa/New Zealand) in creating an international sporting bubble on the Central Coast of New South Wales, separating them from their families and friends across the Tasman Sea. Appeals to the mental health of fans and the importance of the NRL to myths of “Australianness” notwithstanding, the league had not prudently maintained a financial reserve and so could not afford to shut down for long. Significant gambling revenue for leagues like the NRL and Australian Football League (AFL) also influenced the push to return to sport business as usual. Sport contests were needed in order to exploit the gambling opportunities – especially online and mobile – stimulated by home “confinement”. During the coronavirus lockdowns, Australians’ weekly spending on gambling went up by 142 per cent, and the NRL earned significantly more than usual from gambling revenue—potentially $10 million above forecasts for 2020. Despite the clear financial imperative at play, including heavy reliance on gambling, sporting bubble-making involved special licence. The state of Queensland, which had pursued a hard-line approach by closing its borders for most of those wishing to cross them for biographical landmark events like family funerals and even for medical treatment in border communities, became “the nation's sporting hub”. Queensland became the home of most teams of the men’s AFL (notably the women’s AFLW season having been cancelled) following a large Covid-19 second wave in Melbourne. The women’s National Netball League was based exclusively in Queensland. This state, which for the first time hosted the AFL Grand Final, deployed sport as a tool in both national sports tourism marketing and internal pre-election politics, sponsoring a documentary, The Sporting Bubble 2020, via its Tourism and Events arm. While Queensland became the larger bubble incorporating many other sporting bubbles, both the AFL and the NRL had versions of the “fly in, fly out” labour rhythms conventionally associated with the mining industry in remote and regional areas. In this instance, though, the bubble experience did not involve long stays in miners’ camps or even the one-night hotel stopovers familiar to the popular music and sport industries. Here, the bubble moved, usually by plane, to fulfil the requirements of a live sport “gig”, whereupon it was immediately returned to its more solid bubble hub or to domestic self-isolation. In the space created between disciplined expectation and deplored non-compliance, the sporting bubble inevitably became the scrutinised object and subject of scandal. Sporting Bubble Scandals While people with a very low risk of spreading Covid-19 (coming from areas with no active cases) were denied entry to Queensland for even the most serious of reasons (for example, the death of a child), images of AFL players and their families socialising and enjoying swimming at the Royal Pines Resort sporting bubble crossed our screens. Yet, despite their (players’, officials’ and families’) relative privilege and freedom of movement under the AFL Covid-Safe Plan, some players and others inside the bubble were involved in “scandals”. Most notable was the case of a drunken brawl outside a Gold Coast strip club which led to two Richmond players being “banished”, suspended for 10 matches, and the club fined $100,000. But it was not only players who breached Covid-19 bubble protocols: Collingwood coaches Nathan Buckley and Brenton Sanderson paid the $50,000 fine imposed on the club for playing tennis in Perth outside their bubble, while Richmond was fined $45,000 after Brooke Cotchin, wife of team captain Trent, posted an image to Instagram of a Gold Coast day spa that she had visited outside the “hub” (the institutionally preferred term for bubble). She was subsequently distressed after being trolled. Also of concern was the lack of physical distancing, and the range of people allowed into the sporting bubble, including babysitters, grandparents, and swimming coaches (for children). There were other cases of players being caught leaving the bubble to attend parties and sharing videos of their “antics” on social media. Biosecurity breaches of bubbles by players occurred relatively frequently, with stern words from both the AFL and NRL leaders (and their clubs) and fines accumulating in the thousands of dollars. Some people were also caught sneaking into bubbles, with Lekahni Pearce, the girlfriend of Swans player Elijah Taylor, stating that it was easy in Perth, “no security, I didn’t see a security guard” (in Barron, Stevens, and Zaczek) (a month later, outside the bubble, they had broken up and he pled guilty to unlawfully assaulting her; Ramsey). Flouting the rules, despite stern threats from government, did not lead to any bubble being popped. The sport-media machine powering sporting bubbles continued to run, the attendant emotional or health risks accepted in the name of national cultural therapy, while sponsorship, advertising and gambling revenue continued to accumulate mostly for the benefit of men. Gendering Sporting Bubbles Designed as biosecurity structures to maintain the supply of media-sport content, keep players and other vital cogs of the machine running smoothly, and to exclude Covid-19, sporting bubbles were, in their most advanced form, exclusive luxury camps that illuminated the elevated socio-cultural status of sportsmen. The ongoing inequalities between men’s and women’s sport in Australia and around the world were clearly in evidence, as well as the politics of gender whereby women are obliged to “care” and men are enabled to be “careless” – or at least to manage carefully their “duty of care”. In Australia, the only sport for women that continued during the height of the Covid-19 lockdown was netball, which operated in a bubble that was one of sacrifice rather than privilege. With minimum salaries of only $30,000 – significantly less than the lowest-paid “rookies” in the AFL – and some being mothers of small children and/or with professional jobs juggled alongside their netball careers, these elite sportswomen wanted to continue to play despite the personal inconvenience or cost (Pavlidis). Not one breach of the netballers out of the bubble was reported, indicating that they took their responsibilities with appropriate seriousness and, perhaps, were subjected to less scrutiny than the sportsmen accustomed to attracting front-page headlines. National Netball League (also known after its Queensland-based naming rights sponsor as Suncorp Super Netball) players could be regarded as fortunate to have the opportunity to be in a bubble and to participate in their competition. The NRL Women’s (NRLW) Premiership season was also completed, but only involved four teams subject to fly in, fly out and bubble arrangements, and being played in so-called curtain-raiser games for the NRL. As noted earlier, the AFLW season was truncated, despite all the prior training and sacrifice required of its players. Similarly, because of their resource advantages, the UK men’s and boy’s top six tiers of association football were allowed to continue during lockdown, compared to only two for women and girls. In the United States, inequalities between men’s and women’s sports were clearly demonstrated by the conditions afforded to those elite sportswomen inside the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) sport bubble in the IMG Academy in Florida. Players shared photos of rodent traps in their rooms, insect traps under their mattresses, inedible food and blocked plumbing in their bubble accommodation. These conditions were a far cry from the luxury usually afforded elite sportsmen, including in Florida’s Walt Disney World for the men’s NBA, and is just one of the many instances of how gendered inequality was both reproduced and exacerbated by Covid-19. Bursting the Bubble As we have seen, governments and corporate leaders in sport were able to create material and metaphorical bubbles during the Covid-19 lockdown in order to transmit stadium sport contests into home spaces. The rationale was the importance of sport to national identity, belonging and the routines and rhythms of life. But for whom? Many women, who still carry the major responsibilities of “care”, found that Covid-19 intensified the affective relations and gendered inequities of “home” as a leisure site (Fullagar and Pavlidis). Rates of domestic violence surged, and many women experienced significant anxiety and depression related to the stress of home confinement and home schooling. During the pandemic, women were also more likely to experience the stress and trauma of being first responders, witnessing virus-related sickness and death as the majority of nurses and care workers. They also bore the brunt of much of the economic and employment loss during this time. Also, as noted above, livelihoods in the arts and cultural sector did not receive the benefits of the “bubble”, despite having a comparable claim to sport in contributing significantly to societal wellbeing. This sector’s workforce is substantially female, although men dominate its senior roles. Despite these inequalities, after the late March to May hiatus, many elite male sportsmen – and some sportswomen - operated in a bubble. Moving in and out of them was not easy. Life inside could be mentally stressful (especially in long stays of up to 150 days in sports like cricket), and tabloid and social media troll punishment awaited those who were caught going “over the fence”. But, life in the sporting bubble was generally preferable to the daily realities of those afflicted by the trauma arising from forced home confinement, and for whom watching moving sports images was scant compensation for compulsory immobility. The ethical foundation of the sparkly, ephemeral fantasy of the sporting bubble is questionable when it is placed in the service of a voracious “media sports cultural complex” (Rowe, Global Media Sport) that consumes sport labour power and rolls back progress in gender relations as a default response to a global pandemic. Covid-19 dramatically highlighted social inequalities in many areas of life, including medical care, work, and sport. For the small minority of people involved in sport who are elite professionals, the only thing worse than being in a sporting bubble during the pandemic was not being in one, as being outside precluded their participation. Being inside the bubble was a privilege, albeit a dubious one. But, as in wider society, not all sporting bubbles are created equal. Some are more opulent than others, and the experiences of the supporting and the supported can be very different. The surface of the sporting bubble may be impermanent, but when its interior is opened up to scrutiny, it reveals some very durable structures of inequality. Bubbles are made to burst. They are, by nature, temporary, translucent structures created as spectacles. As a form of luminosity, bubbles “allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer” (Deleuze, 52). In echoing Deleuze, Angela McRobbie (54) argues that luminosity “softens and disguises the regulative dynamics of neoliberal society”. The sporting bubble was designed to discharge that function for those millions rendered immobile by home confinement legislation in Australia and around the world, who were having to deal with the associated trauma, risk and disadvantage. Hence, the gender and class inequalities exacerbated by Covid-19, and the precarious and pressured lives of elite athletes, were obscured. We contend that, in the final analysis, the sporting bubble mainly serves those inside, floating tantalisingly out of reach of most of those outside who try to grasp its elusive power. Yet, it is a small group beyond who wield that power, having created bubbles as armoured vehicles to salvage any available profit in the midst of a global pandemic. References AAP. “NRL Makes Desperate Plea to Government as It Announces Season Will Go Ahead.” 7News.com.au 15 Mar. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://7news.com.au/sport/rugby-league/nrl-makes-desperate-plea-to-government-as-it-announces-season-will-go-ahead-c-745711>. Al Jazeera English. “Sports TV: Faking Spectators and Spectacles.” The Listening Post 26 Sep. 2020 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AlD63s26sQ&feature=youtu.be&t=827>. Barron, Jackson, Kylie Stevens, and Zoe Zaczek. “WAG Who Broke into COVID-19 Bubble for an Eight-Hour Rendezvous with Her AFL Star Boyfriend Opens Up on ‘How Easy It Was’—and Apologises for ‘Really Big Mistake’ That Cost Club $50,000.” The Daily Mail 19 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8638959/WAG-AFL-star-sacked-season-coronavirus-breach-reveals-easy-sneak-in.html>. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage, 1992. Benedict, Jeff. Public Heroes, Private Felons: Athletes and Crimes against Women. Boston: Northeastern Uni. Press, 1999. Benfante, Agata, Marialaura di Tella, Annunziata Romeo, and Lorys Castelli. “Traumatic Stress in Healthcare Workers during COVID-19 Pandemic: A Review of the Immediate Impact.” Frontiers in Psychology 11 (23 Oct. 2020). Blaine, Lech. “The Art of Class War.” The Monthly. 17 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2020/august/1596204000/lech-blaine/art-class-war#mtr>. Brooks, Samantha K., Rebecca K. Webster, Louise E. Smith, Lisa Woodland, Simon Wessely, Neil Greenberg, and Gideon J. Rubin. “The Psychological Impact of Quarantine and How to Reduce It: Rapid Review of the Evidence.” The Lancet 26 Feb. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30460-8/fulltext>. Caust, Jo. “Coronavirus: 3 in 4 Australians Employed in the Creative and Performing Arts Could Lose Their Jobs.” The Conversation 20 Apr. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-3-in-4-australians-employed-in-the-creative-and-performing-arts-could-lose-their-jobs-136505>. Connor, James. “The Athlete as Widget: How Exploitation Explains Elite Sport.” Sport in Society 12.10 (2009): 1369–77. Courage, Cara. “Women in the Arts: Some Questions.” The Guardian 5 Mar. 2012. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-blog/2012/mar/05/women-in-the-arts-introduction>. Davenport, Thomas H., and John C. Beck. The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2001. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. and ed. S. Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Dennien, Matt, and Lydia Lynch. “Footage Shows Relaxed Scenes from AFL Hub amid Calls for Exception Overhaul.” Brisbane Times 3 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/footage-shows-relaxed-scenes-from-afl-hub-amid-calls-for-exemption-overhaul-20200903-p55s74.html>. Dobeson, Shanee. “Bailey Defends Qld Border Rules after Grieving Mother Denied Entry to Bury Son.” MyGC.com.au 12 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.mygc.com.au/bailey-defends-qld-border-rules-after-grieving-mother-denied-exemption-to-bury-son>. Dunn, Amelia. “Who Is Deemed an ‘Essential’ Worker under Australia’s COVID-19 Rules?” SBS News 26 Mar. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AlD63s26sQ&feature=youtu.be&t=827>. Emiko. “Women’s Unpaid Care Work in Australia.” YWCA n.d. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.ywca.org.au/opinion/womens-unpaid-care-work-in-australia>. Fullagar, Simone, and Adele Pavlidis. “Thinking through the Disruptive Effects and Affects of the Coronavirus with Feminist New Materialism.” Leisure Sciences (2020). 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01490400.2020.1773996?journalCode=ulsc20>. Flood, Michael, and Sue Dyson. “Sport, Athletes, and Violence against Women.” NTV Journal 4.3 (2007): 37–46. Goodwin, Sam. “AFL Boss Left Fuming over ‘Out of Control’ Quarantine Party.” Yahoo! Sport 8 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://au.sports.yahoo.com/afl-2020-uproar-out-of-control-quarantine-party-224251554.html>. Griffith News. “New Research Shows Why Musicians among the Hardest Hit by COVID-19.” 18 June 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://news.griffith.edu.au/2020/06/18/new-research-shows-why-musicians-among-the-hardest-hit-by-COVID-19>. Hart, Chloe. “‘This Is the Hardest It’s Going to Get’: NZ Warriors Open Up about Relocating to Australia for NRL.” ABC News 8 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-08/nz-warriors-open-up-about-relocation-to-australia-for-nrl/12531074>. Hooper, James. “10 Broncos Hit with Fines as Club Cops Huge Sanction over Pub Bubble Breach.” Fox Sports 18 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.foxsports.com.au/nrl/nrl-premiership/teams/broncos/nrl-2020-brisbane-broncos-pub-covid19-bubble-breach-fine-sanctions-who-was-at-the-pub/news-story/d3bd3c559289a8b83bc3fccbceaffe78>. Hytner, Mike. “AFL Suspends Season and Cancels AFLW amid Coronavirus Crisis.” The Guardian 22 Mar. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/mar/22/afl-nrl-and-a-league-press-on-despite-restrictions>. Jones, Wayne. “Ray of Hope for Medical Care across Border.” Echo Netdaily 14 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.echo.net.au/2020/08/ray-of-hope-for-medical-care-across-border>. Jouavel, Levi. “Women’s Football Shutdowns: ‘It’s Unfair Boys’ Academies Can Still Play’.” BBC News 10 Nov. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-54876198>. Keh, Andrew. “We Hope Your Cheers for This Article Are for Real.” The New York Times 16 June 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/sports/coronavirus-stadium-fans-crowd-noise.html>. Kennedy, Else. “‘The Worst Year’: Domestic Violence Soars in Australia during COVID-19.” The Guardian 1 Dec. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/dec/01/the-worst-year-domestic-violence-soars-in-australia-during-COVID-19>. Keoghan, Sarah. “‘Everyone’s Concerned’: Players Cop 70% Pay Cut.” Sydney Morning Herald 28 Mar. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.smh.com.au/sport/netball/everyone-s-concerned-players-cop-70-per-cent-pay-cut-20200328-p54esz.html>. Knox, Malcolm. “Gambling’s Share of NRL Revenue Could Well Double: That Brings Power.” Sydney Morning Herald. 15 May 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.smh.com.au/sport/gambling-s-share-of-nrl-revenue-could-well-double-that-brings-power-20200515-p54tbg.html>. McGrath, Pat. “Racing Victoria Got $16.6 Million in Emergency COVID Funding: Then Online Horse Racing Gambling Revenue Skyrocketed.” ABC News 3 Nov. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-11-03/racing-victoria-emergency-coronavirus-COVID-funding/12838012>. McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2009. Madden, Helena. “Lebron James’s Suite in the NBA Bubble Is Fit for a King.” Robb Report 16 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://robbreport.com/travel/hotels/lebron-james-nba-bubble-suite-1234569303>. Maguire, Joseph. “Sportization.” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Ed. George Ritzer. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. 4710–11. Mathieson, Craig. “Michael Jordan Pierces the Bubble of Elite Sport in Juicy ESPN Doco.” Sydney Morning Herald. 13 May 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.smh.com.au/culture/tv-and-radio/michael-jordan-pierces-the-bubble-of-elite-sport-in-juicy-espn-doco-20200511-p54rwc.html>. Maurice, Megan. “Australia’s Summer of Cricket during COVID Is about Money and Power—and Men”. 6 Jan. 2021. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/jan/06/australias-summer-of-cricket-during-COVID-is-about-money-and-power-and-men>. Murphy, Catherine. “Cricket Australia Contributed to Circumstances Surrounding Ball-Tampering Scandal, Review Finds”. ABC News 20 Oct. 2018. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-29/scathing-report-released-into-cricket-australia-culture/10440972>. News.com.au. “How an AFL Star Wide’s Instagram Post Led to a Hefty Fine and a Journalist Being Stood Down.” NZ Herald 3 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/how-an-afl-star-wifes-instagram-post-led-to-a-hefty-fine-and-a-journalist-being-stood-down/7IDR4SXQ6QW5WDFBV42BK3M7YQ>. Nicholson, Matthew, Anthony Kerr, and Merryn Sherwood. Sport and the Media: Managing the Nexus. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2015. Pavlidis, Adele. “Being Grateful: Materialising ‘Success’ in Women’s Contact Sport.” Emotion, Space and Society 35 (2020). 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1755458620300207>. Phillips, Sam. “‘The Future of the Season Is in Their Hands’: Palaszczuk’s NRL Warning.” Sydney Morning Herald 10 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.smh.com.au/sport/nrl/the-future-of-the-season-is-in-their-hands-palaszczuk-s-nrl-warning-20200810-p55k7j.html>. Pierik, Jon, and Ryan, Peter. “‘I Own the Consequences’: Stack, Coleman-Jones Apologise for Gold Coast Incident.” The Age 5 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theage.com.au/sport/afl/i-own-the-consequences-stack-apologises-for-gold-coast-incident-20200905-p55spq.html>. Poposki, Claudia, and Louise Ayling. “AFL Star’s Wife Who Caused Uproar by Breaching Quarantine to Go to a Spa Reveals She’s Been Smashed by Vile Trolls.” Daily Mail Australia 29 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8674083/AFL-WAG-Brooke-Cotchin-breached-COVID-19-quarantine-spa-cops-abuse-trolls.html>. Ramsey, Michael. “Axed Swan Spared Jail over Ex-Girlfriend Assault.” AFL.com.au 2 Dec. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.afl.com.au/news/526677/axed-swan-spared-jail-over-ex-girlfriend-assault>. Read, Brent. “The NRL Is Set to Finish the Season on a High after Stunning Financial Results.” The Australian 1 Dec. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/nrl/the-nrl-is-set-to-finish-the-season-on-a-high-after-stunning-financial-results/news-story/1ce9c2f9b598441d88daaa8cc2b44dc1>. Reel, Justine, J., and Emily Crouch. “#MeToo: Uncovering Sexual Harassment and Assault in Sport.” Journal of Clinical Sport Psychology 13.2 (2018): 177–79. Rogers, Michael. “Buckley, Sanderson to Pay Pies’ Huge Fine for COVID Breach.” AFL.com.au 1 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.afl.com.au/news/479118/buckley-sanderson-to-pay-pies-huge-fine-for-COVID-breach>. Richardson, David, and Richard Denniss. “Gender Experiences during the COVID-19 Lockdown: Women Lose from COVID-19, Men to Gain from Stimulus.” The Australia Institute June 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/gender-experiences-during-the-COVID-19-lockdown>. Rowe, David. “All Sport Is Global: A Hard Lesson from the Pandemic.” Open Forum 28 Mar. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.openforum.com.au/all-sport-is-global-a-hard-lesson-from-the-pandemic>. ———. “And the Winner Is … Television: Spectacle and Sport in a Pandemic.” Open Forum 19 Sep. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.openforum.com.au/and-the-winner-istelevision-spectacle-and-sport-in-a-pandemic>. ———. Global Media Sport: Flows, Forms and Futures. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. ———. “Scandals and Sport.” Routledge Companion to Media and Scandal. Eds. Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord. London: Routledge, 2019. 324–32. ———. “Subjecting Pandemic Sport to a Sociological Procedure.” Journal of Sociology 56.4 (2020): 704–13. Schout, David. “Cricket Prepares for Mental Health Challenges Thrown Up by Bubble Life.” The Guardian 8 Nov. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/nov/08/cricket-prepares-for-mental-health-challenges-thrown-up-by-bubble-life>. Spaaij, Ramón. Sport and Social Mobility: Crossing Boundaries. London: Routledge, 2011. The Sporting Bubble. Dir. Peter Dickson. Nine Network Australia, 2020. Swanston, Tim. “With Coronavirus Limiting Interstate Movement, Queensland Is the Nation’s Sporting Hub—Is That Really Safe?” ABC News 29 Aug. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-29/coronavirus-queensland-rules-for-sports-teams-explainer/12542634>. Toffoletti, Kim. “How Is Gender-Based Violence Covered in the Sporting News? An Account of the Australian Football League Sex Scandal.” Women's Studies International Forum 30.5 (2007): 427–38. Urry, John. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007. Walter, Brad. “From Shutdown to Restart: How NRL Walked Tightrope to Get Season Going Again.” NRL.com 25 May 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.nrl.com/news/2020/05/25/from-shutdown-to-restart-how-nrl-walked-tightrope-to-get-season-going-again>. Wade, Lisa. “Rape on Campus: Athletes, Status, and the Sexual Assault Crisis.” The Conversation 7 Mar. 2017. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://theconversation.com/rape-on-campus-athletes-status-and-the-sexual-assault-crisis-72255>. Webster, Andrew. “Sydney Roosters’ Mitchell Pearce Involved in a Drunken Incident with a Dog? And Your Point Is ...?” Sydney Morning Herald 28 Jan. 2016. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.smh.com.au/sport/nrl/sydney-roosters-mitchell-pearce-involved-in-a-drunken-incident-with-a-dog-and-your-point-is--20160127-gmfemh.html>. Whittaker, Troy. “Three-Peat Not Driving Broncos in NRLW Grand Final.” NRL.com 24 Oct. 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://www.nrl.com/news/2020/10/24/three-peat-not-driving-broncos-in-nrlw-grand-final>. Yahoo! Sport Staff. “‘Not Okay’: Uproar over ‘Disgusting’ Find inside Quarantine.” Yahoo! Sport 9 July 2020. 8 Mar. 2021 <https://au.sports.yahoo.com/wnba-disturbing-conditions-coronavirus-bubble-slammed-003557243.html>.