Journal articles on the topic 'Graphic novels Australia'

There is growing interest in not only intensive care unit (ICU) outcomes but also the resources required to deliver this care and itscost-effectiveness. The most available metric of resource utilisation is ICU length of stay, which is influenced by casemix, illness severity, and institutional characteristics, including delays in discharge. For instance, ICU length of stay is generally longer for more severely ill patients. Comparison of length of stay between units must therefore account for differences in baseline patient characteristics.

<p>This paper analyses the challenges faced by clients, students and teachers involved in a clinical program which uses new technology to deliver legal services in remote areas of Southern Queensland, Australia. A range of novel issues were addressed by Griffith University Law School, Learning Network Queensland and Caxton Legal Centre in their partnership development and delivery of this clinical program which involves the use of audio-graphics conferencing to enable students to provide legal advice and assistance to people hundreds of kilometres away. The ‘Advanced Family Law-Clinic’ program commenced in July 1999 with financial support from the Federal Attorney-General’s Department. The paper considers the range of issues which arose in development of the program.</p>

BackgroundIn Australia, evidence-based guidelines recommend that women consider taking selective oestrogen receptor modulators (SERMs) to reduce their risk of breast cancer. In practice, this requires effective methods for communicating the harms and benefits of taking SERMs so women can make an informed choice.AimTo evaluate how different risk presentations influence women’s decisions to consider taking SERMs.Design and settingCross-sectional, correlational study of Australian women in general practice.MethodThree risk communication formats were developed that included graphics, numbers, and text to explain the reduction in breast cancer risk and risk of side effects for women taking SERMs (raloxifene or tamoxifen). Women aged 40–74 years in two general practices were shown the risk formats using vignettes of hypothetical women at moderate or high risk of breast cancer and asked to choose ‘If this was you, would you consider taking a SERM?’ Descriptive statistics and predictors (risk format, level of risk, and type of SERM) of choosing SERMs were determined by logistic regression.ResultsA total of 288 women were recruited (an 88% response rate) between March and May 2017. The risk formats that showed a government statement and an icon array were associated with a greater likelihood of considering SERMs relative to one that showed a novel expected frequency tree. Risk formats for raloxifene and for the high-risk vignettes were also more strongly associated with choosing to consider SERMs. No associations were found with any patient demographics.ConclusionSpecific risk formats may lead to more women considering taking SERMs to reduce breast cancer risk, especially if they are at high risk of the condition. Raloxifene may be a more acceptable SERM to patients.

Three interrelated phenomena of a global visuospatial representation are discussed within the context of a subtype of “spatial dyslexia” as part of an “ecological syndrome.” (1) Results from a new test, Draw-A-Person-With-Face-In-Front (using simple measurement and requiring no graphic or aesthetic skills) showed in a third of 269 Australian Aboriginal school children a deficient representation of spatial relations within the natural pattern of the upper part of the human face. (2) The test performance apparently is an indicator of a similarly deficient representation of the spatial relations within written signs (single letters, short, isolated functional words, and novel or “nonwords” lacking strong semantic association and imageability). The test discriminates between two modes of visuospatial pictorial (and implied mental) representation, a simultaneous and merely “ inter object”-related global kind vs a successive and “ intraobject”-related one. Further support for such conceptualizing is found in a positive correlation between certain low literacy skills and the specific results (in 6000 examined cases) on the new drawing test. Both inabilities implicate a simultaneous global mode of visuospatial processing, which early in life promptly elicits the infants' in discriminate automatic “smiling response” and appears to be resorted to still later in life by persons with “spatial dyslexia.” (3) Such conceptualizing interrelates with the so far puzzling difference between “literal alexia” vs “verbal alexia” known to neuropathology (not implicated in the present cases but pointing to an underlying structuring process shared by pathological and by “ecological syndromes” alike).

Background: Pulsed field ablation (PFA) is a novel form of ablation using electrical fields to ablate cardiac tissue. There are only limited data assessing the feasibility and safety of this type of ablation in humans. Methods: PULSED AF (Pulsed Field Ablation to Irreversibly Electroporate Tissue and Treat AF; https://www.clinicaltrials.gov ; unique identifier: NCT04198701) is a nonrandomized, prospective, multicenter, global, premarket clinical study. The first-in-human pilot phase evaluated the feasibility and efficacy of pulmonary vein isolation using a novel PFA system delivering bipolar, biphasic electrical fields through a circular multielectrode array catheter (PulseSelect; Medtronic, Inc). Thirty-eight patients with paroxysmal or persistent atrial fibrillation were treated in 6 centers in Australia, Canada, the United States, and the Netherlands. The primary outcomes were ability to achieve acute pulmonary vein isolation intraprocedurally and safety at 30 days. Results: Acute electrical isolation was achieved in 100% of pulmonary veins (n=152) in the 38 patients. Skin-to-skin procedure time was 160±91 minutes, left atrial dwell time was 82±35 minutes, and fluoroscopy time was 28±9 minutes. No serious adverse events related to the PFA system occurred in the 30-day follow-up including phrenic nerve injury, esophageal injury, stroke, or death. Conclusions: In this first-in-human clinical study, 100% pulmonary vein isolation was achieved using only PFA with no PFA system–related serious adverse events. Graphic Abstract: A graphic abstract is available for this article.

The field of comics has undergone palpable shifts in print and digital publishing cultures, from newspaper strips and zines to hardbound graphic novels and works still emerging in the era of Web 2.0. Comics that leave behind the aesthetic trappings of print to embrace digital platforms and media are known variously as digital comics, download comics, hypercomics and webcomics. This paper adopts the term “webcomics” to denote a precise, hybrid medium combining the visual-verbal grammar of comics with the capacious potentials of digitality. Through the case study of These Memories Won’t Last, a webcomic by Australian artist and graphic designer Stuart Campbell (known by his pseudonym, Sutu), I aim to explore the ways Campbell engages sound, animation and other interactive elements alongside drawings that render the lived experiences of his grandfather, who suffers from late-stage dementia. This paper considers how webcomics might transform the stasis of word-and-image to explore and communicate subjects that sit on the outer edges of representation, such as memory, identity and trauma. It responds to a new generation of artists who harness digital technologies to expand and revise the comics form and considers the potential effects of this practice on creating, reading and interpretating life stories.

In his recent re-evaluation of McLuhanite theories for the information age, Digital McLuhan, Paul Levinson makes what at first glance appears to be a curious statement: he says that on the Web "the common denominator ... is the written word, as it is and has been with all things having to do with computers -- and will likely continue to be until such time, if ever, that the spoken word replaces the written as the vehicle of computer commands" (38). This, however, seems to directly contradict what any Web user has been able to experience for several years now: Web content has increasingly come to rely on graphics, at first still, now also often animated, and continues to include more and more audiovisual elements of various kinds. We don't even have to look at the current (and, hopefully, passing) phase of interminable Shockwave splash pages, which users have to endure while they wait to be transferred to the 'real' content of a site: even on as print-focussed a page as the one you're currently reading, you'll see graphical buttons to the left and at the bottom, for example. Other sites far surpass this for graphical content: it is hard to imagine what the official Olympics site or that of EXPO 2000 would look like in text-only versions. The drive towards more and more graphics has long been, well, visible. Already in 1997 (at a time when 33.6k modems were considered fast) Marshall considered the Internet to have entered its "graphic stage, a transitional media form that has made surfing the net feel like flipping through a glossy magazine or the interlinkages of a multimedia game or encyclopedia CD-ROMs"; to him this stage "relies on a construction that is textual and graphically enhanced through software overlays ... and highlighted by sample images, sound bites and occasionally short, moving images" (51). This historicised view mirrors a distinction made around the same time by Lovink, who divided users into "IBM-PC-modernists" still running text-based interfaces, and those enjoying the "Apple-Windows 95-postmodernism" of their graphical user interfaces (Lovink and Winkler 15). In the age of GUIs, in fact, 'text' in itself does not really exist on screen any more: everything from textual to graphical information consists of individual pixels in the same way, which is precisely what makes Levinson's initial statement appear so anachronistic. The move from 'text' to 'graphics and text' could thus be seen as a sign of the overall shift from the industrial to the information age -- a view not without precedent, since the transition from modernist to postmodernist times is similarly contemporaneous with the rise of graphic design as a form of communication as well as art. Beyond such broad strokes, we can also identify some of the finer details presented by the current state of graphics on the Web, however. Marshall's 'graphic stage', after all, was a 'transitional' one, and by now it seems that we might have passed it already, entering into a new aesthetic paradigm which appears to have borrowed many of its approaches from the realm of computer games: the new Web vision is shiny, colourful, animated, and increasingly also accompanied by sound effects. This is no surprise since the mass acceptance of personal computers themselves was largely driven by their use as a source of entertainment. Gaming and computers are inseparably interconnected, and the development of home computers' graphical capabilities in particular has long been driven almost exclusively by players' needs for better, faster, more realistic graphics. Of course, the way we interact with computers also owes a significant debt to games. Engagement in a dialogue with the machine, in which the computer displays both our own actions and its responses, representing us and itself simultaneously on screen, is the predominant mode of computing, and such a mode of engagement (dissolving the barriers between human mind and machinic computation) can now also be found in our interaction with the Web. Here, too, individual knowledge blends with the information available on the network as we immerse ourselves in hypertextual connectivity. As Talbott writes, "clearly, a generation raised on Adventure and video games -- where every door conceals a treasure or a monster worth pursuing in frenetic style -- has its own way of appreciating the hypertext interface" (13); not only has the Web taken on the aesthetics of computer gaming, then, but using the Web itself exhibits aspects of participation in a global 'knowledge game'. Talbott means to criticise this when he writes that thus "the doctrines of endless Enlightenment and Progress become the compelling subtext of a universal video game few can resist playing" (196), but however we may choose to evaluate this game, the observation itself is sound. One possible reason for taking a critical view of this development is that computer and video games rarely present more than the appearance of participation; while players may have a feeling of control over features of the game, the game itself usually remains entirely unaffected and ready for a restart at any moment. Web users might similarly feel empowered by the wealth of information to which they have gained access online, without actually making use of that information to form new knowledge for themselves. This is a matter for the individual user, however; where they have a true interest in the information they seek, we can have every confidence that they will process it to their advantage, too. Beyond this, the skills of information seeking learnt from Web use might also have overall benefits for users, as a kind of 'mind-eye coordination' similar to the 'hand-eye coordination' benefits often attributed to the playing of action games. The ability to figure out unknown problems, the desire to understand and gain control of a situation, which they can learn from computer games, is likely to help them better understand the complexity and interconnectedness of anything they might learn: "it could ... well be true that the cross-linking inherent in hypertext encourages people to see the connections among different aspects of the world so that they will get less fragmented knowledge" (Nielsen 190). The increasingly graphical nature of Web content could appear to work against this, however: "extensions of traditional hyperTEXT systems to encompass hyperMEDIA introduces [sic] a new dimension. ... The picture that 'speaks a thousand words' may say a thousand different words to different viewers. Pictures or graphics lend themselves much more than does text to multiple interpretations", as McAleese claims (12-13) -- but perhaps this overrates significantly the ability of text to anchor down meaning to any one point. Rather, it is questionable whether text and images really are that different from one another -- viewed from a historical perspective, certainly, opinions are divided, it seems: "the medieval church feared the power of the visual image because of the way it appeared to licence the imagination and the consideration of alternatives. Obversely, contemporary cultural critics fear that the abandonment of the written word in favour of graphics is stifling critical and creative powers" (Moody 60) -- take, for example, the commonly held view that movies made from novels limit the reader's imagination to the particular portrayal of events chosen for the film. In fact, there are good reasons to believe that both text and images (especially when they are increasingly easy to manipulate by digital means, thus losing once and for all their claim to photographic 'realism') can 'say a thousand different words to different viewers' -- indeed, traditional photography has also been described as 'writing with light'. As Levinson notes, therefore, "once the photograph is converted to a digital format, it is as amenable to manipulation, as divorced from the reality it purports to represent, as the words which appear on the same screen. On that score, the Internet's co-option of photography -- the rendering of the formerly analogue image as its content -- is at least as profound as the Internet's promotion of written communication" (43), and this, then, may perhaps begin to provide a resolution to his overall preference for writing as the predominant Internet communication form, as quoted above: online writing now includes in almost equal measure 'print' text and graphical images, both of which are of course graphically rendered on screen by the computer anyway; they combine into a new form of writing not unlike ancient hieroglyphics. On the Web, writing has come full circle: from the iconographic representations of the earliest civilisations through their simplification and solidification into the various alphabets back to a new online iconography. This also demonstrates the strong Western bias of this technology, of course: had computers emerged from Chinese or Japanese culture, for example -- where alphabets in the literal sense don't exist -- chances are they would never have existed in a text-only form. Now that we have passed the alphabetic stage to re-enter an era of iconography, then, it remains to be seen how this change along with our overall "'immersion' in hypertext will affect the way that we mentally structure our world. Linear argumentation is more a consequence of alphabetic writing than of printed books and it remains to be seen if hypertext presentation will significantly erode this predominant convention for mentally ordering our world" (McKnight et al. 41). Perhaps the computer game experience (where a blending of text and graphics had begun some time before the Web) can provide some early pointers already, then. The game-like nature of information search and usage online might help to undermine some of the more heavily encrusted structures of information dissemination that are still dominant: "we are promised, on the information 'library' side, less of the dogmatic and more of the ludic, less of the canonical and more of the festive. Fewer arguments from authority, through more juxtaposition of authorities" (Debray 146). This is also supported by the fact that there usually exists no one central authority, no one central site, in any field of information covered by the Web, but that there rather is a multiplicity of sources and viewpoints with varying claims to 'authority' and 'objectivity'; rather than rely on authorities to determine what is accepted knowledge, Web users must, and do, distil their own knowledge from the information they find in their searches. Kumon and Aizu's notion that from the industrial-age "wealth game" we have now moved into the "wisdom game" (320) sums up this view. However, for all the ludic exuberance of this game, we should also be concerned that, as in any game, we are also likely to see winners and losers. Those unaware of the rules of the game, and people who are prevented from playing for personal or socioeconomic reasons (the increased use of graphics will make it much more difficult for certain disabled readers to use the Web, for example) must not be left out of it. In gaming terminology, perhaps the formation of teams including such disadvantaged people is the answer? References Debray, Régis. "The Book as Symbolic Object." The Future of the Book. Ed. Geoffrey Nunberg. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996. 139-51. Kumon, Shumpei, and Izumi Aizu. "Co-Emulation: The Case for a Global Hypernetwork Society." Global Networks: Computers and International Communication. Ed. Linda M. Harasim. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1994. 311-26. Levinson, Paul. Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium. London: Routledge, 1999. Lovink, Geert, and Hartmut Winkler. "The Computer: Medium or Calculating Machine." Convergence 3.2 (1997): 10-18. Marshall, P. David. "The Commodity and the Internet: Interactivity and the Generation of Audience Commodity." Media International Australia 83 (Feb. 1997): 51-62. McAleese, Ray. "Navigation and Browsing in Hypertext." Hypertext: Theory into Practice. Ed. Ray McAleese. Oxford: Intellect, 1993. 5- 38. McKnight, Cliff, Andrew Dillon, and John Richardson. Hypertext in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. Moody, Nickianne. "Interacting with the Divine Comedy." Fractal Dreams: New Media in Social Context. Ed. Jon Dovey. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1996. 59-77. Nielsen, Jakob. Hypertext and Hypermedia. Boston: Academic P, 1990. Talbott, Stephen L. The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst. Sebastopol, Calif.: O'Reilly and Associates, 1995. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Axel Bruns. "The Knowledge Adventure: Game Aesthetics and Web Hieroglyphics." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/adventure.php>. Chicago style: Axel Bruns, "The Knowledge Adventure: Game Aesthetics and Web Hieroglyphics," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/adventure.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: AxeM/C: A Journal of Media and Culture l Bruns. (2000) The knowledge adventure: game aesthetics and Web hieroglyphics. 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/adventure.php> ([your date of access]).

@font-face{font-family:"Cambria Math";panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4;mso-font-charset:0;mso-generic-font-family:roman;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:-536870145 1107305727 0 0 415 0;}@font-face{font-family:Calibri;panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4;mso-font-charset:0;mso-generic-font-family:swiss;mso-font-pitch:variable;mso-font-signature:-536859905 -1073697537 9 0 511 0;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal{mso-style-unhide:no;mso-style-qformat:yes;mso-style-parent:"";margin-top:0cm;margin-right:0cm;margin-bottom:8.0pt;margin-left:0cm;line-height:107%;mso-pagination:widow-orphan;font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;mso-ansi-language:DE;mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}.MsoChpDefault{mso-style-type:export-only;mso-default-props:yes;font-size:11.0pt;mso-ansi-font-size:11.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri;mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;mso-ansi-language:DE;mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}.MsoPapDefault{mso-style-type:export-only;margin-bottom:8.0pt;line-height:107%;}div.WordSection1{page:WordSection1;}This essay analyzes the main narrative strategies used by Australian artist Shaun Tan in his 2006 wordless graphic novel The Arrival. Following a medium-specific narratological approach, which takes into account the characteristics of the comics medium, the article explores the role that frames, gutters, panels, and other constitutive features of comics play in the representation of narrative time. In addition, the essay addresses how focalization is configured in the graphic novel, proposing a medium-specific typology of the different modes of focalization that can be appreciated in The Arrival.

1991 An afternoon in late 1991 found me on a Sydney bus reading Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991). A disembarking passenger paused at my side and, as I glanced up, hissed, ‘I don’t know how you can read that filth’. As she continued to make her way to the front of the vehicle, I was as stunned as if she had struck me physically. There was real vehemence in both her words and how they were delivered, and I can still see her eyes squeezing into slits as she hesitated while curling her mouth around that final angry word: ‘filth’. Now, almost fifteen years later, the memory is remarkably vivid. As the event is also still remarkable; this comment remaining the only remark ever made to me by a stranger about anything I have been reading during three decades of travelling on public transport. That inflamed commuter summed up much of the furore that greeted the publication of American Psycho. More than this, and unusually, condemnation of the work both actually preceded, and affected, its publication. Although Ellis had been paid a substantial U.S. $300,000 advance by Simon & Schuster, pre-publication stories based on circulating galley proofs were so negative—offering assessments of the book as: ‘moronic … pointless … themeless … worthless (Rosenblatt 3), ‘superficial’, ‘a tapeworm narrative’ (Sheppard 100) and ‘vile … pornography, not literature … immoral, but also artless’ (Miner 43)—that the publisher cancelled the contract (forfeiting the advance) only months before the scheduled release date. CEO of Simon & Schuster, Richard E. Snyder, explained: ‘it was an error of judgement to put our name on a book of such questionable taste’ (quoted in McDowell, “Vintage” 13). American Psycho was, instead, published by Random House/Knopf in March 1991 under its prestige paperback imprint, Vintage Contemporary (Zaller; Freccero 48) – Sonny Mehta having signed the book to Random House some two days after Simon & Schuster withdrew from its agreement with Ellis. While many commented on the fact that Ellis was paid two substantial advances, it was rarely noted that Random House was a more prestigious publisher than Simon & Schuster (Iannone 52). After its release, American Psycho was almost universally vilified and denigrated by the American critical establishment. The work was criticised on both moral and aesthetic/literary/artistic grounds; that is, in terms of both what Ellis wrote and how he wrote it. Critics found it ‘meaningless’ (Lehmann-Haupt C18), ‘abysmally written … schlock’ (Kennedy 427), ‘repulsive, a bloodbath serving no purpose save that of morbidity, titillation and sensation … pure trash, as scummy and mean as anything it depicts, a dirty book by a dirty writer’ (Yardley B1) and ‘garbage’ (Gurley Brown 21). Mark Archer found that ‘the attempt to confuse style with content is callow’ (31), while Naomi Wolf wrote that: ‘overall, reading American Psycho holds the same fascination as watching a maladjusted 11-year-old draw on his desk’ (34). John Leo’s assessment sums up the passionate intensity of those critical of the work: ‘totally hateful … violent junk … no discernible plot, no believable characterization, no sensibility at work that comes anywhere close to making art out of all the blood and torture … Ellis displays little feel for narration, words, grammar or the rhythm of language’ (23). These reviews, as those printed pre-publication, were titled in similarly unequivocal language: ‘A Revolting Development’ (Sheppard 100), ‘Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity’ (Leo 23), ‘Designer Porn’ (Manguel 46) and ‘Essence of Trash’ (Yardley B1). Perhaps the most unambiguous in its message was Roger Rosenblatt’s ‘Snuff this Book!’ (3). Of all works published in the U.S.A. at that time, including those clearly carrying X ratings, the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) selected American Psycho for special notice, stating that the book ‘legitimizes inhuman and savage violence masquerading as sexuality’ (NOW 114). Judging the book ‘the most misogynistic communication’ the organisation had ever encountered (NOW L.A. chapter president, Tammy Bruce, quoted in Kennedy 427) and, on the grounds that ‘violence against women in any form is no longer socially acceptable’ (McDowell, “NOW” C17), NOW called for a boycott of the entire Random House catalogue for the remainder of 1991. Naomi Wolf agreed, calling the novel ‘a violation not of obscenity standards, but of women’s civil rights, insofar as it results in conditioning male sexual response to female suffering or degradation’ (34). Later, the boycott was narrowed to Knopf and Vintage titles (Love 46), but also extended to all of the many products, companies, corporations, firms and brand names that are a feature of Ellis’s novel (Kauffman, “American” 41). There were other unexpected responses such as the Walt Disney Corporation barring Ellis from the opening of Euro Disney (Tyrnauer 101), although Ellis had already been driven from public view after receiving a number of death threats and did not undertake a book tour (Kennedy 427). Despite this, the book received significant publicity courtesy of the controversy and, although several national bookstore chains and numerous booksellers around the world refused to sell the book, more than 100,000 copies were sold in the U.S.A. in the fortnight after publication (Dwyer 55). Even this success had an unprecedented effect: when American Psycho became a bestseller, The New York Times announced that it would be removing the title from its bestseller lists because of the book’s content. In the days following publication in the U.S.A., Canadian customs announced that it was considering whether to allow the local arm of Random House to, first, import American Psycho for sale in Canada and, then, publish it in Canada (Kirchhoff, “Psycho” C1). Two weeks later, when the book was passed for sale (Kirchhoff, “Customs” C1), demonstrators protested the entrance of a shipment of the book. In May, the Canadian Defence Force made headlines when it withdrew copies of the book from the library shelves of a navy base in Halifax (Canadian Press C1). Also in May 1991, the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC), the federal agency that administers the classification scheme for all films, computer games and ‘submittable’ publications (including books) that are sold, hired or exhibited in Australia, announced that it had classified American Psycho as ‘Category 1 Restricted’ (W. Fraser, “Book” 5), to be sold sealed, to only those over 18 years of age. This was the first such classification of a mainstream literary work since the rating scheme was introduced (Graham), and the first time a work of literature had been restricted for sale since Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969. The chief censor, John Dickie, said the OFLC could not justify refusing the book classification (and essentially banning the work), and while ‘as a satire on yuppies it has a lot going for it’, personally he found the book ‘distasteful’ (quoted in W. Fraser, “Sensitive” 5). Moreover, while this ‘R’ classification was, and remains, a national classification, Australian States and Territories have their own sale and distribution regulation systems. Under this regime, American Psycho remains banned from sale in Queensland, as are all other books in this classification category (Vnuk). These various reactions led to a flood of articles published in the U.S.A., Canada, Australia and the U.K., voicing passionate opinions on a range of issues including free speech and censorship, the corporate control of artistic thought and practice, and cynicism on the part of authors and their publishers about what works might attract publicity and (therefore) sell in large numbers (see, for instance, Hitchens 7; Irving 1). The relationship between violence in society and its representation in the media was a common theme, with only a few commentators (including Norman Mailer in a high profile Vanity Fair article) suggesting that, instead of inciting violence, the media largely reflected, and commented upon, societal violence. Elayne Rapping, an academic in the field of Communications, proposed that the media did actively glorify violence, but only because there was a market for such representations: ‘We, as a society love violence, thrive on violence as the very basis of our social stability, our ideological belief system … The problem, after all, is not media violence but real violence’ (36, 38). Many more commentators, however, agreed with NOW, Wolf and others and charged Ellis’s work with encouraging, and even instigating, violent acts, and especially those against women, calling American Psycho ‘a kind of advertising for violence against women’ (anthropologist Elliot Leyton quoted in Dwyer 55) and, even, a ‘how-to manual on the torture and dismemberment of women’ (Leo 23). Support for the book was difficult to find in the flood of vitriol directed against it, but a small number wrote in Ellis’s defence. Sonny Mehta, himself the target of death threats for acquiring the book for Random House, stood by this assessment, and was widely quoted in his belief that American Psycho was ‘a serious book by a serious writer’ and that Ellis was ‘remarkably talented’ (Knight-Ridder L10). Publishing director of Pan Macmillan Australia, James Fraser, defended his decision to release American Psycho on the grounds that the book told important truths about society, arguing: ‘A publisher’s office is a clearing house for ideas … the real issue for community debate [is] – to what extent does it want to hear the truth about itself, about individuals within the community and about the governments the community elects. If we care about the preservation of standards, there is none higher than this. Gore Vidal was among the very few who stated outright that he liked the book, finding it ‘really rather inspired … a wonderfully comic novel’ (quoted in Tyrnauer 73). Fay Weldon agreed, judging the book as ‘brilliant’, and focusing on the importance of Ellis’s message: ‘Bret Easton Ellis is a very good writer. He gets us to a ‘T’. And we can’t stand it. It’s our problem, not his. American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel that revolves around its own nasty bits’ (C1). Since 1991 As unlikely as this now seems, I first read American Psycho without any awareness of the controversy raging around its publication. I had read Ellis’s earlier works, Less than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987) and, with my energies fully engaged elsewhere, cannot now even remember how I acquired the book. Since that angry remark on the bus, however, I have followed American Psycho’s infamy and how it has remained in the public eye over the last decade and a half. Australian OFLC decisions can be reviewed and reversed – as when Pasolini’s final film Salo (1975), which was banned in Australia from the time of its release in 1975 until it was un-banned in 1993, was then banned again in 1998 – however, American Psycho’s initial classification has remained unchanged. In July 2006, I purchased a new paperback copy in rural New South Wales. It was shrink-wrapped in plastic and labelled: ‘R. Category One. Not available to persons under 18 years. Restricted’. While exact sales figures are difficult to ascertain, by working with U.S.A., U.K. and Australian figures, this copy was, I estimate, one of some 1.5 to 1.6 million sold since publication. In the U.S.A., backlist sales remain very strong, with some 22,000 copies sold annually (Holt and Abbott), while lifetime sales in the U.K. are just under 720,000 over five paperback editions. Sales in Australia are currently estimated by Pan MacMillan to total some 100,000, with a new printing of 5,000 copies recently ordered in Australia on the strength of the book being featured on the inaugural Australian Broadcasting Commission’s First Tuesday Book Club national television program (2006). Predictably, the controversy around the publication of American Psycho is regularly revisited by those reviewing Ellis’s subsequent works. A major article in Vanity Fair on Ellis’s next book, The Informers (1994), opened with a graphic description of the death threats Ellis received upon the publication of American Psycho (Tyrnauer 70) and then outlined the controversy in detail (70-71). Those writing about Ellis’s two most recent novels, Glamorama (1999) and Lunar Park (2005), have shared this narrative strategy, which also forms at least part of the frame of every interview article. American Psycho also, again predictably, became a major topic of discussion in relation to the contracting, making and then release of the eponymous film in 2000 as, for example, in Linda S. Kauffman’s extensive and considered review of the film, which spent the first third discussing the history of the book’s publication (“American” 41-45). Playing with this interest, Ellis continues his practice of reusing characters in subsequent works. Thus, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, who first appeared in The Rules of Attraction as the elder brother of the main character, Sean – who, in turn, makes a brief appearance in American Psycho – also turns up in Glamorama with ‘strange stains’ on his Armani suit lapels, and again in Lunar Park. The book also continues to be regularly cited in discussions of censorship (see, for example, Dubin; Freccero) and has been included in a number of university-level courses about banned books. In these varied contexts, literary, cultural and other critics have also continued to disagree about the book’s impact upon readers, with some persisting in reading the novel as a pornographic incitement to violence. When Wade Frankum killed seven people in Sydney, many suggested a link between these murders and his consumption of X-rated videos, pornographic magazines and American Psycho (see, for example, Manne 11), although others argued against this (Wark 11). Prosecutors in the trial of Canadian murderer Paul Bernardo argued that American Psycho provided a ‘blueprint’ for Bernardo’s crimes (Canadian Press A5). Others have read Ellis’s work more positively, as for instance when Sonia Baelo Allué compares American Psycho favourably with Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (1988) – arguing that Harris not only depicts more degrading treatment of women, but also makes Hannibal Lecter, his antihero monster, sexily attractive (7-24). Linda S. Kauffman posits that American Psycho is part of an ‘anti-aesthetic’ movement in art, whereby works that are revoltingly ugly and/or grotesque function to confront the repressed fears and desires of the audience and explore issues of identity and subjectivity (Bad Girls), while Patrick W. Shaw includes American Psycho in his work, The Modern American Novel of Violence because, in his opinion, the violence Ellis depicts is not gratuitous. Lost, however, in much of this often-impassioned debate and dialogue is the book itself – and what Ellis actually wrote. 21-years-old when Less than Zero was published, Ellis was still only 26 when American Psycho was released and his youth presented an obvious target. In 1991, Terry Teachout found ‘no moment in American Psycho where Bret Easton Ellis, who claims to be a serious artist, exhibits the workings of an adult moral imagination’ (45, 46), Brad Miner that it was ‘puerile – the very antithesis of good writing’ (43) and Carol Iannone that ‘the inclusion of the now famous offensive scenes reveals a staggering aesthetic and moral immaturity’ (54). Pagan Kennedy also ‘blamed’ the entire work on this immaturity, suggesting that instead of possessing a developed artistic sensibility, Ellis was reacting to (and, ironically, writing for the approval of) critics who had lauded the documentary realism of his violent and nihilistic teenage characters in Less than Zero, but then panned his less sensational story of campus life in The Rules of Attraction (427-428). Yet, in my opinion, there is not only a clear and coherent aesthetic vision driving Ellis’s oeuvre but, moreover, a profoundly moral imagination at work as well. This was my view upon first reading American Psycho, and part of the reason I was so shocked by that charge of filth on the bus. Once familiar with the controversy, I found this view shared by only a minority of commentators. Writing in the New Statesman & Society, Elizabeth J. Young asked: ‘Where have these people been? … Books of pornographic violence are nothing new … American Psycho outrages no contemporary taboos. Psychotic killers are everywhere’ (24). I was similarly aware that such murderers not only existed in reality, but also in many widely accessed works of literature and film – to the point where a few years later Joyce Carol Oates could suggest that the serial killer was an icon of popular culture (233). While a popular topic for writers of crime fiction and true crime narratives in both print and on film, a number of ‘serious’ literary writers – including Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Kate Millet, Margaret Atwood and Oates herself – have also written about serial killers, and even crossed over into the widely acknowledged as ‘low-brow’ true crime genre. Many of these works (both popular or more literary) are vivid and powerful and have, as American Psycho, taken a strong moral position towards their subject matter. Moreover, many books and films have far more disturbing content than American Psycho, yet have caused no such uproar (Young and Caveney 120). By now, the plot of American Psycho is well known, although the structure of the book, noted by Weldon above (C1), is rarely analysed or even commented upon. First person narrator, Patrick Bateman, a young, handsome stockbroker and stereotypical 1980s yuppie, is also a serial killer. The book is largely, and innovatively, structured around this seeming incompatibility – challenging readers’ expectations that such a depraved criminal can be a wealthy white professional – while vividly contrasting the banal, and meticulously detailed, emptiness of Bateman’s life as a New York über-consumer with the scenes where he humiliates, rapes, tortures, murders, mutilates, dismembers and cannibalises his victims. Although only comprising some 16 out of 399 pages in my Picador edition, these violent scenes are extreme and certainly make the work as a whole disgustingly confronting. But that is the entire point of Ellis’s work. Bateman’s violence is rendered so explicitly because its principal role in the novel is to be inescapably horrific. As noted by Baelo Allué, there is no shift in tone between the most banally described detail and the description of violence (17): ‘I’ve situated the body in front of the new Toshiba television set and in the VCR is an old tape and appearing on the screen is the last girl I filmed. I’m wearing a Joseph Abboud suit, a tie by Paul Stuart, shoes by J. Crew, a vest by someone Italian and I’m kneeling on the floor beside a corpse, eating the girl’s brain, gobbling it down, spreading Grey Poupon over hunks of the pink, fleshy meat’ (Ellis 328). In complete opposition to how pornography functions, Ellis leaves no room for the possible enjoyment of such a scene. Instead of revelling in the ‘spine chilling’ pleasures of classic horror narratives, there is only the real horror of imagining such an act. The effect, as Kauffman has observed is, rather than arousing, often so disgusting as to be emetic (Bad Girls 249). Ellis was surprised that his detractors did not understand that he was trying to be shocking, not offensive (Love 49), or that his overall aim was to symbolise ‘how desensitised our culture has become towards violence’ (quoted in Dwyer 55). Ellis was also understandably frustrated with readings that conflated not only the contents of the book and their meaning, but also the narrator and author: ‘The acts described in the book are truly, indisputably vile. The book itself is not. Patrick Bateman is a monster. I am not’ (quoted in Love 49). Like Fay Weldon, Norman Mailer understood that American Psycho posited ‘that the eighties were spiritually disgusting and the author’s presentation is the crystallization of such horror’ (129). Unlike Weldon, however, Mailer shied away from defending the novel by judging Ellis not accomplished enough a writer to achieve his ‘monstrous’ aims (182), failing because he did not situate Bateman within a moral universe, that is, ‘by having a murderer with enough inner life for us to comprehend him’ (182). Yet, the morality of Ellis’s project is evident. By viewing the world through the lens of a psychotic killer who, in many ways, personifies the American Dream – wealthy, powerful, intelligent, handsome, energetic and successful – and, yet, who gains no pleasure, satisfaction, coherent identity or sense of life’s meaning from his endless, selfish consumption, Ellis exposes the emptiness of both that world and that dream. As Bateman himself explains: ‘Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in. This was civilisation as I saw it, colossal and jagged’ (Ellis 375). Ellis thus situates the responsibility for Bateman’s violence not in his individual moral vacuity, but in the barren values of the society that has shaped him – a selfish society that, in Ellis’s opinion, refused to address the most important issues of the day: corporate greed, mindless consumerism, poverty, homelessness and the prevalence of violent crime. Instead of pornographic, therefore, American Psycho is a profoundly political text: Ellis was never attempting to glorify or incite violence against anyone, but rather to expose the effects of apathy to these broad social problems, including the very kinds of violence the most vocal critics feared the book would engender. Fifteen years after the publication of American Psycho, although our societies are apparently growing in overall prosperity, the gap between rich and poor also continues to grow, more are permanently homeless, violence – whether domestic, random or institutionally-sanctioned – escalates, and yet general apathy has intensified to the point where even the ‘ethics’ of torture as government policy can be posited as a subject for rational debate. The real filth of the saga of American Psycho is, thus, how Ellis’s message was wilfully ignored. While critics and public intellectuals discussed the work at length in almost every prominent publication available, few attempted to think in any depth about what Ellis actually wrote about, or to use their powerful positions to raise any serious debate about the concerns he voiced. Some recent critical reappraisals have begun to appreciate how American Psycho is an ‘ethical denunciation, where the reader cannot but face the real horror behind the serial killer phenomenon’ (Baelo Allué 8), but Ellis, I believe, goes further, exposing the truly filthy causes that underlie the existence of such seemingly ‘senseless’ murder. But, Wait, There’s More It is ironic that American Psycho has, itself, generated a mini-industry of products. A decade after publication, a Canadian team – filmmaker Mary Harron, director of I Shot Andy Warhol (1996), working with scriptwriter, Guinevere Turner, and Vancouver-based Lions Gate Entertainment – adapted the book for a major film (Johnson). Starring Christian Bale, Chloë Sevigny, Willem Dafoe and Reese Witherspoon and, with an estimated budget of U.S.$8 million, the film made U.S.$15 million at the American box office. The soundtrack was released for the film’s opening, with video and DVDs to follow and the ‘Killer Collector’s Edition’ DVD – closed-captioned, in widescreen with surround sound – released in June 2005. Amazon.com lists four movie posters (including a Japanese language version) and, most unexpected of all, a series of film tie-in action dolls. The two most popular of these, judging by E-Bay, are the ‘Cult Classics Series 1: Patrick Bateman’ figure which, attired in a smart suit, comes with essential accoutrements of walkman with headphones, briefcase, Wall Street Journal, video tape and recorder, knife, cleaver, axe, nail gun, severed hand and a display base; and the 18” tall ‘motion activated sound’ edition – a larger version of the same doll with fewer accessories, but which plays sound bites from the movie. Thanks to Stephen Harris and Suzie Gibson (UNE) for stimulating conversations about this book, Stephen Harris for information about the recent Australian reprint of American Psycho and Mark Seebeck (Pan Macmillan) for sales information. References Archer, Mark. “The Funeral Baked Meats.” The Spectator 27 April 1991: 31. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. First Tuesday Book Club. First broadcast 1 August 2006. Baelo Allué, Sonia. “The Aesthetics of Serial Killing: Working against Ethics in The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and American Psycho (1991).” Atlantis 24.2 (Dec. 2002): 7-24. Canadian Press. “Navy Yanks American Psycho.” The Globe and Mail 17 May 1991: C1. Canadian Press. “Gruesome Novel Was Bedside Reading.” Kitchener-Waterloo Record 1 Sep. 1995: A5. Dubin, Steven C. “Art’s Enemies: Censors to the Right of Me, Censors to the Left of Me.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 28.4 (Winter 1994): 44-54. Dwyer, Victor. “Literary Firestorm: Canada Customs Scrutinizes a Brutal Novel.” Maclean’s April 1991: 55. Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. London: Macmillan-Picador, 1991. ———. Glamorama. New York: Knopf, 1999. ———. The Informers. New York: Knopf, 1994. ———. Less than Zero. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. ———. Lunar Park. New York: Knopf, 2005. ———. The Rules of Attraction. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. Fraser, James. :The Case for Publishing.” The Bulletin 18 June 1991. Fraser, William. “Book May Go under Wraps.” The Sydney Morning Herald 23 May 1991: 5. ———. “The Sensitive Censor and the Psycho.” The Sydney Morning Herald 24 May 1991: 5. Freccero, Carla. “Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of American Psycho.” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 27.2 (Summer 1997): 44-58. Graham, I. “Australian Censorship History.” Libertus.net 9 Dec. 2001. 17 May 2006 http://libertus.net/censor/hist20on.html>. Gurley Brown, Helen. Commentary in “Editorial Judgement or Censorship?: The Case of American Psycho.” The Writer May 1991: 20-23. Harris, Thomas. The Silence of the Lambs. New York: St Martins Press, 1988. Harron, Mary (dir.). American Psycho [film]. Edward R. Pressman Film Corporation, Lions Gate Films, Muse Productions, P.P.S. Films, Quadra Entertainment, Universal Pictures, 2004. Hitchens, Christopher. “Minority Report.” The Nation 7-14 January 1991: 7. Holt, Karen, and Charlotte Abbott. “Lunar Park: The Novel.” Publishers Weekly 11 July 2005. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA624404.html? pubdate=7%2F11%2F2005&display=archive>. Iannone, Carol. “PC & the Ellis Affair.” Commentary Magazine July 1991: 52-4. Irving, John. “Pornography and the New Puritans.” The New York Times Book Review 29 March 1992: Section 7, 1. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/15/lifetimes/25665.html>. Johnson, Brian D. “Canadian Cool Meets American Psycho.” Maclean’s 10 April 2000. 13 Aug. 2006 http://www.macleans.ca/culture/films/article.jsp?content=33146>. Kauffman, Linda S. “American Psycho [film review].” Film Quarterly 54.2 (Winter 2000-2001): 41-45. ———. Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Kennedy, Pagan. “Generation Gaffe: American Psycho.” The Nation 1 April 1991: 426-8. Kirchhoff, H. J. “Customs Clears Psycho: Booksellers’ Reaction Mixed.” The Globe and Mail 26 March 1991: C1. ———. “Psycho Sits in Limbo: Publisher Awaits Customs Ruling.” The Globe and Mail 14 March 1991: C1. Knight-Ridder News Service. “Vintage Picks up Ellis’ American Psycho.” Los Angeles Daily News 17 November 1990: L10. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “Psycho: Wither Death without Life?” The New York Times 11 March 1991: C18. Leo, John. “Marketing Cynicism and Vulgarity.” U.S. News & World Report 3 Dec. 1990: 23. Love, Robert. “Psycho Analysis: Interview with Bret Easton Ellis.” Rolling Stone 4 April 1991: 45-46, 49-51. Mailer, Norman. “Children of the Pied Piper: Mailer on American Psycho.” Vanity Fair March 1991: 124-9, 182-3. Manguel, Alberto. “Designer Porn.” Saturday Night 106.6 (July 1991): 46-8. Manne, Robert. “Liberals Deny the Video Link.” The Australian 6 Jan. 1997: 11. McDowell, Edwin. “NOW Chapter Seeks Boycott of ‘Psycho’ Novel.” The New York Times 6 Dec. 1990: C17. ———. “Vintage Buys Violent Book Dropped by Simon & Schuster.” The New York Times 17 Nov. 1990: 13. Miner, Brad. “Random Notes.” National Review 31 Dec. 1990: 43. National Organization for Women. Library Journal 2.91 (1991): 114. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Three American Gothics.” Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews and Prose. New York: Plume, 1999. 232-43. Rapping, Elayne. “The Uses of Violence.” Progressive 55 (1991): 36-8. Rosenblatt, Roger. “Snuff this Book!: Will Brett Easton Ellis Get Away with Murder?” New York Times Book Review 16 Dec. 1990: 3, 16. Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint. New York: Random House, 1969. Shaw, Patrick W. The Modern American Novel of Violence. Troy, NY: Whitson, 2000. Sheppard, R. Z. “A Revolting Development.” Time 29 Oct. 1990: 100. Teachout, Terry. “Applied Deconstruction.” National Review 24 June 1991: 45-6. Tyrnauer, Matthew. “Who’s Afraid of Bret Easton Ellis?” Vanity Fair 57.8 (Aug. 1994): 70-3, 100-1. Vnuk, Helen. “X-rated? Outdated.” The Age 21 Sep. 2003. 17 May 2006 http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/09/19/1063625202157.html>. Wark, McKenzie. “Video Link Is a Distorted View.” The Australian 8 Jan. 1997: 11. Weldon, Fay. “Now You’re Squeamish?: In a World as Sick as Ours, It’s Silly to Target American Psycho.” The Washington Post 28 April 1991: C1. Wolf, Naomi. “The Animals Speak.” New Statesman & Society 12 April 1991: 33-4. Yardley, Jonathan. “American Psycho: Essence of Trash.” The Washington Post 27 Feb. 1991: B1. Young, Elizabeth J. “Psycho Killers. Last Lines: How to Shock the English.” New Statesman & Society 5 April 1991: 24. Young, Elizabeth J., and Graham Caveney. Shopping in Space: Essays on American ‘Blank Generation’ Fiction. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992. Zaller, Robert “American Psycho, American Censorship and the Dahmer Case.” Revue Francaise d’Etudes Americaines 16.56 (1993): 317-25. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brien, Donna Lee. "The Real Filth in : A Critical Reassessment." M/C Journal 9.5 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>. APA Style Brien, D. (Nov. 2006) "The Real Filth in American Psycho: A Critical Reassessment," M/C Journal, 9(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0610/01-brien.php>.

Monsters are everywhere in our popular media narratives. They lurk in the shadows of video games and computer animations, ready to pounce. They haunt the frames of horror films and fantasy televisions shows. They burst out of panels in many comics and graphic novels, bringing with them grotesque forms and nightmarish transformations. They feature recurrently in scary stories for children, echoing the fears of old myths, legends, and fairy tales, and forever drawing attention to our complex views of heroes. They inhabit our nightmares, and challenge our certainties. Monsters are, above all, metaphors. They function both as warnings and as reminders of that which we fear, and which we do not want to admit we desire. Monsters are creatures of difference, but they are never far removed from our human worlds. They aptly reflect not only our fears, but also our deepest and most illicit desires, and like to draw attention to the darkest aspects of our human experience, from the extraordinary to the everyday, from our fictional contexts to the horrors of social media. The monster metaphor is not just part of the imagination, but particularly functions as a representation of “features of a world” that “we are not altogether comfortable living in” (Scott 5). Because of their versatility, monsters refuse to be related to one single aspect of media and culture, and like to resurface in the most unexpected situations. Monsters are entangled with our histories and ways of life, and their representations speak loudly of the complex ways in which we negotiate our relationships and ways of communicating. Monsters present themselves differently from context to context: whether they are covered in scales or equipped with mighty fangs, whether they are undead or all too alive as Internet trolls, monsters always make us wonder about notions of safety and of reliability. While monsters have always been a central part of our modes of storytelling, they can tell us much about our contemporary moment, as we negotiate our concerns over technology, the body, globalisation, and social interaction in our Twenty-first century. Indeed, “while monsters always tapped into anxieties over a changing world”, they have never been “as popular, or as needed, as in the past decade” (Levina and Bui 2). Monsters, for sure, need to be slayed, but that process inevitably entails reflection and understanding of what the monster ‘is’, and what (or who) created it in the first place. In this issue, we approach monsters with fresh curiosity, and enquire into the meaning of their multifaceted incarnations, as both metaphors and as constant—and frightening—reflections of our ways of life. We explore what makes something ‘monstrous’, and how this term is applied figuratively across a variety of media and cultural contexts. We survey how monsters are represented, both physically and metaphorically, and acknowledge them as creatures of both identification and disparity. As Jeffrey Cohen suggests, the monster is always born “as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment, of a time, a feeling, and a place” (Cohen 4). If it is true that monsters reflect our cultural and social anxieties at given moments in time, then we must also wonder what it means to ‘embrace’ the monster, and see its very existence as a definitive part of who we are, how we see ourselves, and how we want to be seen by others. The articles in this issue all pivot on the idea of exploring the monster in media and culture as inevitably connected to our identities. We begin with our feature article, “‘Waiting with Bated Breath’: Navigating the Monstrous World of Online Racism” by Bronwyn Fredericks and Abraham Bradfield, which connects art, social media, and experiences of racism with the concept of the Internet as a ‘monstrous’ space in which new rules apply. We then move to Lawrence May’s “Confronting Ecological Monstrosity: Contemporary Video Game Monsters and the Climate Crisis”, which explores how games can facilitate new forms of ecocriticism through encounters with monsters that both embody and critique ecological collapse. In “Subverting the Monster: Reading Shrek as a Disability Fairy Tale”, Jordan Fyfe and Katie Ellis consider the transgressive potential of the monster in the context of subverting ableist norms and narratives. In the following article, “Kamen Rider: A Monstrous Hero”, Sophia Staite examines how heroism and monstrosity intersect in the Japanese live-action superhero franchise Kamen Rider, noting that “the line between hero and monster has become blurred beyond comprehension”. Angelique Nairn and Deepti Bhargava illustrate how specific professional identities can be framed as monstrous by popular media in “Demon in a Dress? An Exploration of How Television Programming Conceptualises Female Public Relations Practitioners as Monsters”. In “The Megalodon: A Monster of the New Mythology”, Edward Guimont highlights the intersecting forces of science and popular culture in building ‘new’ myths and monsters from nature and the not-so-fossilised past. Drawing on interviews with innovative sonic artist raxil4 (also known as Andrew Page), Will Connor explores the contours of a uniquely ‘monstrous’ musical instrument with the potential to both repel and attract, in “Positively Monstrous! Layers of Meaning within raxil4’s Bone Guitar Thing”. In “Frankenstein Redux: Posthuman Monsters in Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein”, Emily McAvan engages with Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019), a contemporary re-reading of Mary Shelley’s classic that challenges ideas of what it means to be human in the present day. Morgan Pinder’s “Mouldy Matriarchs and Dangerous Daughters: An Ecofeminist Look at Resident Evil Antagonists” brings us back to digital media by focusing on the gendered representation of fungal monstrosities in the video game franchise. In “The Serpent (2021): Monstrous Tourism, a Serial Killer and the Hippie Trail”, Gemma Blackwood explores a Netflix true crime series in which monstrosity intersects with imperialist and globalised ideologies of mass tourism. Finally, Donna Lee Brien explores how conflicting public discourses continue to shape our understanding of the living world in her article “Demon Monsters or Misunderstood Casualties? Writing about Sharks in Australia”. These articles address a wide range of themes and media forms, from climate change to gender and sexuality, from video games to musical instruments. Such diversity illustrates the breadth of research currently being undertaken in the arena of monster studies, but also the extent to which the monster as a symbolic figure continues to have resonance across a variety of academic fields. References Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Monster Theory. U of Minnesota P, 1996. Levina, Marina, and Diem-My Bui. Introduction. In Monster Culture in the 21st Century. Eds. Marina Levina and Diem-My Bui. Bloomsbury, 2013. 1-13. Scott, Niall. Introduction. In Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil. Ed. Niall Scott. Rodopi, 2007. 1-5.

At a time when almost every human transgression, illness, profession and other personal aspect of life has been chronicled in autobiographical writing (Rak)—in 1998 Zinsser called ours “the age of memoir” (3)—writing about fat is one of the most recent subjects to be addressed in this way. This article surveys a range of contemporary autobiographical texts that are titled with, or revolve around, that powerful and most evocative word, “fat”. Following a number of cultural studies of fat in society (Critser; Gilman, Fat Boys; Fat: A Cultural History; Stearns), this discussion views fat in socio-cultural terms, following Lupton in understanding fat as both “a cultural artefact: a bodily substance or body shape that is given meaning by complex and shifting systems of ideas, practices, emotions, material objects and interpersonal relationships” (i). Using a case study approach (Gerring; Verschuren), this examination focuses on a range of texts from autobiographical cookbooks and memoirs to novel-length graphic works in order to develop a preliminary taxonomy of these works. In this way, a small sample of work, each of which (described below) explores an aspect (or aspects) of the form is, following Merriam, useful as it allows a richer picture of an under-examined phenomenon to be constructed, and offers “a means of investigating complex social units consisting of multiple variables of potential importance in understanding the phenomenon” (Merriam 50). Although the sample size does not offer generalisable results, the case study method is especially suitable in this context, where the aim is to open up discussion of this form of writing for future research for, as Merriam states, “much can be learned from […] an encounter with the case through the researcher’s narrative description” and “what we learn in a particular case can be transferred to similar situations” (51). Pro-Fat Autobiographical WritingAlongside the many hundreds of reduced, low- and no-fat cookbooks and weight loss guides currently in print that offer recipes, meal plans, ingredient replacements and strategies to reduce fat in the diet, there are a handful that promote the consumption of fats, and these all have an autobiographical component. The publication of Jennifer McLagan’s Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes in 2008 by Ten Speed Press—publisher of Mollie Katzen’s groundbreaking and influential vegetarian Moosewood Cookbook in 1974 and an imprint now known for its quality cookbooks (Thelin)—unequivocably addressed that line in the sand often drawn between fat and all things healthy. The four chapter titles of this cookbook— “Butter,” subtitled “Worth It,” “Pork Fat: The King,” “Poultry Fat: Versatile and Good For You,” and, “Beef and Lamb Fats: Overlooked But Tasty”—neatly summarise McLagan’s organising argument: that animal fats not only add an unreplaceable and delicious flavour to foods but are fundamental to our health. Fat polarised readers and critics; it was positively reviewed in prominent publications (Morris; Bhide) and won influential food writing awards, including 2009 James Beard Awards for Single Subject Cookbook and Cookbook of the Year but, due to its rejection of low-fat diets and the research underpinning them, was soon also vehemently criticised, to the point where the book was often described in the media as “controversial” (see Smith). McLagan’s text, while including historical, scientific and gastronomic data and detail, is also an outspokenly personal treatise, chronicling her sensual and emotional responses to this ingredient. “I love fat,” she begins, continuing, “Whether it’s a slice of foie gras terrine, its layer of yellow fat melting at the edges […] hot bacon fat […] wilting a plate of pungent greens into submission […] or a piece of crunchy pork crackling […] I love the way it feels in my mouth, and I love its many tastes” (1). Her text is, indeed, memoir as gastronomy / gastronomy as memoir, and this cookbook, therefore, an example of the “memoir with recipes” subgenre (Brien et al.). It appears to be this aspect – her highly personal and, therein, persuasive (Weitin) plea for the value of fats – that galvanised critics and readers.Molly Chester and Sandy Schrecengost’s Back to Butter: A Traditional Foods Cookbook – Nourishing Recipes Inspired by Our Ancestors begins with its authors’ memoirs (illness, undertaking culinary school training, buying and running a farm) to lend weight to their argument to utilise fats widely in cookery. Its first chapter, “Fats and Oils,” features the familiar butter, which it describes as “the friendly fat” (22), then moves to the more reviled pork lard “Grandma’s superfood” (22) and, nowadays quite rarely described as an ingredient, beef tallow. Grit Magazine’s Lard: The Lost Art of Cooking with Your Grandmother’s Secret Ingredient utilises the rhetoric that fat, and in this case, lard, is a traditional and therefore foundational ingredient in good cookery. This text draws on its publisher’s, Grit Magazine (published since 1882 in various formats), long history of including auto/biographical “inspirational stories” (Teller) to lend persuasive power to its argument. One of the most polarising of fats in health and current media discourse is butter, as was seen recently in debate over what was seen as its excessive use in the MasterChef Australia television series (see, Heart Foundation; Phillipov). It is perhaps not surprising, then, that butter is the single fat inspiring the most autobiographical writing in this mode. Rosie Daykin’s Butter Baked Goods: Nostalgic Recipes from a Little Neighborhood Bakery is, for example, typical of a small number of cookbooks that extend the link between baking and nostalgia to argue that butter is the superlative ingredient for baking. There are also entire cookbooks dedicated to making flavoured butters (Vaserfirer) and a number that offer guides to making butter and other (fat-based) dairy products at home (Farrell-Kingsley; Hill; Linford).Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef is typical among chef’s memoirs in using butter prominently although rare in mentioning fat in its title. In this text and other such memoirs, butter is often used as shorthand for describing a food that is rich but also wholesomely delicious. Hamilton relates childhood memories of “all butter shortcakes” (10), and her mother and sister “cutting butter into flour and sugar” for scones (15), radishes eaten with butter (21), sautéing sage in butter to dress homemade ravoli (253), and eggs fried in browned butter (245). Some of Hamilton’s most telling references to butter present it as an staple, natural food as, for instance, when she describes “sliced bread with butter and granulated sugar” (37) as one of her family’s favourite desserts, and lists butter among the everyday foodstuffs that taste superior when stored at room temperature instead of refrigerated—thereby moving butter from taboo (Gwynne describes a similar process of the normalisation of sexual “perversion” in erotic memoir).Like this text, memoirs that could be described as arguing “for” fat as a substance are largely by chefs or other food writers who extol, like McLagan and Hamilton, the value of fat as both food and flavouring, and propose that it has a key role in both ordinary/family and gourmet cookery. In this context, despite plant-based fats such as coconut oil being much lauded in nutritional and other health-related discourse, the fat written about in these texts is usually animal-based. An exception to this is olive oil, although this is never described in the book’s title as a “fat” (see, for instance, Drinkwater’s series of memoirs about life on an olive farm in France) and is, therefore, out of the scope of this discussion.Memoirs of Being FatThe majority of the other memoirs with the word “fat” in their titles are about being fat. Narratives on this topic, and their authors’ feelings about this, began to be published as a sub-set of autobiographical memoir in the 2000s. The first decade of the new millennium saw a number of such memoirs by female writers including Judith Moore’s Fat Girl (published in 2005), Jen Lancaster’s Such a Pretty Fat: One Narcissist’s Quest to Discover If Her Life Makes Her Ass Look Big, or Why Pie Is Not the Answer, and Stephanie Klein’s Moose: A Memoir (both published in 2008) and Jennifer Joyne’s Designated Fat Girl in 2010. These were followed into the new decade by texts such as Celia Rivenbark’s bestselling 2011 You Don’t Sweat Much for a Fat Girl, and all attracted significant mainstream readerships. Journalist Vicki Allan pulled no punches when she labelled these works the “fat memoir” and, although Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s influential categorisation of 60 genres of life writing does not include this description, they do recognise eating disorder and weight-loss narratives. Some scholarly interest followed (Linder; Halloran), with Mitchell linking this production to feminism’s promotion of the power of the micro-narrative and the recognition that the autobiographical narrative was “a way of situating the self politically” (65).aken together, these memoirs all identify “excess” weight, although the response to this differs. They can be grouped as: narratives of losing weight (see Kuffel; Alley; and many others), struggling to lose weight (most of these books), and/or deciding not to try to lose weight (the smallest number of works overall). Some of these texts display a deeply troubled relationship with food—Moore’s Fat Girl, for instance, could also be characterised as an eating disorder memoir (Brien), detailing her addiction to eating and her extremely poor body image as well as her mother’s unrelenting pressure to lose weight. Elena Levy-Navarro describes the tone of these narratives as “compelled confession” (340), mobilising both the conventional understanding of confession of the narrator “speaking directly and colloquially” to the reader of their sins, failures or foibles (Gill 7), and what she reads as an element of societal coercion in their production. Some of these texts do focus on confessing what can be read as disgusting and wretched behavior (gorging and vomiting, for instance)—Halloran’s “gustatory abject” (27)—which is a feature of the contemporary conceptualisation of confession after Rousseau (Brooks). This is certainly a prominent aspect of current memoir writing that is, simultaneously, condemned by critics (see, for example, Jordan) and popular with readers (O’Neill). Read in this way, the majority of memoirs about being fat are about being miserable until a slimming regime of some kind has been undertaken and successful. Some of these texts are, indeed, triumphal in tone. Lisa Delaney’s Secrets of a Former Fat Girl is, for instance, clear in the message of its subtitle, How to Lose Two, Four (or More!) Dress Sizes—And Find Yourself Along the Way, that she was “lost” until she became slim. Linden has argued that “female memoir writers frequently describe their fat bodies as diseased and contaminated” (219) and “powerless” (226). Many of these confessional memoirs are moving narratives of shame and self loathing where the memoirist’s sense of self, character, and identity remain somewhat confused and unresolved, whether they lose weight or not, and despite attestations to the contrary.A sub-set of these memoirs of weight loss are by male authors. While having aspects in common with those by female writers, these can be identified as a sub-set of these memoirs for two reasons. One is the tone of their narratives, which is largely humourous and often ribaldly comic. There is also a sense of the heroic in these works, with male memoirsts frequently mobilising images of battles and adversity. Texts that can be categorised in this way include Toshio Okada’s Sayonara Mr. Fatty: A Geek’s Diet Memoir, Gregg McBride and Joy Bauer’s bestselling Weightless: My Life as a Fat Man and How I Escaped, Fred Anderson’s From Chunk to Hunk: Diary of a Fat Man. As can be seen in their titles, these texts also promise to relate the stratgies, regimes, plans, and secrets that others can follow to, similarly, lose weight. Allen Zadoff’s title makes this explicit: Lessons Learned on the Journey from Fat to Thin. Many of these male memoirists are prompted by a health-related crisis, diagnosis, or realisation. Male body image—a relatively recent topic of enquiry in the eating disorder, psychology, and fashion literature (see, for instance, Bradley et al.)—is also often a surprising motif in these texts, and a theme in common with weight loss memoirs by female authors. Edward Ugel, for instance, opens his memoir, I’m with Fatty: Losing Fifty Pounds in Fifty Miserable Weeks, with “I’m haunted by mirrors … the last thing I want to do is see myself in a mirror or a photograph” (1).Ugel, as that prominent “miserable” in his subtitle suggests, provides a subtle but revealing variation on this theme of successful weight loss. Ugel (as are all these male memoirists) succeeds in the quest be sets out on but, apparently, despondent almost every moment. While the overall tone of his writing is light and humorous, he laments every missed meal, snack, and mouthful of food he foregoes, explaining that he loves eating, “Food makes me happy … I live to eat. I love to eat at restaurants. I love to cook. I love the social component of eating … I can’t be happy without being a social eater” (3). Like many of these books by male authors, Ugel’s descriptions of the food he loves are mouthwatering—and most especially when describing what he identifies as the fattening foods he loves: Reuben sandwiches dripping with juicy grease, crispy deep friend Chinese snacks, buttery Danish pastries and creamy, rich ice cream. This believable sense of regret is not, however, restricted to male authors. It is also apparent in how Jen Lancaster begins her memoir: “I’m standing in the kitchen folding a softened stick of butter, a cup of warmed sour cream, and a mound of fresh-shaved Parmesan into my world-famous mashed potatoes […] There’s a maple-glazed pot roast browning nicely in the oven and white-chocolate-chip macadamia cookies cooling on a rack farther down the counter. I’ve already sautéed the almonds and am waiting for the green beans to blanch so I can toss the whole lot with yet more butter before serving the meal” (5). In the above memoirs, both male and female writers recount similar (and expected) strategies: diets, fasts and other weight loss regimes and interventions (calorie counting, colonics, and gastric-banding and -bypass surgery for instance, recur); consulting dieting/health magazines for information and strategies; keeping a food journal; employing expert help in the form of nutritionists, dieticians, and personal trainers; and, joining health clubs/gyms, and taking up various sports.Alongside these works sit a small number of texts that can be characterised as “non-weight loss memoirs.” These can be read as part of the emerging, and burgeoning, academic field of Fat Studies, which gathers together an extensive literature critical of, and oppositional to, dominant discourses about obesity (Cooper; Rothblum and Solovay; Tomrley and Naylor), and which include works that focus on information backed up with memoir such as self-described “fat activist” (Wann, website) Marilyn Wann’s Fat! So?: Because You Don’t Have to Apologise, which—when published in 1998—followed a print ’zine and a website of the same title. Although certainly in the minority in terms of numbers, these narratives have been very popular with readers and are growing as a sub-genre, with well-known actress Camryn Manheim’s New York Times-bestselling memoir, Wake Up, I'm Fat! (published in 1999) a good example. This memoir chronicles Manheim’s journey from the overweight and teased teenager who finds it a struggle to find friends (a common trope in many weight loss memoirs) to an extremely successful actress.Like most other types of memoir, there are also niche sub-genres of the “fat memoir.” Cheryl Peck’s Fat Girls and Lawn Chairs recounts a series of stories about her life in the American Midwest as a lesbian “woman of size” (xiv) and could thus be described as a memoir on the subjects of – and is, indeed, catalogued in the Library of Congress as: “Overweight women,” “Lesbians,” and “Three Rivers (Mich[igan]) – Social life and customs”.Carol Lay’s graphic memoir, The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude, has a simple diet message – she lost weight by counting calories and exercising every day – and makes a dual claim for value of being based on both her own story and a range of data and tools including: “the latest research on obesity […] psychological tips, nutrition basics, and many useful tools like simplified calorie charts, sample recipes, and menu plans” (qtd. in Lorah). The Big Skinny could, therefore, be characterised with the weight loss memoirs above as a self-help book, but Lay herself describes choosing the graphic form in order to increase its narrative power: to “wrap much of the information in stories […] combining illustrations and story for a double dose of retention in the brain” (qtd. in Lorah). Like many of these books that can fit into multiple categories, she notes that “booksellers don’t know where to file the book – in graphic novels, memoirs, or in the diet section” (qtd. in O’Shea).Jude Milner’s Fat Free: The Amazing All-True Adventures of Supersize Woman! is another example of how a single memoir (graphic, in this case) can be a hybrid of the categories herein discussed, indicating how difficult it is to neatly categorise human experience. Recounting the author’s numerous struggles with her weight and journey to self-acceptance, Milner at first feels guilty and undertakes a series of diets and regimes, before becoming a “Fat Is Beautiful” activist and, finally, undergoing gastric bypass surgery. Here the narrative trajectory is of empowerment rather than physical transformation, as a thinner (although, importantly, not thin) Milner “exudes confidence and radiates strength” (Story). ConclusionWhile the above has identified a number of ways of attempting to classify autobiographical writing about fat/s, its ultimate aim is, after G. Thomas Couser’s work in relation to other sub-genres of memoir, an attempt to open up life writing for further discussion, rather than set in placed fixed and inflexible categories. Constructing such a preliminary taxonomy aspires to encourage more nuanced discussion of how writers, publishers, critics and readers understand “fat” conceptually as well as more practically and personally. 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In a field of study as well-established as the Gothic, it is surprising how much contention there is over precisely what that term refers to. Is Gothic a genre, for example, or a mode? Should it be only applicable to literary and film texts that deal with tropes of haunting and trauma set in a gloomy atmosphere, or might it meaningfully be applied to other cultural forms of production, such as music or animation? Can television shows aimed at children be considered Gothic? What about food? When is something “Gothic” and when is it “horror”? Is there even a difference? The Gothic as a phenomenon is commonly identified as beginning with Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), which was followed by Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778), the romances of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796). Nineteenth-century Gothic literature was characterised by “penny dreadfuls” and novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Frequently dismissed as sensational and escapist, the Gothic has experienced a critical revival in recent decades, beginning with the feminist revisionism of the 1970s by critics such as Ellen Moers, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. With the appearance of studies such as David Punter’s The Literature of Terror (1980), Gothic literature became a reputable field of scholarly research, with critics identifying suburban Gothic, imperial Gothic, postcolonial Gothic and numerous national Gothics, including Irish Gothic and the Gothic of the American South. Furthermore, as this special edition on Gothic shows, the Gothic is by no means limited to literature, with film, television, animation and music all partaking of the Gothic inflection. Indeed, it would be unwise to negate the ways in which the Gothic has developed to find fertile ground beyond the bounds of literature. In our media-centred twenty-first century, the Gothic has colonised different forms of expression, where the impact left by literary works, that were historically the centre of the Gothic itself, is all but a legacy. Film, in particular, has a close connection to the Gothic, where the works of, for instance, Tim Burton, have shown the representative potential of the Gothic mode; the visual medium of film, of course, has a certain experiential immediacy that marries successfully with the dark aesthetics of the Gothic, and its connections to representing cultural anxieties and desires (Botting). The analysis of Gothic cinema, in its various and extremely international incarnations, has now established itself as a distinct area of academic research, where prominent Gothic scholars such as Ken Gelder—with the recent publication of his New Vampire Cinema (2012)—continue to lead the way to advance Gothic scholarship outside of the traditional bounds of the literary.As far as cinema is concerned, one cannot negate the interconnections, both aesthetic and conceptual, between traditional Gothic representation and horror. Jerrold Hogle has clearly identified the mutation and transformation of the Gothic from a narrative solely based on “terror”, to one that incorporates elements of “horror” (Hogle 3). While the separation between the two has a long-standing history—and there is no denying that both the aesthetics and the politics of horror and the Gothic can be fundamentally different—one has to be attuned to the fact that, in our contemporary moment, the two often tend to merge and intersect, often forming hybrid visions of the Gothic, with cinematic examples such as Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) playing testament to this. Indeed, the newly formed representations of “Gothic Horror” and “Gothic Terror” alerts us to the mutable and malleable nature of the Gothic itself, an adaptable mode that is always contextually based. Film is not, however, the only non-literary medium that has incorporated elements of the Gothic over the years. Other visual representations of the Gothic abound in the worlds of television, animation, comics and graphic novels. One must only think here of the multiple examples of recent television series that have found fruitful connections with both the psychologically haunting aspects of Gothic terror, and the gory and grisly visual evocations of Gothic horror: the list is long and diverse, and includes Dexter (2006-2013), Hannibal (2013-), and Penny Dreadful (2014-), to mention but a few. The animation front —in its multiple in carnations —has similarly been entangled with Gothic tropes and concerns, a valid interconnection that is visible both in cinematic and television examples, from The Corpse Bride (2005) to Coraline (2009) and Frankenweeinie (2012). Comics and graphics also have a long-standing tradition of exploiting the dark aesthetics of the Gothic mode, and its sensationalist connections to horror; the instances from this list pervade the contemporary media scope, and feature the inclusion of Gothicised ambiences and characters in both singular graphic novels and continuous comics —such as the famous Arkham Asylum (1989) in the ever-popular Batman franchise. The inclusion of these multi-media examples here is only representative, and it is an almost prosaic accent in a list of Gothicised media that extends to great bounds, and also includes the worlds of games and music. The scholarship, for its part, has not failed to pick up on the transformations and metamorphoses that the Gothic mode has undergone in recent years. The place of both Gothic horror and Gothic terror in a multi-media context has been critically evaluated in detail, and continues to attract academic attention, as the development of the multi-genre and multi-medium journey of the Gothic unfolds. Indeed, this emphasis is now so widespread that a certain canonicity has developed for the study of the Gothic in media such as television, extending the reach of Gothic Studies into the wider popular culture scope. Critical texts that have recently focused on identifying the Gothic in media beyond not only literature, but also film, include Helen Wheatley’s Gothic Television (2007), John C. Tibbetts’ The Gothic Imagination: Conversation of Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction in the Media (2011), and Julia Round’s Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels (2014). Critics often suggest that the Gothic returns at moments of particular cultural crisis, and if this is true, it seems as if we are in such a moment ourselves. Popular television shows such as True Blood and The Walking Dead, books such as the Twilight series, and the death-obsessed musical stylings of Lana Del Ray all point to the pertinence of the Gothic in contemporary culture, as does the amount of submissions received for this edition of M/C Journal, which explore a wide range of Gothic texts. Timothy Jones’ featured essay “The Black Mass as Play: Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out” suggests that although scholarly approaches to the Gothic tend to adopt the methodologies used to approach literary texts and applied them to Gothic texts, yielding readings that are more-or-less congruous with readings of other sorts of literature, the Gothic can be considered as something that tells us about more than simply ourselves and the world we live in. For Jones, the fact that the Gothic is a production of popular culture as much as “highbrow” literature suggests there is something else happening with the way popular Gothic texts function. What if, Jones asks, the popular Gothic were not a type of work, but a kind of play? Jones uses this approach to suggest that texts such as Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out might direct readers not primarily towards the real, but away from it, at least for a time. Wheatley’s novel is explored by Jones as a venue for readerly play, apart from the more substantial and “serious” concerns that occupy most literary criticism. Samantha Jane Lindop’s essay foregrounds the debt David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive owes to J. Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) thus adding to studies of the film that have noted Lynch’s intertextual references to classic cinema such as Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966). Lindop explores not just the striking similarity between Carmilla and Mulholland Drive in terms of character and plot, but also the way that each text is profoundly concerned with the uncanny. Lorna Piatti-Farnell’s contribution, “What’s Hidden in Gravity Falls: Strange Creatures and the Gothic Intertext” is similarly interested in the intertextuality of the Gothic mode, noting that since its inception this has taken many and varied incarnations, from simple references and allusions to more complicated uses of style and plot organisation. Piatti-Farnell suggests it is unwise to reduce the Gothic text to a simple master narrative, but that within its re-elaborations and re-interpretations, interconnections do appear, forming “the Gothic intertext”. While the Gothic has traditionally found fertile ground in works of literature, other contemporary media, such as animation, have offered the Gothic an opportunity for growth and adaptation. Alex Hirsch’s Gravity Falls is explored by Piatti-Farnell as a visual text providing an example of intersecting monstrous creatures and interconnected narrative structures that reveal the presence of a dense and intertextual Gothic network. Those interlacings are connected to the wider cultural framework and occupy an important part in unravelling the insidious aspects of human nature, from the difficulties of finding “oneself” to the loneliness of the everyday. Issues relating to identity also feature in Patrick Usmar’s “Born To Die: Lana Del Rey, Beauty Queen or Gothic Princess?”, which further highlights the presence of the Gothic in a wide range of contemporary media forms. Usmar explores the music videos of Del Rey, which he describes as Pop Gothic, and that advance themes of consumer culture, gender identity, sexuality and the male gaze. Jen Craig’s “The Agitated Shell: Thinspiration and the Gothic Experience of Eating Disorders” similarly focuses on contemporary media and gender identity, problematising these issues by exploring the highly charged topic of “thinspiration” web sites. Hannah Irwin’s contribution also focuses on female experience. “Not of this earth: Jack the Ripper and the development of Gothic Whitechapel” focuses on the murder of five women who were the victims of an assailant commonly referred to by the epithet “Jack the Ripper”. Irwin discusses how Whitechapel developed as a Gothic location through the body of literature devoted to the Whitechapel murders of 1888, known as “Ripperature”. The subject of the Gothic space is also taken up by Donna Brien’s “Forging Continuing Bonds from the Dead to the Living: Gothic Commemorative Practices along Australia’s Leichhardt Highway.” This essay explores the memorials along Leichhardt’s highway as Gothic practice, in order to illuminate some of the uncanny paradoxes around public memorials, as well as the loaded emotional terrain such commemorative practices may inhabit. Furthering our understanding of the Australian Gothic is Patrick West’s contribution “Towards a Politics & Art of the Land: Gothic Cinema of the Australian New Wave and its Reception by American Film Critics.” West argues that many films of the Australian New Wave of the 1970s and 1980s can be defined as Gothic and that international reviews of such films tended to overlook the importance of the Australian landscape, which functions less as a backdrop and more as a participating element, even a character, in the drama, saturating the mise-en-scène. Bruno Starrs’ “Writing My Indigenous Vampires: Aboriginal Gothic or Aboriginal Fantastic” is dedicated to illuminating a new genre of creative writing: that of the “Aboriginal Fantastic”. Starrs’ novel That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! is part of this emerging genre of writing that is worthy of further academic interrogation. Similarly concerned with the supernatural, Erin Mercer’s contribution “‘A Deluge of Shrieking Unreason’: Supernaturalism and Settlement in New Zealand Gothic Fiction” explores the absence of ghosts and vampires in contemporary Gothic produced in New Zealand, arguing that this is largely a result of a colonial Gothic tradition utilising Maori ghosts that complicates the processes through which contemporary writers might build on that tradition. Although there is no reason why the Gothic must include supernatural elements, it is an enduring feature that is taken up by Jessica Balanzategui in “‘You Have a Secret that You Don’t Want To Tell Me’: The Child as Trauma in Spanish and American Horror Film.” This essay explores the uncanny child character and how such children act as an embodiment of trauma. Sarah Baker’s “The Walking Dead and Gothic Excess: The Decaying Social Structures of Contagion” focuses on the figure of the zombie as it appears in the television show The Walking Dead, which Baker argues is a way of exploring themes of decay, particularly of family and society. The essays contained in this special Gothic edition of M/C Journal highlight the continuing importance of the Gothic mode in contemporary culture and how that mode is constantly evolving into new forms and manifestations. The multi-faceted nature of the Gothic in our contemporary popular culture moment is accurately signalled by the various media on which the essays focus, from television to literature, animation, music, and film. The place occupied by the Gothic beyond representational forms, and into the realms of cultural practice, is also signalled, an important shift within the bounds of Gothic Studies which is bound to initiate fascinating debates. The transformations of the Gothic in media and culture are, therefore, also surveyed, so to continue the ongoing critical conversation on not only the place of the Gothic in contemporary narratives, but also its duplicitous, malleable, and often slippery nature. It is our hope that the essays here stimulate further discussion about the Gothic and we will hope, and look forward, to hearing from you. References Botting, Fred. Gothic: The New Critical Idiom. 2nd edition. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014. Hogle, Jerrold. “Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture”. The Cambridge Companion of Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 1-20.

The way we tell stories shapes what we are: it articulates the way we position ourselves in relation to the world. This article explores how immersive practices, as used in virtual reality and intermedial performance, provoke novel dynamics between artist and audience that no longer fit within Western traditions of aesthetic exchange and furthermore challenge our understanding of narrative production and reception. It proposes that new ways of reasoning are needed to allow audience agency and the evolving role of the artist to be explored more fully than is currently possible in mainstream theatre scholarship. One source that can provide a model for considering the dynamics between audience and performer in immersive performance is the Indigenous story systems of Australia. There is a significant synergy between the structure and operation of First Nation songlines and contemporary immersive performance. This is explored with reference to the work of contemporary anthropologists and Indigenous scholars and to recent immersive work from the companies Kaleider and Theatre Conspiracy. The article considers how both ancient narratives and contemporary immersive practices require people to engage with data/ physical space in a specific manner in order for stories to be realised. Furthermore, both bestow creative responsibility and the role of custodian on the user, through whose actions narrative is manifested. Immersive performance challenges assumptions about how information is generated, processed, and passed on, and the power structures involved in such exchanges. This research explores how non-traditional narrative practices can assist the debate about the future of storytelling.

Special Care Notice This paper discusses trauma and violence inflicted upon the Indigenous peoples of Tasmania through the process of colonisation. Content within this paper may be distressing to some readers. Introduction The decimation of the First Peoples of Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) was systematic and swift. First Contact was an emotionally, intellectually, physically, and spiritually confronting series of encounters for the Indigenous inhabitants. There were, according to some early records, a few examples of peaceful interactions (Morris 84). Yet, the inevitable competition over resources, and the intensity with which colonists pursued their “claims” for food, land, and water, quickly transformed amicable relationships into hostile rivalries. Jennifer Gall has written that, as “European settlement expanded in the late 1820s, violent exchanges between settlers and Aboriginal people were frequent, brutal and unchecked” (58). Indeed, the near-annihilation of the original custodians of the land was, if viewed through the lens of time, a process that could be described as one that was especially efficient. As John Morris notes: in 1803, when the first settlers arrived in Van Diemen’s Land, the Aborigines had already inhabited the island for some 25,000 years and the population has been estimated at 4,000. Seventy-three years later, Truganinni, [often cited as] the last Tasmanian of full Aboriginal descent, was dead. (84) Against a backdrop of extreme violence, often referred to as the Black War (Clements 1), there were some, admittedly dubious, efforts to contain the bloodshed. One such effort, in the late 1820s, was the production, and subsequent distribution, of a set of Proclamation Boards. Approximately 100 Proclamation Boards (the Board) were introduced by the Lieutenant Governor of the day, George Arthur (after whom Port Arthur on the Tasman Peninsula is named). The purpose of these Boards was to communicate, via a four-strip pictogram, to the Indigenous peoples of the island colony that all people—black and white—were considered equal under the law. “British Justice would protect” everyone (Morris 84). This is reflected in the narrative of the Boards. The first image presents Indigenous peoples and colonists living peacefully together. The second, and central, image shows “a conciliatory handshake between the British governor and an Aboriginal ‘chief’, highly reminiscent of images found in North America on treaty medals and anti-slavery tokens” (Darian-Smith and Edmonds 4). The third and fourth images depict the repercussions for committing murder, with an Indigenous man hanged for spearing a colonist and a European man also hanged for shooting an Aborigine. Both men executed under “gubernatorial supervision” (Turnbull 53). Image 1: Governor Davey's [sic - actually Governor Arthur's] Proclamation to the Aborigines, 1816 [sic - actually c. 1828-30]. Image Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW (Call Number: SAFE / R 247). The Board is an interesting re-imagining of one of the traditional methods of communication for Indigenous peoples; the leaving of images on the bark of trees. Such trees, often referred to as scarred trees, are rare in modern-day Tasmania as “the expansion of settlements, and the impact of bush fires and other environmental factors” resulted in many of these trees being destroyed (Aboriginal Heritage Tasmania online). Similarly, only a few of the Boards, inspired by these trees, survive today. The Proclamation Board was, in the 1860s, re-imagined as the output of a different Governor: Lieutenant Governor Davey (after whom Port Davey, on the south-west coast of Tasmania is named). This re-imagining of the Board’s creator was so effective that the Board, today, is popularly known as Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines. This paper outlines several other re-imaginings of this Board. In addition, this paper offers another, new, re-imagining of the Board, positing that this is an early “pamphlet” on crime, justice and punishment which actually presents as a pre-cursor to the modern Australian true crime tale. In doing so this work connects the Proclamation Board to the larger genre of crime fiction. One Proclamation Board: Two Governors Labelled Van Diemen’s Land and settled as a colony of New South Wales in 1803, this island state would secede from the administration of mainland Australia in 1825. Another change would follow in 1856 when Van Diemen’s Land was, in another process of re-imagining, officially re-named Tasmania. This change in nomenclature was an initiative to, symbolically at least, separate the contemporary state from a criminal and violent past (Newman online). Tasmania’s violent history was, perhaps, inevitable. The island was claimed by Philip Gidley King, the Governor of New South Wales, in the name of His Majesty, not for the purpose of building a community, but to “prevent the French from gaining a footing on the east side of that island” and also to procure “timber and other natural products, as well as to raise grain and to promote the seal industry” (Clark 36). Another rationale for this land claim was to “divide the convicts” (Clark 36) which re-fashioned the island into a gaol. It was this penal element of the British colonisation of Australia that saw the worst of the British Empire forced upon the Aboriginal peoples. As historian Clive Turnbull explains: the brutish state of England was reproduced in the English colonies, and that in many ways its brutishness was increased, for now there came to Australia not the humanitarians or the indifferent, but the men who had vested interests in the systems of restraint; among those who suffered restraint were not only a vast number who were merely unfortunate and poverty-stricken—the victims of a ‘depression’—but brutalised persons, child-slaughterers and even potential cannibals. (Turnbull 25) As noted above the Black War of Tasmania saw unprecedented aggression against the rightful occupants of the land. Yet, the Aboriginal peoples were “promised the white man’s justice, the people [were] exhorted to live in amity with them, the wrongs which they suffer [were] deplored” (Turnbull 23). The administrators purported an egalitarian society, one of integration and peace but Van Diemen’s Land was colonised as a prison and as a place of profit. So, “like many apologists whose material benefit is bound up with the systems which they defend” (Turnbull 23), assertions of care for the health and welfare of the Aboriginal peoples were made but were not supported by sufficient policies, or sufficient will, and the Black War continued. Colonel Thomas Davey (1758-1823) was the second person to serve as Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen’s Land; a term of office that began in 1813 and concluded in 1817. The fourth Lieutenant Governor of the island was Colonel Sir George Arthur (1784-1854); his term of office, significantly longer than Davey’s, being from 1824 to 1836. The two men were very different but are connected through this intriguing artefact, the Proclamation Board. One of the efforts made to assert the principle of equality under the law in Van Diemen’s Land was an outcome of work undertaken by Surveyor General George Frankland (1800-1838). Frankland wrote to Arthur in early 1829 and suggested the Proclamation Board (Morris 84), sometimes referred to as a Picture Board or the Tasmanian Hieroglyphics, as a tool to support Arthur’s various Proclamations. The Proclamation, signed on 15 April 1828 and promulgated in the The Hobart Town Courier on 19 April 1828 (Arthur 1), was one of several notices attempting to reduce the increasing levels of violence between Indigenous peoples and colonists. The date on Frankland’s correspondence clearly situates the Proclamation Board within Arthur’s tenure as Lieutenant Governor. The Board was, however, in the 1860s, re-imagined as the output of Davey. The Clerk of the Tasmanian House of Assembly, Hugh M. Hull, asserted that the Board was the work of Davey and not Arthur. Hull’s rationale for this, despite archival evidence connecting the Board to Frankland and, by extension, to Arthur, is predominantly anecdotal. In a letter to the editor of The Hobart Mercury, published 26 November 1874, Hull wrote: this curiosity was shown by me to the late Mrs Bateman, neé Pitt, a lady who arrived here in 1804, and with whom I went to school in 1822. She at once recognised it as one of a number prepared in 1816, under Governor Davey’s orders; and said she had seen one hanging on a gum tree at Cottage Green—now Battery Point. (3) Hull went on to assert that “if any old gentleman will look at the picture and remember the style of military and civil dress of 1810-15, he will find that Mrs Bateman was right” (3). Interestingly, Hull relies upon the recollections of a deceased school friend and the dress codes depicted by the artist to date the Proclamation Board as a product of 1816, in lieu of documentary evidence dating the Board as a product of 1828-1830. Curiously, the citation of dress can serve to undermine Hull’s argument. An early 1840s watercolour by Thomas Bock, of Mathinna, an Aboriginal child of Flinders Island adopted by Lieutenant Governor John Franklin (Felton online), features the young girl wearing a brightly coloured, high-waisted dress. This dress is very similar to the dresses worn by the children on the Proclamation Board (the difference being that Mathinna wears a red dress with a contrasting waistband, the children on the Board wear plain yellow dresses) (Bock). Acknowledging the simplicity of children's clothing during the colonial era, it could still be argued that it would have been unlikely the Governor of the day would have placed a child, enjoying at that time a life of privilege, in a situation where she sat for a portrait wearing an old-fashioned garment. So effective was Hull’s re-imagining of the Board’s creator that the Board was, for many years, popularly known as Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines with even the date modified, to 1816, to fit Davey’s term of office. Further, it is worth noting that catalogue records acknowledge the error of attribution and list both Davey and Arthur as men connected to the creation of the Proclamation Board. A Surviving Board: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales One of the surviving Proclamation Boards is held by the Mitchell Library. The Boards, oil on Huon pine, were painted by “convict artists incarcerated in the island penal colony” (Carroll 73). The work was mass produced (by the standards of mass production of the day) by pouncing, “a technique [of the Italian Renaissance] of pricking the contours of a drawing with a pin. Charcoal was then dusted on to the drawing” (Carroll 75-76). The images, once outlined, were painted in oil. Of approximately 100 Boards made, several survive today. There are seven known Boards within public collections (Gall 58): five in Australia (Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, Sydney; Museum Victoria, Melbourne; National Library of Australia, Canberra; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart; and Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston); and two overseas (The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University and the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, University of Cambridge). The catalogue record, for the Board held by the Mitchell Library, offers the following details:Paintings: 1 oil painting on Huon pine board, rectangular in shape with rounded corners and hole at top centre for suspension ; 35.7 x 22.6 x 1 cm. 4 scenes are depicted:Aborigines and white settlers in European dress mingling harmoniouslyAboriginal men and women, and an Aboriginal child approach Governor Arthur to shake hands while peaceful soldiers look onA hostile Aboriginal man spears a male white settler and is hanged by the military as Governor Arthur looks onA hostile white settler shoots an Aboriginal man and is hanged by the military as Governor Arthur looks on. (SAFE / R 247) The Mitchell Library Board was purchased from J.W. Beattie in May 1919 for £30 (Morris 86), which is approximately $2,200 today. Importantly, the title of the record notes both the popular attribution of the Board and the man who actually instigated the Board’s production: “Governor Davey’s [sic – actually Governor Arthur] Proclamation to the Aborigines, 1816 [sic – actually c. 1828-30].” The date of the Board is still a cause of some speculation. The earlier date, 1828, marks the declaration of martial law (Turnbull 94) and 1830 marks the Black Line (Edmonds 215); the attempt to form a human line of white men to force many Tasmanian Aboriginals, four of the nine nations, onto the Tasman Peninsula (Ryan 3). Frankland’s suggestion for the Board was put forward on 4 February 1829, with Arthur’s official Conciliator to the Aborigines, G.A. Robinson, recording his first sighting of a Board on 24 December 1829 (Morris 84-85). Thus, the conception of the Board may have been in 1828 but the Proclamation project was not fully realised until 1830. Indeed, a news item on the Proclamation Board did appear in the popular press, but not until 5 March 1830: We are informed that the Government have given directions for the painting of a large number of pictures to be placed in the bush for the contemplation of the Aboriginal Inhabitants. […] However […] the causes of their hostility must be more deeply probed, or their taste as connoisseurs in paintings more clearly established, ere we can look for any beneficial result from this measure. (Colonial Times 2) The remark made in relation to becoming a connoisseur of painting, though intended to be derogatory, makes some sense. There was an assumption that the Indigenous peoples could easily translate a European-styled execution by hanging, as a visual metaphor for all forms of punishment. It has long been understood that Indigenous “social organisation and religious and ceremonial life were often as complex as those of the white invaders” (McCulloch 261). However, the Proclamation Board was, in every sense, Eurocentric and made no attempt to acknowledge the complexities of Aboriginal culture. It was, quite simply, never going to be an effective tool of communication, nor achieve its socio-legal aims. The Board Re-imagined: Popular Media The re-imagining of the Proclamation Board as a construct of Governor Davey, instead of Governor Arthur, is just one of many re-imaginings of this curious object. There are, of course, the various imaginings of the purpose of the Board. On the surface these images are a tool for reconciliation but as “the story of these paintings unfolds […] it becomes clear that the proclamations were in effect envoys sent back to Britain to exhibit the ingenious attempts being applied to civilise Australia” (Carroll 76). In this way the Board was re-imagined by the Administration that funded the exercise, even before the project was completed, from a mechanism to assist in the bringing about of peace into an object that would impress colonial superiors. Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll has recently written about the Boards in the context of their “transnational circulation” and how “objects become subjects and speak of their past through the ventriloquism of contemporary art history” (75). Carroll argues the Board is an item that couples “military strategy with a fine arts propaganda campaign” (Carroll 78). Critically the Boards never achieved their advertised purpose for, as Carroll explains, there were “elaborate rituals Aboriginal Australians had for the dead” and, therefore, “the display of a dead, hanging body is unthinkable. […] being exposed to the sight of a hanged man must have been experienced as an unimaginable act of disrespect” (92). The Proclamation Board would, in sharp contrast to feelings of unimaginable disrespect, inspire feelings of pride across the colonial population. An example of this pride being revealed in the selection of the Board as an object worthy of reproduction, as a lithograph, for an Intercolonial Exhibition, held in Melbourne in 1866 (Morris 84). The lithograph, which identifies the Board as Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines and dated 1816, was listed as item 572, of 738 items submitted by Tasmania, for the event (The Commissioners 69-85). This type of reproduction, or re-imagining, of the Board would not be an isolated event. Penelope Edmonds has described the Board as producing a “visual vernacular” through a range of derivatives including lantern slides, lithographs, and postcards. These types of tourist ephemera are in addition to efforts to produce unique re-workings of the Board as seen in Violet Mace’s Proclamation glazed earthernware, which includes a jug (1928) and a pottery cup (1934) (Edmonds online). The Board Re-imagined: A True Crime Tale The Proclamation Board offers numerous narratives. There is the story that the Board was designed and deployed to communicate. There is the story behind the Board. There is also the story of the credit for the initiative which was transferred from Governor Arthur to Governor Davey and subsequently returned to Arthur. There are, too, the provenance stories of individual Boards. There is another story the Proclamation Board offers. The story of true crime in colonial Australia. The Board, as noted, presents through a four-strip pictogram an idea that all are equal under the rule of law (Arthur 1). Advocating for a society of equals was a duplicitous practice, for while Aborigines were hanged for allegedly murdering settlers, “there is no record of whites being charged, let alone punished, for murdering Aborigines” (Morris 84). It would not be until 1838 that white men would be punished for the murder of Aboriginal people (on the mainland) in the wake of the Myall Creek Massacre, in northern New South Wales. There were other examples of attempts to bring about a greater equity under the rule of law but, as Amanda Nettelbeck explains, there was wide-spread resistance to the investigation and charging of colonists for crimes against the Indigenous population with cases regularly not going to trial, or, if making a courtroom, resulting in an acquittal (355-59). That such cases rested on “legally inadmissible Aboriginal testimony” (Reece in Nettelbeck 358) propped up a justice system that was, inherently, unjust in the nineteenth century. It is important to note that commentators at the time did allude to the crime narrative of the Board: when in the most civilized country in the world it has been found ineffective as example to hang murderers in chains, it is not to be expected a savage race will be influenced by the milder exhibition of effigy and caricature. (Colonial Times 2) It is argued here that the Board was much more than an offering of effigy and caricature. The Proclamation Board presents, in striking detail, the formula for the modern true crime tale: a peace disturbed by the act of murder; and the ensuing search for, and delivery of, justice. Reinforcing this point, are the ideas of justice seen within crime fiction, a genre that focuses on the restoration of order out of chaos (James 174), are made visible here as aspirational. The true crime tale does not, consistently, offer the reassurances found within crime fiction. In the real world, particularly one as violent as colonial Australia, we are forced to acknowledge that, below the surface of the official rhetoric on justice and crime, the guilty often go free and the innocent are sometimes hanged. Another point of note is that, if the latter date offered here, of 1830, is taken as the official date of the production of these Boards, then the significance of the Proclamation Board as a true crime tale is even more pronounced through a connection to crime fiction (both genres sharing a common literary heritage). The year 1830 marks the release of Australia’s first novel, Quintus Servinton written by convicted forger Henry Savery, a crime novel (produced in three volumes) published by Henry Melville of Hobart Town. Thus, this paper suggests, 1830 can be posited as a year that witnessed the production of two significant cultural artefacts, the Proclamation Board and the nation’s first full-length literary work, as also being the year that established the, now indomitable, traditions of true crime and crime fiction in Australia. Conclusion During the late 1820s in Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) a set of approximately 100 Proclamation Boards were produced by the Lieutenant Governor of the day, George Arthur. The official purpose of these items was to communicate, to the Indigenous peoples of the island colony, that all—black and white—were equal under the law. Murderers, be they Aboriginal or colonist, would be punished. The Board is a re-imagining of one of the traditional methods of communication for Indigenous peoples; the leaving of drawings on the bark of trees. The Board was, in the 1860s, in time for an Intercolonial Exhibition, re-imagined as the output of Lieutenant Governor Davey. This re-imagining of the Board was so effective that surviving artefacts, today, are popularly known as Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines with the date modified, to 1816, to fit the new narrative. The Proclamation Board was also reimagined, by its creators and consumers, in a variety of ways: as peace offering; military propaganda; exhibition object; tourism ephemera; and contemporary art. This paper has also, briefly, offered another re-imagining of the Board, positing that this early “pamphlet” on justice and punishment actually presents a pre-cursor to the modern Australian true crime tale. The Proclamation Board tells many stories but, at the core of this curious object, is a crime story: the story of mass murder. Acknowledgements The author acknowledges the Palawa peoples: the traditional custodians of the lands known today as Tasmania. The author acknowledges, too, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation upon whose lands this paper was researched and written. The author extends thanks to Richard Neville, Margot Riley, Kirsten Thorpe, and Justine Wilson of the State Library of New South Wales for sharing their knowledge and offering their support. The author is also grateful to the reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and for making valuable suggestions. ReferencesAboriginal Heritage Tasmania. “Scarred Trees.” Aboriginal Cultural Heritage, 2012. 12 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.aboriginalheritage.tas.gov.au/aboriginal-cultural-heritage/archaeological-site-types/scarred-trees›.Arthur, George. “Proclamation.” The Hobart Town Courier 19 Apr. 1828: 1.———. Governor Davey’s [sic – actually Governor Arthur’s] Proclamation to the Aborigines, 1816 [sic – actually c. 1828-30]. Graphic Materials. Sydney: Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, c. 1828-30.Bock, Thomas. Mathinna. Watercolour and Gouache on Paper. 23 x 19 cm (oval), c. 1840.Carroll, Khadija von Zinnenburg. Art in the Time of Colony: Empires and the Making of the Modern World, 1650-2000. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2014.Clark, Manning. History of Australia. Abridged by Michael Cathcart. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997 [1993]. Clements, Nicholas. The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania. St Lucia, Qld.: U of Queensland P, 2014.Colonial Times. “Hobart Town.” Colonial Times 5 Mar. 1830: 2.The Commissioners. Intercolonial Exhibition Official Catalogue. 2nd ed. Melbourne: Blundell & Ford, 1866.Darian-Smith, Kate, and Penelope Edmonds. “Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers.” Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim. Eds. Kate Darian-Smith and Penelope Edmonds. New York: Routledge, 2015. 1–14. Edmonds, Penelope. “‘Failing in Every Endeavour to Conciliate’: Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Boards to the Aborigines, Australian Conciliation Narratives and Their Transnational Connections.” Journal of Australian Studies 35.2 (2011): 201–18.———. “The Proclamation Cup: Tasmanian Potter Violet Mace and Colonial Quotations.” reCollections 5.2 (2010). 20 May 2015 ‹http://recollections.nma.gov.au/issues/vol_5_no_2/papers/the_proclamation_cup_›.Felton, Heather. “Mathinna.” Companion to Tasmanian History. Hobart: Centre for Tasmanian Historical Studies, University of Tasmania, 2006. 29 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/M/Mathinna.htm›.Gall, Jennifer. Library of Dreams: Treasures from the National Library of Australia. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2011.Hull, Hugh M. “Tasmanian Hieroglyphics.” The Hobart Mercury 26 Nov. 1874: 3.James, P.D. Talking about Detective Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.Mace, Violet. Violet Mace’s Proclamation Jug. Glazed Earthernware. Launceston: Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, 1928.———. Violet Mace’s Proclamation Cup. Glazed Earthernware. Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 1934.McCulloch, Samuel Clyde. “Sir George Gipps and Eastern Australia’s Policy toward the Aborigine, 1838-46.” The Journal of Modern History 33.3 (1961): 261–69.Morris, John. “Notes on a Message to the Tasmanian Aborigines in 1829, popularly called ‘Governor Davey’s Proclamation to the Aborigines, 1816’.” Australiana 10.3 (1988): 84–7.Nettelbeck, Amanda. “‘Equals of the White Man’: Prosecution of Settlers for Violence against Aboriginal Subjects of the Crown, Colonial Western Australia.” Law and History Review 31.2 (2013): 355–90.Newman, Terry. “Tasmania, the Name.” Companion to Tasmanian History, 2006. 16 Sep. 2015 ‹http://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/T/Tasmania%20name.htm›.Reece, Robert H.W., in Amanda Nettelbeck. “‘Equals of the White Man’: Prosecution of Settlers for Violence against Aboriginal Subjects of the Crown, Colonial Western Australia.” Law and History Review 31.2 (2013): 355–90.Ryan, Lyndall. “The Black Line in Van Diemen’s Land: Success or Failure?” Journal of Australian Studies 37.1 (2013): 3–18.Savery, Henry. 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IntroductionWe are increasingly being told to make ethical food choices, often by high-profile chefs advocating what they view as ethical consumption habits. Some actively promote vegetarian or vegan diets, with a growing number of high-profile restaurants featuring only or mainly plant-based meals. However, what makes food or restaurant menus ethical is not assessed by most of us using one standardised definition. Our food values differ based on our outlooks, past experiences, and perhaps most importantly, how we balance various trade-offs inherent in making food choices under different circumstances and in diverse contexts.Restaurants can face difficulties when trying to balance ethical considerations. For instance, is it inconsistent to promote foraging, seasonality, local products, and plant-based eating, yet also serve meat and other animal-derived protein products on the same menu? For example, Danish chef Rene Redzepi, co-owner of the Michelin-starred restaurant Noma in Copenhagen who recently had an extended stay in Australia (Redzepi), recently offered a purely vegetarian menu featuring foraged native ingredients. However, Redzepi followed this with a meat-based menu including teal, moose leg, reindeer tongue, and wild duck brain. These changes make clear that although Redzepi was still conflicted about serving animal products (Ankeny and Bray), he thinks that options for ethical eating are not limited to plants and that it is important to utilise available, and especially neglected, resources in novel ways.In this article, we argue that celebrity and other high-profile chefs have roles to play in conversations about the emerging range of new meat consumption norms, which might include humanely produced meat, wild meat, or other considerations. However, we contend that restaurants and popular media may be limited spaces in which to engage consumers in these conversations. Ultimately, celebrity and high-profile chefs can help us not only to reflect on our eating habits, but also to engage us in ways that help us to ask the right questions rather than encouraging reliance on set answers from them or other supposed experts.Chefs and New Meat NormsChefs are now key voices in the politics of lifestyle, shaping both the grammars and the practices of ethical consumption, which is further reinforced by the increasing mediatisation of food and food politics (Phillipov, Media). Contemporary trends toward ethical consumption have been much critiqued; nevertheless, ethical consumption has become a dominant means through which individuals within contemporary marketised, neoliberal economies are able to invest lifestyle choices with ethical, social, and civic meanings (Barnett et al.; Lewis and Potter). While vegetarianism was once considered a central pillar of ethical diets, the rise of individualized and diverse approaches to food and food politics has seen meat (at least in its “ethical” form) not only remain firmly on the menu, but also become a powerful symbol of “good” politics, taste, and desirable lifestyles (Pilgrim 112).Chefs’ involvement in promoting ethical meat initially began within restaurants catering for an elite foodie clientele. The details provided about meat producers and production methods on the menu of Alice Waters’ Californian restaurant Chez Panisse and her cookbooks (Waters), or the focus by Fergus Henderson on “nose to tail” eating at his London restaurant St. John (Henderson) has led many to cite them as among the originators of the ethical meat movement. But the increasing mediatisation of food and the emergence of chefs as celebrity brands with their own TV shows, cookbooks, YouTube channels, websites, sponsorship deals, and myriad other media appearances has allowed ethical meat to move out of elite restaurants and into more quotidian domestic spaces. High profile UK and US exposés including “campaigning culinary documentaries” fronted by celebrity chefs (Bell, Hollows, and Jones 179), along with the work of popular food writers such as Michael Pollan, have been instrumental in the mainstreaming of diverse new meat norms.The horrifying depictions of intensive chicken, beef, and pork farming in these exposés have contributed to greater public awareness of, and concern about, industrialised meat production. However, the poor welfare conditions of animals raised in battery cages and concentrated animal feeding operations often are presented not as motivations to eschew meat entirely, but instead as reasons to opt for more ethical alternatives. For instance, Hugh’s Chicken Run, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s 2008 television campaign for chicken welfare, resulted in making more free-range products available in British supermarkets (Johnston). More recently, there have been significant expansions in markets for variously defined categories such as grass-fed, free-range, organic, welfare-certified, humane, and/or environmentally friendly meat products in Australia and elsewhere, thanks in part to increased media attention to animal welfare issues (Arcari 169).As media has emerged as a “fundamental component of contemporary foodscapes, how they ‘perform’ and function, and the socio-material means by which they are produced” (Johnston and Goodman 205), ethical meat has increasingly been employed as a strategic resource in mainstream media and marketing. Ethical meat, for example, has been a key pillar in the contemporary rebranding of both of Australia’s major supermarkets (Lewis and Huber 289). Through partnerships that draw upon the “ethical capital” (290) of celebrity chefs including Jamie Oliver and Curtis Stone, and collaborations with animal welfare organisations such as the RSPCA, ethical meat has become central to supermarket advertising campaigns in recent years. Such campaigns have been especially successful for Coles supermarkets, which controls almost 30% of Australia’s highly concentrated grocery market (Roy Morgan). The retailer’s long-term sponsorship of MasterChef Australia (Network 10, 2009–)—a show that presents meat (or, as they term it, “protein”) as an essential component of most dishes and which regularly rates in the top 10 of Australian television programs (OzTAM)—further helps to emphasise that the solution to ethical problems is not to avoid meat, but to choose (Coles’) “better” meat (see fig. 1). This is promoted on the basis of a combination of ethics, price, and taste, and, remarkably, is able to deliver “better welfare at no extra cost to you” (Parker, Carey, and Scrinis 209). In short, chefs are making major contributions to awareness of ethical norms relating to meat consumption in a variety of settings. Figure 1: An example of a current meat product on the shelf at a major Australian retailer with packaging that makes a range of claims relating to production practices and quality, among other attributes. (Emily Buddle)“The Good Life”Lifestyle media has been a key site through which meat eating is normalised and recuperated into “ethical” frameworks (Arcari 169). Utopian visions of small-scale animal agriculture are a key feature of popular texts from the River Cottage Australia (Foxtel Networks, 2013–) series to Gourmet Farmer (SBS, 2010–) and Paddock to Plate (Foxtel Networks, 2013–). These programs are typically set in bucolic rural surrounds and centre on the host’s “escape” from the city to a more fulfilling, happier existence in the country (Phillipov, “Escaping”). Rural self-sufficiency is frequently framed as the solution to urban consumers’ alienation from the sources of their food, and a means of taking responsibility for the food they eat. The opening credits of Gourmet Farmer, for instance, outline host Matthew Evans’s quest to “know and trust what [he] eat[s]”, either by growing the food himself or being “no more than one degree of separation from the person who does”.This sense of connection to one’s food is central to how these programs make meat consumption ethical. Indeed, the production of animals for food reinforces particular notions of “the good life” in which the happiness of the animal is closely aligned with the happiness of its human producer. While texts sometimes show food animals’ full lifecycle from birth to slaughter, lifestyle media focuses mainly on their happy existence while still alive. Evans gives his pigs names that foreground their destiny as food (e.g., Prosciutto and Cassoulet), but he also pampers them as though they are pets, feeding them cherries and apples, and scratching them behind the ears much like he would his dog. These bucolic televisual images serve to anchor the programs’ many “spin-off” media texts, including blog posts, cookbooks (e.g. Evans), and endorsements, that instruct urban audiences who do not have the luxury of raising their own meat on how to source ethical alternatives. They also emphasise the deliciousness of meat raised and killed in humane, “natural” conditions, as opposed to those subjected to more intensive, industrialised production systems.Some argue that the notion of “ethical meat” merely masks the realities of humans’ domination over animals (Arcari). However the transition from “happy animals” to “happy meat” (Pilgrim 123) has been key to lifestyle media’s recuperation of (certain kinds of) meat production as a “humane, benevolent and wholly ‘natural’ process” (Parry 381), which helps to morally absolve the chefs who promote it, and by extension, their audiences.The Good DeathMeat consumption has been theorised to be based on the invisibility of the lives and deaths of animals—what has been termed the “absent referent” by feminist philosopher Carol J. Adams (14; see also Fiddes). This line of argument holds that slaughter and other practices that may raise moral concerns are actively hidden from view, and that animals are “made absent” within food consumption practices (Evans and Miele 298). Few meat consumers, at least those in Western countries, have seen animal slaughter first hand, and a disconnect between meat and animal is actively maintained through current retail practices (such as pre-packaged meat with few identifying cues), as well as in our language use, at least in English where most of the names of the meat are different to those of the animal (Plous; Croney) and where euphemisms such as “harvesting” abound (Abrams, Zimbres, and Carr). In many locales, including Australia, there is squeamishness about talking about slaughter and the processes by which “animal” becomes “meat” which in turn prevents open discussion about the origins of meat (Bray et al., “Conversation”).Campaigning culinary documentaries by chefs, including Matthew Evans’s recent For the Love of Meat (SBS, 2016), aim to reconnect animal and meat in order to critique modern meat production methods. In addition, Gourmet Farmer and River Cottage Australia both feature depictions of hunting (skinning and butchering of the animals is shown but viewers are rarely exposed to the kill itself) and emphasise the use of highly skilled hunters in order to bring about a quick death. By highlighting not only a good life but also what constitutes a “good death”, celebrity chefs and others are arguably generating discussion about what makes meat ethical by emphasizing that the quality of death is as important as the quality of life. In many of these programs, the emphasis is on more boutique or small-scale production systems which typically produce meat products that are higher priced and more difficult to source.Given that such products are likely out of reach for many potential consumers because of price point, convenience, or both, perhaps unsurprisingly the emphasis in many of these programs is on the consumer rather than the consumed. Hence these programs tend to be more about constructing an “ethical meat consumer”, defined implicitly as someone who acknowledges the meat/animal connection through conscious exposure to the realities of animal slaughter (for example, by watching a documentary), by “meeting your meat” such as in the BBC series Kill It, Cook It, Eat It (BBC, 2007; Evans and Miele), or by actively participating in the slaughter process as Evans did with his own chickens on Gourmet Farmer. As anthropologist Catie Gressier notes in her study of wild meat consumers in Australia, “hunting meat is seen as more noble than purchasing it, while wild meat is seen as preferable to farmed” (Gressier 58). Gressier also describes how one of her participants viewed hunting (and eating locally) as preferable to veganism because of the “animal violence that is the inevitable outcome of mass-crop agriculture” (58). However some scholars have argued that highly graphic depictions of slaughter in the popular media are becoming more commonplace as a masculinised type of “gastro-snuff” (a term referring to food-related visual depictions of brutal killings) (Parry 382). These types of efforts thus may fail to create dialogue about what constitutes ethical meat or even an ethical meat consumer, and may well reinforce more traditional ideas about human/non-human hierarchies.In contrast to coverage in popular media, detailed descriptions of commercial slaughter, in particular pre-slaughter (lairage) conditions, are yet to make it on to restaurant menus, despite the connections between meat quality and pre-slaughter conditions being well recognised even by consumers (Evans and Miele). Commercial slaughter conditions are one of the reasons that hunting is framed as more ethical than “ethically farmed” animals. As an Internet post, quoted in Adams (“Redneck” 50), puts it: “Hunting? A creature is peacefully in its own domain, it is shot. How is that worse than being carried for hours in a truck, being forced into a crush, hearing the bellows of other creatures, being physically restrained at the peak of terror, then culled?” Although determining precise rates of consumption of wild meat is methodologically difficult (Conservation Visions 28), available rates of hunting together with limited consumption data indicate that Australians currently eat less game or wild-caught meat per capita than those in Europe or North America. However, there is a sector of the community in Australia who pursue hunting as part of their ethical food habits (Bray et al., “Ferals”) with the largest proportion of wild-meat consumers being those who hunted it themselves (Gressier).In many cases, descriptions of animal lives (using descriptors such as “free range” or “grass fed”) serve implicitly as proxies for assurances that the animals’ deaths also have been good. One exception is the increasing awareness of the use of halal slaughter methods in part due to more transparent labelling, despite limited public awareness about the nature of these methods, particularly in the Australian context where they in fact comply with standard animal welfare requirements such as pre-slaughter stunning (Bergeauld-Blackler). Detailed descriptions of post-mortem conditions (e.g., aging conditions and time) are more common on restaurant menus, although arguably these no longer draw attention to the connections between the animal and the meat, and instead focus on the meat itself, its flavour and other physical qualities, rather than on ethical attributes.Thus, although it would seem obvious that ethical meat consumption should involve considerations about slaughter conditions or what makes a “good death”, most efforts have focused on encouraging people to make better and more reflexive consumer choices, rather than promoting deeper engagement with slaughter processes, perhaps underscoring that this domain may still represent one of the final food taboos. Although it might seem to be counterintuitive that wild or hunted meat could be viewed as an ethical food choice, particularly if vegetarianism or veganism is taken as the main point of comparison, these trends point toward the complexities inherent in food choice and the inevitable trade-offs in values that occur in these processes.Problems with Promoting Ethical Meat Norms: Ways ForwardIt is undeniable that many people are reflecting on their consumption habits in order to pursue decisions that better reflect their values. Attempting to be an “ethical meat consumer” clearly fits within these broader trends. However there are a number of problems associated with current approaches to ethical meat consumption, and these raise questions as to whether such efforts are likely to result in broader changes. First, it is not clear that restaurants are the most appropriate spaces for people to engage with ethical considerations, including those relating to meat consumption. Many people seek to try something new, or to treat themselves when dining out, but these behaviours do not necessarily translate into changes in everyday eating habits. Reasons are varied but include that people cannot reproduce the same types of dishes or concepts at home as what they get at restaurants (or see on TV shows for that matter), and that many products may be out of an acceptable price range or inconvenient for daily consumption. Others want to escape from ethical decisions when dining out by relying on those preparing the food to do the work for them, and thus sometimes simply consume without necessarily investigating every detail relating to its production, preparation, and so on.Perhaps more importantly, many are sceptical about the promotion of various meat-related values by high-profile or celebrity chefs, raising questions about whether ethical categories are merely packaging or window dressing designed to sell products, or if they are truly tied to deeper values and better products. Such concerns are reinforced by tendencies to emphasize one type of meat product—say free-range, grass-fed, or humanely-raised—as better than all others, or even as the only right choice, and thus can at times seem to be elitist in their approaches, since they emphasize that only certain (often extremely expensive boutique products) count as ethical. As scholars have noted about the classed nature of many of these consumption practices (see, for example, Bell and Hollows; Naccarato and LeBesco), these types of value judgments are likely to be alienating to many people, and most importantly will not foster deeper reflections on our consumption habits.However it is clear that celebrity and other high-profile chefs do get the public’s attention, and thus can play important roles in shaping conversations about fostering more ethical ways of eating, including meat consumption. We contend that it is important not to emphasize only one right way of eating, but to actively consider the various trade-offs that we make when choosing what to buy, prepare, and consume. Promoting answers by nominating certain meat products or production methods as always better in all circumstances, no matter how these might be in conflict with other values, such as preferences for local, organic, alignment with cultural or religious values, sustainable, fair trade, and so on, is not likely to result in meaningful public engagement. Critiques of Pollan and other food activists make similar points about the potential elitism and hence limited value of promoting narrow forms of ethical eating (e.g., Guthman et al.; Zimmerman).In addition, such food categories often serve as proxies for deeper values, but not necessarily for the same values for all of us. Simply relying on categories or types of products thus fails to allow engagement with the underlying rationale for various choices. More generally, promoting individual consumer decision-making and market demand as the keys to ethical consumption overlooks the broader systemic issues that limit our choices, and in turn limits attention to changes that might be made in that system (e.g., Lavin; Guthman et al.; DeLind; Ankeny).Thus instead of promoting one right way of eating meat, or a narrow number of acceptable choices, celebrities, chefs, and restauranteurs should consider how they can help to promote dialogue and the posing of the right types of questions to consumers and diners, including about trade-offs inherent in meat consumption and choices of other products, ethical and otherwise. They also should use their roles as change-makers to consider how they might influence the broader food system, but without promoting a single right way of eating. Parallel to recent calls from scientists for a new planetary health diet which promotes increased vegetable consumption and reduced meat consumption for environmental, health, and other reasons, by providing a range of trade-offs to support a diet that that allows individuals to make personalised choices (Willett et al.), hybrid approaches to ethical eating are more likely to have influence on consumers and in turn on changing eating habits.ReferencesAbrams, Katie M., Thais Zimbres, and Chad Carr. “Communicating Sensitive Scientific Issues: The Interplay between Values, Attitudes, and Euphemisms in Communicating Livestock Slaughter.” Science Communication 37 (2015): 485–505.Adams, Carol. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist Vegetarian Critical Theory. London: Continuum, 2000.Adams, Michael. “‘Redneck, Barbaric, Cashed Up Bogan? 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This paper addresses that natural consort of love: sex. It particularly considers the absence of actual sex from mainstream popular culture and the marginalisation of 'fun' sex as porn, requiring its illicit circulation as ‘illegitimate’ videos. The absence of sex from films classified and screened in public venues (even to over-18s) prevents a discourse about actual sex informing the discourse of love and romance perpetuated through Hollywood movies. The value of a variety of representations of sexual practice in the context of a discussion of love, sex and romance in Western cinema was briefly illuminated for the few days that Baise-moi was legitimately screened in Australia. For all that love is one of the great universal themes, Western cinema tends to communicate this ‘finer feeling’ through recourse to romance narratives. Which is not to say that romantic representations of love are devoid of sex, just that that the cinematic convention is to indicate sex, without showing it. Indeed, without the actors 'doing it'. The peculiarity of this situation is not usually clear, however, because there is so little mainstream sex-cinema with which to compare the anodyne gyrations of romantic Hollywood. Which was where Baise-moi came in, briefly. Baise-moi is variously translated for English-speaking cinema audiences as 'Fuck me' (in Australia) and 'Rape me' (in the US, where, astonishingly, Rape me is seen as a less objectionable title than Fuck me.) Of the two titles, Fuck me is by far the cleverer and more authentically related to the meaning and content, whereas Rape me is a travesty, particularly given the shocking power of an extremely graphic and violent rape scene which initiates much of the succeeding violence. An early appeal by the Australian Attorney-General (to the Review Board) against the Office of Film and Literature Classification’s granting of an R rating meant that Baise-moi was hastily removed from Australian cinemas. The movie is, however, heavily reviewed on the web and readers are referred to commentaries such as those by Gary Morris and Frank Vigorito. The grounds on which Classification was refused were given as ‘strong depictions of violence’, ‘sexual violence’, ‘frequent, actual detailed sex scenes’ and ‘scenes which demean both women and men’. Violence, sexual violence and ‘scenes which demean’ are hardly uncommon in films (although it may be unusual that these demean even-handedly). If the amount of violence is nothing new, the sex was certainly different from the usual cinematic fare. Although this was not the first time that ‘unsimulated’ sex had been shown on the art-house big screen, the other major examples were not entirely similar. Romance was wordy, arguably feminist, and a long way from mindless sex-because-they-like-it. Intimacy 's ‘sex scenes are explicit but totally non pornographic, they’re painful, needy, unsatisfying except on an orgasmic level’, according to Margaret Pomeranz, who reviewed the film for SBS. Baise-moi is different because, as Vigorito says, ‘please make no mistake that the two main characters in this film, the so-called French Thelma and Louise, certainly do want to fuck’. (They also like to kill.) Baise-moi is often characterised as a quasi-feminist revenge movie where the two protagonists Manu (a porn star) and Nadine (a sex worker) seek revenge with (according to Morris) ‘ultimately more nihilism than party-hearty here, with the non-stop killings laid squarely at the doorstep of a society that’s dehumanized its citizens’. While the brutality depicted is mind-blowing (sometimes literally/visually) it is the sex that got the film banned, but not until after some 50,000 Australians had seen it. The elements that separate Baise-moi from Intimacy and Romance (apart from the extreme violence) is that the characters have (heterosexual) sex with a variety of partners, and sometimes do so just for fun. Further, although the Office of Film and Literature Classification ‘considers that the film has significant artistic and cultural merit’ (OFLC), one of the directors wrote the novel on which the film is based while the other director and the two stars are former porn industry workers. If Baise-moi had been accepted as cinema-worthy, where would the sex-on-the-screen factor have stopped for future classification of films? The popular culture approach to romance, love and sex moves comparatively smoothly from the first kiss to the rumpled sheets. Although the plot of a romantic film may consist in keeping the love and sex activities apart, the love is (almost invariably) requited. And, as films such as Notting Hill demonstrate, true love these days is communicated less frequently through the willingness of a couple to have sex (which generally goes without saying), and more often through commitment to the having and rearing of a shared child (whereas off-screen this may more usually be the commitment of a shared mortgage). Sex, in short, is popularly positioned as a precursor to love; as not entirely necessary (and certainly not sufficient) but very usually associated with the state of 'being in love'. It is comparatively rare to see any hesitation to engage in sex on the part of a film-portrayed loving couple, other than hurdles introduced through the intervention of outside forces. A rare example of thinking and talking before fucking is The Other Sister , but this means it rates as an R in the States because of ‘thematic elements involving sex-related material’. In contrast, the film Notting Hill, where the characters played by Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant hardly pause for breath once attraction is established, rates a PG-13 (‘for sexual content and brief strong language’). Thus it is all right for producers to have sex in a storyline, but any hesitation, or discussion, makes the film unsuited to younger audiences. Given that characters’ thinking about sex, and talking about sex, as part of (or preliminary to) having sex apparently increases the age at which the audience is allowed to see the film, perhaps it should not be surprising that actually showing sex about which the audience can then think and talk is almost entirely banned. Yet for a culture that associates sex so strongly with love, and celebrates love so thoroughly in film, television and literature (not to mention popular magazines such as Woman's Day, New Idea, New Weekly and Who), to be occasionally challenged by a film that includes actual sex acts seems not unreasonable, particularly when restricted to audiences of consenting adults. Ian McEwan's debut collection of short stories, First love, last rites explores this conundrum of 'the sex that shall only be acted, never performed' in a short story, 'Cocker at the theatre' (McEwan 57). The tale is about a theatrical production where the actors are new, and nude, and the theme of the play is copulation. It is a story of its time, mid-seventies, the resonating-hippie Age of Aquarius, when Hair still rocked. McEwan's naked couples are assembled by the play's director and then pressed together to begin the rhythmic moves required to complement the thumping musical score of GTC: ‘Grand Time Copulation’. The male and female actors are not near enough to each other, so they are spliced closer together: ‘When they began to move again their pubic hair rasped’ (57-8). The director is unimpressed by the result: ‘I know it's hard, but you have to look as if you're enjoying this thing.' (His voice rose.) 'Some people do, you know. It's a fuck, you understand, not a funeral.' (His voice sank.) 'Let's have it again, with some enthusiasm this time.' However, all is not entirely well, after a good second beginning. ‘Them on the end, they're going too fast, what do you think?' [says the director to the stage manager] They watched together. It was true, the two who had been moving well, they were a little out of time ... 'My God,' said [the director] 'They're fucking … It's disgusting and obscene … pull them apart.' (58-9). The issue raised here, as in the case of the removal of any classification from Baise-moi that effectively prevented further public screenings, is the double standard of a society that expends so much of its critical and cultural energies in exploring the nature of love, romance and sexual attraction but balks (horrified) at the representation of actual sex. Yet one of the values of a cinematic replay of 'unsimulated sex' is that it acts as a ‘reality check’ for all the mushy renditions of romance that form the mainstream representation of 'love' on-screen. So, if we want to see sex, should we not simply consume pornography? In modern-day Australia it is impossible to discuss depictions of live sex without conjuring up connotations of ‘porn’. Porn, however, is not usually consumed in a manner or place that allows it to interrogate media messages from mainstream production houses and distributors. Watching porn, for example at home on video, removes it from a context in which it could realistically prompt a re-evaluation of the visual diet of love and sex Hollywood-style, an opportunity that was provided by Baise-moi during its temporary season. The comparative absence of on-screen sexual activity means that there is an absence of texts through which we can interrogate mainstream representations of lovemaking. Whereas the Eros Foundation aims to promote debate leading to ‘logical perspectives on sex and rational law reform of the sex industry’, and avoids using the term 'pornography' on its home page, it is hard to find any representations of unsimulated sex that are not classified as porn and consequently easily pigeon-holed as 'not relevant' to cultural debate except in general terms regarding (say) 'censorship' or 'the portrayal of women'. It is hard to know what Baise-moi might have said to Australian audiences about the relationship between sex, authenticity (Morris uses the term ‘trashy integrity’) and popular culture since the film was screened for only the briefest of intervals, and throughout that time the ‘hype’ surrounding it distracted audiences from any discussion other than would it/wouldn't it, and should it/shouldn't it, be banned. Hopefully, a future Attorney-General will allow the adults in this country to enjoy the same range of popular cultural inputs available to citizens in more liberal nations, and back the initial (liberal) decision of the OFLC. And what has love got to do with all this? Not much it seems, although doesn't popular culture ‘teach’ that one of the main uses for a love theme is to provide an excuse for some gratuitous sex? Perhaps, after all, it is time to cut to the chase and allow sex to be screened as a popular culture genre in its own right, without needing the excuse of a gratuitous love story. Works Cited McEwan, Ian. First love, last rites. London: Picador, 1975. 56-60. Morris, Gary. “Baise-moi. Feminist screed or fetish-fuckathon? Best to flip a coin.” Lip Magazine 2001. http://www.lipmagazine.org/articles/revi... OFLC. Classification Review Board News release, 10 May 2002. http://www.oflc.gov.au/PDFs/RBBaiseMoi.pdf Pomeranz, Margaret. “Intimacy.” The Movie Show: Reviews. http://www.sbs.com.au/movieshow/reviews.... Vigorito, Frank. “Natural porn killers.” Offoffofffilm 2001. http://www.offoffoff.com/film/2001/baise... Filmography Baise-moi. Dirs. Virginie Despentes and CoRalie Trinh Thi. Dist. Film Fixx, 2000. Intimacy. Dir. Patrice Chereau. Dist. Palace Films, 2001. Notting Hill. Dir. Roger Michell. Dist. Universal Pictures, 1999. Romance. Dir. Catherine Breillat. Dist. Potential Films, 1999. The other sister. Dir. Gary Marshall. Dist. Touchstone Pictures, 1999. Links http://www.offoffoff.com/film/2001/baisemoi.php3 http://www.eros.com.au http://film.guardian.co.uk/censorship/news/0,11729,713540,00.html http://www.sbs.com.au/movieshow/reviews.php3?id=838 http://www.michaelbutler.com/hair http://www.oflc.gov.au/PDFs/RBBaiseMoi.pdf http://www.movie-source.com/no/othersister.shtml http://www.lipmagazine.org/articles/revimorris_128.shtml Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Green, Lelia. "Sex" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/sex.php>. APA Style Green, L., (2002, Nov 20). Sex. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/sex.html

While the term “visual literacy” has grown in popularity in the last 50 years, its meaning remains nebulous. It is described variously as: a vehicle for aesthetic appreciation, a means of defence against visual manipulation, a sorting mechanism for an increasingly data-saturated age, and a prerequisite to civic inclusion (Fransecky 23; Messaris 181; McTigue and Flowers 580). Scholars have written extensively about the first three subjects but there has been less research on how visual literacy frames civic life and how it might help the public as a tool to address disadvantage and assist in removing social and cultural barriers. This article examines a forerunner to visual literacy in the push to create an international symbol language born out of popular education movements, a project that fell short of its goals but still left a considerable impression on graphic media. This article, then, presents an analysis of visual literacy campaigns in the early postwar era. These campaigns did not attempt to invent a symbolic language but posited that images themselves served as a universal language in which students could receive training. Of particular interest is how the concept of visual literacy has been mobilised as a pedagogical tool in design, digital humanities and in broader civic education initiatives promoted by Third Space institutions. Behind the creation of new visual literacy curricula is the idea that images can help anchor a world community, supplementing textual communication. Figure 1: Visual Literacy Yearbook. Montebello Unified School District, USA, 1973. Shedding Light: Origins of the Visual Literacy Frame The term “visual literacy” came to the fore in the early 1970s on the heels of mass literacy campaigns. The educators, creatives and media theorists who first advocated for visual learning linked this aim to literacy, an unassailable goal, to promote a more radical curricular overhaul. They challenged a system that had hitherto only acknowledged a very limited pathway towards academic success; pushing “language and mathematics”, courses “referred to as solids (something substantial) as contrasted with liquids or gases (courses with little or no substance)” (Eisner 92). This was deemed “a parochial view of both human ability and the possibilities of education” that did not acknowledge multiple forms of intelligence (Gardner). This change not only integrated elements of mass culture that had been rejected in education, notably film and graphic arts, but also encouraged the critique of images as a form of good citizenship, assuming that visually literate arbiters could call out media misrepresentations and manipulative political advertising (Messaris, “Visual Test”). This movement was, in many ways, reactive to new forms of mass media that began to replace newspapers as key forms of civic participation. Unlike simple literacy (being able to decipher letters as a mnemonic system), visual literacy involves imputing meanings to images where meanings are less fixed, yet still with embedded cultural signifiers. Visual literacy promised to extend enlightenment metaphors of sight (as in the German Aufklärung) and illumination (as in the French Lumières) to help citizens understand an increasingly complex marketplace of images. The move towards visual literacy was not so much a shift towards images (and away from books and oration) but an affirmation of the need to critically investigate the visual sphere. It introduced doubt to previously upheld hierarchies of perception. Sight, to Kant the “noblest of the senses” (158), was no longer the sense “least affected” by the surrounding world but an input centre that was equally manipulable. In Kant’s view of societal development, the “cosmopolitan” held the key to pacifying bellicose states and ensuring global prosperity and tranquillity. The process of developing a cosmopolitan ideology rests, according to Kant, on the gradual elimination of war and “the education of young people in intellectual and moral culture” (188-89). Transforming disparate societies into “a universal cosmopolitan existence” that would “at last be realised as the matrix within which all the original capacities of the human race may develop” and would take well-funded educational institutions and, potentially, a new framework for imparting knowledge (Kant 51). To some, the world of the visual presented a baseline for shared experience. Figure 2: Exhibition by the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Vienna, photograph c. 1927. An International Picture Language The quest to find a mutually intelligible language that could “bridge worlds” and solder together all of humankind goes back to the late nineteenth century and the Esperanto movement of Ludwig Zamenhof (Schor 59). The expression of this ideal in the world of the visual picked up steam in the interwar years with designers and editors like Fritz Kahn, Gerd Arntz, and Otto and Marie Neurath. Their work transposing complex ideas into graphic form has been rediscovered as an antecedent to modern infographics, but the symbols they deployed were not to merely explain, but also help education and build international fellowship unbounded by spoken language. The Neuraths in particular are celebrated for their international picture language or Isotypes. These pictograms (sometimes viewed as proto-emojis) can be used to represent data without text. Taken together they are an “intemporal, hieroglyphic language” that Neutrath hoped would unite working-class people the world over (Lee 159). The Neuraths’ work was done in the explicit service of visual education with a popular socialist agenda and incubated in the social sphere of Red Vienna at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (Social and Economic Museum) where Otto served as Director. The Wirtschaftsmuseum was an experiment in popular education, with multiple branches and late opening hours to accommodate the “the working man [who] has time to see a museum only at night” (Neurath 72-73). The Isotype contained universalist aspirations for the “making of a world language, or a helping picture language—[that] will give support to international developments generally” and “educate by the eye” (Neurath 13). Figure 3: Gerd Arntz Isotype Images. (Source: University of Reading.) The Isotype was widely adopted in the postwar era in pre-packaged sets of symbols used in graphic design and wayfinding systems for buildings and transportation networks, but with the socialism of the Neuraths’ peeled away, leaving only the system of logos that we are familiar with from airport washrooms, charts, and public transport maps. Much of the uptake in this symbol language could be traced to increased mobility and tourism, particularly in countries that did not make use of a Roman alphabet. The 1964 Olympics in Tokyo helped pave the way when organisers, fearful of jumbling too many scripts together, opted instead for black and white icons to represent the program of sports that summer. The new focus on the visual was both technologically mediated—cheaper printing and broadcast technologies made the diffusion of image increasingly possible—but also ideologically supported by a growing emphasis on projects that transcended linguistic, ethnic, and national borders. The Olympic symbols gradually morphed into Letraset icons, and, later, symbols in the Unicode Standard, which are the basis for today’s emojis. Wordless signs helped facilitate interconnectedness, but only in the most literal sense; their application was limited primarily to sports mega-events, highway maps, and “brand building”, and they never fulfilled their role as an educational language “to give the different nations a common outlook” (Neurath 18). Universally understood icons, particularly in the form of emojis, point to a rise in visual communication but they have fallen short as a cosmopolitan project, supporting neither the globalisation of Kantian ethics nor the transnational socialism of the Neuraths. Figure 4: Symbols in use. Women's bathroom. 1964 Tokyo Olympics. (Source: The official report of the Organizing Committee.) Counter Education By mid-century, the optimism of a universal symbol language seemed dated, and focus shifted from distillation to discernment. New educational programs presented ways to study images, increasingly reproducible with new technologies, as a language in and of themselves. These methods had their roots in the fin-de-siècle educational reforms of John Dewey, Helen Parkhurst, and Maria Montessori. As early as the 1920s, progressive educators were using highly visual magazines, like National Geographic, as the basis for lesson planning, with the hopes that they would “expose students to edifying and culturally enriching reading” and “develop a more catholic taste or sensibility, representing an important cosmopolitan value” (Hawkins 45). The rise in imagery from previously inaccessible regions helped pupils to see themselves in relation to the larger world (although this connection always came with the presumed superiority of the reader). “Pictorial education in public schools” taught readers—through images—to accept a broader world but, too often, they saw photographs as a “straightforward transcription of the real world” (Hawkins 57). The images of cultures and events presented in Life and National Geographic for the purposes of education and enrichment were now the subject of greater analysis in the classroom, not just as “windows into new worlds” but as cultural products in and of themselves. The emerging visual curriculum aimed to do more than just teach with previously excluded modes (photography, film and comics); it would investigate how images presented and mediated the world. This gained wider appeal with new analytical writing on film, like Raymond Spottiswoode's Grammar of the Film (1950) which sought to formulate the grammatical rules of visual communication (Messaris 181), influenced by semiotics and structural linguistics; the emphasis on grammar can also be seen in far earlier writings on design systems such as Owen Jones’s 1856 The Grammar of Ornament, which also advocated for new, universalising methods in design education (Sloboda 228). The inventorying impulse is on display in books like Donis A. Dondis’s A Primer of Visual Literacy (1973), a text that meditates on visual perception but also functions as an introduction to line and form in the applied arts, picking up where the Bauhaus left off. Dondis enumerates the “syntactical guidelines” of the applied arts with illustrations that are in keeping with 1920s books by Kandinsky and Klee and analyse pictorial elements. However, at the end of the book she shifts focus with two chapters that examine “messaging” and visual literacy explicitly. Dondis predicts that “an intellectual, trained ability to make and understand visual messages is becoming a vital necessity to involvement with communication. It is quite likely that visual literacy will be one of the fundamental measures of education in the last third of our century” (33) and she presses for more programs that incorporate the exploration and analysis of images in tertiary education. Figure 5: Ideal spatial environment for the Blueprint charts, 1970. (Image: Inventory Press.) Visual literacy in education arrived in earnest with a wave of publications in the mid-1970s. They offered ways for students to understand media processes and for teachers to use visual culture as an entry point into complex social and scientific subject matter, tapping into the “visual consciousness of the ‘television generation’” (Fransecky 5). Visual culture was often seen as inherently democratising, a break from stuffiness, the “artificialities of civilisation”, and the “archaic structures” that set sensorial perception apart from scholarship (Dworkin 131-132). Many radical university projects and community education initiatives of the 1960s made use of new media in novel ways: from Maurice Stein and Larry Miller’s fold-out posters accompanying Blueprint for Counter Education (1970) to Emory Douglas’s graphics for The Black Panther newspaper. Blueprint’s text- and image-dense wall charts were made via assemblage and they were imagined less as charts and more as a “matrix of resources” that could be used—and added to—by youth to undertake their own counter education (Cronin 53). These experiments in visual learning helped to break down old hierarchies in education, but their aim was influenced more by countercultural notions of disruption than the universal ideals of cosmopolitanism. From Image as Text to City as Text For a brief period in the 1970s, thinkers like Marshall McLuhan (McLuhan et al., Massage) and artists like Bruno Munari (Tanchis and Munari) collaborated fruitfully with graphic designers to create books that mixed text and image in novel ways. Using new compositional methods, they broke apart traditional printing lock-ups to superimpose photographs, twist text, and bend narrative frames. The most famous work from this era is, undoubtedly, The Medium Is the Massage (1967), McLuhan’s team-up with graphic designer Quentin Fiore, but it was followed by dozens of other books intended to communicate theory and scientific ideas with popularising graphics. Following in the footsteps of McLuhan, many of these texts sought not just to explain an issue but to self-consciously reference their own method of information delivery. These works set the precedent for visual aids (and, to a lesser extent, audio) that launched a diverse, non-hierarchical discourse that was nonetheless bound to tactile artefacts. In 1977, McLuhan helped develop a media textbook for secondary school students called City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media. It is notable for its direct address style and its focus on investigating spaces outside of the classroom (provocatively, a section on the third page begins with “Should all schools be closed?”). The book follows with a fine-grained analysis of advertising forms in which students are asked to first bring advertisements into class for analysis and later to go out into the city to explore “a man-made environment, a huge warehouse of information, a vast resource to be mined free of charge” (McLuhan et al., City 149). As a document City as Classroom is critical of existing teaching methods, in line with the radical “in the streets” pedagogy of its day. McLuhan’s theories proved particularly salient for the counter education movement, in part because they tapped into a healthy scepticism of advertisers and other image-makers. They also dovetailed with growing discontent with the ad-strew visual environment of cities in the 1970s. Budgets for advertising had mushroomed in the1960s and outdoor advertising “cluttered” cities with billboards and neon, generating “fierce intensities and new hybrid energies” that threatened to throw off the visual equilibrium (McLuhan 74). Visual literacy curricula brought in experiential learning focussed on the legibility of the cities, mapping, and the visualisation of urban issues with social justice implications. The Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (DGEI), a “collective endeavour of community research and education” that arose in the aftermath of the 1967 uprisings, is the most storied of the groups that suffused the collection of spatial data with community engagement and organising (Warren et al. 61). The following decades would see a tamed approach to visual literacy that, while still pressing for critical reading, did not upend traditional methods of educational delivery. Figure 6: Beginning a College Program-Assisting Teachers to Develop Visual Literacy Approaches in Public School Classrooms. 1977. ERIC. Searching for Civic Education The visual literacy initiatives formed in the early 1970s both affirmed existing civil society institutions while also asserting the need to better inform the public. Most of the campaigns were sponsored by universities, major libraries, and international groups such as UNESCO, which published its “Declaration on Media Education” in 1982. They noted that “participation” was “essential to the working of a pluralistic and representative democracy” and the “public—users, citizens, individuals, groups ... were too systematically overlooked”. Here, the public is conceived as both “targets of the information and communication process” and users who “should have the last word”. To that end their “continuing education” should be ensured (Study 18). Programs consisted primarily of cognitive “see-scan-analyse” techniques (Little et al.) for younger students but some also sought to bring visual analysis to adult learners via continuing education (often through museums eager to engage more diverse audiences) and more radical popular education programs sponsored by community groups. By the mid-80s, scores of modules had been built around the comprehension of visual media and had become standard educational fare across North America, Australasia, and to a lesser extent, Europe. There was an increasing awareness of the role of data and image presentation in decision-making, as evidenced by the surprising commercial success of Edward Tufte’s 1982 book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Visual literacy—or at least image analysis—was now enmeshed in teaching practice and needed little active advocacy. Scholarly interest in the subject went into a brief period of hibernation in the 1980s and early 1990s, only to be reborn with the arrival of new media distribution technologies (CD-ROMs and then the internet) in classrooms and the widespread availability of digital imaging technology starting in the late 1990s; companies like Adobe distributed free and reduced-fee licences to schools and launched extensive teacher training programs. Visual literacy was reanimated but primarily within a circumscribed academic field of education and data visualisation. Figure 7: Visual Literacy; What Research Says to the Teacher, 1975. National Education Association. USA. Part of the shifting frame of visual literacy has to do with institutional imperatives, particularly in places where austerity measures forced strange alliances between disciplines. What had been a project in alternative education morphed into an uncontested part of the curriculum and a dependable budget line. This shift was already forecasted in 1972 by Harun Farocki who, writing in Filmkritik, noted that funding for new film schools would be difficult to obtain but money might be found for “training in media education … a discipline that could persuade ministers of education, that would at the same time turn the budget restrictions into an advantage, and that would match the functions of art schools” (98). Nearly 50 years later educators are still using media education (rebranded as visual or media literacy) to make the case for fine arts and humanities education. While earlier iterations of visual literacy education were often too reliant on the idea of cracking the “code” of images, they did promote ways of learning that were a deep departure from the rote methods of previous generations. Next-gen curricula frame visual literacy as largely supplemental—a resource, but not a program. By the end of the 20th century, visual literacy had changed from a scholarly interest to a standard resource in the “teacher’s toolkit”, entering into school programs and influencing museum education, corporate training, and the development of public-oriented media (Literacy). An appreciation of image culture was seen as key to creating empathetic global citizens, but its scope was increasingly limited. With rising austerity in the education sector (a shift that preceded the 2008 recession by decades in some countries), art educators, museum enrichment staff, and design researchers need to make a case for why their disciplines were relevant in pedagogical models that are increasingly aimed at “skills-based” and “job ready” teaching. Arts educators worked hard to insert their fields into learning goals for secondary students as visual literacy, with the hope that “literacy” would carry the weight of an educational imperative and not a supplementary field of study. Conclusion For nearly a century, educational initiatives have sought to inculcate a cosmopolitan perspective with a variety of teaching materials and pedagogical reference points. Symbolic languages, like the Isotype, looked to unite disparate people with shared visual forms; while educational initiatives aimed to train the eyes of students to make them more discerning citizens. The term ‘visual literacy’ emerged in the 1960s and has since been deployed in programs with a wide variety of goals. Countercultural initiatives saw it as a prerequisite for popular education from the ground up, but, in the years since, it has been formalised and brought into more staid curricula, often as a sort of shorthand for learning from media and pictures. The grand cosmopolitan vision of a complete ‘visual language’ has been scaled back considerably, but still exists in trace amounts. Processes of globalisation require images to universalise experiences, commodities, and more for people without shared languages. Emoji alphabets and globalese (brands and consumer messaging that are “visual-linguistic” amalgams “increasingly detached from any specific ethnolinguistic group or locality”) are a testament to a mediatised banal cosmopolitanism (Jaworski 231). In this sense, becoming “fluent” in global design vernacular means familiarity with firms and products, an understanding that is aesthetic, not critical. It is very much the beneficiaries of globalisation—both state and commercial actors—who have been able to harness increasingly image-based technologies for their benefit. To take a humorous but nonetheless consequential example, Spanish culinary boosters were able to successfully lobby for a paella emoji (Miller) rather than having a food symbol from a less wealthy country such as a Senegalese jollof or a Morrocan tagine. This trend has gone even further as new forms of visual communication are increasingly streamlined and managed by for-profit media platforms. The ubiquity of these forms of communication and their global reach has made visual literacy more important than ever but it has also fundamentally shifted the endeavour from a graphic sorting practice to a critical piece of social infrastructure that has tremendous political ramifications. Visual literacy campaigns hold out the promise of educating students in an image-based system with the potential to transcend linguistic and cultural boundaries. This cosmopolitan political project has not yet been realised, as the visual literacy frame has drifted into specialised silos of art, design, and digital humanities education. It can help bridge the “incomplete connections” of an increasingly globalised world (Calhoun 112), but it does not have a program in and of itself. Rather, an evolving visual literacy curriculum might be seen as a litmus test for how we imagine the role of images in the world. References Brown, Neil. “The Myth of Visual Literacy.” Australian Art Education 13.2 (1989): 28-32. Calhoun, Craig. “Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Social Imaginary.” Daedalus 137.3 (2008): 105–114. Cronin, Paul. “Recovering and Rendering Vital Blueprint for Counter Education at the California Institute for the Arts.” Blueprint for Counter Education. Inventory Press, 2016. 36-58. Dondis, Donis A. A Primer of Visual Literacy. MIT P, 1973. Dworkin, M.S. “Toward an Image Curriculum: Some Questions and Cautions.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 4.2 (1970): 129–132. Eisner, Elliot. Cognition and Curriculum: A Basis for Deciding What to Teach. Longmans, 1982. Farocki, Harun. “Film Courses in Art Schools.” Trans. Ted Fendt. Grey Room 79 (Apr. 2020): 96–99. Fransecky, Roger B. Visual Literacy: A Way to Learn—A Way to Teach. Association for Educational Communications and Technology, 1972. Gardner, Howard. Frames Of Mind. Basic Books, 1983. Hawkins, Stephanie L. “Training the ‘I’ to See: Progressive Education, Visual Literacy, and National Geographic Membership.” American Iconographic. U of Virginia P, 2010. 28–61. Jaworski, Adam. “Globalese: A New Visual-Linguistic Register.” Social Semiotics 25.2 (2015): 217-35. Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Cambridge UP, 2006. Kant, Immanuel. “Perpetual Peace.” Political Writings. Ed. H. Reiss. Cambridge UP, 1991 [1795]. 116–130. Kress, G., and T. van Leeuwen. Reading images: The Grammar of Visual Design. Routledge, 1996. Literacy Teaching Toolkit: Visual Literacy. Department of Education and Training (DET), State of Victoria. 29 Aug. 2018. 30 Sep. 2020 <https://www.education.vic.gov.au:443/school/teachers/teachingresources/discipline/english/literacy/ readingviewing/Pages/litfocusvisual.aspx>. Lee, Jae Young. “Otto Neurath's Isotype and the Rhetoric of Neutrality.” Visible Language 42.2: 159-180. Little, D., et al. 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This issue of M/C Journal called for a wide multidisciplinary exploration around the notion of ‘street’. The papers we received offered this diversity and range from discussions of everyday activities to seeing the street as a site for events, conflicts and the possibility of new learning. They explored a range of social meanings and cultural ramifications engaged in/on/off and around the notion of street. Street in its most conventional sense represents the link between physical places, but more than that, spaces where cultural negotiations are made. They are everyday spaces where the informal meets the formal, and the public meets the private. In other words, they are spaces where unanticipated, sudden encounters may take place, or where ordinary space may be made special. Their utilitarian purpose may be subverted and they become ‘special’ spaces and sites where Formula 1 races, charity runs, street parties, revolutions, protests, and markets occur. They may be formalised sites known for consumption, entertainment, and recreation or where drugs, sex and gambling are found behind closed doors. Feature: “Where Ordinary Activities Lead to War: Street Politics in Seth Tobocman’s War in the Neighborhood” Vanessa Raney’s piece, like many of the others, deals with the street as a site of potential political and social conflict. In this case, she describes elements of the urban experience of New York as represented in Seth Tobocman’s graphic novel War in the Neighbourhood. This centres on the relationships between squatters, the police, politicians and the media in a classic conflict about gentrification or the uses and ownership of urban space. Raney compares the representation of this battle in the novel, with historical and current conflicts about urban space and the place that street plays as a site for these conflicts. Street is not community in the sense beloved of current politicians – a banal consensus about law and order – but the site for contestation and in a few cases, resolution. Thus, streets are not accidents, they are shaped by social and economic changes, cultural imaginings and practices. In “Vigilant Citizens”, Cameron Muir investigates a conflict that took place under the guise of a public petition in the city of Dubbo, New South Wales, Australia in 2003. The petition was for the Carr government to “do something” about the “uncontrollable” criminal children who were taking over the streets. That the children were often Aboriginal was not directly mentioned. Muir tracks the media discursive practices and the government’s campaign of fear leading up to this moment of moral panic, arguing through the idea of Statecraft that the desired order for one’s streets can serve to exclude the rights of these others. Continuing of the theme of order and disorder in the public imagination, Irina Gendelman in “The Romantic and Dangerous Stranger” contrasts the reception given to a sculpted hobo, versus the real hobo on the streets of Seattle. Entwined within the figure of the real hobo are a range of prescribed representations, all of which demand a disciplining of the body and the public spaces – made safe for normalised occupations. Gendelman argues that this ‘othering’ is achieved in part through the control (Foucault) exterted via media discussions of what are the acceptable and stable boundaries of society. To conclude, Gendelman returns to Jane Jacobs’s argument that, as there is no one element that makes the city vibrant, so there is no singular investment that can create cultural capital in the city for all, but that inclusive, well-used public spaces remain one of the best ways to build trust among strangers.. We then move back to Australia, to “Imagining King Street in the Gay/Lesbian Media” and the construction of its place-identity. The media can create shorthand for class and lifestyle differentiation in television land – think Coronation Street, Sesame Street, 42nd Street, Wisteria Lane (Desperate Housewives), or Ramsey Street (Neighbours). But in the local and community newspapers, these socio-economic distinctions come to be replaced by subcultural affiliations of localness. In his comparison between the two iconic gay and lesbian streets in Sydney, Andrew Gorman-Murray’s investigation is driven by the gay/lesbian newspaper discursive portrayals that recreate King Street as alternative and secondary to Oxford Street. His analysis re-emphasises the integral notion of places and streets as social and cultural constructs, open and liable for constant representations, manipulations and challenges. He argues that streets, like identities, are not stable in meaning, they are negotiated subjectively over time and shift according to the imagined constructs, in this case, of the local papers. Street is the social platform for urban displays of inclusion and exclusion: loitering on the street, street kids, living on the street, wrong side of the street, and graffiti on the street, all present conflicting notions surrounding shared city spaces. Melike Turkan Bagli and Sebnem Timur present a personal account of an accidental experience of loitering in a foreign street, “A Bodily Sign of ‘Doing Nothing’: Loitering or the Silence before the Storm”. Faced with this cultural translation at the moment of arrival, the author deliberates on the semiological and discursive impact of what ‘no loitering’ could mean. In hindsight and with adequate cultural context, the notion of loitering is made sense of in relation to the “Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering” law of 1992 and the element of criminality located in the Act. While loitering is clearly a cultural and historically specific term, its ambiguity to the reader emphasises the dissonance such public signs may serve. In the next article, Paula Geyh takes us above the street, transcending the street even, in “Urban Free Flow: A Poetics of Parkour”, to examine the popularity of parkour through a BBC advertisement. Such practices can commonly be regarded as a form of street culture even as their main purpose is to avoid the street! Street thus becomes the main structure against which parkour-ism can be defined. Geyh’s analysis of parkour as a form of physical poetics is dependent on the context of the urban cityscape and the ability of the body to transcend the street below. The street with its multiple meanings is once again defined as another form of social space, one that represents the barriers and repression of urban life. Knowing your back streets distinguishes one as a local rather than the outsider. Being street wise is integral to top selling computer games like Grand Theft Auto, Gangland or Sim City, where the strategy lies in competent negotiation of streets. Or, as Robert Sweeny in “Code of the Street: Videogames and the City” argues, many videogames centred around urban centres often reinvent ways of looking and imagining the street and its utilitarianism. Skateboarding and graffiti become challenges to the player, casting them as active agents of the city in games such as Tony Hawkes’s Underground and Getting Up: Contents under Pressure. Sweeny suggests that the players will perhaps harbour a different view of marginalised activities, having ‘performed’ them in the videogames. But what are the actual effects these games have on the players and their relationship with the cities? How is de Certeau’s idea of walking in the city appropriated for videogames when now the urban may be experienced more often via the screen than in actuality? Thus, this article posits the city as an interface which serves as an overriding context for game playing – and walking in the city may perhaps be read differently forever after an interactive walk. Finally, Andrew Hickey’s paper “Street Smarts/Smart Streets: Public Pedagogies and the Streetscape” considers the street as a site of instruction or learning. As we move through our streets we are bombarded by advertising messages, directed by public signage, influenced by our fellow walkers and disciplined by multiple codes of behaviour, implicit and explicit. The papers in this volume reflect different aspects of that learning – how do we learn how to be citizens? How do we learn about ownership and inequality? Exclusion and inclusion? At a time of high levels of insecurity in the global North, fear of crime and suspicion of outsiders, these papers suggest that the street still has things to teach us that we can not easily learn in other ways. The street is a particular form of public space, but one that, these papers suggest, precisely because of their role as marginal spaces and as sometime sites of context, cannot easily be replaced. Kate Oakley & Jinna TayM/C Journal ‘street’ Issue Editors Citation reference for this article MLA Style Oakley, Kate, and Jinna Tay. "Street." M/C Journal 9.3 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/00-editorial.php>. APA Style Oakley, K., and J. Tay. (Jul. 2006) "Street," M/C Journal, 9(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/00-editorial.php>.

Conventional definitions of design rarely capture its reach into our everyday lives. The Design Council, for example, estimates that more than 2.5 million people use design-related skills, principles, and practices on a daily basis in UK workplaces (Design Council 5, 8). Further, they calculate that these workers contribute £209 billion to the economy annually (8). The terrain of design professions extends from the graphic design of online environments, the business models that make them economically viable, and the algorithms that enable them to function, through to the devices we use, the clothes we wear, the furniture we sit on and the spaces where we live and work. Yet paradoxically a search of online dictionaries reiterates the connection of design primarily to drawing and making plans for buildings. As we witness the adoption of practices of “design thinking” in non-traditional design disciplines, it is interesting to note that the Italian renaissance term disegno, referred to both drawing and aspects of thinking. Giorgio Vasari claimed that design was “the animating principle of all creative processes” (Sorabello). Buckminster Fuller was just as florid and even more expansive when he argued that “the opposite of design is chaos” (Papanek 2). The Oxford English Dictionary captures a broad sense of design as “a plan or scheme conceived in the mind and intended for subsequent execution” (OED Online). This issue of M/C Journal offered contributors the opportunity to consider “design” in its broadest sense. The articles in this issue cast a wide net over design in both practice and theory, and emerge from varied disciplinary bases including material culture, graphic design, media studies, and architecture. The authors critique diverse design practices and pedagogy as well as the social reach of design and its political potential. Design Canons and the Economy While design histories begin with the earliest accounts of toolmaking (Margolin), the Industrial Revolution reinforced the more abstract intellectual dimensions of the discipline. Changing methods of production distinguished making from thinking and led to the emergence of the design profession (Spark). During the twentieth century, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was instrumental in not only raising awareness of design, but its exhibitions and acquisitions endorsed and canonised the styles and figures associated with “good design”. From its promotion of modern architecture in 1932, to the Good Design exhibition in 1950, MoMA’s advocacy reinforced a selective (and exclusive) canon for modernist design, educating the design-conscious consumer and reaching out to public taste, even advising of local stockists. Design became a means to mediate the art of the past with contemporary furnishings, that they accurately predicted would become the art of the future (MoMA 1). Drawing from this context, in this issue, Curt Lund’s essay interrogates a porcelain toy tea set from 1968 through the lens of material culture analysis to confirm its role in mediating relationships, transmitting values, and embodying social practices, tastes, and beliefs. MoMA was not unique in recognising both the artistic merit and commercial potential of design. Few design activities are inseparable from the market economy and the language of design has infiltrated business more broadly. Design processes are used in seemingly novel ways across businesses and governments seeking to improve their digital and real-world services. A 2018 report by the UK’s Design Council recognised the expanding reach of design and the competitive advantage of design-based economies: the skills, principles and practices of design are now widely used from banking to retail. Designers, too, have always drawn on a range of different skills, tools and technologies to deliver new ideas, goods and services. This is what makes design unique, and is how it makes products, services and systems more useful, usable and desirable in advanced economies around the world. (Design Council 5) Underpinned by design, the global gaming market, for example, is an expanding multi-billion-dollar industry. In this issue, Heather Blakey explores connections made in the digital world. Her article asks, how the design of interactions between characters in the game world can align the player experience with the designer's objectives? The reality of working within the design economy is also addressed by Yaron Meron, whose article in this issue examines the frequent absence of the brief in the graphic design context. Meron highlights problems that arise due to a recurring failure to define the scope of the brief and its significance to a formal collaborative framework between designers and their clientele. Recognition of the design economy’s value has translated to the educational sector. With the expansion of design practice beyond its traditional twentieth century silos, higher education managers are seeking to harness design as a source of innovation, driven by the perceptions of value in disparate industries. This desire for interdisciplinarity raises significant questions about pedagogy and the future of the design studio, which has anchored design tuition since the late nineteenth century. Mark Sawyer’s and Philip Goldswain’s article proposes the employment of concepts from open design literature, “meta-design”, and design “frames” to inform a toolkit to enable shared meaning in an architectural studio setting. Design for a Better World The American industrial designer George Nelson described design as “an attempt to make a contribution through change” (Packard 69), echoing the perception that progress represents improvement in a teleological sense. Many designers have long pursued social agendas and explored solutions to inequities. What loosely unites the disparate design disciplines is a shared sense that design improves the world we live in. But even with the best intentions, design does not inevitably lead to a better world. Accounts of design frequently recognise its shortcomings. These might include narratives that document or delight in famous design failures, such as the complex circumstances that led to the famed demolition of the Pruitt Igoe housing complex in the 1970s (Bristol). We also regularly encounter design flaws in the digital environment—whether an encryption algorithm open to compromise or online forms that do not recognise apostrophes or umlauts. Although on one level this leads to frustration, it also leads to other types of exclusion. Lisa Hackett’s article on 1950s-style fashion shows how the failure of the fashion industry to accommodate varying body shapes has led some women to seek solutions with vintage-style fashion choices. Hackett’s article brings to mind the serious concerns that occur when the standards that define the normative fail to account for large parts of the population. Overlooking gender and race can have a cumulative and significant impact on the everyday lives of women and minorities (Criado-Perez). The global pandemic has emphasised the dangers arising from PPE ill-designed for racial and gender diversity (Porterfield). The idea that design was a means of progressive improvement began to be prominently debunked in the 1960s with the discussion of the design life of machines, objects, and buildings. Planned obsolescence—or designed obsolescence as it was also known—came to attention in the early 1960s when Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers called into question the ethics of post-war consumerism. Packard’s work drew attention to the ethical responsibilities of designers, by revealing their complicity in the phenomenon of planned obsolescence. Packard’s critique linked the problem of “growthmanship” with issues of saturation and disposal (Packard 5). Large digital libraries replace physical objects but introduce new types of clutter. The anxieties produced by alerts that one’s device is “out of memory” may be easily dismissed as “first world problems”, but the carbon footprint of digital communication and storage is a global concern (Tsukayama; Chan). Digital clutter is explored in Ananya’s article “Minimalist Design in the Age of Archive Fever” in this issue. Ananya contrasts minimalist aesthetics, and Marie Kondo-style decluttering, with our burgeoning prosthetic memory, and its attendant digital footprint. In the late 1960s, Victor Papanek considered the ethics of design choices, and in particular, the nexus between design and consumerism, acknowledging Thorstein Veblen’s coruscating critique of conspicuous consumption. But Papanek also drew attention to contemporary environmental crises. He railed against industrial designers, architects, and planners, attributing blame for the profligate consumerism and environmental degradation arguing that “in all pollution, designers are implicated, at least partially" (14). Inclusive Design Papanek’s influential advocacy acknowledged the political dimensions of design and the inherent biases of the time. In response to his teaching, Danish student Susanne Koefoed designed the now ubiquitous International Symbol of Access (ISA), which Guffey suggests is the most widely exported work of Scandinavian design (358). In this issue’s feature article, Sam Holleran explores the connection between visual literacy and civic life, and the design of an international symbol language, which aimed to ameliorate social disadvantage and cultural barriers. Discussions of inclusive design acknowledge that design history is most often Eurocentric, and frequently exclusionary of diversity. Articles in this issue examine more inclusive approaches to design. These efforts to make design more inclusive extend beyond the object or product, to examining techniques and processes that might improve society. Poiner and Drake, for example, explore the potential and challenges of participatory approaches in the design of buildings for a remote Indigenous community. Fredericks and Bradfield, in this issue, argue that Indigenous memes can provoke audiences and demand recognition of First Nations peoples. The meme offers a more inclusive critique of a national government’s intransigence to constitutional change that recognises Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. Further, they advocate for co-design of policy that will enshrine an Indigenous Voice to the Australian Parliament. There are many reasons to be grateful for design and optimistic about its future: the swift design and production of efficacious vaccines come to mind. But as Papanek recognised 50 years ago, designers, most often handmaidens of capital, are still implicated in the problems of the Anthropocene. How can design be used to repair the legacies of a century of profligacy, pollution, and climate change? Design needs its advocates, but the preaching and practice of design are best tempered with continuous forms of critique, analysis, and evaluation. Acknowledgements The editors thank the scholars who submitted work for this issue and the blind referees for their thoughtful and generous responses to the articles. References Bristol, Katharine G. “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.” Journal of Architectural Education 44.3 (1991): 163–171. Chan, Delle. “Your Website Is Killing the Planet.” Wired, 22 Mar. 21. <https://www.wired.co.uk/article/internet-carbon-footprint>. Criado-Perez, Caroline. Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. Chatto & Windus, 2019. "design, n." OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2021. <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/50840. Accessed 8 August 2021>. Design Council UK. Designing a Future Economy: Developing Design Skills for Productivity and Innovation. Feb. 2018. <https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/asset/document/Designing_a_future_economy18.pdf>. Guffey, Elizabeth. “The Scandinavian Roots of the International Symbol of Access.” Design and Culture 7.3 (2015): 357–76. DOI: 10.1080/17547075.2015.1105527. Margolin, Victor. World History of Design. Vol. 1. Bloomsbury, 2017. Museum of Modern Art. “First Showing of Good Design Exhibition in New York.” Press Release. 16 Nov. 1950. <https://assets.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_325754.pdf?_ga=2.206889043.1160124053.1628409746-2001272077.1623303269>. Packard, Vance. The Waste Makers. David McKay, 1960. Papanek, Victor J. Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change. Bantam Books, 1973. Porterfield, Carlie. “A Lot of PPE Doesn’t Fit Women—and in the Coronavirus Pandemic, It Puts Them in Danger.” Forbes, 29 Apr. 2020. <https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2020/04/29/a-lot-of-ppe-doesnt-fit-women-and-in-the-coronavirus-pandemic-it-puts-them-in-danger/?sh=5b5deaf9315a>. Sorabella, Jean. “Venetian Color and Florentine Design.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. Oct. 2002 <http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/vefl/hd_vefl.htm>. Sparke, Penny. “Design.” Grove Art Online, 2003. <https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T022395>. Tsukayama, Hayley. “How Bad Is Email for the Environment?” Washington Post, 25 Jan. 2017. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/01/25/how-bad-is-email-for-the-environment/>.

The concept of transmedia storyworlds unfolding across complex serial narrative structures has become increasingly important to the study of modern media industries and audience communities. Yet, the precise connections between transmedia networks, serial structures, and narrative processes often remain underdeveloped. The dispersion of potential story elements across a diverse collection of media platforms and technologies prompts questions concerning the function of seriality in the absence of fixed instalments, the meaning of narrative when plot is largely a personal construction of each audience member, and the nature of storytelling in the absence of a unifying author, or when authorship itself takes on a serial character. This special issue opens a conversation on the intersection of these three concepts and their implications for a variety of disciplines, artistic practices, and philosophies. By re-thinking these concepts from fresh perspectives, the collection challenges scholars to consider how a wide range of academic, aesthetic, and social phenomena might be productively thought through using the overlapping lenses of transmedia, seriality, and narrativity. Thus, the collection gathers scholars from life-writing, sport, film studies, cultural anthropology, fine arts, media studies, and literature, all of whom find common ground at this fruitful crossroads. This breadth also challenges the narrow use of transmedia as a specialized term to describe current developments in corporate mass media products that seek to exploit the affordances of hybrid digital media environments. Many prominent scholars, including Marie-Laure Ryan and Henry Jenkins, acknowledge that a basic definition of transmedia as stories with extensions and reinterpretations in numerous media forms includes the oldest kinds of human expression, such as the ancient storyworlds of Arthurian legend and The Odyssey. Yet, what Jenkins terms “top-down” transmedia—that is, pre-planned and often corporate transmedia—has received a disproportionate share of scholarly attention, with modern franchises like The Matrix, the Marvel universe, and Lost serving as common exemplars (Flanagan, Livingstone, and McKenny; Hadas; Mittell; Scolari). Thus, many of the contributions to this issue push the boundaries of what has commonly been studied as transmedia as well as the limits of what may be considered a serial structure or even a story. For example, these papers imagine how an autobiography may also be a digital concept album unfolding in reverse, how participatory artistic performances may unfold in unpredictable instalments across physical and digital space, and how studying sports fandom as a long series of transmedia narrative elements encourages scholars to grapple with the unique structures assembled by audiences of non-fictional story worlds. Setting these experimental offerings into dialogue with entries that approach the study of transmedia in a more established manner provides the basis for building bridges between such recognized conversations in new media studies and potential collaborations with other disciplines and subfields of media studies.This issue builds upon papers collected from four years of the International Transmedia Serial Narration Seminar, which I co-organized with Dr. Claire Cornillon, Assistant Professor (Maîtresse de Conférences) of comparative literature at Université de Nîmes. The seminar held sessions in Paris, Le Havre, Rouen, Amsterdam, and Utrecht, with interdisciplinary speakers from the USA, Australia, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. As a transnational, interdisciplinary project intended to cross both theoretical and physical boundaries, the seminar aimed to foster exchange between academic conversations that can become isolated not only within disciplines, but also within national and linguistic borders. The seminar thus sought to enhance academic mobility between both people and ideas, and the digital, open-access publication of the collected papers alongside additional scholarly interlocutors serves to broaden the seminar’s goals of creating a border-crossing conversation. After two special issues primarily collecting the French language papers in TV/Series (2014) and Revue Française des Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication (2017), this issue seeks to share the Transmedia Serial Narration project with a wider audience by publishing the remaining English-language papers, accompanied by several other contributions in dialogue with the seminar’s themes. It is our hope that this collection will invite a broad international audience to creatively question the meaning of transmedia, seriality, and narrativity both historically and in the modern, rapidly changing, global and digital media environment.Several articles in the issue illuminate existing debates and common case studies in transmedia scholarship by comparing theoretical models to the much more slippery reality of a media form in flux. Thus, Mélanie Bourdaa’s feature article, “From One Medium to the Next: How Comic Books Create Richer Storylines,” examines theories of narrative complexity and transmedia by scholars including Henry Jenkins, Derek Johnson, and Jason Mittell to then propose a new typology of extensions to accommodate the lived reality expressed by producers of transmedia. Because her interviews with artists and writers emphasize the co-constitutive nature of economic and narrative considerations in professionals’ decisions, Bourdaa’s typology can offer researchers a tool to clarify the marketing and narrative layers of transmedia extensions. As such, her classification system further illuminates what is particular about forms of corporate transmedia with a profit orientation, which may not be shared by non-profit, collective, and independently produced transmedia projects.Likewise, Radha O’Meara and Alex Bevan map existing scholarship on transmedia to point out the limitations of deriving theory only from certain forms of storytelling. In their article “Transmedia Theory’s Author Discourse and Its Limitations,” O’Meara and Bevan argue that scholars have preferred to focus on examples of transmedia with a strong central author-figure or that they may indeed help to rhetorically shore up the coherency of transmedia authorship through writing about transmedia creators as auteurs. Tying their critique to the established weaknesses of auteur theory associated with classic commentaries like Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author” and Foucault’s “What is an Author?”, O’Meara and Bevan explain that this focus on transmedia creators as authority figures reinforces hierarchical, patriarchal understandings of the creative process and excludes from consideration all those unauthorized transmedia extensions through which audiences frequently engage and make meaning from transmedia networks. They also emphasize the importance of constructing academic theories of transmedia authorship that can accommodate collaborative forms of hybrid amateur and professional authorship, as well as tolerate the ambiguities of “authorless” storyworlds that lack clear narrative boundaries. O’Meara and Bevan argue that such theories will help to break down gendered power hierarchies in Hollywood, which have long allowed individual men to “claim credit for the stories and for all the work that many people do across various sectors and industries.”Dan Hassler-Forest likewise considers existing theory and a corporate case study in his examination of analogue echoes within a modern transmedia serial structure by mapping the storyworld of Twin Peaks (1990). His article, “‘Two Birds with One Stone’: Transmedia Serialisation in Twin Peaks,” demonstrates the push-and-pull between two contemporary TV production strategies: first, the use of transmedia elements that draw viewers away from the TV screen toward other platforms, and second, the deployment of strategies that draw viewers back to the TV by incentivizing broadcast-era appointment viewing. Twin Peaks offers a particularly interesting example of the manner in which these strategies intertwine partly because it already offered viewers an analogue transmedia experience in the 1990s by splitting story elements between TV episodes and books. Unlike O’Meara and Bevan, who elucidate the growing prominence of transmedia auteurs who lend rhetorical coherence to dispersed narrative elements, Hassler-Forest argues that this older analogue transmedia network capitalized upon the dilution of authorial authority, due to the distance between TV and book versions, to negotiate tensions between the producers’ competing visions. Hassler-Forest also notes that the addition of digital soundtrack albums further complicates the serial nature of the story by using the iTunes and TV distribution schedules to incentivize repeated sequential consumption of each element, thus drawing modern viewers to the TV screen, then the computer screen, and then back again.Two articles offer a concrete test of these theoretical perspectives by utilizing ethnographic participant-observation and interviewing to examine how audiences actually navigate diffuse, dispersed storyworlds. For example, Céline Masoni’s article, “From Seriality to Transmediality: A Socio-narrative Approach of a Skilful and Literate Audience,” documents fans’ highly strategic participatory practices. From her observations of and interviews with fans, Masoni theorizes the types of media literacy and social as well as technological competencies cultivated through transmedia fan practices. Olivier Servais and Sarah Sepulchre’s article similarly describes a long-term ethnography of fan transmedia activity, including interviews with fans and participant-observation of the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) Game of Thrones Ascent (2013). Servais and Sepulchre find that most people in their interviews are not “committed” fans, but rather casual readers and viewers who follow transmedia extensions sporadically. By focusing on this group, they widen the existing research which often focuses on or assumes a committed audience like the skilful and literate fans discussed by Masoni.Servais and Sepulchre’s results suggest that these viewers may be less likely to seek out all transmedia extensions but readily accept and adapt unexpected elements, such as the media appearances of actors, to add to their serial experiences of the storyworld. In a parallel research protocol observing the Game of Thrones Ascent MMORPG, Servais and Sepulchre report that the most highly-skilled players exhibit few behaviours associated with immersion in the storyworld, but the majority of less-skilled players use their gameplay choices to increase immersion by, for example, choosing a player name that evokes the narrative. As a result, Servais and Sepulchre shed light upon the activities of transmedia audiences who are not necessarily deeply committed to the entire transmedia network, and yet who nonetheless make deliberate choices to collect their preferred narrative elements and increase their own immersion.Two contributors elucidate forms of transmedia that upset the common emphasis on storyworlds with film or TV as the core property or “mothership” (Scott). In her article “Transmedia Storyworlds, Literary Theory, Games,” Joyce Goggin maps the history of intersections between experimental literature and ludology. As a result, she questions the continuing dichotomy between narratology and ludology in game studies to argue for a more broadly transmedia strategy, in which the same storyworld may be simultaneously narrative and ludic. Such a theory can incorporate a great deal of what might otherwise be unproblematically treated as literature, opening up the book to interrogation as an inherently transmedial medium.L.J. Maher similarly examines the serial narrative structures that may take shape in a transmedia storyworld centred on music rather than film or TV. In her article “You Got Spirit, Kid: Transmedial Life-Writing Across Time and Space,” Maher charts the music, graphic novels, and fan interactions that comprise the Coheed and Cambria band storyworld. In particular, Maher emphasizes the importance of autobiography for Coheed and Cambria, which bridges between fictional and non-fictional narrative elements. This interplay remains undertheorized within transmedia scholarship, although a few have begun to explicate the use of transmedia life-writing in an activist context (Cati and Piredda; Van Luyn and Klaebe; Riggs). As a result, Maher widens the scope of existing transmedia theory by more thoroughly connecting fictional and autobiographical elements in the same storyworld and considering how serial transmedia storytelling structures may differ when the core component is music.The final three articles take a more experimental approach that actively challenges the existing boundaries of transmedia scholarship. Catherine Lord’s article, “Serial Nuns: Michelle Williams Gamaker’s The Fruit Is There to Be Eaten as Serial and Trans-serial,” explores the unique storytelling structures of a cluster of independent films that traverse time, space, medium, and gender. Although not a traditional transmedia project, since the network includes a novel and film adaptations and extensions by different directors as well as real-world locations and histories, Lord challenges transmedia theorists to imagine storyworlds that include popular history, independent production, and spatial performances and practices. Lord argues that the main character’s trans identity provides an embodied and theoretical pivot within the storyworld, which invites audiences to accept a position of radical mobility where all fixed expectations about the separation between categories of flora and fauna, centre and periphery, the present and the past, as well as authorized and unauthorized extensions, dissolve.In his article “Non-Fiction Transmedia: Seriality and Forensics in Media Sport,” Markus Stauff extends the concept of serial transmedia storyworlds to sport, focusing on an audience-centred perspective. For the most part, transmedia has been theorized with fictional storyworlds as the prototypical examples. A growing number of scholars, including Arnau Gifreu-Castells and Siobhan O'Flynn, enrich our understanding of transmedia storytelling by exploring non-fiction examples, but these are commonly restricted to the documentary genre (Freeman; Gifreu-Castells, Misek, and Verbruggen; Karlsen; Kerrigan and Velikovsky). Very few scholars comment on the transmedia nature of sport coverage and fandom, and when they do so it is often within the framework of transmedia news coverage (Gambarato, Alzamora, and Tárcia; McClearen; Waysdorf). Stauff’s article thus provides a welcome addition to the existing scholarship in this field by theorizing how sport fans construct a user-centred serial transmedia storyworld by piecing together narrative elements across media sources, embodied experiences, and the serialized ritual of sport seasons. In doing so, he points toward ways in which non-fiction transmedia may significantly differ from fictional storyworlds, but he also enriches our understanding of an audience-centred perspective on the construction of transmedia serial narratives.In his artistic practice, Robert Lawrence may most profoundly stretch the existing parameters of transmedia theory. Lawrence’s article, “Locate, Combine, Contradict, Iterate: Serial Strategies for PostInternet Art,” details his decades-long interrogation of transmedia seriality through performative and participatory forms of art that bridge digital space, studio space, and public space. While theatre and fine arts have often been considered through the theoretical lens of intermediality (Bennett, Boenisch, Kattenbelt, Vandsoe), the nexus of transmedia, seriality, and narrative enables Lawrence to describe the complex, interconnected web of planned and unplanned extensions of his hybrid digital and physical installations, which often last for decades and incorporate a global scope. Lawrence thus takes the strategies of engagement that are perhaps more familiar to transmedia theorists from corporate viral marketing campaigns and turns them toward civic ends (Anyiwo, Bourdaa, Hardy, Hassler-Forest, Scolari, Sokolova, Stork). As such, Lawrence’s artistic practice challenges theorists of transmedia and intermedia to consider the kinds of social and political “interventions” that artists and citizens can stage through the networked possibilities of transmedia expression and how the impact of such projects can be amplified through serial repetition.Together, the whole collection opens new pathways for transmedia scholarship, more deeply explores how transmedia narration complicates understandings of seriality, and constructs an international, interdisciplinary dialogue that brings often isolated conversations into contact. In particular, this issue enriches the existing scholarship on independent, artistic, and non-fiction transmedia, while also proposing some important limitations, exceptions, and critiques to existing scholarship featuring corporate transmedia projects with a commercial, top-down structure and a strong auteur-like creator. These diverse case studies and perspectives enable us to understand more inclusively the structures and social functions of transmedia in the pre-digital age, to theorize more robustly how audiences experience transmedia in the current era of experimentation, and to imagine more broadly a complex future for transmedia seriality wherein professionals, artists, and amateurs all engage in an iterative, inclusive process of creative and civic storytelling, transcending artificial borders imposed by discipline, nationalism, capitalism, and medium.ReferencesAnyiwo, U. Melissa. "It’s Not Television, It’s Transmedia Storytelling: Marketing the ‘Real’World of True Blood." True Blood: Investigating Vampires and Southern Gothic. Ed. Brigid Cherry. New York: IB Tauris, 2012. 157-71.Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. Basingstoke: Macmillian, 1988. 142-48.Bennett, Jill. "Aesthetics of Intermediality." Art History 30.3 (2007): 432-450.Boenisch, Peter M. "Aesthetic Art to Aisthetic Act: Theatre, Media, Intermedial Performance." (2006): 103-116.Bourdaa, Melanie. "This Is Not Marketing. This Is HBO: Branding HBO with Transmedia Storytelling." Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network 7.1 (2014).Cati, Alice, and Maria Francesca Piredda. "Among Drowned Lives: Digital Archives and Migrant Memories in the Age of Transmediality." a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32.3 (2017): 628-637.Flanagan, Martin, Andrew Livingstone, and Mike McKenny. The Marvel Studios Phenomenon: Inside a Transmedia Universe. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.Foucault, Michel. "Authorship: What Is an Author?" Screen 20.1 (1979): 13-34.Freeman, Matthew. "Small Change – Big Difference: Tracking the Transmediality of Red Nose Day." VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture 5.10 (2016): 87-96.Gambarato, Renira Rampazzo, Geane C. Alzamora, and Lorena Peret Teixeira Tárcia. 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Introduction Let me start by telling you about my “first-world problem”: I study girls’ autobiographical practice in digital spaces but the conceptual tools in my field have been developed chiefly in order to read and analyse printed books. Girls’ digital engagements with self-representation—such as web comics and blogs—are fascinating texts and I want to know what they can tell us about how girls’ written selves connect in complex ways to broader cultural constructions of girlhood. The Greek roots of the word autobiography autos, bios, and graphe (self, life, writing) inform the kinds of approaches that have been taken to address the relationship between an autobiographical text and its author (Smith and Watson, Reading 1). Further, the understanding of autobiography as “self life writing” has shaped what kinds of texts get to be called autobiography and what texts are something else—identity work, media-making, or marginal textual practice. Fortunately, due to the proliferation of online activity that engages autobiographical modes of textual practice, life writing scholars are beginning to develop new tools in order to address these “texts”—blogs, tweets, status updates, avatars, and a variety of digital personas—to find out what they can tell us about cultural understandings of selfhood and what it means to communicate “real” life through media. One of these tools under construction is the idea of “automedia,” which I will elaborate on below. The same integration of digital spaces and platforms into daily life that is prompting the development of new tools in autobiography studies—which P. David Marshall has described as “the proliferation of the public self”—has also given rise to the field of persona studies, which addresses the ways in which individuals engage in practices of self-presentation in order to form commoditised identities that circulate in affective communities (Marshall 163). To the field of persona studies, this essay contributes an approach to the author website as a site of self-presentation that works to “package” an authorial persona for circulation within contemporary literary marketplaces. Significantly, I address these websites not as direct representations of a pre-existing self, but as automedial texts that need to be read and interpreted, and which work to construct the authorial self or persona. I draw on theories of authorship to propose the “author website” as a genre of automedial representation that creates authorial personas for public consumption. Specifically, I consider the website of Erika Moen—a young, female author working in the medium of autobiographical comics—as a case study in order to explore the tensions between Moen’s authorial self (as produced in the digital elements of erikamoen.com) and the other, more deliberately autobiographical, renderings of her self that appear in her comics. Although young cartoonists tend to position themselves as artists rather than authors, the recent academic and critical interest in the “graphic novel” form has resulted in a growing sense of these works as literary and their makers as authors. In thinking through this distinction, Andrew Bennett’s suggestion that “asking ‘what is an author?’ is intimately related to the question ‘what is literature?’” (118) points to why cartoonists, whose texts are part image and part text and only sometimes bound up as books, have not always been contextualised as authors. Contemporary Authors and the Impetus to “Connect” To have an identity as an author is distinct from being an author. It is one thing to sit at a desk doing the work of writing a book. Making oneself visible as an author is a very different kind of work. Writers are asked to present themselves as authors in a range of contexts such as writers’ festivals, readings, book signings, interviews and book promotion tours, and this demand has increased with the rise of social media: writers are now expected to represent themselves across a variety of digital platforms, which currently include Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. These events and spaces reflect changing reading practices in which readers wish to move beyond the “solitary act of reading” and to participate in literary communities (Johanson and Freeman, 304). Within these communities authors occupy a role that is part celebrity, part guru, and part (imagined) close friend. Johanson and Freeman, in considering the appeal of writers’ festivals, argue “audiences seek genuine relationships with artists […] and are sensitive to a lack of authenticity on the part of the artist in the relationship” (306). Readers want to have access to authors: to get near them, the real them. And this sets up the expectation of a two-way street in which there is pressure on authors to also be participants and to grant readers the access they desire. Author websites are one way that writers respond to the call to make themselves visible and accessible as authors within literary communities, and this call is often framed as an impetus to “connect with” an audience. But the primary function of the author website is to exploit readers’ fascination with the author in order to sell books. In neoliberal cultures the pressure is on for all kinds of people to use online tools and spaces to commoditise their self-representation by cultivating a “self-brand,” and, to varying degrees of alarm, disgust, or pragmatism, this is certainly one way that the author is conceptualised: as a brand name (See Australian Society of Authors; Evers; Force; and Rankin). The author as brand name guarantees and markets a reading experience particular to that brand. As with many other commodities, author brands are a mechanism for organising books into categories with identifiable traits in order that readers/consumers may identify which books appeal to their reading tastes and choose their purchases accordingly. It is as Michel Foucault remarks in answer to the question “What is an Author?”: it is “a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes and chooses” (159). Digital spaces in particular are seen as opportunities for authors to create an “online presence” by communicating themselves as a brand on a website. I am proposing that we might look at how these websites draw on intimate modes of self-representation to create an author-subject that is knowable to a reading public, and to think about how the features of these sites and their digital contexts shape the kinds of authorial personas that can be produced in the medium of the author website. In order to do this, I now want to turn to the field of auto/biography studies in which there is a growing body of work that considers a range of online modes of self-representation as texts that can be read, analysed and understood within a broader framework of auto/biographical practices (autobiography is sometimes written with a slash, as in, auto/biography in order to acknowledge both biography and autobiography within a range of textual practices that broadly deal with life narrative). It is worth mentioning here that there is much diversity within author websites, and not all of them work to facilitate a connection with the reader. In fact, some work conversely to distance the author or to shroud them in mystery, among a range of other functions and formats. These sites of resistance to the pressure to “connect” are just as interesting in the context of finding out how online spaces are used to construct authors, however, there is not room to explore them here. The Author Website: An Automedial Genre In order to address new forms of (chiefly digital) self-representation that go beyond the printed book, scholars working in the field of auto/biography studies have proposed the concept of “automedia” as an alternative to terms such as autobiography, life writing or life narrative. Leading memoir and life narrative theorist Julie Rak (2013) argues that the concept of autobiography—and the ways that scholars have approached the genre—has been dominated by ideas of “narrative” and “writing” that are ill-suited to reading and analysing many online modes of self-representation. For example, although we might have trouble trying to read a Facebook wall or a Second Life avatar as “an autobiography” in the traditional sense, these performances of self-identity demonstrate ways in which users are taking up technology in order to engage in the business of autobiographical representation. And they are interesting for what they might be able to tell us about cultural understandings of selfhood and what it means to “live” a “life.” Rak proposes that these texts, which move beyond the medium of the written word, and which are not necessarily crafted (or read) as a story or narrative, might be studied not as autobiography but instead as automedia. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson also point to automedia as a way of approaching autobiographical texts in a way that emphasizes how the telling or mediation of a life actually shapes the kind of story that can be told about it. They state that “media cannot simply be conceptualized as “tools” for presenting a preexisting, essential self. … Media technologies do not just transparently present the self. They constitute and expand it” (“Virtually Me” 77). So we might understand an automedial approach as a way of studying auto/biographical texts (of a variety of forms) that take into account how the effects of media shape the kinds of selves that can be represented, and which understands the self not as a preexisting subject that might be distilled into story form but as an entity that is brought into being through the processes of mediation. In my conceptualisation, this approach understands that the self does not exist outside of mediation, and it seeks to comprehend how the processes of (auto-)mediation shape selfhood both in individual terms (by analysing a particular automedial text to understand how it constructs the specific subject of that text) and in more general terms (how conventions and practices of different kinds of media shape and reflect cultural ideas of the self). As such, I do not think that automedia as an approach to autobiographical texts need be limited to digital media—after all, books are still media. But the modes of self-representation being taken up in online contexts present scholars with urgent questions about what it means to represent life and the self in increasingly social, networked, multi-media ways. The author website is an increasingly valuable tool for making writers visible as authors in online environments; but how are they automedial? By creating a mediated construction of an authorial persona that functions as a space in which readers (or to be more inclusive, internet users) can move around and experience the author’s mediated persona, the author website draws on strategies of auto/biographical representation in order to respond to a demand for personal access to the author. The author website works to create an often interactive space of contact between the writer as author and the public, where an audience (or internet user) is able to explore the author as he or she is constructed by his or her website. In order to explore how this kind of analysis might begin, I will turn to comics artist Erika Moen and her website erikamoen.com. Case Study: Erika Moen’s Authorial Persona Erika Moen is a self-published comics author based in the US. Her online diary comic DAR!: A Super-Girly Top Secret Comic Diary (2003-2009) grew out of her printed mini comics about coming out as lesbian. Moen’s website erikamoen.com is a good example of a highly developed automedial space, and it works to construct her as a comics author by offering for public consumption an authorial persona that functions as a brand, packaging and marketing her work. This case study is compelling for two reasons. Firstly, the graphic medium that Moen works in is particularly suited to the current moment in Web 2.0 history in which images—often in conjunction with words—are increasingly central. Secondly, the autobiographical nature of her work makes for interesting tensions between the authorial persona that is represented on her website and the autobiographical subject of her comics. For autobiographical authors, the call for them to be accessible to the public takes on an extra dimension. A consistent author brand should maintain an alignment between the kind of work they produce and their persona. In the case of autobiographical writers, their persona is anchored in a textual representation of their real-life self, so this allows us to think about the different functions of these two constructions, and the ways they speak to each other (or don’t). Moen is credited with generating the content of the site; however, her website was designed by a web designer and is based on a blog format. Although Moen’s site is much more than a blog, the blog format is evident as an influence on the design of the site which comprises nine pages: “Home,” “Art Portfolio,” “Comics,” “About,” “Events and Appearances,” “Press,” “Blog,” “Shop,” and “Contact.” In a broader consideration of this kind of author website, the four pages Home, About, Shop, and Contact, represent the key functions that these sites perform. The home page grounds the site, giving the user a first impression and overview of the author brand. “About” is the place that users can find biographical information. The site’s shop indicates the context of the space as a site that occurs within commercial networks of production and consumption, and which also works to disguise the commoditisation of the author by delineating a separate space for commerce that focuses on their work as the object for sale. The “Contact” page provides further channels for “connecting” with the author. The focus of this essay is Moen’s “Home” page (Figure 1). The home page anchors the site and works to create a professional persona for Moen that draws heavily on her autobiographical voice and cartoon style (which she has honed in her works DAR! and Oh Joy Sex Toy). It is highly significant that the face that welcomes the user to the site is not a photographic image of Moen but rather her cartoon avatar, which greets users with an assured and friendly smile. Those familiar with her work will recognise this picture as Moen. If readers fail to make this connection, there are clickable headings immediately to the right of the figure that use the first-person voice: the headings invite the user to “check out my work” and ask them “what am I up to?” (my emphasis). Taking a cue from the comic medium, the user might associate the proximity of the image of the cartoon girl to these statements, and read the two elements cohesively like a comics panel, understanding that the girl is the speaker, and the speaker is the author Erika Moen. Moen, as the author constructed by the website, almost always addresses the reader in this chatty, informal voice which echoes the voice she uses in her comics. On the home page, the reader is asked several questions and all of these appear in close proximity to the drawing of Moen. In addition to the one mentioned above, the reader is asked if they are “Looking to purchase some art?” and whether they “Want to see what I’ve created?” Instead of using labels here, the website uses questions addressed to the reader, and these appear clustered around the cartoon image of Moen which is rendered in her style. These questions draw the reader into an implied conversation, and they also suggest a presence or speaker behind the screen which, prompted by the cartoon Erika, the reader is encouraged to imagine as Erika Moen. This illusion of two-way communication invites the reader to experience the site as a personal encounter, and Moen’s perky, friendly voice that speaks intimately to her readers about her latest activities, products and appearances is the thread that sews together the different spaces of the site as well as Moen’s published work. Above the drawn image of Moen appear the words “Erika Moen” in a large “handwritten” font that dominates the screen. The illusion of handwriting here is significant. Hilary Chute, a scholar of autobiographical comics, in her book Graphic Women argues that handwriting constitutes an important autobiographical act on the part of the comic memoirist. She states that handwriting “underscores the subjective personality of the author” and acts as “a trace of autobiography in the mark of its maker” (10-11). Indeed, handwriting is often read as a sign of humanity and authenticity that is understood in opposition to the machined construction of computer generated fonts. The idea that handwriting can be traced back to an individual and that personal traits can be discovered by decoding a person’s handwriting are ideas that reflect an autobiographical reading of handwriting and its place within textual culture. In this context, on the website of a comics artist, in addition to referencing the medium of cartoons, it also signals these ideas about authenticity and autobiography, and it implies the human behind the digital text. Everything on the home page is a product of Moen herself and each element communicates her persona as an indie, DIY, self-published cartoonist: each image that appears on the home page is drawn by her hand; her voice inflects the majority of the text on the page; some of the writing appears in a handwritten font; even, the bio states, her degree from Pitzer College is “self-made.” Moen’s Home page is an automedial space that facilitates a connection between author and reader that is grounded in the commoditised networks of persona production and consumption: the site serves not only to encourage the reader to buy Moen’s autobiographical comics, but effectively to “buy into” her personal brand. It constructs a persona that draws on a combination of visual and textual signals which at once connect Moen to her comics works and also encourage readers to feel as if they “know” Erika: her name in handwriting, her comics portrait which welcomes the reader, and the subheadings that draw the reader into a conversation. Although there is much more to explore on Moen’s website, in order to demonstrate some key considerations of an automedial approach I have examined several significant elements of the homepage which form the basis for a fuller reading of the site. Conclusion This essay sits at the burgeoning intersection of autobiography studies and digital media studies, and is part of an attempt to understand how digital media practices impact on what kinds of self-representation are produced and consumed. In this way, it contributes to the field of persona studies, which is also invested in exploring systems that facilitate the “presentation of the self that are now ubiquitous in contemporary culture” (Barbour & Marshall). I have suggested that the author website can be read as a genre of automedia in order to explore how these digital spaces—which are embedded in networks of literary production and consumption—draw on auto/biographical strategies to construct an authorial persona that works to sell books by connecting with an audience. This essay works towards further research on paratextual sites that can tell us more about how writers are constructed as authors in the contemporary literary landscape, and I have proposed that a consideration of the deployment and construction of authorial personas is integral to understanding “the author” in this cultural moment. References Anderson, Hephzibah. “How Authors Become Mega-Brands.” BBC. British Broadcasting Corporation. 19 Feb. 2014. 15 Apr. 2014. Australian Society of Authors. “Marketing: The Author as Brand Name.” DVD. Australian Society of Authors, n.d. 15 Apr. 2014. Barbour, Kim, and David Marshall. “The Academic Online: Constructing Persona through the World Wide Web.” First Monday 17.9 (2012). 19 May 2014. Bennett, Andrew. The Author. Abingdon: Routledge, 2005. Chute, Hilary L. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Evers, Stuart. “Bestselling Authors, or Branding Machines?” The Guardian 12 June 2008. 15 Apr. 2014. Force, Marie. “A Finger on the Pulse of Readers – New Survey Confirms Reader Passion for e-Books, But Half Still Want Paperbacks.” PR Newswire 1 Aug. 2013. 14 Apr. 2014. Johanson, Katya, and Robin Freeman. “The Reader as Audience: The Appeal of the Writers’ Festival to the Contemporary Audience.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 26.2 (2012): 303-314. Marshall, P David. “Persona Studies: Mapping the Proliferation of the Public Self.” Journalism 15.2 (2014): 153-170. Moen, Erika. DAR!: A Super-Girly Top Secret Comic Diary. 2003-2009. 10 Apr. 2014. Moen, Erika. Erika Moen. c. 2014. 22 Apr. 2014. Moen, Erika. Oh Joy Sex Toy. 2011-2014. 10 Apr. 2014. Pitsaki, Irini. “Strategic Brand Management Tools in Publishing.” The International Journal of the Book 8.3 (2008): 103-112. Rak, Julie. “First Person? Life Writing versus Automedia.” Beyond the Subject: New Developments in Life Writing: IABA Europe 2013. 31 Oct. - 3 Nov. 2013. Rankin, Jennifer. “Publish and Be Branded: The New Threat to Literature’s Laboratory.” The Guardian 14 Jan. 2014. 15 Apr. 2014. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson. “Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. 70-95.

The borderline between fiction and non-fiction is, like much that is liminal, deeply attractive to observers, and among the consequences of this is a proliferation of names; 'faction', 'fictocriticism' and the shifting pairing of docudrama/dramadoc operate to indicate the blending of different types of fictional and non-fictional material. All of these produce that feeling of unease proper to liminal states. In his recent study, Derek Paget notes how it is the seriousness of the truth claims of that version of non-fiction called documentary that makes its mixing with drama so fraught with potential for controversy. In Queensland we might recall some of the arguments over the screening of Joh's Jury, but Paget underpins his analysis of material like the 1992 HBO/Granada production Hostages with reference to the four year sentence imposed in 1997 on German documentary maker Michael Born for faking material for his documentaries (1). Here not making clear the hybridity of the material was not just an impropriety, but a crime. Yet the liminal material that most fascinates me hides its hybrid nature behind a shifting collection of different terms, ones like 'projection', 'forecast', 'extrapolation' or even (on bad days) 'mission statement'. This particular body of writing is accessible non-fiction about the future. As one who has used science fiction as my basic tool for thinking about the future since I was a child, the question 'how do you write non-fictionally about something that has not yet happened?' fascinates me. That it does not seem to bother other people all that much is what seems strange. How is it that non-fiction about the future differs from science fiction about the future (and for those unfamiliar with or disdainful about the genre, sf can be set in the present, the past or the future)? Certainly one can see distinctions at the extremes; the arrival of tentacled telepathic aliens travelling faster than light characterises sf rather than science, but as another space probe sets off for the Red Planet and visionary future missions are planned, how smug can we be about the difference between the projections of what will be found and the calm descriptive passages of Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars? Indeed the example of the Mars probe was prompted by my current piece of sf reading -- Paul McCauley's Fairyland -- where the 21st century inhabitants of a nanotech-enhanced Europe pursue their affairs against the background of the arrival of television pictures of the first landing of humans on Mars. Sf really loves to vaunt its relationship to science. Devotees of sf, fans and aware readers alike, can reel off a collection of instances when sf seemed to have predicted future scientific or technological developments. The core one here is Arthur C. Clarke's statement of the principles of communication satellites over a decade before the launch of Telstar. (It is quite possible that those people under the age of 50 who know what Telstar is -- the 'r' is now a very important distinguishing feature -- only do so because of its function in this prime example.) Most of the other examples are at heart ones of naming rather than scientific principles -- waldos are now more or less what Robert Heinlein called them in the novella Waldo, and cyberspace is the word used to name something not very much like the inhabitable virtual space in William Gibson's Neuromancer, though many pretend otherwise. There are more, but they are vastly outnumbered by the instances of irrelevance or worse, failed prediction. Most readers have favourite moments when people in the control room of a space ship reach for a slide rule or feed in punch cards, but sf, especially genre sf (i.e. not literary fiction or utopian allegory set in the future), is in the business of entertainment not prediction. Science fiction needs science to give it generic clout, or as Darko Suvin demands, to provide the cognitive support for its imaginative operations (13). Sf writers, even those given to fantastic elements, like to provide acknowledgement pages where they thank the scientists who aren't to blame for any mistakes but helped a lot. Anne McCaffrey is much given to thanking Jack Cohen, but then so are a lot of other people -- Cohen is a biologist, great fan of the genre and a major deliverer of lectures on scientific topics at sf fan conventions. Writers like David Brin actually are scientists with serious credentials. People heavily involved in sf can trot out reams of these instances as well as mentioning how writers without scientific training can still stay within credible parameters when designing new worlds by feeding the data of their desired planet into a computer program which will give them its physical properties and save them from being bombarded with reader's letters pointing out their mistakes. But all of this wonderful fertile mix of science and fiction comes to an abrupt halt when the field of play is science itself in its public guise. Here science is real, science is earnest and sf is a serious problem -- it gives people bad ideas and worse it is popular, especially with the young. While sf is constantly trying to make claims for its own scientificity, trying to show that science and the fiction that has taken its name are absolutely made for each other, entwined together for ever and ever amen, science keeps disentangling the fictional tendrils, pushing off the importunate lover, and trying to deny it was ever tempted to get involved. Sf has so much to gain from the relationship -- status and difference from its fictional like; science has so much to lose. But there is something for science to gain -- and if it's not as even-handed as Fred Astaire giving Ginger Rogers class while she gave him sex appeal, that is a pretty accurate description of the trade (and yes, to continue the analogy, sf does have to do it backwards and in high heels). Sf is the blonde or the beefcake that pulls in the punters for the serious business of the factual, but having called people in, it must be disowned. If you haven't heard my title, you haven't been watching televised technology programmes like Australia's great export success (forget about Neighbours, I mean Beyond 2000, already operating to overcome the lack of prescience about how long the title would work) and you've been missing some news and current affairs too. It seems particularly common in non-fiction segments on robotics. A small mechanical device shambles towards the camera as a voice-over intones "This may look like science fiction, but it is actually a scene from a laboratory in downtown Tokyo" (or it might be from the Media Labs at MIT -- the difference being in the visible pizza boxes). The viewer has been hailed with something familiar and attractive, which has then been disavowed to allow the truth to shine through. Why does the catch phrase occur? Why invoke science fiction only to deny it? A piece of writing about the future cast in the non-fictional mode calls on science fiction for one of several reasons: it may want to attract readers; it may need an accompanying graphic; or it may want to talk about a wonderful new gizmo of some kind and feel the need to attach the unknown to something (however bizarrely) known. Sf is the solution to all these problems since it is arresting or popular (more fun that dusty old science might be feared to be -- I must say I don't have this view of science, but it underwrites the establishment of organisations for the Public Understanding of Science and other pieces of science PR) and it produces pictures purporting to be of the future that have more appeal than the other bodies of futurological graphics. If you don't use stills from sf films or TV (and these are certainly preferable in terms of respectability to the kind of material used for the covers of sf novels or comics), what you are left with are graphs or architects' drawings and these can only do so much. I don't really know all that many people who share my fondness for the Southern Oscillation Index graph on the weather forecast, after all. I recently came across a different use of sf in something of a scientific context. It was not disavowed quite, and I did not even find it accurate, but it points to the symbiotic elements of the couple which is not a couple. It was a review of Richard Ellis's The Search for the Giant Squid (Guardian Weekly 10 Jan. 99). Much of the material referred to in the book was fictional, but the squid and the core of the book was scientific. Michael Dirda, the reviewer, starts a paragraph in the middle of the review by saying: "When he wants to, Ellis can make his science almost science fictional: 'It is now assumed that the sperm whale captures its prey by emitting sound beams of such intensity that they can stun or even kill the prey.'" Now that doesn't sound science fictional to me -- it sounds pretty much pure David Attenborough. And neither Dirda nor Ellis appear to disavow the sf evoked. It is as if there was a convention by which a scientifically-inflected piece of journalism had to gesture to sf come what may, but only had to deny it if it involved the future where the risk of the truth claims of the scientific being compromised by the sf is presumably greater. The basic requirement in being seen to speak truthfully about the future is to reduce apparent fictionality. The best way to do this is to call on the most powerful available truth-speaking discourse, that is to speak scientifically or even more these days, economically. Science can talk very seriously indeed about the future (though it is being tempted into dangerous waters by computer technology working with terms like nanobots and foglets), but as for economics... Well, it has a whole practice which it calls futures, which is entirely speculative, but which can result in the most hallowed production of the 'real' to be encountered -- actual money. To a surprising, or perhaps that should be suspicious, extent, science disguises the fact that it speaks of the future. It engages in inventions which will become usable, discovers things which will change how current practices will be conducted, projects variations in demand; all these wonderful things which only reveal in the tense of the associated verb that their time of actuality is not quite yet. The area that is most overt about its practice of non-fictional future speaking is actually called futurology. Futurology is centred far more in the social sciences and this makes it comparatively weak from the outset. It may be that its honesty about what it engages in reduces its social power. Announcing oneself a futurologist may work as a chat-up line (though the social occasion at which it did so might give one pause) but it doesn't convert into truth-speaking power -- much better to claim to specialise in futures. Yet, when futurology calls on sf, at least it is not necessary for it to engage in the same processes of disavowal or even denial. Academics get used to being disappointed by articles that sound as if they would be really promising for a current or projected piece of work, but one of my greatest disappointments was with a brief piece by Jim Dator with the great title "What Do 'You' Do When Your Robot Bows, as Your Clone Enters Holographic MTV?". Dator is currently head of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies at the University of Hawaii and chair of the World Future Studies Federation. He is thus someone who constantly works with the problem at the core of my concern. As I recall, when I went in search of the Dator article, I had expectations of an etiquette guide for the multiply present, but what I got was more a piece noting how wow! humans may not (continue to) be the peak of evolution for that much longer. Well, Charles Darwin died for that thought long ago anyway and why would Alan Turing have bothered with his Test if he hadn't suspected something similar. Although it's quite an old article at the speed Dator publishes, its calling on an sf scenario, however low-key, to draw attention to non-fictional writing is characteristic of the practice shared with science. I may have been saddened by its failure to even try to deliver on the promise of its title, but at least futurology does not see the necessity of disavowal. In all the reading I've done over the years in both areas there has only been one occasion when I've encountered any disclaimer in a science fictional work which has any parallel to the insistent disclaimers of science fictionality in science writing. It is not of course a disclaimer of scientificity. Instead it is an emphatic assertion of fictionality. What, you ask could possibly require this in a piece of science fiction? Ah, what but autobiography and within that the suspicion of sexual confession. Nicola Griffith puts a post-note to her most recent novel Slow River (both an ecological and a psycho-sexual thriller). It reads: "There is a disturbing tendency among readers -- particularly critics -- to assume that any woman who writes about abuse, no matter how peripherally, must be speaking from her own experience. This is, in Joanna Russ's terms, a denial of the writer's imagination. Should anyone be tempted to assume otherwise, let me be explicit: Slow River is fiction not autobiography. I made it up." So there you have a hierarchy of threats to status, perhaps: science, science fiction and (women's) autobiography. Observe however that I have not put the economic on the list. References Dator, Jim. "What Do 'You' Do When Your Robot Bows, as Your Clone Enters Holographic MTV?" Futures 21 (4 Aug. 1989): 361-5. Paget, Derek. No Other Way to Tell It: Dramadoc/Docudrama on Television. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979 Recommendations Griffith, Nicola. Slow River. New York: Del Rey, 1995. McCauley, Paul. Fairyland. London: Vista, 1995. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Frances Bonner. "This May Look like Science Fiction, But..." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.1 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/look.php>. Chicago style: Frances Bonner, "This May Look like Science Fiction, But...," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 1 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/look.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Frances Bonner. (1999) This may look like science fiction, but... M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9902/look.php> ([your date of access]).

IntroductionEmpathy: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another, either in the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner; also: the capacity for this. (Merriam-Webster, “Empathy”)Compassion: sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it. (Merriam-Webster, “Compassion”)After thirty years of being a vegetarian, my eyes were opened to the inherent cruelty in animal-use industries. I became vegan and spoke out on these issues at animal rights events, rallies and ethical leadership forums. My private psychology practice attracted a significant number of vegans who presented with symptoms of anxiety and depression. However, unlike many of my non-vegan clients who were unclear as to what caused their symptoms, vegans reported it as being directly related to their discovery of systematised animal misuse in society. It was as if they had extended their compassion beyond their own species.Despite these issues being increasingly discussed in open circles, this extension of compassion seems to be limited to veganism. Why is veganism increasing as a compassionate centre, with animal social justice being at its core? Drawing on key emotional experiences of vegans, based on a survey conducted in 2018 and observational data from a private psychology practice, this article explores the experiences of compassion and empathy of vegans, and the impact such experiences can have on social change.The Increase in VeganismVeganism has noticeably increased over the past decade, with greater public debate in the media. A 2016 Roy Morgan poll indicated that the number of strict vegetarian adults in Australia was 2.1 million; an increase of nearly half a million people over four years, and likely to grow (Roy Morgan). Internationally, veganism was the biggest trend of 2018, with over three times the level of interest online as “vegetarian” or “gluten-free” (The Vegan Society).I believe there are a number of reasons for this, including greater awareness through social media, increased social mobility, and people becoming aware of international practices (Oberst). Photos and videos of animal suffering are more easily accessible via mobile devices, and can be shared at a faster rate than mainstream media could traditionally share news (Forgrieve). Small budget Indie films have also shared unknown information with the public, such as Earthlings, Dominion, Cowspiracy, and Kangaroo. In addition to this, I believe there is a greater propensity for people to challenge authority and previous direction from doctors or politicians in what is known as “the era of respect” (Mowat, Corrigan, and Long).These circumstances and more have led to an increase in people making more informed, kinder choices with regard to veganism; suggesting the opening of a new era of compassion beyond one’s own species. However, living in a world where the majority of people’s consumer choices facilitates animal abuse behind closed doors, the vegan is left struggling with “the burden of knowing”; knowledge of the facts of animal mistreatment and the inability to change it or successfully induce others to acknowledge it (Mann, Vystopia).Case Study ResearchBetween 2013 and 2018 I held individual psychological counselling sessions with over 100 self-selected vegans. For these case studies, the definition of “vegan” means someone who has chosen to live their life underpinned by the philosophy of the non-use and non-exploitation of animals and informs what they eat, wear, use and are involved in. These individuals reached out to me because of the trauma they reported experiencing since learning of the ubiquitous nature of animal cruelty in society. They claimed to feel more comfortable with a vegan professional who they felt understood their anguish.From these sessions, using the qualitative research methodology of hermeneutics (Rennie), I began to notice a pattern relating to the nature and enormity of the typical vegan’s distress. Almost every vegan who came to see me presented with symptoms related to their awareness of the systemised cruelty towards animals. Their distress was compounded when they shared this information with their friends and family, whom they were sure would be equally upset by it. Instead, many people responded with indifference, criticism, and anger, saying that everyone has a right to choose what to eat. These feelings of frustration and powerlessness left them unable to reconcile competing beliefs; that the people they loved were capable of turning their eyes away from the suffering their consumer choices were financing. The typical symptoms they reported included (fig. 1):Complicated griefMental anguishDepressionAnxietySelf-medicationAnger and despairSelf-harmSuicidal thoughtsHopelessnessLonelinessPost-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)Fig. 1: Typical symptoms reported by vegans in individual counselling sessions, 2013–2018.After over 1,300 hours of one-to-one sessions with vegans around the world, plus anecdotal stories from vegans I met at numerous events, I came to believe that the vegan’s pain is unique to being vegan and warrants a specific definition.It is imperative to me that vegans do not become labelled as mentally ill or chronically dysfunctional, for which the only solution is medication. As a fellow sufferer of the “burden of knowing”, I wanted to create a term to validate our experience and avoid medicalising our plight. Only then can the vegan’s experience be examined from a humane perspective and solutions be found to help us. Then, we can become part of the rising tide of social action that says human superiority and animal abuse is unacceptable. Because I believe that this experience and associated symptoms are existential in nature, I called this “Vystopia” (Mann, Vystopia).VystopiaThe Existential crisis experienced by vegans, arising out of an awareness of the trance-like collusion with a dystopian world and the awareness of the greed, ubiquitous animal exploitation, and speciesism in a modern dystopia. (Mann, “Suffer”)Vystopia is the anguish a vegan feels, knowing about the systematised cruelty towards animals in society, and the further distress they experience with the unconscious collusion of non-vegans, and their resistance or criticism of this information. Many of my clients experienced a range of symptoms of vystopia (fig. 2): Feelings of alienation from non-vegansMisanthropyGuilt over past consumption of animalsGuilt that they are not doing enough to save animalsInability to enjoy normal aspects of lifeFrustration with non-vegans who don’t ask more questionsAnger with the “burden of knowing”Powerlessness when health professionals tell them “it’s normal”Fig. 2: Symptoms of VystopiaMisdiagnosis of the Vegan’s ConditionMany doctors have referred patients to me for mental health symptoms of eating disorders, social adjustment disorder, and self-harm. It is my opinion that vegans referred to me with these symptoms do not suffer from traditional eating or self-harm disorders.As I learned from working in a psychiatric teaching hospital in the UK, clients with these conditions are often deeply unaware of the reasons influencing their symptoms. Their symptoms become an outward sign of hidden or unconscious distress which is too painful to confront directly. The vegans sent to me are deeply distressed due to the horror they’ve witnessed or now know about in the animal industries.I discovered that regularly viewing graphic videos of animal abuse was linked with vegan clients diagnosed as having self-harm tendencies (Klonsky). They view these as they feel guilty if they don’t know about all aspects of the animal’s suffering. It’s only by knowing all the details that they can be informed and act to change it. Vegan clients who have told their doctors they “can’t eat around people who are consuming animals” are often diagnosed as having eating disorders, although they lack the typical medical symptoms of eating disorders. While it is possible for vegans, like anyone else, to suffer from these conditions, I believe that many clients have been misdiagnosed. For many, their symptoms are indicative of a normal, feeling human’s way of dealing with vystopia: The truth is that it is not a pathology, but the distress a vegan feels when they look at the state of the world and the cruelty and suffering and it’s an absolutely rational response any feeling human being should feel; a dystopian reaction to what they are seeing. (Klaper)Survey ResearchBetween February and July 2018, I conducted an anonymous online survey of 820 vegans. The survey comprised 26 multiple-choice questions covering 7 main areas:How long someone has been veganLength they have experienced vystopiaWhen vystopia was most experiencedWhere people seek help for vystopiaWhat they do to reduce symptomsFamily and relationships where significant others are not veganWhat support is most needed to help vystopiansResultsWhilst an in-depth analysis of the results is outside the scope of this article, some of the key responses are as follows (figs. 3–6):How long have you been vegan?1–5 years48%Less than 6 months16%6–12 months14%5–10 years12%10 years plus10%Fig. 3: Length of time as vegan.How long have you suffered from vystopia?1–5 years39%5–10 years21%6–12 months15%Less than 6 months13%10 years plus12%Fig. 4: Length of time suffering from vystopia.When do you most experience vystopia?Others around you eat animals79%Seeing images of animal cruelty78%Other people refuse to hear about animal cruelty78%Grocery shopping69%People laugh at you for being vegan56%Family celebrations55%Holidays40%At work events39%All the time37%When away from vegan friends30%Other8%NB: Participants invited to tick all that apply Fig. 5: When vystopia is experienced.What do you do to reduce your vystopia?Remove yourself from the world58%Increase animal advocacy55%Talk to friends34%Self-medicate (e.g. alcohol, drugs, food)24%Other16%See a doctor2%Fig. 6: Actions taken to reduce vystopia.Explaining the Differences in Adoption of VeganismWhy do some people extend their compassion towards animals whilst others are unaware of the need to do so, or believe it is anthropomorphic or sentimental? Research is needed to examine this more, but my own research and anecdotal experience suggests some factors:Social ConformityMany people are strongly influenced by what they perceive as socially normal (Mallinson and Hatemi). Cultural and family traditions, media, and community behaviour all influence the food and lifestyle choices of society. Most people are unaware that their consumer choices play a role in the mistreatment and abuse of animals.Social conditioning influences whether people choose to investigate new information further or continue with the status quo for the sake of fitting in. The need to fit in creates a social trance whereby people continue to collude with animal cruelty through their inaction, and in fact their willful ignorance means they are not likely to change their actions, as they don’t know any differently.The vegan is one who has chosen to find out the truth about animal exploitation and extend their compassion towards other species by abstaining from anything related to animal abuse.Personal and Social Defense MechanismsSimilar to social conformity, the concept of being “different” from the perceived norm is enough for many people to continue with their actions, regardless of the consequence for animals. Similarly, those who are suddenly privy to new information may feel judged by the messenger, and resistance is easier than change. The vegan is one who chooses to adjust their actions, despite the judgement or ridicule which may accompany it.Personality VariablesOn the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Myers and Myers), my anecdotal experience suggests that individuals with preferences for “feeling” over “thinking” are more likely to become vegan. The vegan community consists of many different personality types, with those who are strong “feeling” types more inclined to display empathy and empathetic action.Avoidance of Existential Anxiety When a person’s understanding of the world is challenged, this can create anxiety, where one is compelled to ask, “What else don’t I know?” If animal cruelty can occur at such a widespread rate—with most of society oblivious to it—what else is going on behind closed doors? For some, the reality of facing the truth can create enough angst that they will resist knowing and changing. The vegan may still experience such angst, but is compelled to change for the sake of the animals. Differing Capacity to Encompass Novel IdeasIdeas which vary from a widely believed ideology are often rejected, simply because the new idea is too radical to believe or comprehend. Consider the Law of Gravity or the concept of germs, both initially shunned by experts. Some people are more willing to delve into a new concept and explore the possibilities which come with it. Others are firmly tied to conformist ideology and will only jump on the bandwagon once others are driving it.Differing Levels of ConsciousnessIn the original book on Spiral Dynamics, Beck and Cowan talk about the magnetic forces that attract and repel individuals, the webs that connect people within organisations, and influence the rise and fall of nations and cultures. The book tracks our historic emergence from clans and tribes to networks and inter-connected networks. It identifies seven variations on how change occurs in individuals, society and leadership.Its relevance for veganism is in appreciating that there are different levels of consciousness in society. For example, a vegan passionate about the ethical treatment of animals would be faced with resistance from a hunter with a more tribal level of consciousness, according to the Spiral Dynamics model. It would be like two people from different planets communicating. Another example would be a community outraged by the influence of veganism on local employment, as demand for dairy reduces. By understanding where other people or groups are coming from, we can adapt the way in which we communicate. If vegans talk ethics and non-speciesism to people focused primarily on job security, they will face resistance.Tipping PointsIn marketing, the uptake of products and services follows a certain pattern. For example, in the 1990s, few people believed that the mobile phone market would explode to such a point. The same goes for changes in collective beliefs and ideas in society, such as the early protagonists for the Abolition of Slavery. These early innovators and adopters faced enormous resistance by those who benefited from the trade. As the movement gathered momentum, it reached what Gladwell has called the “Tipping Point”, “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point” (12). As Gladwell stresses here, “ideas, products, messages and behaviours spread like viruses do” (7).In The Empathetic Civilization, Rifkin discusses society being wired for empathy. This occurs when the neurons in the brain mirror those of people around them, and can be likened to the psychological concept of “entrainment”. This phenomenon suggests that vegans have the ability to influence others through showing empathy and compassion.Increasingly, teenage vegans are referred to me who say, “I just had this awareness and know it is wrong to eat animals”. Many of them hadn’t seen anything on veganism or spoken to anyone about animal exploitation. I believe that this is an example of what Jung has called the “Collective Unconscious”; the structures of the unconscious mind which are shared among beings of the same species. This is encouraging for vegans who often feel helpless and cannot see how a vegan world will happen in their lifetime.ConclusionThose who are vegan for ethical reasons appear to feel compelled to take action to end animals’ plight. This may be because of the ubiquitous nature of the problem, but also because other people’s non-veganism is contributing to their vystopia.The extended compassion of vegans leaves them feeling depressed, wondering how enough people are going to change in order for veganism to become the new norm. The concept of entrainment is an encouraging one for vegans, reminding us of the importance of playing our part in being the example we want others to “entrain” to.It is my experience that empathy alone will not alleviate vystopia for these ethically-driven vegans. Vystopia can only be alleviated through action. A person may feel compelled to take action to end the suffering of refugees, children, the homeless and when they tell people, their efforts are applauded. The vegan who changes their everyday consumer choices to end animal suffering is often met with resistance, derision or criticism, as the non-vegan insists they have choice or that animals are inferior to humans. Another person may disagree with animal cruelty and yet refuse to change their consumer habits which finance the cruelty. One’s food choices are powerful political actions, and disagreeing with animal cruelty yet eating animals fuels the vegan’s vystopia. By shifting our focus from how awful the world is to taking action every day to mirror the vegan world we seek, we are creating a new norm to which others will entrain.With the increase in veganism trending upwards, the changes we are seeing across the world might mirror our compulsion to act. While the depth of animal empathy and vystopia is full of real anguish, I believe it also provides what we need to propel the world towards a vegan norm.ReferencesBeck, Don Edward, and Christopher Cowan. Spiral Dynamics: Mastering Values, Leadership and Change. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005.Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret. Dirs. Kip Anderson and Keegan Kuhn. Appian Way, A.U.M. Films, First Spark Media, 2014.Dominion. Dir. Chris Delforce. Aussie Farms, 2018.Earthlings. Dir. Shaun Monson. Libra Max and Maggie Q, 2005.Forgrieve, Janet. “The Growing Acceptance of Veganism.” Forbes 2 Nov. 2018. 29 Mar. 2018 <https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetforgrieve/2018/11/02/picturing-a-kindler-gentler-world-vegan-month/#331421342f2b>.Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. London: Abacus, 2000.Jung, Carl G. The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. 1969.Kangaroo: A Love-Hate Story. Dirs. Michael McIntyre and Kate Clere-McIntyre. Hopping Pictures, 2017.Klaper, Michael. “Interview with Dr. Michael Klaper.” YouTube 17 Aug. 2018. 29 Mar. 2019 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=87&v=8EQOUODlq2c>.Klonsky, E. David. “The Functions of Deliberate Self-Injury: A Review of the Evidence.” Clinical Psychology Review 27.2 (2007): 226–39. Mallinson, Daniel J., and Peter K. Hatemi. “The Effects of Information and Social Conformity on Opinion Change.” Plos One 13.5 (2018). 29 Mar. 2019 <https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0196600>.Mann, Clare. “Do You Suffer from Vystopia? The Discovery of Systemised Cruelty.” Blog post. No date. 5 Apr. 2019 <https://www.veganpsychologist.com/do-you-suffer-from-vystopia/?platform=hootsuite>.———. Vystopia: The Anguish of Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World. Sydney: Communicate31, 2018.Mowat, Andrew, John Corrigan, and Douglas Long. The Success Zone: 5 Powerful Steps to Growing Yourself and Leading Others. Mt. Evelyn: Global Publishing Group, 2009.Myers, Isabel Briggs, and Peter B. Myers. Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type. 2nd ed. Mountain View: Consulting Psychologists Press, 1995.Oberst, Lindsay. “Why the Global Rise in Vegan and Plant-Based Eating Isn’t a Fad (600% Increase in U.S. Vegans + Other Astounding Stats).” Food Revolution Network 18 Jan. 2018. 20 Mar. 2019 <https://foodrevolution.org/blog/vegan-statistics-global/>. Rennie, David L. “Methodical Hermeneutics and Humanistic Psychology.” The Humanistic Psychologist 35.1 (2007): 1-14.Rifkin, Jeremy. The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. Cambridge: Polity, 2010.Roy Morgan. “The Slow But Steady Rise of Vegetarianism in Australia.” Roy Morgan 15 Aug. 2016. 29 Mar. 2019 <http://www.roymorgan.com/findings/vegetarianisms-slow-but-steady-rise-in-australia-201608151105>.The Vegan Society. “Statistics.” The Vegan Society, 2019. 20 Mar. 2019 <https://www.vegansociety.com/news/media/statistics>.

IntroductionI spent five days on the Arizona Utah border, photographing Monument Valley and the surrounding areas as part of a group of eight undertaking a landscape photography workshop under the direction of a Navajo guide. Observing where our guide was taking us, and watching and talking to other tourist photographers, I was reminded of John Urry’s concept of the “tourist gaze” and the idea that tourists see destinations in terms of the promotional images they are familiar with (Urry 1). It seemed that tourists re-created images drawn from the popular imaginary, inserting themselves into familiar narratives of place. The goal of the research was to look specifically at the tourist gaze, that is, the way that tourists see view destinations and then represent that vision in their images. Circle of Representation Urry explained the tourist gaze as a particular way of seeing the world as a series of images created by the tourism industry; images which were then consumed or collected through tourist photography. He saw this as constituting a “closed circle of representation” where the images employed by the tourism industry to attract tourists to particular destinations were reproduced in tourists’ own holiday snaps, and as more tourists sought out these locations, they were increasingly used to represent the destination. Susan Sontag saw travel employed as “a strategy for accumulating photographs” (9) suggesting that the images were the culmination of the journey. Urry also saw the end point of tourism as travellers to a destination “demonstrating that they have really been there by showing their version of the images that they had seen originally before they set off” (140).Talking to the guide, my group, and other tourists about the images we were recording, and reviewing images tagged Monument Valley on Instagram revealed that digital and network technologies had altered tourists’ photographic practices. Tourist impressions of destinations come from a wide range of popular culture sources. They have, even on smartphones, fairly sophisticated tools for creating images; and they have diverse networks for distributing their images. Increasingly, the images that tourists see as representative of Monument Valley came from popular culture and social media, and not simply from tourism promotions. People are posting their travel images online, and are in turn looking to posts from others in their search for travel information (Akehurst 55). The current circle of representation in tourist photography is not simply a process of capturing promotional imagery, but an interaction between tourists that draws upon films, television, and other popular culture forms. Tourist photographs are less a matter of “consuming places” (Urry 259) and more an identity performance through which they create ongoing personal narratives of place by inserting themselves into pre-existing stories about the destination and circulating the new narratives.Jenkins analysed brochures on Australia available to potential tourists in Vancouver, Canada, and determined that the key photographic images used to promote Australia were Uluru and the Sydney Opera House, followed by sandy beaches alongside tropical blue waters. Interviews with Canadian backpackers travelling around Australia, and an examination of the images these backpackers took with the disposable cameras they were given, found a correlation between the brochure images and the personal photographs. Jenkins concluded that the results supported Urry’s theory of a closed circle of representation, in that the images from the brochures were “tracked down and recaptured, and the resulting photographs displayed upon return home by the backpackers as evidence of the trip” (Jenkins 324).Garrod randomly selected 25 tourists along the seafront of Aberystwyth, Wales, and gave them a single-use camera, a brief socio-demographic questionnaire, a photo log, and a reply-paid envelope in which they could return these items. The tourists were asked to take 12 photos and log the reason they took each photograph and what they tried to capture in terms of their visit to Aberystwyth. Nine females and four males returned their cameras, providing 164 photographs, which were compared with 70 postcards depicting Aberystwyth. While an initial comparison revealed similarities in the content of tourist photographs and the picture postcards of the town, Garrod’s analysis revealed two main differences: postcards featured wide angle or panoramic views, while tourist photos tended to be close up or detail shots and postcards included natural features, particularly bodies of water, while tourist photographs were more often of buildings and man-made structures. Garrod concluded that the relationship between tourism industry images and tourist photographs “might be more subtle and complex than simply for the two protagonists in the relationship to mimic one other” (356).MethodIdentifying a tourist’s motivation for taking a particular photograph, the source of inspiration for the image, and the details of what the photographer was attempting to capture involves the consideration of a range of variables, many of which cannot be controlled. The ability of the photographer and the sophistication of their equipment will have an impact on the type of images captured; for example this may explain the absence of panoramas in Aberystwyth tourist photos. The length of the stay and the level of familiarity with the location may also have an impact; on a first visit a tourist may look for the major landmarks and on subsequent visits photograph the smaller details. The personal history of the tourist, the meaning the location has for them, their reasons for visiting and their mood at the time, will all influence their selection of photo subjects. Giving tourists a camera and then asking them to photograph the destination may influence the choice of subject and the care taken with composition, however this does ensure a direct link between the tourist opinions gathered and the images analysed. An approach that depends on seeing the images taken independently by the tourists who were interviewed has logistical problems that significantly reduce sample size.Fourteen randomly selected tourists at the visitors centre in Monument Valley, a random sampling of 500 Instagram images hash tagged Monument Valley, and photographs taken by seven photographers in the author’s group were studied by the author. The tourists were asked what they wanted to take photographs of while in Monument Valley, and why of those particular subjects. The images taken by these tourists were not available for analysis for logistical reasons, and 500 Instagram images tagged #MonumentValley were collected as generally representative of tourist images. Members of the photography workshop group were all serious amateur photographers with digital SLR cameras, interchangeable lenses, and tripods. Motivations, decisions and the evaluation of images were discussed with this group, and their images reviewed in terms of the extent to which the image was felt to be representative of the location.Monument ValleyMonument Valley can be considered a mythic space in that it is a real place that has taken on mythic meanings that go beyond physical characteristics and lived experiences (Slotkin 11). Located on the Navajo Tribal Park on the Arizona Utah border, it is known by the Navajo as Tse'Bii'Ndzisgaii or “Valley of the Rocks.” Monument Valley is emblematic of the Wild West, the frontier beyond which civilization vanishes, a mythology originally derived from the Western Films of director John Ford. Ford's film, Stagecoach, was shot in Monument Valley and Ford returned nine times to shoot Westerns here, even when films (such as The Searchers, set in Texas) were not set in Arizona or Utah. The spectacular desert scenery with its towering rock formations combine epic grandeur with brutal conditions, providing an appropriate backdrop for dramatic oppositions: civilization versus barbarity, community versus wilderness, freedom versus domestication. The mythological meanings attached to Monument Valley were extended in the films, novels, television programs, and advertising that followed. Footage of Monument Valley is used to represent a blend of freedom and danger in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Easy Rider, Thelma & Louise, Marlborough and Chevrolet advertising, the television series Airwolf and episodes of Doctor Who. Monument Valley was the culmination of Forrest Gump's exhaustive run, and the setting for music videos by Kanye West, Madonna and Michael Jackson, each drawing on the themes of alienation and the displacement of the hero. While Westerns are on one level uniquely American, they are consistent with widely known romantic myths and stories, and the universal narratives evoked by Monument Valley have appeal far outside the USA. The iconic images of Monument Valley have been circulated well beyond tourist informational material, permeating a breadth of popular culture forms.Photographing the ValleyPhotography is intrinsically linked with tourism, fulfilling a number of roles. Travel can have as its purpose the collection of images, and as such, photography can function to structure the travel experience, and to evaluate its success (Schroeder; Sontag). Recognisable images of the location provide evidence that travel was undertaken, places were visited, and the traveller has experienced some form of authentic or exotic experience (Chalfen 435). Sharing images is an essential part of the process. The various roles of photography are to an extent dependent on having a shared mental image of what photographs from the travel location would look like. This mental image is derived, in part, from tourism sources such as postcards, brochures, and websites, but also from popular culture, and increasingly from photographs taken by other tourists. Travel images are shared online on sites such as Trip Advisor and Virtual Tourist, as well as travel blogs and photo sharing sites like Flickr and Instagram. People who post images online are likely to look to the same sites to search for travel information from others (Akehurst 55), reinforcing specific images as representative of the place and the experience.At the beginning of our photography-based tour we were asked which locations we wanted to photograph. There was a general consensus, with people looking for vistas and panoramas, “golden hour” light on the rock formations of buttes and mesas, sunrises and sunsets with silhouetted landscape forms, and close-ups of shadow patterns and textures. Our guide added that one day had been set aside for the iconic images, which were described as the “Forest Gump” shot from Highway 163, the Mittens at sunrise, John Ford Point (as most recently seen in The Lone Ranger movie posters), and the vista from Artist’s Point or North Window. When I asked tourists at the visitor information centre the same question about the images they wanted to capture, the responses were uniform with all of them saying the view of The Mittens, which was immediately before them. Seventy-eight percent (N=11) said that they were after a general panorama with the distinctive landforms, and Highway 163 was named by 57 percent (N=8). Few gave more than these three sites. Forty-two percent (N=6) described the John Ford Point image with the Navajo rider as a goal, and the same number said they would like to take some sunrise or sunset images. Twenty-eight percent (N=4) were looking to take images of themselves or their friends and family, with the distinctive landscape as a backdrop. There was a high level of consistency between the images described by the guide as “iconic” and the photographs that tourists wished to capture.Categorising five hundred Instagram images with the hashtag Monument Valley revealed 195 pictures (39 percent) of the Mittens, 58 of which were taken at sunrise or sunset. There were 88 images (18 percent) taken of Highway 163. John Ford Point featured in 26 images (five percent) of images and Artist’s Point was the location in 20 (four percent). Seventy-nine photographs (16 percent) were of other landmarks such as the Three Sisters, Elephant Butte, and Rain God Mesa, all visible from the self-drive circuit. Landmarks which could only be visited accompanied by a Navajo guide, accounted for 48 (nine percent) of the Instagram images. There were 16 images (three percent) of people, meals, and cars without any recognisable landmarks in the frame. The remaining 28 images (five percent) were of landmarks in the Southwest, but not in Monument Valley, although they were tagged as such.As expected, the photography tour group had a fairly wide range of images, which included close-ups of rocks, images of juniper trees, and images taken in places that were accessible only with a high clearance vehicle and a Navajo guide, such as the Totem Pole and Yei Bi Chei, the Valley of the Gods, and the slickrock formations of Mystery Valley. However, in the images selected at the end of the workshop as representative of their experience of Monument Valley, all participants included the iconic images of Highway 163, the Mittens, and the Artist’s Point vista.Very few images were of the Navajo people. Tourists are requested not to photograph the Navajo unless they were at a sign-posted location where a mechanism was available for paying for the privilege. Here the Navajo posed in traditional dress, engaged in customary activities, or as foreground interest in the desert landscape. The few tourists availing themselves of these opportunities seemed self-conscious, hurriedly taking the snap and paying the fee. Gillespie explains this as the effect of the “reverse gaze” where the photographed positions the photographer “as an ignorant and superficial tourist” (349). At the time, only one of the iconic images was featured on one of the official tourist sites, with the Mittens forming the banner image on the Visit Utah Monument Valley page. The Visit Arizona Monument Valley page had a single image (of the Ear of the Wind natural arch), and the Navajo Nation Parks and Recreation Monument Valley page also had a single image, that of the Three Sisters formation.Image and MeaningThe dominant subject in both tourist and tourism industry images is the Mittens. This image is also prominent in popular culture beginning with John Ford's film Stagecoach, through to Kanye West’s Bound 2 music video. This suggests that there is a closed circle of representation in tourist photography, with visitors capturing the images they have previously seen as representative of the destination. However, there may be an additional, more prosaic, explanation. The Mittens can be photographed from the terrace at the visitors centre, from the rooms at the View Hotel, or they can be captured from the car park, meaning that tourists do not have to leave their cars to attach this image to their travel narrative. The second most photographed landscape was that of Highway 163, an image that can be taken without even having to pay the fee and enter the Navajo Park.Garrod’s study of tourist and professional images of Aberystwyth noted that tourists did not have photographs taken from the top of the hill, and while no explanation for this was given, it could be that ease of access was a consideration. While the number of visitors to America’s national parks and recreation areas is increasing each year, the amount of time each visitor spends at the attraction is in decline. The average visit to Yosemite lasts just under five hours, visitors stay for just under two hours in Saguaro National Park in Arizona, and at the Grand Canyon National Park, most visitors spend just 17 minutes looking at the magnificent landscape (Bernstein; de Graaf). In Yosemite National Park many visitors “simply rolled by slowly in their cars, taking photos out the windows” (de Graaf np). So, ease of access to locations familiar from popular culture images is a factor in tourist representations of their destinations.Our photography tour group stayed five days in Monument Valley and travelled further afield to locations only accessible with a Navajo guide, however the images selected as representative of Monument Valley were of the same easily reached landmarks. This suggests that the process around the perpetuation of iconic tourist images is more complex than simple ease of access, or first impressions.What is apparent in looking at both the Instagram images and those photographs selected as representative by the tour group, is that what is depicted is not necessarily contemporary tourist experience, but rather a way of seeing the experience in terms of personal and cultural stories. Photography involves the selection, structuring and shaping of what is to be captured (Urry 260), so that the image is as much the representation of a perception, as a snapshot of experienced reality. In a guide to photographing the southwest of the USA, Matrés regrets the greater restrictions on movement and the increased commercialisation in Monument Valley (170), which reduce the possibility of photographing under good light conditions, and of capturing images without tourist buses, sales booths, and consequent crowds. However, almost all of the photographs studied avoided these. Photographers seemed to have expended considerable effort to produce an idealised image of a Western landscape that would have been familiar to John Ford, as the photographs were not of a commercialised, crowded tourist destination. When someone paid the horseman to ride out to the end of John Ford Point, groups of tourists would walk out too, fussing over the horse, however having people in the image led to those on the photography tour rejecting the image as representative of Monument Valley. For the most part, the landscape images highlighted the isolation and remoteness, depicting the frontier beyond which civilization ceases to exist.ConclusionPhotography is one of the performances through which people establish personal realities (Crang 245), and the reality for Monument Valley tourists is that it is still a remote destination. It is in the driest and least populated part of the US, and receives only 350,000 visitors a year compared, with the five million people who visit the nearby Grand Canyon. On a prosaic level, tourist photographs verify that the location was visited (Sontag 9), so the images must be able to be readily associated with the destination. They are evidence that the tourist has experienced some form of authentic, exotic, place (Chalfen 435), and so must depict scenes that differ from the everyday landscape. They also play a role in constructing an identity based in being a particular type of tourist, so they need to contribute to the narrative constructed from a blend of mythologies, memories and experiences. The circle of representation in tourist images is still closed, though it has broadened to constitute a narrative derived from a range of sources. By capturing the iconic landmarks of Monument Valley framed to emphasise the grandeur and isolation, tourists insert themselves into a narrative that includes John Wayne and Kanye West at the edge of civilization.References2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968.Airwolf. Dir. Donald P. Bellisario, CBS, 1984–1986.Akehurst, Gary. “User Generated Content: The Use of Blogs for Tourism Organisations and Tourism Consumers.” Service Business 3.1 (2009): 51-61.Bernstein, Danny. “The Numbers behind National Park Visitation.” National Parks Traveller, 2010. 5 Aug. 2016 <http://www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2010/04/numbers-behind-national-park-visitation/>.Kanye West. Bound 2. Nick Knight Good Music, 2013.Chalfen, Richard M. “Photography’s Role in Tourism: Some Unexplored Relationships.” Annals of Tourism Research 6.4 (1979): 435–447Crang, Mike. “Knowing, Tourism and Practices of Vision.” Leisure/Tourism Geographies: Practices and Geographical Knowledge. Ed. David Crouch. London: Routledge, 1999. 238–56.De Graaf, John. “Finding Time for Our Parks.” Earth Island Journal, 2016. 5 Aug. 2016 <http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/finding_time_for_our_parks/>.Doctor Who. Sydney Newman, C. E. Webber, Donald Wilson. BBC One, 1963–present.Easy Rider. Dir. Dennis Hopper. Columbia Pictures, 1969.Garrod, Brian. “Understanding the Relationship between Tourism Destination Imagery and Tourist Photography.” Journal of Travel Research 47.3 (2009): 346-358Gillespie, Alex. "Tourist Photography and the Reverse Gaze." Ethos 34.3 (2006): 343-366.Jenkins, Olivia. “Photography and Travel Brochures: The Circle of Representation.” Tourism Geographies 5.3 (2003): 305-328.Matrés, Laurent. Photographing the Southwest. Alta Loma, CA: Graphie Publishers, 2006.Schroeder, Jonathan E. Visual Consumption. London: Routledge, 2002.Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. London: Penguin Books, 1977 Stagecoach. Dir. John Ford. United Artists, 1937.The Searchers. Dir. John Ford. Warner Bros, 1956.Thelma & Louise. Dir. Ridley Scott. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1991.Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage, 1992.

No man [...] can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which one may be true. (Nathaniel Hawthorne Scarlet Letter – as seen and pondered by Tony Soprano at Bowdoin College, The Sopranos, Season 1, Episode 5: “College”)The fictitious is a particular and varied source of insight into the everyday world. The idea of seriality—with its variations of the serial, series, seriated—is very much connected to our patterns of entertainment. In this essay, I want to begin the process of testing what values and meanings can be drawn from the idea of seriality into comprehending the play of persona in contemporary culture. From a brief overview of the intersection of persona and seriality as well as a review of the deployment of seriality in popular culture, the article focuses on the character/ person-actor relationship to demonstrate how seriality produces persona. The French term for character—personnage—will be used to underline the clear relations between characterisation, person, and persona which have been developed by the recent work by Lenain and Wiame. Personnage, through its variation on the word person helps push the analysis into fully understanding the particular and integrated configuration between a public persona and the fictional role that an actor inhabits (Heinich).There are several qualities related to persona that allow this movement from the fictional world to the everyday world to be profitable. Persona, in terms of origins, in and of itself implies performance and display. Jung, for instance, calls persona a mask where one is “acting a role” (167); while Goffman considers that performance and roles are at the centre of everyday life and everyday forms and patterns of communication. In recent work, I have use persona to describe how online culture pushes most people to construct a public identity that resembles what celebrities have had to construct for their livelihood for at least the last century (“Persona”; “Self”). My work has expanded to an investigation of how online persona relates to individual agency (“Agency”) and professional postures and positioning (Barbour and Marshall).The fictive constructions then are intensified versions of what persona is addressing: the fabrication of a role for particular directions and ends. Characters or personnages are constructed personas for very directed ends. Their limitation to the study of persona as a dimension of public culture is that they are not real; however, when one thinks of the actor who takes on this fictive identity, there is clearly a relationship between the real personality and that of the character. Moreover, as Nayar’s analysis of highly famous characters that are fictitious reveals, these celebrated characters, such as Harry Potter or Wolverine, sometime take on a public presence in and of themselves. To capture this public movement of a fictional character, Nayar blends the terms celebrity with fiction and calls these semi-public/semi-real entities “celefiction”: the characters are famous, highly visible, and move across media, information, and cultural platforms with ease and speed (18-20). Their celebrity status underlines their power to move outside of their primary text into public discourse and through public spaces—an extra-textual movement which fundamentally defines what a celebrity embodies.Seriality has to be seen as fundamental to a personnage’s power of and extension into the public world. For instance with Harry Potter again, at least some of his recognition is dependent on the linking or seriating the related books and movies. Seriality helps organise our sense of affective connection to our popular culture. The familiarity of some element of repetition is both comforting for audiences and provides at least a sense of guarantee or warranty that they will enjoy the future text as much as they enjoyed the past related text. Seriality, though, also produces a myriad of other effects and affects which provides a useful background to understand its utility in both the understanding of character and its value in investigating contemporary public persona. Etymologically, the words “series” and seriality are from the Latin and refer to “succession” in classical usage and are identified with ancestry and the patterns of identification and linking descendants (Oxford English Dictionary). The original use of the seriality highlights its value in understanding the formation of the constitution of person and persona and how the past and ancestry connect in series to the current or contemporary self. Its current usage, however, has broadened metaphorically outwards to identify anything that is in sequence or linked or joined: it can be a series of lectures and arguments or a related mark of cars manufactured in a manner that are stylistically linked. It has since been deployed to capture the production process of various cultural forms and one of the key origins of this usage came from the 19th century novel. There are many examples where the 19th century novel was sold and presented in serial form that are too numerous to even summarise here. It is useful to use Dickens’ serial production as a defining example of how seriality moved into popular culture and the entertainment industry more broadly. Part of the reason for the sheer length of many of Charles Dickens’ works related to their original distribution as serials. In fact, all his novels were first distributed in chapters in monthly form in magazines or newspapers. A number of related consequences from Dickens’ serialisation are relevant to understanding seriality in entertainment culture more widely (Hayward). First, his novel serialisation established a continuous connection to his readers over years. Thus Dickens’ name itself became synonymous and connected to an international reading public. Second, his use of seriality established a production form that was seen to be more affordable to its audience: seriality has to be understood as a form that is closely connected to economies and markets as cultural commodities kneaded their way into the structure of everyday life. And third, seriality established through repetition not only the author’s name but also the name of the key characters that populated the cultural form. Although not wholly attributable to the serial nature of the delivery, the characters such as Oliver Twist, Ebenezer Scrooge or David Copperfield along with a host of other major and minor players in his many books become integrated into everyday discourse because of their ever-presence and delayed delivery over stories over time (see Allen 78-79). In the same way that newspapers became part of the vernacular of contemporary culture, fictional characters from novels lived for years at a time in the consciousness of this large reading public. The characters or personnages themselves became personalities that through usage became a way of describing other behaviours. One can think of Uriah Heep and his sheer obsequiousness in David Copperfield as a character-type that became part of popular culture thinking and expressing a clear negative sentiment about a personality trait. In the twentieth century, serials became associated much more with book series. One of the more successful serial genres was the murder mystery. It developed what could be described as recognisable personnages that were both fictional and real. Thus, the real Agatha Christie with her consistent and prodigious production of short who-dunnit novels was linked to her Belgian fictional detective Hercule Poirot. Variations of these serial constructions occurred in children’s fiction, the emerging science fiction genre, and westerns with authors and characters rising to related prominence.In a similar vein, early to mid-twentieth century film produced the film serial. In its production and exhibition, the film serial was a déclassé genre in its overt emphasis on the economic quality of seriality. Thus, the film serial was generally a filler genre that was interspersed before and after a feature film in screenings (Dixon). As well as producing a familiarity with characters such as Flash Gordon, it was also instrumental in producing actors with a public profile that grew from this repetition. Flash Gordon was not just a character; he was also the actor Buster Crabbe and, over time, the association became indissoluble for audiences and actor alike. Feature film serials also developed in the first half-century of American cinema in particular with child actors like Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland often reprising variations of their previous roles. Seriality more or less became the standard form of delivery of broadcast media for most of the last 70 years and this was driven by the economies of production it developed. Whether the production was news, comedy, or drama, most radio and television forms were and are variation of serials. As well as being the zenith of seriality, television serials have been the most studied form of seriality of all cultural forms and are thus the greatest source of research into what serials actually produced. The classic serial that began on radio and migrated to television was the soap opera. Although most of the long-running soap operas have now disappeared, many have endured for more than 30 years with the American series The Guiding Light lasting 72 years and the British soap Coronation Street now in its 64th year. Australian nighttime soap operas have managed a similar longevity: Neighbours is in its 30th year, while Home and Away is in its 27th year. Much of the analyses of soap operas and serials deals with the narrative and the potential long narrative arcs related to characters and storylines. In contrast to most evening television serials historically, soap operas maintain the continuity from one episode to the next in an unbroken continuity narrative. Evening television serials, such as situation comedies, while maintaining long arcs over their run are episodic in nature: the structure of the story is generally concluded in the given episode with at least partial closure in a manner that is never engaged with in the never-ending soap opera serials.Although there are other cultural forms that deploy seriality in their structures—one can think of comic books and manga as two obvious other connected and highly visible serial sources—online and video games represent the other key media platform of serials in contemporary culture. Once again, a “horizon of expectation” (Jauss and De Man 23) motivates the iteration of new versions of games by the industry. New versions of games are designed to build on gamer loyalties while augmenting the quality and possibilities of the particular game. Game culture and gamers have a different structural relationship to serials which at least Denson and Jahn-Sudmann describe as digital seriality: a new version of a game is also imagined to be technologically more sophisticated in its production values and this transformation of the similitude of game structure with innovation drives the economy of what are often described as “franchises.” New versions of Minecraft as online upgrades or Call of Duty launches draw the literal reinvestment of the gamer. New consoles provide a further push to serialisation of games as they accentuate some transformed quality in gameplay, interaction, or quality of animated graphics. Sports franchises are perhaps the most serialised form of game: to replicate new professional seasons in each major sport, the sports game transforms with a new coterie of players each year.From these various venues, one can see the centrality of seriality in cultural forms. There is no question that one of the dimensions of seriality that transcends these cultural forms is its coordination and intersection with the development of the industrialisation of culture and this understanding of the economic motivation behind series has been explored from some of the earliest analyses of seriality (see Hagedorn; Browne). Also, seriality has been mined extensively in terms of its production of the pleasure of repetition and transformation. The exploration of the popular, whether in studies of readers of romance fiction (Radway), or fans of science fiction television (Tulloch and Jenkins; Jenkins), serials have provided the resource for the exploration of the power of the audience to connect, engage and reconstruct texts.The analysis of the serialisation of character—the production of a public personnage—and its relation to persona surprisingly has been understudied. While certain writers have remarked on the longevity of a certain character, such as Vicky Lord’s 40 year character on the soap opera One Life to Live, and the interesting capacity to maintain both complicated and hidden storylines (de Kosnik), and fan audience studies have looked at the parasocial-familiar relationship that fan and character construct, less has been developed about the relationship of the serial character, the actor and a form of twinned public identity. Seriality does produce a patterning of personnage, a structure of familiarity for the audience, but also a structure of performance for the actor. For instance, in a longitudinal analysis of the character of Fu Manchu, Mayer is able to discern how a patterning of iconic form shapes, replicates, and reiterates the look of Fu Manchu across decades of films (Mayer). Similarly, there has been a certain work on the “taxonomy of character” where the serial character of a television program is analysed in terms of 6 parts: physical traits/appearance; speech patterns, psychological traits/habitual behaviours; interaction with other characters; environment; biography (Pearson quoted in Lotz).From seriality what emerges is a particular kind of “type-casting” where the actor becomes wedded to the specific iteration of the taxonomy of performance. As with other elements related to seriality, serial character performance is also closely aligned to the economic. Previously I have described this economic patterning of performance the “John Wayne Syndrome.” Wayne’s career developed into a form of serial performance where the individual born as Marion Morrison becomes structured into a cultural and economic category that determines the next film role. The economic weight of type also constructs the limits and range of the actor. Type or typage as a form of casting has always been an element of film and theatrical performance; but it is the seriality of performance—the actual construction of a personnage that flows between the fictional and real person—that allows an actor to claim a persona that can be exchanged within the industry. Even 15 years after his death, Wayne remained one of the most popular performers in the United States, his status unrivalled in its close definition of American value that became wedded with a conservative masculinity and politics (Wills).Type and typecasting have an interesting relationship to seriality. From Eisenstein’s original use of the term typage, where the character is chosen to fit into the meaning of the film and the image was placed into its sequence to make that meaning, it generally describes the circumscribing of the actor into their look. As Wojcik’s analysis reveals, typecasting in various periods of theatre and film acting has been seen as something to be fought for by actors (in the 1850s) and actively resisted in Hollywood in 1950 by the Screen Actors Guild in support of more range of roles for each actor. It is also seen as something that leads to cultural stereotypes that can reinforce the racial profiling that has haunted diverse cultures and the dangers of law enforcement for centuries (Wojcik 169-71). Early writers in the study of film acting, emphasised that its difference from theatre was that in film the actor and character converged in terms of connected reality and a physicality: the film actor was less a mask and more a sense of “being”(Kracauer). Cavell’s work suggested film over stage performance allowed an individuality over type to emerge (34). Thompson’s semiotic “commutation” test was another way of assessing the power of the individual “star” actor to be seen as elemental to the construction and meaning of the film role Television produced with regularity character-actors where performance and identity became indissoluble partly because of the sheer repetition and the massive visibility of these seriated performances.One of the most typecast individuals in television history was Leonard Nimoy as Spock in Star Trek: although the original Star Trek series ran for only three seasons, the physical caricature of Spock in the series as a half-Vulcan and half-human made it difficult for the actor Nimoy to exit the role (Laws). Indeed, his famous autobiography riffed on this mis-identity with the forceful but still economically powerful title I am Not Spock in 1975. When Nimoy perceived that his fans thought that he was unhappy in his role as Spock, he published a further tome—I Am Spock—that righted his relationship to his fictional identity and its continued source of roles for the previous 30 years. Although it is usually perceived as quite different in its constitution of a public identity, a very similar structure of persona developed around the American CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite. With his status as anchor confirmed in its power and centrality to American culture in his desk reportage of the assassination and death of President Kennedy in November 1963, Cronkite went on to inhabit a persona as the most trusted man in the United States by the sheer gravitas of hosting the Evening News stripped across every weeknight at 6:30pm for the next 19 years. In contrast to Nimoy, Cronkite became Cronkite the television news anchor, where persona, actor, and professional identity merged—at least in terms of almost all forms of the man’s visibility.From this vantage point of understanding the seriality of character/personnage and how it informs the idea of the actor, I want to provide a longer conclusion about how seriality informs the concept of persona in the contemporary moment. First of all, what this study reveals is the way in which the production of identity is overlaid onto any conception of identity itself. If we can understand persona not in any negative formulation, but rather as a form of productive performance of a public self, then it becomes very useful to see that these very visible public blendings of performance and the actor-self can make sense more generally as to how the public self is produced and constituted. My final and concluding examples will try and elucidate this insight further.In 2013, Netflix launched into the production of original drama with its release of House of Cards. The series itself was remarkable for a number of reasons. First among them, it was positioned as a quality series and clearly connected to the lineage of recent American subscription television programs such as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Dexter, Madmen, The Wire, Deadwood, and True Blood among a few others. House of Cards was an Americanised version of a celebrated British mini-series. In the American version, an ambitious party whip, Frank Underwood, manoeuvres with ruthlessness and the calculating support of his wife closer to the presidency and the heart and soul of American power. How the series expressed quality was at least partially in its choice of actors. The role of Frank Underwood was played by the respected film actor Kevin Spacey. His wife, Clare, was played by the equally high profile Robin Warren. Quality was also expressed through the connection of the audience of viewers to an anti-hero: a personnage that was not filled with virtue but moved with Machiavellian acuity towards his objective of ultimate power. This idea of quality emerged in many ways from the successful construction of the character of Tony Soprano by James Gandolfini in the acclaimed HBO television series The Sopranos that reconstructed the very conception of the family in organised crime. Tony Soprano was enacted as complex and conflicted with a sense of right and justice, but embedded in the personnage were psychological tropes and scars, and an understanding of the need for violence to maintain influence power and a perverse but natural sense of order (Martin).The new television serial character now embodied a larger code and coterie of acting: from The Sopranos, there is the underlying sense and sensibility of method acting (see Vineberg; Stanislavski). Gandolfini inhabited the role of Tony Soprano and used the inner and hidden drives and motivations to become the source for the display of the character. Likewise, Spacey inhabits Frank Underwood. In that new habitus of television character, the actor becomes subsumed by the role. Gandolfini becomes both over-determined by the role and his own identity as an actor becomes melded to the role. Kevin Spacey, despite his longer and highly visible history as a film actor is overwhelmed by the televisual role of Frank Underwood. Its serial power, where audiences connect for hours and hours, where the actor commits to weeks and weeks of shoots, and years and years of being the character—a serious character with emotional depth, with psychological motivation that rivals the most visceral of film roles—transforms the actor into a blended public person and the related personnage.This blend of fictional and public life is complex as much for the producing actor as it is for the audience that makes the habitus real. What Kevin Spacey/Frank Underwood inhabit is a blended persona, whose power is dependent on the constructed identity that is at source the actor’s production as much as any institutional form or any writer or director connected to making House of Cards “real.” There is no question that this serial public identity will be difficult for Kevin Spacey to disentangle when the series ends; in many ways it will be an elemental part of his continuing public identity. This is the economic power and risk of seriality.One can see similar blendings in the persona in popular music and its own form of contemporary seriality in performance. For example, Eminem is a stage name for a person sometimes called Marshall Mathers; but Eminem takes this a step further and produces beyond a character in its integration of the personal—a real personnage, Slim Shady, to inhabit his music and its stories. To further complexify this construction, Eminem relies on the production of his stories with elements that appear to be from his everyday life (Dawkins). His characterisations because of the emotional depth he inhabits through his rapped stories betray a connection to his own psychological state. Following in the history of popular music performance where the singer-songwriter’s work is seen by all to present a version of the public self that is closer emotionally to the private self, we once again see how the seriality of performance begins to produce a blended public persona. Rap music has inherited this seriality of produced identity from twentieth century icons of the singer/songwriter and its display of the public/private self—in reverse order from grunge to punk, from folk to blues.Finally, it is worthwhile to think of online culture in similar ways in the production of public personas. Seriality is elemental to online culture. Social media encourage the production of public identities through forms of repetition of that identity. In order to establish a public profile, social media users establish an identity with some consistency over time. The everydayness in the production of the public self online thus resembles the production and performance of seriality in fiction. Professional social media sites such as LinkedIn encourage the consistency of public identity and this is very important in understanding the new versions of the public self that are deployed in contemporary culture. However, much like the new psychological depth that is part of the meaning of serial characters such as Frank Underwood in House of Cards, Slim Shady in Eminem, or Tony Soprano in The Sopranos, social media seriality also encourages greater revelations of the private self via Instagram and Facebook walls and images. We are collectively reconstituted as personas online, seriated by the continuing presence of our online sites and regularly drawn to reveal more and greater depths of our character. In other words, the online persona resembles the new depth of the quality television serial personnage with elaborate arcs and great complexity. Seriality in our public identity is also uncovered in the production of our game avatars where, in order to develop trust and connection to friends in online settings, we maintain our identity and our patterns of gameplay. At the core of this online identity is a desire for visibility, and we are drawn to be “picked up” and shared in some repeatable form across what we each perceive as a meaningful dimension of culture. Through the circulation of viral images, texts, and videos we engage in a circulation and repetition of meaning that feeds back into the constancy and value of an online identity. Through memes we replicate and seriate content that at some level seriates personas in terms of humour, connection and value.Seriality is central to understanding the formation of our masks of public identity and is at least one valuable analytical way to understand the development of the contemporary persona. This essay represents the first foray in thinking through the relationship between seriality and persona.ReferencesBarbour, Kim, and P. David Marshall. “The Academic Online Constructing Persona.” First Monday 17.9 (2012).Browne, Nick. “The Political Economy of the (Super)Text.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9.3 (1984): 174-82. Cavell, Stanley. “Reflections on the Ontology of Film.” Movie Acting: The Film Reader. Ed. Wojcik and Pamela Robertson. London: Routledge, 2004 (1979). 29-35.Dawkins, Marcia Alesan. “Close to the Edge: Representational Tactics of Eminem.” The Journal of Popular Culture 43.3 (2010): 463-85.De Kosnik, Abigail. “One Life to Live: Soap Opera Storytelling.” How to Watch Television. Ed. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 355-63.Denson, Shane, and Andreas Jahn-Sudmann. “Digital Seriality: On the Serial Aesthetics and Practice of Digital Games.” Journal of Computer Game Culture 7.1 (2013): 1-32.Dixon, Wheeler Winston. “Flash Gordon and the 1930s and 40s Science Fiction Serial.” Screening the Past 11 (2011). 20 May 2014.Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1973.Hagedorn, Roger “Technology and Economic Exploitation: The Serial as a Form of Narrative Presentation.” Wide Angle 10. 4 (1988): 4-12.Hayward, Jennifer Poole. Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera. 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Social media companies like to claim the world. Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook is “building a global community”. Twitter promises to show you “what’s happening in the world right now”. Even Parler claims to be the “global town square”. Indeed, among the fungible aspects of digital culture is the promise of geographic fungibility—the interchangeability of location and national provenance. The taglines of social media platforms tap into the social imagination of the Internet erasing distance—Marshall McLuhan’s global village on a touch screen (see fig. 1). Fig. 1: Platform taglines: YouTube, Twitter, Parler, and Facebook have made globality part of their pitch to users. Yet users’ perceptions of geographic fungibility remain unclear. Scholars have proposed forms of cosmopolitan and global citizenship in which national borders play less of a role in how people engage with political ideas (Delanty; Sassen). Others suggest the potential erasure of location may be disorienting (Calhoun). “Nobody lives globally”, as Hugh Dyer writes (64). In this article, I interrogate popular and academic assumptions about global political spaces, looking at geographic fungibility as a condition experienced by users. The article draws on interviews conducted with Twitter users in the Scandinavian region. Norway, Sweden, and Denmark offer an interesting contrast to online spaces because of their small and highly cohesive political cultures; yet these countries also have high Internet penetration rates and English proficiency levels, making them potentially highly globally connected (Syvertsen et al.). Based on a thematic analysis of these interviews, I find fungibility emerges as a key feature of how users interact with politics at a global level in three ways: invisibility: fungibility as disconnection; efficacy: fungibility as empowerment; and antagonism: non-fungibility as strategy. Finally, in contrast to currently available models, I propose that online practices are not characterised so much by cosmopolitan norms, but by what I describe as fungible citizenship. Geographic Fungibility and Cosmopolitan Hopes Let’s back up and take a real-life example that highlights what it means for geography to be fungible. In March 2017, at a high-stakes meeting of the US House Intelligence Committee, a congressman suddenly noticed that President Donald Trump was not only following the hearing on television, but was live-tweeting incorrect information about it on Twitter. “This tweet has gone out to millions of Americans”, said Congressman Jim Himes, noting Donald Trump’s follower count. “16.1 million to be exact” (C-SPAN). Only, those followers weren’t just Americans; Trump was tweeting to 16.1 million followers worldwide (see Sevin and Uzunoğlu). Moreover, the committee was gathered that day to address an issue related to geographic fungibility: it was the first public hearing on Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 American presidential race—which occurred, among other places, on Twitter. In a way, democratic systems are based on fungibility. One person one vote. Equality before the law. But land mass was not imagined to be commutable, and given the physical restrictions of communication, participation in the public sphere was largely assumed to be restricted by geography (Habermas). But online platforms offer a fundamentally different structure. Nancy Fraser observes that “public spheres today are not coextensive with political membership. Often the interlocutors are neither co-nationals nor fellow citizens” (16). Netflix, YouTube, K-Pop, #BLM: the resources that people draw on to define their worlds come less from nation-specific media (Robertson 179). C-SPAN’s online feed—if one really wanted to—is as easy to click on in Seattle as in Stockholm. Indeed, research on Twitter finds geographically dispersed networks (Leetaru et al.). Many Twitter users tweet in multiple languages, with English being the lingua franca of Twitter (Mocanu et al.). This has helped make geographic location interchangeable, even undetectable without use of advanced methods (Stock). Such conditions might set the stage for what sociologists have envisioned as cosmopolitan or global public spheres (Linklater; Szerszynski and Urry). That is, cross-border networks based more on shared interest than shared nationality (Sassen 277). Theorists observing the growth of online communities in the late 1990s and early 2000s proposed that such activity could lead to a shift in people’s perspectives on the world: namely, by closing the communicative distance with the Other, people would also close the moral distance. Delanty suggested that “discursive spaces of world openness” could counter nationalist tendencies and help mobilise cosmopolitan citizens against the negative effects of globalisation (44). However, much of this discourse dates to the pre-social media Internet. These platforms have proved to be more hierarchical, less interactive, and even less global than early theorists hoped (Burgess and Baym; Dahlgren, “Social Media”; Hindman). Although ordinary citizens certainly break through, entrenched power dynamics and algorithmic structures complicate the process, leading to what Bucher describes as a reverse Panopticon: “the possibility of constantly disappearing, of not being considered important enough” (1171). A 2021 report by the Pew Research Center found most Twitter users receive few if any likes and retweets of their content. In short, it may be that social media are less like Marshall McLuhan’s global village and more like a global version of Marc Augé’s “non-places”: an anonymous and disempowering whereabouts (77–78). Cosmopolitanism itself is also plagued by problems of legitimacy (Calhoun). Fraser argues that global public opinion is meaningless without a constituent global government. “What could efficacy mean in this situation?” she asks (15). Moreover, universalist sentiment and erasure of borders are not exactly the story of the last 15 years. Media scholar Terry Flew notes that given Brexit and the rise of figures like Trump and Bolsonaro, projections of cosmopolitanism were seriously overestimated (19). Yet social media are undeniably political places. So how do we make sense of users’ engagement in the discourse that increasingly takes place here? It is this point I turn to next. Citizenship in the Age of Social Media In recent years, scholars have reconsidered how they understand the way people interact with politics, as access to political discourse has become a regular, even mundane part of our lives. Increasingly they are challenging old models of “informed citizens” and traditional forms of political participation. Neta Kligler-Vilenchik writes: the oft-heard claims that citizenship is in decline, particularly for young people, are usually based on citizenship indicators derived from these legacy models—the informed/dutiful citizen. Yet scholars are increasingly positing … citizenship [is not] declining, but rather changing its form. (1891) In other words, rather than wondering if tweeting is like a citizen speaking in the town square or merely scribbling in the margins of a newspaper, this line of thinking suggests tweeting is a new form of citizen participation entirely (Bucher; Lane et al.). Who speaks in the town square these days anyway? To be clear, “citizenship” here is not meant in the ballot box and passport sense; this isn’t about changing legal definitions. Rather, the citizenship at issue refers to how people perceive and enact their public selves. In particular, new models of citizenship emphasise how people understand their relation to strangers through discursive means (Asen)—through talking, in other words, in its various forms (Dahlgren, “Talkative Public”). This may include anything from Facebook posts to online petitions (Vaughan et al.) to digital organising (Vromen) to even activities that can seem trivial, solitary, or apolitical by traditional measures, such as “liking” a post or retweeting a news story. Although some research finds users do see strategic value in such activities (Picone et al.), Lane et al. argue that small-scale acts are important on their own because they force us to self-reflect on our relationship to politics, under a model they call “expressive citizenship”. Kligler-Vilenchik argues that such approaches to citizenship reflect not only new technology but also a society in which public discourse is less formalised through official institutions (newspapers, city council meetings, clubs): “each individual is required to ‘invent themselves’, to shape and form who they are and what they believe in—including how to enact their citizenship” she writes (1892). However, missing from these new understandings of politics is a spatial dimension. How does the geographic reach of social media sites play into perceptions of citizenship in these spaces? This is important because, regardless of the state of cosmopolitan sentiment, political problems are global: climate change, pandemic, regulation of tech companies, the next US president: many of society’s biggest issues, as Beck notes, “do not respect nation-state or any other borders” (4). Yet it’s not clear whether users’ correlative ability to reach across borders is empowering, or overwhelming. Thus, inspired particularly by Delanty’s “micro” cosmopolitanism and Dahlgren’s conditions for the formation of citizenship (“Talkative Public”), I am guided by the following questions: how do people negotiate geographic fungibility online? And specifically, how do they understand their relationship to a global space and their ability to be heard in it? Methodology Christensen and Jansson have suggested that one of the underutilised ways to understand media cultures is to talk to users directly about the “mediatized everyday” (1474). To that end, I interviewed 26 Twitter users in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. The Scandinavian region is a useful region of study because most people use the Web nearly every day and the populations have high English proficiency (Syvertsen et al.). Participants were found in large-scale data scrapes of Twitter, using linguistic and geographic markers in their profiles, a process similar to the mapping of the Australian Twittersphere (Bruns et al.). The interviewees were selected because of their mixed use of Scandinavian languages and English and their participation in international networks. Participants were contacted through direct messages on Twitter or via email. In figure 2, the participants’ timeline data have been graphed into a network map according to who users @mentioned and retweeted, with lines representing tweets and colours representing languages. The participants include activists, corporate consultants, government employees, students, journalists, politicians, a security guard, a doctor, a teacher, and unemployed people. They range from age 24 to 60. Eight are women, reflecting the gender imbalance of Twitter. Six have an immigrant background. Eight are right-leaning politically. Participants also have wide variation in follower counts in order to capture a variety of experiences on the platform (min=281, max=136,000, median=3,600, standard deviation=33,708). All users had public profiles, but under Norwegian rules for research data, they will be identified here by an ID and their country, gender, and follower count (e.g., P01, Sweden, M, 23,000). Focussing on a single platform allowed the interviews to be more specific and makes it easier to compare the participants’ responses, although other social media often came up in the course of the interviews. Twitter was selected because it is often used in a public manner and has become an important channel for political communication (Larsson and Moe). The interviews lasted around an hour each and were conducted on Zoom between May 2020 and March 2021. Fig. 2: Network map of interview participants’ Twitter timelines. Invisibility: The Abyss of the Global Village Each participant was asked during the interview how they think about globality on Twitter. For many, it was part of the original reason for joining the platform. “Twitter had this reputation of being the hangout of a lot of the world’s intellectuals”, said P022 (Norway, M, 136,000). One Swedish woman described a kind of cosmopolitan curation process, where she would follow people on every continent, so that her feed would give her a sense of the world. “And yes, you can get that from international papers”, she told me, “but if I actually consumed as much as I do on Twitter in papers, I would be reading papers and articles all day” (P023, Sweden, F, 384). Yet while globality was part of the appeal, it was also an abstraction. “I mean, the Internet is global, so everything you do is going to end up somewhere else”, said one Swedish user (P013, M, 12,000). Users would echo the taglines that social media allow you to “interact with someone half a world away” (P05, Norway, M, 3,300) but were often hard-pressed to recall specific examples. A strong theme of invisibility—or feeling lost in an abyss—ran throughout the interviews. For many users this manifested in a lack of any visible response to their tweets. Even when replying to another user, the participants didn’t expect much dialogic engagement with them (“No, no, that’s unrealistic”.) For P04 (Norway, F, 2,000), tweeting back a heart emoji to someone with a large following was for her own benefit, much like the intrapersonal expressions described by Lane et al. that are not necessarily intended for other actors. P04 didn’t expect the original poster to even see her emoji. Interestingly, invisibility was more of a frustration among users with several thousand followers than those with only a few hundred. Having more followers seemed to only make Twitter appear more fickle. “Sometimes you get a lot of attention and sometimes it’s completely disregarded” said P05 (Norway, M, 3,300). P024 (Sweden, M, 2,000) had essentially given up: “I think it’s fun that you found me [to interview]”, he said, “Because I have this idea that almost no one sees my tweets anymore”. In a different way, P08 (Norway, F) who had a follower count of 121,000, also felt the abstraction of globality. “It’s almost like I’m just tweeting into a void or into space”, she said, “because it's too many people to grasp or really understand that these are real people”. For P08, Twitter was almost an anonymous non-place because of its vastness, compared with Facebook and Instagram where the known faces of her friends and family made for more finite and specific places—and thus made her more self-conscious about the visibility of her posts. Efficacy: Fungibility as Empowerment Despite the frequent feeling of global invisibility, almost all the users—even those with few followers—believed they had some sort of effect in global political discussions on Twitter. This was surprising, and seemingly contradictory to the first theme. This second theme of empowerment is characterised by feelings of efficacy or perception of impact. One of the most striking examples came from a Danish man with 345 followers. I wondered before the interview if he might have automated his account because he replied to Donald Trump so often (see fig. 3). The participant explained that, no, he was just trying to affect the statistics on Trump’s tweet, to get it ratioed. He explained: it's like when I'm voting, I'm not necessarily thinking [I’m personally] going to affect the situation, you know. … It’s the statistics that shows a position—that people don't like it, and they’re speaking actively against it. (P06, Denmark, M, 345) Other participants described their role similarly—not as making an impact directly, but being “one ant in the anthill” or helping information spread “like rings in the water”. One woman in Sweden said of the US election: I can't go to the streets because I'm in Stockholm. So I take to their streets on Twitter. I'm kind of helping them—using the algorithms, with retweets, and re-enforcing some hashtags. (P018, Sweden, F, 7,400) Note that the participants rationalise their Twitter activities through comparisons to classic forms of political participation—voting and protesting. Yet the acts of citizenship they describe are very much in line with new norms of citizenship (Vaughan et al.) and what Picone et al. call “small acts of engagement”. They are just acts aimed at the American sphere instead of their national sphere. Participants with large followings understood their accounts had a kind of brand, such as commenting on Middle Eastern politics, mocking leftist politicians, or critiquing the media. But these users were also sceptical they were having any direct impact. Rather, they too saw themselves as being “a tiny part of a combined effect from a lot of people” (P014, Norway, M, 39,000). Fig. 3: Participant P06 replies to Trump. Antagonism: Encounters with Non-Fungibility The final theme reflects instances when geography became suddenly apparent—and thrown back in the faces of the users. This was often in relation to the 2020 American election, which many of the participants were following closely. “I probably know more about US politics than Swedish”, said P023 (Sweden, F, 380). Particularly among left-wing users who listed a Scandinavian location in their profile, tweeting about the topic had occasionally led to encounters with Americans claiming foreign interference. “I had some people telling me ‘You don't have anything to do with our politics. You have no say in this’” said P018 (Sweden, F, 7,400). In these instances, the participants likewise deployed geography strategically. Participants said they would claim legitimacy because the election would affect their country too. “I think it’s important for the rest of the world to give them [the US] that feedback. That ‘we’re depending on you’” said P017 (Sweden, M, 280). As a result of these interactions, P06 started to pre-emptively identify himself as Danish in his tweets, which in a way sacrificed his own geographic fungibility, but also reinforced a wider sense of geographic fungibility on Twitter. In one of his replies to Donald Trump, Jr., he wrote, “Denmark here. The world is hoping for real leader!” Conclusion: Fungible Citizenship The view that digital media are global looms large in academic and popular imagination. The aim of the analysis presented here is to help illuminate how these perceptions play into practices of citizenship in digital spaces. One of the contradictions inherent in this research is that geographic or linguistic information was necessary to find the users interviewed. It may be that users who are geographically anonymous—or even lie about their location—would have a different relationship to online globality. With that said, several key themes emerged from the interviews: the abstraction and invisibility of digital spaces, the empowerment of geographic fungibility, and the occasional antagonistic deployment of non-fungibility by other users and the participants. Taken together, these themes point to geographic fungibility as a condition that can both stifle as well as create new arenas for political expression. Even spontaneous and small acts that aren’t expected to ever reach an audience (Lane et al.) nevertheless are done with an awareness of social processes that extend beyond the national sphere. Moreover, algorithms and metrics, while being the source of invisibility (Bucher), were at times a means of empowerment for those at a physical distance. In contrast to the cosmopolitan literature, it is not so much that users didn’t identify with their nation as their “community of membership” (Sassen)—they saw it as giving them an important perspective. Rather, they considered politics in the EU, US, UK, Russia, and elsewhere to be part of their national arena. In this way, the findings support Delanty’s description of “changes within … national identities rather than in the emergence in new identities” (42). Yet the interviews do not point to “the desire to go beyond ethnocentricity and particularity” (42). Some of the most adamant and active global communicators were on the right and radical right. For them, opposition to immigration and strengthening of national identity were major reasons to be on Twitter. Cross-border communication for them was not a form of resistance to nationalism but wholly compatible with it. Instead of the emergence of global or cosmopolitan citizenship then, I propose that what has emerged is a form of fungible citizenship. This is perhaps a more ambivalent, and certainly a less idealistic, view of digital culture. It implies that users are not elevating their affinities or shedding their national ties. Rather, the transnational effects of political decisions are viewed as legitimate grounds for political participation online. This approach to global platforms builds on and nuances current discursive approaches to citizenship, which emphasise expression (Lane et al.) and contribution (Vaughan et al.) rather than formal participation within institutions. Perhaps the Scandinavian users cannot cast a vote in US elections, but they can still engage in the same forms of expression as any American with a Twitter account. That encounters with non-fungibility were so notable to the participants also points to the mundanity of globality on social media. Vaughan et al. write that “citizens are increasingly accustomed to participating in horizontal networks of relationships which facilitate more expressive, smaller forms of action” (17). The findings here suggest that they are also accustomed to participating in geographically agnostic networks, in which their expressions of citizenship are at once small, interchangeable, and potentially global. References Asen, Robert. "A Discourse Theory of Citizenship." Quarterly Journal of Speech 90.2 (2004): 189–211. Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London: Verso, 1995. Beck, Ulrich. The Cosmopolitan Vision. Trans. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity, 2006. Bruns, Axel, et al. "The Australian Twittersphere in 2016: Mapping the Follower/Followee Network." Social Media + Society 3.4 (2017): 1–15. Bucher, Taina. "Want to Be on the Top? Algorithmic Power and the Threat of Invisibility on Facebook." New Media & Society 14.7 (2012): 1164–80. 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"The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Social Theory." British Journal of Sociology 57.1 (2006): 25–47. Dyer, Hugh C. Coping and Conformity in World Politics. Routledge, 2009. Flew, Terry. "Globalization, Neo-Globalization and Post-Globalization: The Challenge of Populism and the Return of the National." Global Media and Communication 16.1 (2020): 19–39. Fraser, Nancy. "Transnationalizing the Public Sphere: On the Legitimacy and Efficacy of Public Opinion in a Post-Westphalian World." Theory, Culture & Society 24.4 (2007): 7–30. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1991 [1962]. Kligler-Vilenchik, Neta. "Alternative Citizenship Models: Contextualizing New Media and the New ‘Good Citizen’." New Media & Society 19.11 (2017): 1887–903. Lane, Daniel S., Kevin Do, and Nancy Molina-Rogers. "What Is Political Expression on Social Media Anyway? 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According to The Betoota Advocate (Parker), a CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) paper has recently established that “it takes roughly seven minutes on average for a vegan to tell you that they’re vegan” (qtd. in Harrington et al. 135). For such a statement to have currency as a joke means that it is grounded in a shared experience of being vegan on the one hand, and of encountering vegans on the other. Why should vegans feel such a need to justify themselves? I recognise the observation as being true of me, and this article is one way to explore this perspective: writing to find out what I currently only intuit. As Richardson notes (516), writing is “a way of ‘knowing’—a method of discovery and analysis. By writing in different ways, we discover new aspects of our topic and our relationship to it. Form and content are inseparable” (qtd. in Wall 151).Autoethnography, the qualitative research methodology used for this article, is etymologically derived from Greek to indicate a process for exploring the self (autos) and the cultural (“ethno” from ethnos—nation, tribe, people, class) using a shared, understood, approach (“graphy” from graphia, writing). It relies upon critical engagement with and synthesising of the personal. In Wall’s words, this methodological analysis of human experience “says that what I know matters” (148). The autoethnographic investigation (Riggins; Sparkes) reported here interrogates the experience of “being judged” as a vegan: firstly, by myself; secondly, by other vegans; and ultimately by the wider society. As Ellis notes, autoethnography is “research, writing, story and method that connect the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social and political. Autoethnographic forms feature concrete action, emotion, embodiment, self-consciousness, and introspection” (xix).Introspection is important because researchers’ stories of their observations are interwoven with self-reflexive critique and analysis: “illustrative materials are meant to give a sense of what the observed world is really like, while the researcher’s interpretations are meant to represent a more detached conceptualization of that reality” (Strauss and Corbin 22). Leaving aside Gans’s view that this form of enquiry represents the “climax of the preoccupation with self […] an autobiography written by sociologists” (542), an autoethnography generally has the added advantage of protecting against Glendon and Stanton’s concern that interpretive studies “are often of too short a duration to be able to provide sufficiently large samples of behaviour” (209). In my case, I have twelve years of experience of identifying as a vegan to draw upon.My experience is that being vegan is a contested activity with a significant range of variation that partly reflects the different initial motivations for adopting this increasingly mainstream identity. Greenebaum notes that “ethical vegans differentiate between those who ‘eat’ vegan (health vegans) and those who ‘live’ vegan (ethical vegans)”, going on to suggest that these differences create “hierarchies and boundaries between vegans” (131). As Greenebaum acknowledges, there is sometimes a need to balance competing priorities: “an environmental vegan […] may purchase leather products over polyvinyl chloride (PVC), thinking that leather is a better choice for the environment” (130). Harrington et al. similarly critique vegan motivations as encompassing “a selfless pursuit for those who cared for other beings (animals)” to “a concern about impacts that affect all humans (environment), and an interest mostly in the self (individual health …)” (144). Wright identifies a fourth group of vegans: those searching for a means of dietary inclusivity (2). I have known Orthodox Jewish households that have adopted veganism because it is compatible with keeping Kosher, while many strict Hindus are vegan and some observant Muslims may also follow suit, to avoid meat that is not Halal certified.The Challenge of the EverydayAlthough my initial vegan promptings were firmly at the selfish end of an altruism spectrum, my experience is that motivation is not static. Being a vegan for any reason increasingly primes awareness of more altruistic motivations “at the intersection of a diversity of concerns [… promoting] a spread and expansion of meaning to view food choices holistically” (Harrington et al. 144). Even so, everyday life offers a range of temptations and challenges that require constant juggling and, sometimes, a string of justifications: to oneself, and to others. I identify as a bit of a bad vegan, and not simply because I embrace the possibility that “honey is a gray area” (Greenebaum, quoting her participant Jason, 139). I’m also flexible around wine, for example, and don’t ask too many questions about whether the wine I drink is refined using milk, or egg-shells or even (yuk!) fish bladders. The point is, there are an infinite number of acid tests as to what constitutes “a real vegan”, encouraging inter-vegan judgmentality. Some slight definitional slippage aligns with Singer and Mason’s argument, however, that vegans should avoid worrying about “trivial infractions of the ethical guidelines […] Personal purity isn’t really the issue. Not supporting animal abuse – and persuading others not to support it – is. Giving people the impression that it is virtually impossible to be vegan doesn’t help animals at all” (Singer and Mason 258–9).If I were to accept a definition of non-vegan, possibly because I have a leather handbag among other infractions, that would feel inauthentic. The term “vegan” helpfully labels my approach to food and drink. Others also find it useful as a shorthand for dietary preferences (except for the small but significant minority who muddle veganism with being gluten free). From the point of view of dietary prohibitions I’m a particularly strict vegan, apart from honey. I know people who make exceptions for line-caught fish, or the eggs from garden-roaming happy chooks, but I don’t. I increasingly understand the perspectives of those who have a more radical conception of veganism than I do, however: whose vision and understanding is that “behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The ‘absent referent’ is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product [… keeping] something from being seen as having been someone” (Adams 14). The concept of the global suffering of animals inherent in the figures: “31.1 billion each year, 85.2 million each day, 3.5 million each hour, 59,170 each minute” (Adams dedication) is appalling; as well as being an under-representation of the current situation since the globe has had almost two further decades of population growth and rising “living standards”.Whatever the motivations, it’s easy to imagine that the different branches of veganism have more in common than divides them. Being a vegan of any kind helps someone identify with other variations upon the theme. For example, even though my views on animal rights did not motivate my choice to become vegan, once I stopped seeing other sentient creatures as a handy food source I began to construct them differently. I gradually realised that, as a species, we were committing the most extraordinary atrocities on a global scale in treating animals as disposable commodities without rights or feelings. The large-scale production of what we like to term “meat and poultry” is almost unadulterated animal suffering, whereas the by-catch (“waste products”) of commercial fishing represents an extraordinary disregard of the rights to life of other creatures and, as Cole and Morgan note, “The number of aquatic animals slaughtered is not recorded, their individual deaths being subsumed by aggregate weight statistics” (135). Even if we did accept that humans have the right to consume some animals some of the time, should the netting of a given weight of edible fish really entail the death of many, many time more weight of living creatures that will be “wasted”: the so-called by-catch? Such wanton destruction has increasingly visible impacts upon complex food chains, and the ecosystems that sustain us all.The Vegan Threat to the Status QuoExamining the evidence for the broader community being biased against vegetarians and vegans, MacInnis and Hodson identify that these groups are “clear targets of relatively more negative attitudes” (727) towards them than other minority groups. Indeed, “only drug addicts were evaluated more negatively than vegetarians and vegans” (726). While “vegans were evaluated more negatively than vegetarians” (732), there was a hierarchy in negative evaluations according to the underlying motivation for someone adopting veganism or vegetarianism. People motivated by personal health received the least negative evaluations from the general population followed by those who were motivated by the environment. The greatest opprobrium was reserved for vegans who were motivated by animal rights (732). MacInnis and Hodson reason that this antipathy is because “vegetarians and vegans represent strong threats to the status quo, given that prevailing cultural norms favour meat-eating” (722). Also implied here is that fact that eating meat is itself a cultural norm associated with masculinity (Rothgerber).Adams’s work links the unthinking, normative exploitation of animals to the unthinking, normative exploitation of women, a situation so aligned that it is often expressed through the use of a common metaphor: “‘meat’ becomes a term to express women’s oppression, used equally by patriarchy and feminists, who say that women are ‘pieces of meat’” (2002, 59). Rothberger further interrogates the relationship between masculinity and meat by exploring gender in relation to strategies for “meat eating justification”, reflecting a 1992 United States study that showed, of all people reporting that they were vegetarian, 68% were women and 32% men (Smart, 1995). Rothberger’s argument is that:Following a vegetarian diet or deliberately reducing meat intake violates the spirit of Western hegemonic masculinity, with its socially prescribed norms of stoicism, practicality, seeking dominance, and being powerful, strong, tough, robust and invulnerable […] Such individuals have basically cast aside a relatively hidden male privilege—the freedom and ability to eat without criticism and scrutiny, something that studies have shown women lack. (371)Noting that “to raise concerns about the injustices of factory farming and to feel compelled by them would seem emotional, weak and sensitive—feminine characteristics” (366), Rothberger sets the scene for me to note two items of popular culture which achieved cut-through in my personal life. The evidence for this is, in terms of all the pro-vegan materials I encounter, these were two of a small number that I shared on social media. In line with Rothberger’s observations, both are oppositional to hegemonic masculinity:one represents a feminised, mother and child exchange that captures the moment when a child realises the “absent referent” of the dead animal in the octopus on his plate—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrU03da2arE;while the other is a sentimentalised and sympathetic recording of cattle luxuriating in their first taste of pastureland after a long period of confinement—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huT5__BqY_U.Seeing cows behaving like pets does call attention to the artificial distinction between “companion animals” and other animals. As Cole and Stewart note, “the naming of other animals is useful for human beings, while it is dangerous, and frequently lethal, for other animals. This is because the words we use to name other animals are saturated with common sense knowledge claims about those animals that legitimate their habitual use for humans” (13). Thus a cat, in Western culture, has a very different life trajectory to a cow. Adams notes the contrary case where the companion animal is used as a referent for a threatened human:Child sexual abusers often use threats and/or violence against companion animals to achieve compliance from their victims. Batterers harm or kill a companion animal as a warning to their partner that she could be next; as a way of further separating her from meaningful relationships; to demonstrate his power and her powerlessness. (Adams 57)For children who are still at a stage where animals are creatures of fascination and potential friends, who may be growing up with Charlotte’s Web (White) or Peter Rabbit (Potter), the mental gymnastics of suspending identification with these fellow creatures are harder because empathy and imagination are more active and the ingrained habit of eating without thinking has not had so long to develop. Indeed, children often understand domestic animals as “members of the family”, as illustrated by an interview with Kani, a 10-year old participant in one of my research projects. “In the absence of her extended family overseas, Kani adds her pets to [the list of] those with whom she shares her family life: ‘And my mum and my uncle and then our cat Dobby. I named it [for Harry Potter’s house elf] ...and the goldfish. The goldfish are Twinkle, Glitter, Glow and Bobby’” (Green and Stevenson). Such perceptions may well filter through to children having a different understanding of animals-as-food, even though Cole and Stewart note that “children enter into an adult culture habituated to [the] banal conceptualization of other animals according to their (dis)utilities” (21).Evidence-Based VeganismThose M/C Journal readers who know me personally will understand that one reason why I embrace the “bad vegan” label, is that I’m no more obviously a pin-up for healthy veganism than I am for ethical or environmental veganism. In particular, my BMI (Body Mass Index) is significantly outside the “healthy” range. Even so, I attribute a dramatic change in my capacity for stamina-based activity to my embrace of veganism. A high-speed recap of the evidence would include: in 2009 I embarked on a week-long 500km Great Vic bike ride; in 2012 I successfully completed a Machu Picchu trek at high altitude; by 2013 I was ready for my first half marathon (reprised in 2014, and 2017); in 2014 I cycled from Surfers’ Paradise to Noosa—somewhat less successfully than in my 2009 venture, but even so; in 2016 I completed the Oxfam 50km in 24 hours (plus a half hour, if I’m honest); and in 2017 I completed the 227km Portuguese Camino; in 2018 I jogged an average of over 3km per day, every day, up until 20 September... Apart from indicating that I live an extremely fortunate life, these activities seem to me to demonstrate that becoming vegan in 2007 has conferred a huge health benefit. In particular, I cannot identify similar metamorphoses in the lives of my 50-to-60-something year-old empty-nester friends. My most notable physical feat pre-veganism was the irregular completion of Perth’s annual 12km City-to-Surf fun run.Although I’m a vegan for health reasons, I didn’t suddenly wake up one day and decide that this was now my future: I had to be coaxed and cajoled into looking at my food preferences very differently. This process entailed my enrolling in a night school-type evening course, the Coronary Health Improvement Program: 16 x 3 hour sessions over eight weeks. Its sibling course is now available online as the Complete Health Improvement Program. The first lesson of the eight weeks convincingly demonstrated that what is good for coronary health is also good for health in general, which I found persuasive and reassuring given the propensity to cancer evident in my family tree. In the generation above me, my parents each had three siblings so I have a sample of eight immediate family to draw upon. Six of these either have cancer at the moment, or have died from cancer, with the cancers concerned including breast (1), prostate (2), lung (1), pancreas (1) and brain (1). A seventh close relative passed away before her health service could deliver a diagnosis for her extraordinarily elevated eosinophil levels (100x normal rates of that particular kind of white blood cell: potentially a blood cancer, I think). The eighth relative in that generation is my “bad vegan” uncle who has been mainly plant-based in his dietary choices since 2004. At 73, he is still working three days per week as a dentist and planning a 240 km trek in Italy as his main 2019 holiday. That’s the kind of future I’m hoping for too, when I grow up.And yet, one can read volumes of health literature without stumbling upon Professor T. Colin Campbell’s early research findings via his work on rodents and rodent cells that: “nutrition [was] far more important in controlling cancer promotion than the dose of the initiating carcinogen” and that “nutrients from animal-based foods increased tumor development while nutrients from plant-based foods decreased tumor development” (66, italics in original). Plant was already an eminent scientist at the point where she developed breast cancer, but she noted her amazement at learning “precisely how much has been discovered already [that] has not filtered through to the public” (18). The reason for the lack of visible research in this area is not so much its absence, but more likely its political sensitivity in an era of Big Food. As Harrington et al.’s respondent Samantha noted, “I think the meat lobby’s much bigger than the vegetable lobby” (147). These arguments are addressed in greater depth in Green et al.My initiating research question—Why do I feel the need to justify being vegan?—can clearly be answered in a wide variety of ways. Veganism disrupts the status quo: it questions both the appropriateness of humanity’s systematic torturing of other species for food, and the risks that those animal-based foods pose for the long-term health of human populations. It offends many vested interests from Big Food to accepted notions of animal welfare to the conventional teachings of the health industry. Identifying as a vegan represents an outcome of one or more of a wide range of motivations, some of which are more clearly self-serving (read “bad”); while others are more easily identified as altruistic (read “good”). After a decade or more of personal experimentation in this space, I’m proud to identify as a “bad vegan”. It’s been a great choice personally and, I hope, for some other creatures whose planet I share.ReferencesAdams, Carol. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum, 1990.Campbell, T. Colin, and Thomas M. Cambell. The China Study: Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health. Dallas: BenBella Books, 2005.Cole, Matthew, and Karen Morgan. “Vegaphobia: Derogatory Discourses of Veganism and the Reproduction of Speciesism in UK National Newspaper.” British Journal of Sociology 62 (2011): 134–53.———, and Kate Stewart. Our Children and Other Animals: The Cultural Construction of Human-Animal Relations in Childhood. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.Ellis, Carolyn. The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography. Oxford: Altamira Press, 2004.Gans, Herbert J. “Participant Observation in the Era of ‘Ethnography’.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 28.5 (1999): 540–48.Glendon, A. 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