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Journal articles on the topic 'Patriarchal binary oppositions'

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1

فؤاد حاجو, سهير, and ابراهيم علي مراد. "The Destruction of Gilead’s Binary Thought In Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale." Al-Adab Journal 1, no. 119 (December 24, 2018): 83–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.31973/aj.v1i119.337.

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This paper focuses on interpreting Margret Atwood’s outlook towards the affiliation of power between man and woman, and, likewise, the hidden meaning of her message(s) to women in general. These issues will be explained by interpreting or considering her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale as a pattern of oppositions. The conceptual tool that is used to uncover the keys for the questions of whether Atwood is with or against women and how she visualizes women’s experience and distress under the patriarchal rules are; binary oppositions and Derrida’s concept of différance. Using the binary oppositions Gilead’s central and restricted ideologies and the handmaids’ silent response become comprehensible. Then by reversing these binary conceptions, depending on Derrida’s concept, the incompatibles will be proved. Atwood’s depiction of woman is not always positive and not negative as well. Therefore, this paper assumes that women are being used and dehumanized in Gilead which gives hints for the author’s view of men’s inclination to imprison women and deprive them from their right to live a normal life. Furthermore, the binary thought depicts women as inert and powerless. The second part and after reversing the binary opposition we conclude that the handmaids and women in general are able to convert the hierarchical belief by taking on the same tool that has been used to oppress them.
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2

Jordaan, D. J., and W. Mulder. "Maar net nog ’n butch? ’n Feministiese lesing van die Halewijnlied." Literator 16, no. 1 (April 30, 1995): 67–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/lit.v16i1.587.

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Just another butch? A feminist reading of the HalewijnliedIn this article the authors argue that a form of covert feminism is present in the Halewijnlied (Song of Halewijn), an important Middle Dutch text. Utilizing the poststructuralist notion of écriture rather than lecture, the latent content of the text is explored, enabling the authors to (re-)construct the ‘meaning' of the text within the context of Kristeva's notion that the Virgin cult constitutes "a triumph of the unconscious in monotheism This "triumph of the unconscious "amounts to a form of female power which is the “underhand double of explicit phallic power" and sets up a temporary "commonality of the sexes" within the patriarchal system. By means of the personage of the Princess, Freudian displacement in terms of social sex roles occurs, negating some of the binary oppositions characterising the man:woman dichotomy. This process results in an 'androgenic’ space in which both sexes are temporarily set free from the sexual roles forced upon them by a patriarchal system.
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Tanvir, Omama, and Nazish Amir. "Deconstructive Analysis Of The Short Story “Saleema” By Daniyal Mueenuddin." University of Chitral Journal of Linguistics and Literature 1, no. 1 (March 3, 2018): 106–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.33195/uochjll/1/1/06/2017.

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The aim of this research is to apply deconstructive approach to a short story. For this purpose Daniyal Mueenuddin’s short story “Saleema” is selected and analyzed. Through deconstruction the feminist reading of the story is dismantled and the power dynamics of the patriarchal Pakistani society are subverted. The research is anchored in Derrida’s concept of unreliability of language and Cuddon’s idea of reversal of binary oppositions. The paper finds that the protagonist Saleema is not as weak and oppressed as she is perceived to be, rather she is a resilient, independent woman who uses any means possible to get what she wants. The power and authority reside with her and not with any male character. The study is purely qualitative and exploratory in nature.
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4

Mishra, Indira Acharya. "Transformation of the Feminine Self in Yogamāyā." JODEM: Journal of Language and Literature 10, no. 1 (September 30, 2019): 48–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/jodem.v10i1.30398.

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This article aims to analyze the struggle of Yogamaya, the lead female character of the novel Yogamāyā, by Neelam Karki Niharika. The novel based on the real life story of a rebel, Yogamaya, chronicles the incidents of her life that triggered her to cast off her feminine self and rebel for the establishment of a just society based on equity. The article examines those factors that force Yogamaya to rebel against the existing society and the process of her rebellion drawing insights form Helen Cixous and other feminists who find patriarchal gender roles based on binary opposition as oppressive, and suggest that women should act beyond gender binary and subvert the patriarchal norms and values that restrict them in every walk of their lives. I use transliteration and free translation while citing from the novel in the analysis. The finding of the article suggests that a number of factors instigate Yogamaya cast of her feminine self and emerge as a rebel. It helps to understand how Yogamaya subverts patriarchy within its bound exposing the inherent biasness in it.
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Thapa, Dharma. "The Politics of Eroticism: Political Writing and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things." Crossing the Border: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 1, no. 1 (May 23, 2014): 51–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/ctbijis.v1i1.10468.

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This article analyses the erotic relationships between sexes depicted in Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small things in the binary opposition: those based on bourgeois patriarchal dominance and that based on equality and mutual respect. It focuses on the relationship between Ammu and Velutha as love, in diametrical contrast with the former pattern, based on independent choices and guided and inspired by radical politics. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/ctbijis.v1i1.10468 Crossing the Border: International Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies Vol.1(1) 2013; 51-58
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6

Ayuningtyas, Paramita. "Deconstructing The Stereotypes Of Women Through A Female Voice In Burial Rites (2013) By Hannah Kent." Lingua Cultura 9, no. 2 (November 30, 2015): 75. http://dx.doi.org/10.21512/lc.v9i2.819.

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Patriarchal society regulates how women should behave and act. If a woman obeys the social rules, she will be labeled as a good woman. On the other hand, if a woman does not follow the social values, she will be immediately categorized as an evil woman and given negative stereotypes. This binary opposition between a good woman and a bad woman is often criticized by the feminists because they think this categorization burdens women. This issue is also highlighted by Hannah Kent in her novel Burial Rites (2013). This novel is set in a rural society in Iceland in the 19th century with its patriarchal values, focusing on a woman named Agnes that will soon be executed. This theme interested the researcher to study Burial Rites more deeply using feminist perspective. Characters, setting and point of view are the intrinsic elements discussed in this research. The result of the analysis shows that through these three elements, Burial Rites describes society’s stereotypes about ‘evil women’ and there is an effort from the author to deconstruct the stereotype through a female voice.
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7

Winarti, Winarti. "EKSISTENSI PEREMPUAN DALAM PUISI 'BRIDE SONG' KARYA CHRISTINA ROSSETTI." LEKSEMA: Jurnal Bahasa dan Sastra 3, no. 2 (December 6, 2018): 149. http://dx.doi.org/10.22515/ljbs.v3i2.1144.

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This article aims at describing women existence as reflected on Bride Song poem written by Christina Rossseti. Rossetti’s view on women’s lives was inspired much by her awareness toward the their conditions in Victorian’s era. In the meantime, women were shaped to be an individuals who fulfill the ideal standard as preferred by men. By Bride Song, Rosetti tried to break patriarchal domination toward women. She wanted to turn back the existence equivalence between men and women based on human rights. She also attemped to open the world’s perspective to accept women’s existence as important as men’s and not just a binary opposition of it. Women’s existence in Bride Song is not only a struggle against men’s domination in Victorian era, but it also has relevance with contemporary issues on women’s struggle to show their existence in this modern era.
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8

Rohmatin, Fatkhu. "Dekonstruksi Wacana Patriarki dan Kebungkaman Perempuan dalam Manuskrip Hikayat Darma Tasiyah." Jumantara: Jurnal Manuskrip Nusantara 10, no. 2 (December 31, 2019): 149. http://dx.doi.org/10.37014/jumantara.v10i2.598.

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In the old tradition of Nusantara literature, in this case Malay and Javanese, often represented a model of society that adhered to a patriarchal system. This system puts women at the subordinate level, under the domination of men. This phenomenon was also represented in one of the manuscripts of the National Library of the Republic of Indonesia collection entitled 'Hikayat Darma Tasiyah' with the script code W 124B. This study aims to deconstruct the point of view of reading the script using Derrida's deconstruction approach model, in order to obtain a new meaning which is binary in opposition to the general meaning produced from the point of view of structural readings. With deconstruction reading, the meaning of obedience and silence turns into acts of resistance, mistakes become rebellion, expulsion is precisely like liberation and so on. As a literary work that discusses the patriarchy system, Hikayat Darma Tasiyah is actually able to turn into a destroyer of the patriarchy system itself, only through deconstruction reading.
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Ghani, Hana. "The Feminine Other: Monsters and Magic in Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." J-Lalite: Journal of English Studies 2, no. 1 (June 30, 2021): 55. http://dx.doi.org/10.20884/1.jes.2021.2.1.4172.

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Monsters are perceived as humanity’s enemy that should be eradicated. However, based on Jeffrey Cohen’s Monster Theory (1997), monsters play an important role in understanding humanity’s fears and anxieties. Monstrosity hinges upon the binary opposition of the Self and the Other, in which the Other is seen as a threat to the Self. With this in mind, this article addresses the female monsters of two medieval texts: Beowulf and Sir Gawain and The Green Knight. This paper aims to examine the female monsters, Grendel’s mother and Morgan the Fay, as a cultural reference to unravel the patriarchal anxieties of the time. Grendel’s mother represents a threat to the homosocial hierarchal bonds of Medieval society. Meanwhile, Morgan the Fay signifies danger to knighthood, chivalry, and courtly romance. At the same time, this paper also aims to continue the critical analysis and literature of the female characters in both texts with a heavy emphasis on their Otherness.
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Spring, Lauren, and Darlene E. Clover. "Museums, Socio-Ecological Thinking, and Activist Pedagogies of Imagination." Andragoška spoznanja 27, no. 1 (April 19, 2021): 63–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/as/9620.

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This article explores the complex, “contact zone” nature of museums within the context of the current environmental crisis threatening our planet. Historically and even today, museums have engaged in a practice of “monocultural” thinking which is mired in a pretext to neutrality that has advanced the patriarchal capitalist neoliberal status quo and maintained a vision of a human/non-human binary of power, dominance, and control. However, there is also growing evidence that museums are shifting their approaches. Focusing on examples from Canada, we discuss how museums are using exhibitions and pedagogical and community outreach strategies to render visible deeply problematic and global “technofossil” practices, encourage activism through aesthetic engagement, encourage dialogue between community and industry as well as engage in imaginative decolonising initiatives that remap our understandings of who we are and where we need to go. We argue that in taking up environmental issues in politically intentional ways, museums create “oppositional views” that act as pedagogical sites of resistance.
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11

Kandel, Mukti. "Nature as Woman in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!" Literary Studies 34, no. 01 (September 2, 2021): 118–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/litstud.v34i01.39532.

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The present paper explores the metaphoric and symbolic meaning of feminized nature in Willa Cather’s novel O Pioneers! through the perspective of ecofeminism. The reveals that the invasion of human beings into nature is related to the patriarchy, the inequality between men and women and the binary opposition of man and nature.It primarily focuses on the characters towards nature especially in two ways – the desirable peaceful nature as a virgin and the chaotic destructive nature as a witch. This paper basically analyses how nature or land in the novel is portrayed like a virgin and a witch at the same time when the Nebraska prairie is changed into agricultural farmland. The portrayal of nature or land as stubborn or unruly land in the novel reflects the negative attitude of male characters towards nature and as such their failure to understand the Nebraska prairie especially the land of Hanover. This paper concludes that the association of women and femininity with nature in environmental discourse perpetuates patriarchal traditions and domination.
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12

Harrow, Kenneth W. "Faat Kine and the Feminism of the Old Man." Études littéraires africaines, no. 30 (November 17, 2014): 20–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/1027344ar.

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Faat Kine (2000), c’est l’anti-Xala (1974) : ce film tardif semble complètement renverser les structures et la pensée à l’oeuvre dans la production antérieure, et l’on peut se demander pourquoi Sembène rompt ainsi avec sa critique du capitalisme. Dans Faat Kine, l’auteur aborde en effet les impératifs féministes dans le cadre d’une économie libérale qui limite la libération à une égalité consentie dans un imaginaire phallocentrique : en somme, « un féminisme à l’ancienne ». De façon plus générale, Faat Kine comprend un élément mélodramatique, et dans ce cadre, une opposition binaire et manichéenne entre le bien et le mal qui ne fait pas dans le détail mais verse plutôt dans le déterminisme : nous sommes exposés au tableau misérabiliste d’un ordre injuste, mais cela permet en dernier ressort de prendre conscience de notre opposition à la patriarchie : ce sont là tout à la fois la finalité et les limites de l’idéologie du film.
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13

Stiebert, Johanna. "SHAME AND PROPHECY: APPROACHES PAST AND PRESENT." Biblical Interpretation 8, no. 3 (2000): 255–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156851500750096345.

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AbstractShame is widely discussed both in the literature of psychology (in contradistinction to guilt) and social anthropology (in binary opposition with honour, where it is associated particularly with women and public loss of status). Recently, the honour–shame model has been used as heuristic pattern for analysing biblical texts. The focus has been primarily on the patriarchal narratives and Deuteronomistic history; yet the preponderance of shame vocabulary occurs in the prophetic corpus. Here the model proves to be ill fitting. One reason is that it tends to apply to static societies, whereas insofar as social contexts are implied in the Prophets these tend to be depicted as marked by turmoil and chaos attending the exile. In the absence of discussions using models constructed for the purposes of examining situations of social upheaval (such as revolutions or millenarian eruptions) three new approaches are proposed and discussed with regard to Ezekiel 16. The purpose is to probe their suitability for elucidating this baffling text as well as to redress the paucity of prophetic shame studies. The first examines antilanguages; the second grotesque language and the third, deviance amplification.
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14

Freeman, Sandra. "Bisexuality in Cixous's Le Nom d'Œdipe." Theatre Research International 23, no. 3 (1998): 242–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0307883300020009.

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In her essay, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Hélène Cixous talks about bisexuality and writing. Feminist writing may be said to be truly bisexual not in the sense which does away with sexual difference thereby producing neutrality, but in the sense that male and female are both omnipresent, exchanging, intermingling, enriching each other. Freed from the constraints of conventional binary opposition, male and female are able to unite, divide, multiply in an almost endless expansion of possibilities. The celebration of difference which does not divide, which is at the heart of sexual pleasure, transfusing and transforming the whole living being, will be found in women's writing, since women's songs spring from a body which denies castration. I use the future tense, since in the same essay Cixous declares that these songs use the future tense, since these songs have not yet been written, that women must liberate themselves from the dominance of the phallus, of men's language, in order to give voice to thensensuality, their sexuality, in all its complexity; to speak in the language which existed before patriarchal dominance, the fore-language which has a multiplicity of tongues. To sing a woman's song, in the language of the body, which rejects the law of the castrating father, telling of a total sexual pleasure knowing no guilt, no boundaries, is a courageous act in a world which has invented the direst forms of punishment for such transgression.
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Stalpaert, Christel, and Sophie Doutreligne. "Performing with the Masquerade: Towards a Corporeal Reconstitution of Sophie Taeuber’s Dada Performances." Performance Philosophy 4, no. 2 (February 1, 2019): 528–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.21476/pp.2019.42228.

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This contribution aims for a “corporeal reconstitution” (Irigaray) of Sophie Taeuber’s (1889-1943) dance performances at the Cabaret Voltaire and the Galerie Dada in 1916/17. This means that the movements from the static images informing the history of Dada art need to be re-imagined. It implies a rendering perceptible of Taeuber’s trained dancer’s body, its particular movements, and the quality of these movements. Through testimonies of contemporaries, it becomes clear that Taeuber not only dances in a costume or behind a mask but with the mask, the costume and sound poems. The reconstitution of the moving body with the mask thus points at a foregrounding of the masquerade to which she is convicted as a woman. Her mimetic strategy (Irigaray) or playful repetition of the masquerade entails a “radically new mode of relating” (Obler 2009, 223) between human and non-human materiality. Taeuber is not only moving in between puppet and puppeteer, movement and stasis, abstraction and expressivity, performer and mask, presence and absence, but also in between feminine and masculine. The hybrid movements in her mimetic strategy disrupt the binary nature of the oppositional pairs. In dancing the perpetual movement in between dualities, through a patchwork of genres and materials (her drawings, embroideries and tapestries are also driven by kinetic forces), Taeuber not only playfully rebels against patriarchal discourse, but also against the dehumanizing effects of World War One violently raging through Europe.
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"Deconstructive Analysis Of The Short Story “Saleema” By Daniyal Mueenuddin." University of Chitral Journal of Linguistics and Literature, November 30, 2018, 60–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.33195/jll.v1ii.150.

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The aim of this research is to apply deconstructive approach to a short story. For this purpose Daniyal Mueenuddin’s short story “Saleema” is selected and analyzed. Through deconstruction the feminist reading of the story is dismantled and the power dynamics of the patriarchal Pakistani society are subverted. The research is anchored in Derrida’s concept of unreliability of language and Cuddon’s idea of reversal of binary oppositions. The paper finds that the protagonist Saleema is not as weak and oppressed as she is perceived to be, rather she is a resilient, independent woman who uses any means possible to get what she wants. The power and authority reside with her and not with any male character. The study is purely qualitative and exploratory in nature.
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17

"Deconstructive Analysis Of The Short Story “Saleema” By Daniyal Mueenuddin." University of Chitral Journal of Linguistics and Literature, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.33195/jll.v1ii.27.

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The aim of this research is to apply a deconstructive approach to a short story. For this purpose, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s short story “Saleema” is selected and analyzed. Through deconstruction, the feminist reading of the story is dismantled and the power dynamics of the patriarchal Pakistani society are subverted. The research is anchored in Derrida’s concept of the unreliability of language and Cuddon’s idea of reversal of binary oppositions. The paper finds that the protagonist Saleema is not as weak and oppressed as she is perceived to be, rather she is a resilient, independent woman who uses any means possible to get what she wants. The power and authority reside with her and not with any male character. The study is purely qualitative and exploratory in nature. Keywords: Deconstruction, Post-structuralism, Feminism, Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Saleema
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18

"Deconstructive Analysis Of The Short Story “Saleema” By Daniyal Mueenuddin." University of Chitral Journal of Linguistics and Literature, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.33195/jll.v1ii.27.

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The aim of this research is to apply a deconstructive approach to a short story. For this purpose, Daniyal Mueenuddin’s short story “Saleema” is selected and analyzed. Through deconstruction, the feminist reading of the story is dismantled and the power dynamics of the patriarchal Pakistani society are subverted. The research is anchored in Derrida’s concept of the unreliability of language and Cuddon’s idea of reversal of binary oppositions. The paper finds that the protagonist Saleema is not as weak and oppressed as she is perceived to be, rather she is a resilient, independent woman who uses any means possible to get what she wants. The power and authority reside with her and not with any male character. The study is purely qualitative and exploratory in nature. Keywords: Deconstruction, Post-structuralism, Feminism, Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Saleema
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19

Rangarajan, Uttara. "Redrawing Boundaries." FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts, no. 28 (June 28, 2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.2218/forum.28.3053.

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Colonialism, as a material, discursive and imaginative process was based on constructing colonized territories and native populations in rigid and specific ways. Colonized territories were depicted as lush, wild and hostile, the opposite or ‘other’ to the colonizing nation. A spatial binary of civilized and ordered metropoles contrasted with unruly and disorganized colonies, marginalized and subordinated the latter. Yet, colonialism’s attempts to organize and control differences often met opposition from those who existed in ambivalent spaces that didn’t fit colonial binaries. This paper explores the work of two such authors Jean Rhys and Katherine Mansfield and argues that their writings subvert and challenge colonial boundaries by depicting spaces as fluid and heterogeneous. As white women from the colonies (Caribbean and New Zealand respectively) Rhys and Mansfield occupied liminal positions, unable to fit within colonial binaries of white and native, they were marked as inferior due to their social background as well as gender. This gave them unique insight into the patriarchal colonial system and it’s arbitrary boundaries. Focusing on Rhys’ novels Wide Sargasso Sea and Voyage in the Dark and Mansfield’s short stories 'Prelude and At The Bay', this paper examines the blurring of colonized, native and metropolitan spaces in these works. Analyzing the authors’ depiction of natural spaces, this paper further argues that Rhys and Mansfield highlight instances of colonial insecurity and expose the shaky foundations of colonial knowledge. By eschewing the male, colonizing gaze Rhys and Mansfield depict spaces as contradictory and multidimensional and in this process break down colonial walls and boundaries.
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West, Patrick Leslie. "“Glossary Islands” as Sites of the “Abroad” in Post-Colonial Literature: Towards a New Methodology for Language and Knowledge Relations in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People and Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby." M/C Journal 19, no. 5 (October 13, 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1150.

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Reviewing Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby (2013), Eve Vincent notes that it shares with Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (1984) one significant feature: “a glossary of Indigenous words.” Working with various forms of the term “abroad”, this article surveys the debate The Bone People ignited around the relative merits of such a glossary in texts written predominantly in English, the colonizing language. At stake here is the development of a post-colonial community that incorporates Indigenous identity and otherness (Maori or Aboriginal) with the historical legacy of the English/Indigenous-language multi-lingualism of multi-cultural Australia and New Zealand. I argue that the terms of this debate have remained static since 1984 and that this creates a problem for post-colonial theory. Specifically, the debate has favoured a binary either/or approach, whereby either the Indigenous language or English has been empowered with authority over the text’s linguistic, historical, cultural and political territory. Given that the significations of “abroad” include a travelling encounter with overseas places and the notion of being widely scattered or dispersed, the term has value for an investigation into how post-colonialism as a historical circumstance is mediated and transformed within literature. Post-colonial literature is a response to the “homeland” encounter with a foreign “abroad” that creates particular wide scatterings or dispersals of writing within literary texts.In 1989, Maryanne Dever wrote that “some critics have viewed [The Bone People’s] glossary as a direct denial of otherness. … It can be argued, however, that the glossary is in fact a further way of asserting that otherness” (24). Dever is responding to Simon During, who wrote in 1985 that “by translating the Maori words into English [the glossary allows] them no otherness within its Europeanising apparatus” (During 374). Dever continues: “[The glossary] is a considered statement of the very separateness of the Maori language. In this way, the text inverts the conventional sense of privileging, the glossary forming the key into a restricted or privileged form of knowledge” (24). Dever’s language is telling: “direct denial of otherness,” “asserting that otherness,” and “the very separateness of the Maori language,” reinforce a binary way of thinking that is reproduced by Vincent in 2013 (24).This binary hinders a considered engagement with post-colonial difference because it produces hierarchal outcomes. For Toril Moi, “binary oppositions are heavily imbricated in the patriarchal value system: each opposition can be analysed as a hierarchy where the ‘feminine’ side is always seen as the negative, powerless instance” (104). Inspired by Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey’s concept of “tidalectics”, my article argues that the neologism “glossary islands” provides a more productive way of thinking about the power relations of the relationship of glossaries of Indigenous words to Hulme’s and Lucashenko’s mainly English-language, post-colonial novels. Resisting a binary either/or approach, “glossary islands” engages with the inevitable intermingling of languages of post-colonial and multi-cultural nations and holds value for a new methodological approach to the glossary as an element of post-colonial (islandic) literature.Both The Bone People and Mullumbimby employ female protagonists (Kerewin Holmes and Jo Breen respectively) to explore how family issues resolve into an assertion of place-based community for people othered by enduring colonial forces. Difficult loves and difficult children provide opportunities for tension and uneasy resolution in each text. In Hulme’s novel, Kerewin resists the romantic advances of Joe Gillayley to the end, without ever entirely rejecting him. Similarly, in Mullumbimby, Jo and Twoboy Jackson conduct a vacillating relationship, though one that ultimately steadies. The Bone People tells of an autistic child, Simon P. Gillayley, while Mullumbimby thematises a difficult mother-daughter relationship in its narration of single-mother Jo’s struggles with Ellen. Furthermore, employing realist and magic realist techniques, both novels present family and love as allegories of post-colonial community, thereby exemplifying Stephen Slemon’s thesis that “the real social relations of post-colonial cultures appear, through the mediation of the text’s language of narration, in the thematic dimension of the post-colonial magic realist work” (12).Each text also shows how post-colonial literature always engages with the “abroad” by virtue of the post-colonial relationship of the indigenous “homeland” to the colonial “imported abroad”. DeLoughrey characterises this post-colonial relationship to the “abroad” by a “homeland” as a “tidalectics”, meaning “a dynamic and shifting relationship between land and sea that allows island literatures to be engaged in their spatial and historical complexity” (2-3). The Bone People and Mullumbimby are examples of island literatures for their geographic setting. But DeLoughrey does not compress “tidalectics” to such a reductionist definition. The term itself is as “dynamic and shifting” as what it signifies, and available for diverse post-colonial redeployments (DeLoughrey 2).The margin of land and sea that DeLoughrey foregrounds as constitutive of “tidalectics” is imaginatively re-expressed in both The Bone People and Mullumbimby. Lucashenko’s novel is set in the Byron Bay hinterland, and the text is replete with teasing references to “tidalectics”. For example, “Jo knew that the water she watched was endlessly cycling upriver and down, travelling constantly between the saltwater and the fresh” (Lucashenko 260-61). The writing, however, frequently exceeds a literal “tidalectics”: “Everything in the world was shapeshifting around her, every moment of every day. Nothing remained as it was” (Lucashenko 261).Significantly, Jo is no passive figure at the centre of such “shapeshifting”. She actively takes advantage of the “dynamic and shifting” interplay between elemental presences of her geographical circumstances (DeLoughrey 2). It is while “resting her back against the granite and bronze directional marker that was the last material evidence of humanity between Ocean Shores and New Zealand,” that Jo achieves her major epiphany as a character (Lucashenko 261). “Her eyelids sagged wearily. … Jo groaned aloud, exhausted by her ignorance and the unending demands being made on her to exceed it. The temptation to fall asleep in the sun, and leave these demands far behind, began to take her over. … No. We need answers” (Lucashenko 263). The “tidalectics” of her epiphany is telling: the “silence then splintered” (262) and “momentarily the wrens became, not birds, but mere dark movement” (263). The effect is dramatic: “The hairs on Jo’s arms goosepimpled. Her breathing grew fast” (263). “With an unspoken curse for her own obtuseness”, Jo becomes freshly decisive (264). Thus, a “tidalectics” is not a mere geographic backdrop. Rather, a “dynamic and shifting” landscape—a metamorphosis—energizes Jo’s identity in Mullumbimby. In the “homeland”/“abroad” flux of “tidalectics”, post-colonial community germinates.The geography of The Bone People is also a “tidalectics”, as demonstrated, for instance, by chapter five’s title: “Spring Tide, Neap Tide, Ebb Tide, Flood” (Hulme 202). Hulme’s novel contains literally hundreds of such passages that dramatise the margin of land and sea as “dynamic and shifting” (DeLoughrey 2). Again: “She’s standing on the orangegold shingle, arms akimbo, drinking the beach in, absorbing sea and spindrift, breathing it into her dusty memory. It’s all here, alive and salt and roaring and real. The vast cold ocean and the surf breaking five yards away and the warm knowledge of home just up the shore” (163). Like the protagonist of Mullumbimby, Kerewin Holmes is an energised subject at the margin of land and sea. Geography as “tidalectics” is activated in the construction of character identity. Kerewin involves her surroundings with her sense of self, as constituted through memory, in a fashion that enfolds the literal with the metaphorical: memory is “dusty” in the midst of “vast” waters (163).Thus, at least three senses of “abroad” filter through these novels. Firstly, the “abroad” exists in the sense of an abroad-colonizing power retaining influence even in post-colonial times, as elaborated in Simon During’s distinction between the “post-colonised” and the “post-colonisers” (Simon 460). Secondly, the “abroad” reveals itself in DeLoughrey’s related conceptualisation of “tidalectics” as a specific expression of the “abroad”/“homeland” relationship. Thirdly, the “abroad” is present by virtue of the more general definition it shares with “tidalectics”; for “abroad”, like “tidalectics”, also signifies being widely scattered, at large, ranging freely. There is both denotation and connotation in “tidalectics”, which Lucashenko expresses here: “the world was nothing but water in the air and water in the streams” (82). That is, beyond any “literal littoral” geography, “abroad” is linked to “tidalectics” in this more general sense of being widely scattered, dispersed, ranging freely.The “tidalectics” of Lucashenko’s and Hulme’s novels is also shared across their form because each novel is a complex interweaving of English and the Indigenous language. Here though, we encounter a clear difference between the two novels, which seems related to the predominant genres of the respective texts. In Lucashenko’s largely realist mode of writing, the use of Indigenous words is more transparent to a monolingual English speaker than is Hulme’s use of Maori in her novel, which tends more towards magic realism. A monolingual English speaker can often translate Lucashenko almost automatically, through context, or through an in-text translation of the words worked into the prose. With Hulme, context usually withholds adequate clues to the meaning of the Maori words, nor are any in-text translations of the Maori commonly offered.Leaving aside for now any consideration of their glossaries, each novel presents a different representation of the post-colonial/“abroad” relationship of an Indigenous language to English. Mullumbimby is the more conservative text in this respect. The note prefacing Mullumbimby’s Glossary reads: “In this novel, Jo speaks a mixture of Bundjalung and Yugambeh languages, interspersed with a variety of Aboriginal English terms” (283). However, the Indigenous words often shade quite seamlessly into their English translation, and the “Aboriginal English” Jo speaks is actually not that different from standard English dialogue as found in many contemporary Australian novels. If anything, there is only a slight, distinguishing American flavour to Jo’s dialogue. In Mullumbimby, the Indigenous tongue tends to disappear into the text’s dominant language: English.By contrast, The Bone People contains many instances where Maori presents in all its bold strangeness to a monolingual English speaker. My reading experience consisted in running my eyes over the words but not really taking them in, except insofar as they represented a portion of Maori of unknown meaning. I could look up the recondite English words (of which there were many) in my dictionary or online, but it was much harder to conveniently source definitions of the Maori words, especially when they formed larger syntactic units.The situation is reversed, however, when one considers the two glossaries. Mullumbimby’s glossary asserts the difference of the Indigenous language(s) by having no page numbers alongside its Indigenous words (contrast The Bone People’s glossary) and because, despite being titled Glossary as a self-sufficient part of the book, it is not mentioned in any Contents page. One comes across Lucashenko’s glossary, at the end of her novel, quite unexpectedly. Conversely, Hulme’s glossary is clearly referenced on its Contents page, where it is directly described as a “Translation of Maori Words and Phrases” commencing on page 446. Hulme’s glossary appears predictably, and contains page references to all its Maori words or phrases. This contrasts with Lucashenko’s glossary, which follows alphabetical order, rather than the novel’s order. Mullumbimby’s glossary is thus a more assertive textual element than The Bone People’s glossary, which from the Contents page on is more homogenised with the prevailing English text.Surely the various complexities of these two glossaries show the need for a better way of critically engaging with them that does not lead to the re-accentuation of the binary terms in which the scholarly discussion about their genre has been couched so far. Such a methodology needs to be sensitive to the different forms of these glossaries and of others like them in other texts. But some terminological minesweeping is required in order to develop this methodology, for a novel and a glossary are different textual forms and should not be compared like for like. A novel is a work of the imagination in fictional form whereas a glossary is a meta-text that, according to The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, comprises “a list with explanations, often accompanying a text, of abstruse, obsolete, dialectal, or technical terms.” The failure to take this difference substantially into account explains why the debate around Hulme’s and Lucashenko’s glossaries as instruments of post-colonial language relationships has defaulted, thus far, to a binary approach insensitive to the complexities of linguistic relations in post-colonial and multi-cultural nations. Ignoring the formal difference between novel and glossary patronises a reading that proceeds by reference to binary opposition, and thus hierarchy.By contrast, my approach is to read these glossaries as texts that can be read and interpreted as one might read and interpret the novels they adjoin, and also with close attention to the architecture of their relationship to the novels they accompany. This close reading methodology enables attention to the differences amongst glossaries, as much as to the differences between them and the texts they gloss. One consequence of this is that, as I have shown above, a text might be conservative so far as its novel segment is concerned, yet radical so far as its glossary is concerned (Mullumbimby), or vice versa (The Bone People).To recap, “tidalectics” provides a way of engaging with the post-colonial/“abroad” (linguistic) complexities of island nations and literatures. It denotes “a dynamic and shifting relationship between land and sea that allows island literatures to be engaged in their spatial and historical complexity” (DeLoughrey 2-3). The methodological challenge for my article is to show how “tidalectics” is useful to a consideration of that sub-genre of post-colonial novels containing glossaries. Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey’s unpacking of “tidalectics” considers not just islands but also the colonial relationships of (archetypally mainland European) colonial forces to islands. Referring to the popularity of “desert-island stories” (12), DeLoughrey notes how “Since the colonial expansion of Europe, its literature has increasingly inscribed the island as a reflection of various political, sociological, and colonial practices” (13). Further, “European inscriptions of island topoi have often upheld imperial logic and must be recognized as ideological tools that helped make colonial expansion possible” (13). DeLoughrey also underscores the characteristics of such “desert-island stories” (12), including how accidental colonization of “a desert isle has been a powerful and repeated trope of empire building and of British literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (13). Shipwrecks are the most common narrative device of such “accidents”.Drawing on the broad continuum of the several significations of “abroad”, one can draw a parallel between the novel-glossary relationship and the mainland-island relationship DeLoughrey outlines. I recall here Stephen Slemon’s suggestion that “the real social relations of post-colonial cultures appear, through the mediation of the text’s language of narration, in the thematic dimension of the post-colonial magic realist work” (12). Adapting Slemon’s approach, one might read the formal (as opposed to thematic) dimension of the glossary in a post-colonial narrative like The Bone People or Mullumbimby as another literary appearance of “the real social relations of post-colonial cultures” (Slemon 12). What’s appearing is the figure of the island in the form of the glossary: hence, my neologism “glossary islands”. These novels are thus not only examples of island novels to be read via “tidalectics”, but of novels with their own islands appended to them, as glossaries, in the “abroad” of their textuality.Thus, rather than seeing a glossary in a binary either/or way as a sign of the (artificial) supremacy of either English or the Indigenous language, one could use the notion of “glossary islands” to more fully engage with the complexities of post-colonialism as expressed in literature. Seen in this light, a glossary (as to The Bone People or Mullumbimby) can be read as an “abroad” through which the novel circulates its own ideas or inventions of post-colonial community. In this view, islands and glossaries are linked through being intensified sites of knowledge, as described by DeLoughrey. Crucially, the entire, complex, novel-glossary relationship needs to be analysed, and it is possible (though space considerations mediate against pursuing this here) that a post-colonial novel’s glossary expresses the (Freudian) unconscious knowledge of the novel itself.Clearly then, there is a deep irony in how what Simon During calls the “Europeanising apparatus” of the glossary itself becomes, in Mullumbimby, an object of colonisation (During 374). (Recall how one comes across the glossary at the end of Lucashenko’s novel unexpectedly—accidentally—as a European might be cast up upon a desert island.) I hazard the suggestion that a post-colonial novel is more radical in its post-colonial politics the more “island-like” its glossary is, because this implies that the “glossary island” is being used to better work out the nature of post-colonial community as expressed and proposed in the novel itself. Here then, again, the seemingly more radical novel linguistically, The Bone People, seems in fact to be less radical than Mullumbimby, given the latter’s more “island-like” glossary. Certainly their prospects for post-colonial community are being worked out on different levels.Working with the various significations of “abroad” that span the macro level of historical circumstances and the micro levels of post-colonial literature, this article has introduced a new methodological approach to engaging with Indigenous language glossaries at the end of post-colonial texts written largely in English. This methodology responds to the need to go beyond the binary either/or approach that has characterised the debate in this patch of post-colonial studies so far. A binary view of language relations, I suggest, is debilitating to prospects for post-colonial community in post-colonial, multi-cultural and island nations like Australia and New Zealand, where language flows are multifarious and complex. My proposed methodology, as highlighted in the neologism “glossary islands”, seems to show promise for the (re-)interpretation of Mullumbimby and The Bone People as texts that deal, albeit in different ways, with similar issues of language relations and of community. An “abroad” methodology provides a powerful infrastructure for engagement with domains such as post-colonialism that, as Stephen Slemon indicates, involve the intensive intermingling of the largest geo-historical circumstances with the detail, even minutiae, of the textual expression of those circumstances, as in literature.ReferencesDeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P, 2007.Dever, Maryanne. “Violence as Lingua Franca: Keri Hulme’s The Bone People.” World Literature Written in English 29.2 (1989): 23-35.During, Simon. “Postmodernism or Postcolonialism?” Landfall 39.3 (1985): 366-80.———. “Postmodernism or Post-Colonialism Today.” Postmodernism: A Reader. Ed. Thomas Docherty. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. 448-62.Hulme, Keri. The Bone People. London: Pan-Picador, 1986.Lucashenko, Melissa. Mullumbimby. St Lucia, Queensland: U of Queensland P, 2013.Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Routledge, 1985.Slemon, Stephen. “Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse.” Canadian Literature 116 (Spring 1988): 9-24.The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Ed. Lesley Brown. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1993.Vincent, Eve. “Country Matters.” Sydney Review of Books. Sydney: The Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney, 2013. 8 Aug. 2016 <http://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/country-matters/>.
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21

Waterhouse-Watson, Deb, and Adam Brown. "Women in the "Grey Zone"? Ambiguity, Complicity and Rape Culture." M/C Journal 14, no. 5 (October 18, 2011). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.417.

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Abstract:
Probably the most (in)famous Australian teenager of recent times, now-17-year-old Kim Duthie—better known as the “St Kilda Schoolgirl”—first came to public attention when she posted naked pictures of two prominent St Kilda Australian Football League (AFL) players on Facebook. She claimed to be seeking revenge on the players’ teammate for getting her pregnant. This turned out to be a lie. Duthie also claimed that 47-year-old football manager Ricky Nixon gave her drugs and had sex with her. She then said this was a lie, then that she lied about lying. That she lied at least twice is clear, and in doing so, she arguably reinforced the pervasive myth that women are prone to lie about rape and sexual abuse. Precisely what occurred, and why Duthie posted the naked photographs will probably never be known. However, it seems clear that Duthie felt herself wronged. Can she therefore be held entirely to blame for the way she went about seeking redress from a group of men with infinitely more power than she—socially, financially and (in terms of the priority given to elite football in Australian society) culturally? The many judgements passed on Duthie’s behaviour in the media highlight the crucial, seldom-discussed issue of how problematic behaviour on the part of women might reinforce patriarchal norms. This is a particularly sensitive issue in the context of a spate of alleged sexual assaults committed by elite Australian footballers over the past decade. Given that representations of alleged rape cases in the media and elsewhere so often position women as blameworthy for their own mistreatment and abuse, the question of whether or not women can and should be held accountable in certain situations is particularly fraught. By exploring media representations of one of these complex scenarios, we consider how the issue of “complicity” might be understood in a rape culture. In doing so, we employ Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi’s highly influential concept of the “grey zone,” which signifies a complex and ambiguous realm that challenges both judgement and representation. Primo Levi’s “Grey Zone,” Patriarchy and the Problem of Judgement In his essay titled “The Grey Zone” (published in 1986), Levi is chiefly concerned with Jewish prisoners in the Nazi-controlled camps and ghettos who obtained “privileged” positions in order to prolong their survival. Reflecting on the inherently complex power relations in such extreme settings, Levi positions the “grey zone” as a metaphor for moral ambiguity: a realm with “ill-defined outlines which both separate and join the two camps of masters and servants. [The ‘grey zone’] possesses an incredibly complicated internal structure, and contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge” (27). According to Levi, an examination of the scenarios and experiences that gave rise to the “grey zone” requires a rejection of the black-and-white binary opposition(s) of “friend” and “enemy,” “good” and “evil.” While Levi unequivocally holds the perpetrators of the Holocaust responsible for their actions, he warns that one should suspend judgement of victims who were entrapped in situations of moral ambiguity and “compromise.” However, recent scholarship on the representation of “privileged” Jews in Levi’s writings and elsewhere has identified a “paradox of judgement”: namely, that even if moral judgements of victims in extreme situations should be suspended, such judgements are inherent in the act of representation, and are therefore inevitable (see Brown). While the historical specificity of Levi’s reflections must be kept in mind, the corruptive influences of power at the core of the “grey zone”—along with the associated problems of judgement and representation—are clearly far more prevalent in human nature and experience than the Holocaust alone. Levi’s “grey zone” has been appropriated by scholars in the fields of Holocaust studies (Petropoulos and Roth xv-xviii), philosophy (Todorov 262), law (Luban 161–76), history (Cole 248–49), theology (Roth 53–54), and popular culture (Cheyette 226–38). Significantly, Claudia Card (The Atrocity Paradigm, “Groping through Gray Zones” 3–26) has recently applied Levi’s concept to the field of feminist philosophy. Indeed, Levi’s questioning of whether or not one can—or should—pass judgement on the behaviour of Holocaust victims has considerable relevance to the divisive issue of how women’s involvement in/with patriarchy is represented in the media. Expanding or intentionally departing from Levi’s ideas, many recent interpretations of the “grey zone” often misunderstand the historical specificity of Levi’s reflections. For instance, while applying Levi’s concept to the effects of patriarchy and domestic violence on women, Lynne Arnault makes the problematic statement that “in order to establish the cruelty and seriousness of male violence against women as women, feminists must demonstrate that the experiences of victims of incest, rape, and battering are comparable to those of war veterans, prisoners of war, political prisoners, and concentration camp inmates” (183, n.9). It is important to stress here that it is not our intention to make direct parallels between the Holocaust and patriarchy, or between “privileged” Jews and women (potentially) implicated in a rape culture, but to explore the complexity of power relations in society, what behaviour eventuates from these, and—most crucial to our discussion here—how such behaviour is handled in the mass media. Aware of the problem of making controversial (and unnecessary) comparisons, Card (“Women, Evil, and Gray Zones” 515) rightly stresses that her aim is “not to compare suffering or even degrees of evil but to note patterns in the moral complexity of choices and judgments of responsibility.” Card uses the notion of the “Stockholm Syndrome,” citing numerous examples of women identifying with their torturers after having been abused or held hostage over a prolonged period of time—most (in)famously, Patricia Hearst. While the medical establishment has responded to cases of women “suffering” from “Stockholm Syndrome” by absolving them from any moral responsibility, Card writes that “we may have a morally gray area in some cases, where there is real danger of becoming complicit in evildoing and where the captive’s responsibility is better described as problematic than as nonexistent” (“Women, Evil, and Gray Zones” 511). Like Levi, Card emphasises that issues of individual agency and moral responsibility are far from clear-cut. At the same time, a full awareness of the oppressive environment—in the context that this paper is concerned with, a patriarchal social system—must be accounted for. Importantly, the examples Card uses differ significantly from the issue of whether or not some women can be considered “complicit” in a rape culture; nevertheless, similar obstacles to understanding problematic situations exist here, too. In the context of a rape culture, can women become, to use Card’s phrase, “instruments of oppression”? And if so, how is their controversial behaviour to be understood and represented? Crucially, Levi’s reflections on the “grey zone” were primarily motivated by his concern that most historical and filmic representations “trivialised” the complexity of victim experiences by passing simplistic judgements. Likewise, the representation of sexual assault cases in the Australian mass media has often left much to be desired. Representing Sexual Assault: Australian Football and the Media A growing literature has critiqued the sexual culture of elite football in Australia—one in which women are reportedly treated with disdain, positioned as objects to be used and discarded. At least 20 distinct cases, involving more than 55 players and staff, have been reported in the media, with the majority of these incidents involving multiple players. Reports indicate that such group sexual encounters are commonplace for footballers, and the women who participate in sexual practices are commonly judged, even in the sports scholarship, as “groupies” and “sluts” who are therefore responsible for anything that happens to them, including rape (Waterhouse-Watson, “Playing Defence” 114–15; “(Un)reasonable Doubt”). When the issue of footballers and sexual assault was first debated in the Australian media in 2004, football insiders from both Australian rules and rugby league told the media of a culture of group sex and sexual behaviour that is degrading to women, even when consensual (Barry; Khadem and Nancarrow 4; Smith 1; Weidler 4). The sexual “culture” is marked by a discourse of abuse and objectification, in which women are cast as “meat” or a “bun.” Group sex is also increasingly referred to as “chop up,” which codes the practice itself as an act of violence. It has been argued elsewhere that footballers treating women as sexual objects is effectively condoned through the mass media (Waterhouse-Watson, “All Women Are Sluts” passim). The “Code of Silence” episode of ABC television program Four Corners, which reignited the debate in 2009, was even more explicit in portraying footballers’ sexual practices as abusive, presenting rape testimony from three women, including “Clare,” who remains traumatised following a “group sex” incident with rugby league players in 2002. Clare testifies that she went to a hotel room with prominent National Rugby League (NRL) players Matthew Johns and Brett Firman. She says that she had sex with Johns and Firman, although the experience was unpleasant and they treated her “like a piece of meat.” Subsequently, a dozen players and staff members from the team then entered the room, uninvited, some through the bathroom window, expecting sex with Clare. Neither Johns nor Firman has denied that this was the case. Clare went to the police five days later, saying that professional rugby players had raped her, although no charges were ever laid. The program further includes psychiatrists’ reports, and statements from the police officer in charge of the case, detailing the severe trauma that Clare suffered as a result of what the footballers called “sex.” If, as “Code of Silence” suggests, footballers’ practices of group sex are abusive, whether the woman consents or not, then it follows that such a “gang-bang culture” may in turn foster a rape culture, in which rape is more likely than in other contexts. And yet, many women insist that they enjoy group sex with footballers (Barry; Drill 86), complicating issues of consent and the degradation of women. Feminist rape scholarship documents the repetitive way in which complainants are deemed to have “invited” or “caused” the rape through their behaviour towards the accused or the way they were dressed: defence lawyers, judges (Larcombe 100; Lees 85; Young 442–65) and even talk show hosts, ostensibly aiming to expose the problem of rape (Alcoff and Gray 261–64), employ these tactics to undermine a victim’s credibility and excuse the accused perpetrator. Nevertheless, although no woman can be in any way held responsible for any man committing sexual assault, or other abuse, it must be acknowledged that women who become in some way implicated in a rape culture also assist in maintaining that culture, highlighting a “grey zone” of moral ambiguity. How, then, should these women, who in some cases even actively promote behaviour that is intrinsic to this culture, be perceived and represented? Charmyne Palavi, who appeared on “Code of Silence,” is a prime example of such a “grey zone” figure. While she stated that she was raped by a prominent footballer, Palavi also described her continuing practice of setting up footballers and women for casual sex through her Facebook page, and pursuing such encounters herself. This raises several problems of judgement and representation, and the issue of women’s sexual freedom. On the one hand, Palavi (and all other women) should be entitled to engage in any consensual (legal) sexual behaviour that they choose. But on the other, when footballers’ frequent casual sex is part of a culture of sexual abuse, there is a danger of them becoming complicit in, to use Card’s term, “evildoing.” Further, when telling her story on “Code of Silence,” Palavi hints that there is an element of increased risk in these situations. When describing her sexual encounters with footballers, which she states are “on her terms,” she begins, “It’s consensual for a start. I’m not drunk or on drugs and it’s in, [it] has an element of class to it. Do you know what I mean?” (emphasis added). If it is necessary to define sex “on her terms” as consensual, this implies that sometimes casual “sex” with footballers is not consensual, or that there is an increased likelihood of rape. She also claims to have heard about several incidents in which footballers she knows sexually abused and denigrated, if not actually raped, other women. Such an awareness of what may happen clearly does not make Palavi a perpetrator of abuse, but neither can her actions (such as “setting up” women with footballers using Facebook) be considered entirely separate. While one may argue, following Levi’s reflections, that judgement of a “grey zone” figure such as Palavi should be suspended, it is significant that Four Corners’s representation of Palavi makes implicit and simplistic moral judgements. The introduction to Palavi follows the story of “Caroline,” who states that first-grade rugby player Dane Tilse broke into her university dormitory room and sexually assaulted her while she slept. Caroline indicates that Tilse left when he “picked up that [she] was really stressed.” Following this story, the program’s reporter and narrator Sarah Ferguson introduces Palavi with, “If some young footballers mistakenly think all women want to have sex with them, Charmyne Palavi is one who doesn’t necessarily discourage the idea.” As has been argued elsewhere (Waterhouse-Watson, “Framing the Victim”), this implies that Palavi is partly responsible for players holding this mistaken view. By implication, she therefore encouraged Tilse to assume that Caroline would want to have sex with him. Footage is then shown of Palavi and her friends “applying the finishing touches”—bronzing their legs—before going to meet footballers at a local hotel. The lighting is dim and the hand-held camerawork rough. These techniques portray the women as artificial and “cheap,” techniques that are also employed in a remarkably similar fashion in the documentary Footy Chicks (Barry), which follows three women who seek out sex with footballers. In response to Ferguson’s question, “What’s the appeal of those boys though?” Palavi repeats several times that she likes footballers mainly because of their bodies. This, along with the program’s focus on the women as instigators of sex, positions Palavi as something of a predator (she was widely referred to as a “cougar” following the program). In judging her “promiscuity” as immoral, the program implies she is partly responsible for her own rape, as well as acts of what can be termed, at the very least, sexual abuse of other women. The problematic representation of Palavi raises the complex question of how her “grey zone” behaviour should be depicted without passing trivialising judgements. This issue is particularly fraught when Four Corners follows the representation of Palavi’s “nightlife” with her accounts of footballers’ acts of sexual assault and abuse, including testimony that a well-known player raped Palavi herself. While Ferguson does not explicitly question the veracity of Palavi’s claim of rape, her portrayal is nevertheless largely unsympathetic, and the way the segment is edited appears to imply that she is blameworthy. Ferguson recounts that Palavi “says she was able to put [being raped] out of her mind, and it certainly didn’t stop her pursuing other football players.” This might be interpreted a positive statement about Palavi’s ability to move on from a rape; however, the tone of Ferguson’s authoritative voiceover is disapproving, which instead implies negative judgement. As the program makes clear, Palavi continues to organise sexual encounters between women and players, despite her knowledge of the “dangers,” both to herself and other women. Palavi’s awareness of the prevalence of incidents of sexual assault or abuse makes her position a problematic one. Yet her controversial role within the sexual culture of elite Australian football is complicated even further by the fact that she herself is disempowered (and her own allegation of being raped delegitimised) by the simplistic ideas about “assault” and “consent” that dominate social discourse. Despite this ambiguity, Four Corners constructs Palavi as more of a perpetrator of abuse than a victim—not even a victim who is “morally compromised.” Although we argue that careful consideration must be given to the issue of whether moral judgements should be applied to “grey zone” figures like Palavi, the “solution” is far from simple. No language (or image) is neutral or value-free, and judgements are inevitable in any act of representation. In his essay on the “grey zone,” Levi raises the crucial point that the many (mis)understandings of figures of moral ambiguity and “compromise” partly arise from the fact that the testimony and perspectives of these figures themselves is often the last to be heard—if at all (50). Nevertheless, an article Palavi published in Sydney tabloid The Daily Telegraph (19) demonstrates that such testimony can also be problematic and only complicate matters further. Palavi’s account begins: If you believed Four Corners, I’m supposed to be the NRL’s biggest groupie, a wannabe WAG who dresses up, heads out to clubs and hunts down players to have sex with… what annoys me about these tags and the way I was portrayed on that show is the idea I prey on them like some of the starstruck women I’ve seen out there. (emphasis added) Palavi clearly rejects the way Four Corners constructed her as a predator; however, rather than rejecting this stereotype outright, she reinscribes it, projecting it onto other “starstruck” women. Throughout her article, Palavi reiterates (other) women’s allegedly predatory behaviour, continually portraying the footballers as passive and the women as active. For example, she claims that players “like being contacted by girls,” whereas “the girls use the information the players put on their [social media profiles] to track them down.” Palavi’s narrative confirms this construction of men as victims of women’s predatory actions, lamenting the sacking of Johns following “Code of Silence” as “disgusting.” In the context of alleged sexual assault, the “predatory woman” stereotype is used in place of the raped woman in order to imply that sexual assault did not occur; hence Palavi’s problematic discourse arguably reinforces sexist attitudes. But can Palavi be considered complicit in validating this damaging stereotype? Can she be blamed for working within patriarchal systems of representation, of which she has also been a victim? The preceding analysis shows judgement to be inherent in the act of representation. The paucity of language is particularly acute when dealing with such extreme situations. Indeed, the language used to explore this issue in the present article cannot escape terminology that is loaded with meaning(s), which quotation marks can perhaps only qualify so far. Conclusion This paper does not claim to provide definitive answers to such complex dilemmas, but rather to highlight problems in addressing the sensitive issues of ambiguity and “complicity” in women’s interactions with patriarchal systems, and how these are represented in the mass media. Like the controversial behaviour of teenager Kim Duthie described earlier, Palavi’s position throws the problems of judgement and representation into disarray. There is no simple solution to these problems, though we do propose that these “grey zone” figures be represented in a self-reflexive, nuanced manner by explicitly articulating questions of responsibility rather than making simplistic judgements that implicitly lessen perpetrators’ culpability. Levi’s concept of the “grey zone” helps elucidate the fraught issue of women’s potential complicity in a rape culture, a subject that challenges both understanding and representation. Despite participating in a culture that promotes the abuse, denigration, and humiliation of women, the roles of women like Palavi cannot in any way be conflated with the roles of the perpetrators of sexual assault. These and other “grey zones” need to be constantly rethought and renegotiated in order to develop a fuller understanding of human behaviour. References Alcoff, Linda Martin, and Laura Gray. “Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation.” Signs 18.2 (1993): 260–90. Arnault, Lynne S. “Cruelty, Horror, and the Will to Redemption.” Hypatia 18.2 (2003): 155–88. Barry, Rebecca. Footy Chicks. Dir. Rebecca Barry. Australia: SBS Television, off-air recording, 2006. Benedict, Jeff. Public Heroes, Private Felons: Athletes and Crimes against Women. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1997. Benedict, Jeff. Athletes and Acquaintance Rape. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 1998. Brison, Susan J. Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002. Brown, Adam. “Beyond ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’: Breaking Down Binary Oppositions in Holocaust Representations of ‘Privileged’ Jews.” History Compass 8.5 (2010): 407–18. ———. “Confronting ‘Choiceless Choices’ in Holocaust Videotestimonies: Judgement, ‘Privileged’ Jews, and the Role of the Interviewer.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Communication Studies, Special Issue: Interrogating Trauma: Arts & Media Responses to Collective Suffering 24.1 (2010): 79–90. ———. “Marginalising the Marginal in Holocaust Films: Fictional Representations of Jewish Policemen.” Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies 15 (2009). 14 Oct. 2011 ‹http://www.limina.arts.uwa.edu.au/previous/vol11to15/vol15/ibpcommended?f=252874›. ———. “‘Privileged’ Jews, Holocaust Representation and the ‘Limits’ of Judgement: The Case of Raul Hilberg.” Ed. Evan Smith. Europe’s Expansions and Contractions: Proceedings of the XVIIth Biennial Conference of the Australasian Association of European Historians (Adelaide, July 2009). Unley: Australian Humanities Press, 2010: 63–86. ———. “The Trauma of ‘Choiceless Choices’: The Paradox of Judgement in Primo Levi’s ‘Grey Zone.’” Trauma, Historicity, Philosophy. Ed. Matthew Sharpe. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2007: 121–40. ———. “Traumatic Memory and Holocaust Testimony: Passing Judgement in Representations of Chaim Rumkowski.” Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique, 15 (2008): 128–44. Card, Claudia. The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. ———. “Groping through Gray Zones.” On Feminist Ethics and Politics. Ed. Claudia Card. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999: 3–26. ———. “Women, Evil, and Gray Zones.” Metaphilosophy 31.5 (2000): 509–28. Cheyette, Bryan. “The Uncertain Certainty of Schindler’s List.” Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List. Ed. Yosefa Loshitzky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997: 226–38. “Code of Silence.” Four Corners. Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Australia, 2009. Cole, Tim. Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto. New York: Routledge, 2003. Drill, Stephen. “Footy Groupie: I Am Not Ashamed.” Sunday Herald Sun, 24 May 2009: 86. Gavey, Nicola. Just Sex? The Cultural Scaffolding of Rape. East Sussex: Routledge, 2005. Khadem, Nassim, and Kate Nancarrow. “Doing It for the Sake of Your Mates.” Sunday Age, 21 Mar. 2004: 4. Larcombe, Wendy. Compelling Engagements: Feminism, Rape Law and Romance Fiction. Sydney: Federation Press, 2005. Lees, Sue. Ruling Passions. Buckingham: Open UP, 1997. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. London: Michael Joseph, 1986. Luban, David. “A Man Lost in the Gray Zone.” Law and History Review 19.1 (2001): 161–76. Masters, Roy. Bad Boys: AFL, Rugby League, Rugby Union and Soccer. Sydney: Random House Australia, 2006. Palavi, Charmyne. “True Confessions of a Rugby League Groupie.” Daily Telegraph 19 May 2009: 19. Petropoulos, Jonathan, and John K. Roth, eds. Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath. New York: Berghahn, 2005. Roth, John K. “In Response to Hannah Holtschneider.” Fire in the Ashes: God, Evil, and the Holocaust. Eds. David Patterson and John K. Roth. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2005: 50–54. Smith, Wayne. “Gang-Bang Culture Part of Game.” The Australian 6 Mar. 2004: 1. Todorov, Tzvetan. Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps. Translated by Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollack. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991. Waterhouse-Watson, Deb. “All Women Are Sluts: Australian Rules Football and Representations of the Feminine.” Australian Feminist Law Journal 27 (2007): 155–62. ———. “Framing the Victim: Sexual Assault and Australian Footballers on Television.” Australian Feminist Studies (2011, in press). ———. “Playing Defence in a Sexual Assault ‘Trial by Media’: The Male Footballer’s Imaginary Body.” Australian Feminist Law Journal 30 (2009): 109–29. ———. “(Un)reasonable Doubt: Narrative Immunity for Footballers against Allegations of Sexual Assault.” M/C Journal 14.1 (2011). Weidler, Danny. “Players Reveal Their Side of the Story.” Sun Herald 29 Feb. 2004: 4. Young, Alison. “The Waste Land of the Law, the Wordless Song of the Rape Victim.” Melbourne University Law Review 2 (1998): 442–65.
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Das, Devaleena. "What’s in a Term: Can Feminism Look beyond the Global North/Global South Geopolitical Paradigm?" M/C Journal 20, no. 6 (December 31, 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1283.

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Introduction The genealogy of Feminist Standpoint Theory in the 1970s prioritised “locationality”, particularly the recognition of social and historical locations as valuable contribution to knowledge production. Pioneering figures such as Sandra Harding, Dorothy Smith, Patricia Hill Collins, Alison Jaggar, and Donna Haraway have argued that the oppressed must have some means (such as language, cultural practices) to enter the world of the oppressor in order to access some understanding of how the world works from the privileged perspective. In the essay “Meeting at the Edge of Fear: Theory on a World Scale”, the Australian social scientist Raewyn Connell explains that the production of feminist theory almost always comes from the global North. Connell critiques the hegemony of mainstream Northern feminism in her pyramidal model (59), showing how theory/knowledge is produced at the apex (global North) of a pyramid structure and “trickles down” (59) to the global South. Connell refers to a second model called mosaic epistemology which shows that multiple feminist ideologies across global North/South are juxtaposed against each other like tiles, with each specific culture making its own claims to validity.However, Nigerian feminist Bibi Bakare-Yusuf’s reflection on the fluidity of culture in her essay “Fabricating Identities” (5) suggests that fixing knowledge as Northern and Southern—disparate, discrete, and rigidly structured tiles—is also problematic. Connell proposes a third model called solidarity-based epistemology which involves mutual learning and critiquing with a focus on solidarity across differences. However, this is impractical in implementation especially given that feminist nomenclature relies on problematic terms such as “international”, “global North/South”, “transnational”, and “planetary” to categorise difference, spatiality, and temporality, often creating more distance than reciprocal exchange. Geographical specificity can be too limiting, but we also need to acknowledge that it is geographical locationality which becomes disadvantageous to overcome racial, cultural, and gender biases — and here are few examples.Nomenclatures: Global-North and Global South ParadigmThe global North/South terminology differentiating the two regions according to means of trade and relative wealth emerged from the Brandt Report’s delineation of the North as wealthy and South as impoverished in 1980s. Initially, these terms were a welcome repudiation of the hierarchical nomenclature of “developed” and “developing” nations. Nevertheless, the categories of North and South are problematic because of increased socio-economic heterogeneity causing erasure of local specificities without reflecting microscopic conflicts among feminists within the global North and the global South. Some feminist terms such as “Third World feminism” (Narayan), “global feminism” (Morgan), or “local feminisms” (Basu) aim to centre women's movements originating outside the West or in the postcolonial context, other labels attempt to making feminism more inclusive or reflective of cross-border linkages. These include “transnational feminism” (Grewal and Kaplan) and “feminism without borders” (Mohanty). In the 1980s, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality garnered attention in the US along with Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which raised feminists’ awareness of educational, healthcare, and financial disparities among women and the experiences of marginalised people across the globe, leading to an interrogation of the aims and purposes of mainstream feminism. In general, global North feminism refers to white middle class feminist movements further expanded by concerns about civil rights and contemporary queer theory while global South feminism focusses on decolonisation, economic justice, and disarmament. However, the history of colonialism demonstrates that this paradigm is inadequate because the oppression and marginalisation of Black, Indigenous, and Queer activists have been avoided purposely in the homogenous models of women’s oppression depicted by white radical and liberal feminists. A poignant example is from Audre Lorde’s personal account:I wheeled my two-year-old daughter in a shopping cart through a supermarket in Eastchester in 1967, and a little white girl riding past in her mother’s cart calls out excitedly, ‘oh look, Mommy, a baby maid!’ And your mother shushes you, but does not correct you, and so fifteen years later, at a conference on racism, you can still find that story humorous. But I hear your laughter is full of terror and disease. (Lorde)This exemplifies how the terminology global North/South is a problem because there are inequities within the North that are parallel to the division of power and resources between North and South. Additionally, Susan Friedman in Planetary Modernisms observes that although the terms “Global North” and “Global South” are “rhetorically spatial” they are “as geographically imprecise and ideologically weighted as East/West” because “Global North” signifies “modern global hegemony” and “Global South” signifies the “subaltern, … —a binary construction that continues to place the West at the controlling centre of the plot” (Friedman, 123).Focussing on research-activism debate among US feminists, Sondra Hale takes another tack, emphasising that feminism in the global South is more pragmatic than the theory-oriented feminist discourse of the North (Hale). Just as the research-scholarship binary implies myopic assumption that scholarship is a privileged activity, Hale’s observations reveal a reductive assumption in the global North and global South nomenclature that feminism at the margins is theoretically inadequate. In other words, recognising the “North” as the site of theoretical processing is a euphemism for Northern feminists’ intellectual supremacy and the inferiority of Southern feminist praxis. To wit, theories emanating from the South are often overlooked or rejected outright for not aligning with Eurocentric framings of knowledge production, thereby limiting the scope of feminist theories to those that originate in the North. For example, while discussing Indigenous women’s craft-autobiography, the standard feminist approach is to apply Susan Sontag’s theory of gender and photography to these artefacts even though it may not be applicable given the different cultural, social, and class contexts in which they are produced. Consequently, Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi’s Islamic methodology (Mernissi), the discourse of land rights, gender equality, kinship, and rituals found in Bina Agarwal’s A Field of One’s Own, Marcia Langton’s “Grandmothers’ Law”, and the reflection on military intervention are missing from Northern feminist theoretical discussions. Moreover, “outsiders within” feminist scholars fit into Western feminist canonical requirements by publishing their works in leading Western journals or seeking higher degrees from Western institutions. In the process, Northern feminists’ intellectual hegemony is normalised and regularised. An example of the wealth of the materials outside of mainstream Western feminist theories may be found in the work of Girindrasekhar Bose, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, founder of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society and author of the book Concept of Repression (1921). Bose developed the “vagina envy theory” long before the neo-Freudian psychiatrist Karen Horney proposed it, but it is largely unknown in the West. Bose’s article “The Genesis and Adjustment of the Oedipus Wish” discarded Freud’s theory of castration and explained how in the Indian cultural context, men can cherish an unconscious desire to bear a child and to be castrated, implicitly overturning Freud’s correlative theory of “penis envy.” Indeed, the case of India shows that the birth of theory can be traced back to as early as eighth century when study of verbal ornamentation and literary semantics based on the notion of dbvani or suggestion, and the aesthetic theory of rasa or "sentiment" is developed. If theory means systematic reasoning and conceptualising the structure of thought, methods, and epistemology, it exists in all cultures but unfortunately non-Western theory is largely invisible in classroom courses.In the recent book Queer Activism in India, Naisargi Dev shows that the theory is rooted in activism. Similarly, in her essay “Seed and Earth”, Leela Dube reveals how Eastern theories are distorted as they are Westernised. For instance, the “Purusha-Prakriti” concept in Hinduism where Purusha stands for pure consciousness and Prakriti stands for the entire phenomenal world is almost universally misinterpreted in terms of Western binary oppositions as masculine consciousness and feminine creative principle which has led to disastrous consequences including the legitimisation of male control over female sexuality. Dube argues how heteropatriarchy has twisted the Purusha-Prakriti philosophy to frame the reproductive metaphor of the male seed germinating in the female field for the advantage of patrilineal agrarian economies and to influence a homology between reproductive metaphors and cultural and institutional sexism (Dube 22-24). Attempting to reverse such distortions, ecofeminist Vandana Shiva rejects dualistic and exploitative “contemporary Western views of nature” (37) and employs the original Prakriti-Purusha cosmology to construct feminist vision and environmental ethics. Shiva argues that unlike Cartesian binaries where nature or Prakriti is inert and passive, in Hindu Philosophy, Purusha and Prakriti are inseparable and inviolable (Shiva 37-39). She refers to Kalika Purana where it is explained how rivers and mountains have a dual nature. “A river is a form of water, yet is has a distinct body … . We cannot know, when looking at a lifeless shell, that it contains a living being. Similarly, within the apparently inanimate rivers and mountains there dwells a hidden consciousness. Rivers and mountains take the forms they wish” (38).Scholars on the periphery who never migrated to the North find it difficult to achieve international audiences unless they colonise themselves, steeping their work in concepts and methods recognised by Western institutions and mimicking the style and format that western feminist journals follow. The best remedy for this would be to interpret border relations and economic flow between countries and across time through the prism of gender and race, an idea similar to what Sarah Radcliffe, Nina Laurie and Robert Andolina have called the “transnationalization of gender” (160).Migration between Global North and Global SouthReformulation of feminist epistemology might reasonably begin with a focus on migration and gender politics because international and interregional migration have played a crucial role in the production of feminist theories. While some white mainstream feminists acknowledge the long history of feminist imperialism, they need to be more assertive in centralising non-Western theories, scholarship, and institutions in order to resist economic inequalities and racist, patriarchal global hierarchies of military and organisational power. But these possibilities are stymied by migrants’ “de-skilling”, which maintains unequal power dynamics: when migrants move from the global South to global North, many end up in jobs for which they are overqualified because of their cultural, educational, racial, or religious alterity.In the face of a global trend of movement from South to North in search of a “better life”, visual artist Naiza Khan chose to return to Pakistan after spending her childhood in Lebanon before being trained at the University of Oxford. Living in Karachi over twenty years, Khan travels globally, researching, delivering lectures, and holding exhibitions on her art work. Auj Khan’s essay “Peripheries of Thought and Practise in Naiza Khan’s Work” argues: “Khan seems to be going through a perpetual diaspora within an ownership of her hybridity, without having really left any of her abodes. This agitated space of modern hybrid existence is a rich and ripe ground for resolution and understanding. This multiple consciousness is an edge for anyone in that space, which could be effectively made use of to establish new ground”. Naiza Khan’s works embrace loss or nostalgia and a sense of choice and autonomy within the context of unrestricted liminal geographical boundaries.Early work such as “Chastity Belt,” “Heavenly Ornaments”, “Dream”, and “The Skin She Wears” deal with the female body though Khan resists the “feminist artist” category, essentially because of limited Western associations and on account of her paradoxical, diasporic subjectivity: of “the self and the non-self, the doable and the undoable and the anxiety of possibility and choice” (Khan Webpage). Instead, Khan theorises “gender” as “personal sexuality”. The symbolic elements in her work such as corsets, skirts, and slips, though apparently Western, are purposely destabilised as she engages in re-constructing the cartography of the body in search of personal space. In “The Wardrobe”, Khan establishes a path for expressing women’s power that Western feminism barely acknowledges. Responding to the 2007 Islamabad Lal Masjid siege by militants, Khan reveals the power of the burqa to protect Muslim men by disguising their gender and sexuality; women escape the Orientalist gaze. For Khan, home is where her art is—beyond the global North and South dichotomy.In another example of de-centring Western feminist theory, the Indian-British sitar player Anoushka Shankar, who identifies as a radical pro-feminist, in her recent musical album “Land of Gold” produces what Chilla Bulbeck calls “braiding at the borderlands”. As a humanitarian response to the trauma of displacement and the plight of refugees, Shankar focusses on women giving birth during migration and the trauma of being unable to provide stability and security to their children. Grounded in maternal humility, Shankar’s album, composed by artists of diverse background as Akram Khan, singer Alev Lenz, and poet Pavana Reddy, attempts to dissolve boundaries in the midst of chaos—the dislocation, vulnerability and uncertainty experienced by migrants. The album is “a bit of this, and a bit of that” (borrowing Salman Rushdie’s definition of migration in Satanic Verses), both in terms of musical genre and cultural identities, which evokes emotion and subjective fluidity. An encouraging example of truly transnational feminist ethics, Shankar’s album reveals the chasm between global North and global South represented in the tension of a nascent friendship between a white, Western little girl and a migrant refugee child. Unlike mainstream feminism, where migration is often sympathetically feminised and exotified—or, to paraphrase bell hooks, difference is commodified (hooks 373) — Shankar’s album simultaneously exhibits regional, national, and transnational elements. The album inhabits multiple borderlands through musical genres, literature and politics, orality and text, and ethnographic and intercultural encounters. The message is: “the body is a continent / But may your heart always remain the sea" (Shankar). The human rights advocate and lawyer Randa Abdel-Fattah, in her autobiographical novel Does My Head Look Big in This?, depicts herself as “colourful adjectives” (such as “darkies”, “towel-heads”, or the “salami eaters”), painful identities imposed on her for being a Muslim woman of colour. These ultimately empower her to embrace her identity as a Palestinian-Egyptian-Australian Muslim writer (Abdel-Fattah 359). In the process, Abdel-Fattah reveals how mainstream feminism participates in her marginalisation: “You’re constantly made to feel as you’re commenting as a Muslim, and somehow your views are a little bit inferior or you’re somehow a little bit more brainwashed” (Abdel-Fattah, interviewed in 2015).With her parental roots in the global South (Egyptian mother and Palestinian father), Abdel-Fattah was born and brought up in the global North, Australia (although geographically located in global South, Australia is categorised as global North for being above the world average GDP per capita) where she embraced her faith and religious identity apparently because of Islamophobia:I refuse to be an apologist, to minimise this appalling state of affairs… While I'm sick to death, as a Muslim woman, of the hypocrisy and nonsensical fatwas, I confess that I'm also tired of white women who think the answer is flashing a bit of breast so that those "poor," "infantilised" Muslim women can be "rescued" by the "enlightened" West - as if freedom was the sole preserve of secular feminists. (Abdel-Fattah, "Ending Oppression")Abdel-Fattah’s residency in the global North while advocating for justice and equality for Muslim women in both the global North and South is a classic example of the mutual dependency between the feminists in global North and global South, and the need to recognise and resist neoliberal policies applied in by the North to the South. In her novel, sixteen-year-old Amal Mohamed chooses to become a “full-time” hijab wearer in an elite school in Melbourne just after the 9/11 tragedy, the Bali bombings which killed 88 Australians, and the threat by Algerian-born Abdel Nacer Benbrika, who planned to attack popular places in Sydney and Melbourne. In such turmoil, Amal’s decision to wear the hijab amounts to more than resistance to Islamophobia: it is a passionate search for the true meaning of Islam, an attempt to embrace her hybridity as an Australian Muslim girl and above all a step towards seeking spiritual self-fulfilment. As the novel depicts Amal’s challenging journey amidst discouraging and painful, humiliating experiences, the socially constructed “bloody confusing identity hyphens” collapse (5). What remains is the beautiful veil that stands for Amal’s multi-valence subjectivity. The different shades of her hijab reflect different moods and multiple “selves” which are variously tentative, rebellious, romantic, argumentative, spiritual, and ambitious: “I am experiencing a new identity, a new expression of who I am on the inside” (25).In Griffith Review, Randa-Abdel Fattah strongly criticises the book Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks, a Wall-Street Journal reporter who travelled from global North to the South to cover Muslim women in the Middle East. Recognising the liberal feminist’s desire to explore the Orient, Randa-Abdel calls the book an example of feminist Orientalism because of the author’s inability to understand the nuanced diversity in the Muslim world, Muslim women’s purposeful downplay of agency, and, most importantly, Brooks’s inevitable veil fetishism in her trip to Gaza and lack of interest in human rights violations of Palestinian women or their lack of access to education and health services. Though Brooks travelled from Australia to the Middle East, she failed to develop partnerships with the women she met and distanced herself from them. This underscores the veracity of Amal’s observation in Abdel Fattah’s novel: “It’s mainly the migrants in my life who have inspired me to understand what it means to be an Aussie” (340). It also suggests that the transnational feminist ethic lies not in the global North and global South paradigm but in the fluidity of migration between and among cultures rather than geographical boundaries and military borders. All this argues that across the imperial cartography of discrimination and oppression, women’s solidarity is only possible through intercultural and syncretistic negotiation that respects the individual and the community.ReferencesAbdel-Fattah, Randa. Does My Head Look Big in This? Sydney: Pan MacMillan Australia, 2005.———. “Ending Oppression in the Middle East: A Muslim Feminist Call to Arms.” ABC Religion and Ethics, 29 April 2013. <http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2013/04/29/3747543.htm>.———. “On ‘Nine Parts Of Desire’, by Geraldine Brooks.” Griffith Review. <https://griffithreview.com/on-nine-parts-of-desire-by-geraldine-brooks/>.Agarwal, Bina. A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1994.Amissah, Edith Kohrs. Aspects of Feminism and Gender in the Novels of Three West African Women Writers. Nairobi: Africa Resource Center, 1999.Andolina, Robert, Nina Laurie, and Sarah A. Radcliffe. Indigenous Development in the Andes: Culture, Power, and Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.Anzaldúa, Gloria E. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.Bakare-Yusuf, Bibi. “Fabricating Identities: Survival and the Imagination in Jamaican Dancehall Culture.” Fashion Theory 10.3 (2006): 1–24.Basu, Amrita (ed.). Women's Movements in the Global Era: The Power of Local Feminisms. Philadelphia: Westview Press, 2010.Bulbeck, Chilla. Re-Orienting Western Feminisms: Women's Diversity in a Postcolonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.Connell, Raewyn. “Meeting at the Edge of Fear: Theory on a World Scale.” Feminist Theory 16.1 (2015): 49–66.———. “Rethinking Gender from the South.” Feminist Studies 40.3 (2014): 518-539.Daniel, Eniola. “I Work toward the Liberation of Women, But I’m Not Feminist, Says Buchi Emecheta.” The Guardian, 29 Jan. 2017. <https://guardian.ng/art/i-work-toward-the-liberation-of-women-but-im-not-feminist-says-buchi-emecheta/>.Devi, Mahasveta. "Draupadi." Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Critical Inquiry 8.2 (1981): 381-402.Friedman, Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.Grewal, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.Hale, Sondra. “Transnational Gender Studies and the Migrating Concept of Gender in the Middle East and North Africa.” Cultural Dynamics 21.2 (2009): 133-52.hooks, bell. “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.” Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.Langton, Marcia. “‘Grandmother’s Law’, Company Business and Succession in Changing Aboriginal Land Tenure System.” Traditional Aboriginal Society: A Reader. Ed. W.H. Edward. 2nd ed. Melbourne: Macmillan, 2003.Lazreg, Marnia. “Feminism and Difference: The Perils of Writing as a Woman on Women in Algeria.” Feminist Studies 14.1 (Spring 1988): 81-107.Liew, Stephanie. “Subtle Racism Is More Problematic in Australia.” Interview. music.com.au 2015. <http://themusic.com.au/interviews/all/2015/03/06/randa-abdel-fattah/>.Lorde, Audre. “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.” Keynoted presented at National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Storrs, Conn., 1981.Mernissi, Fatima. The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam. Trans. Mary Jo Lakeland. New York: Basic Books, 1991.Moghadam, Valentine. Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East. London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003.Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. Talkin' Up to the White Woman: Aboriginal Women and Feminism. St Lucia: Queensland University Press, 2000.Morgan, Robin (ed.). Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women's Movement Anthology. New York: The Feminist Press, 1984.Narayan, Uma. Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism, 1997.
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Nahrung, Nollie Joy. "Cooking with Luce: Parler-Femme through Textual Montage." M/C Journal 16, no. 3 (June 23, 2013). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.647.

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This series of digital cut-ups offers a personal response to my readings of selected works by Luce Irigaray, using words, images, and graphemes from domestic cookery books as ingredients for thinking and writing. Through these textual montage experiments, I engage with parler-femme (speaking (as) woman) as both concept and practice to explore love, fluidity, and desire through multiple mimetic modes. Textual montage is an alternative writing practice that foregrounds embodied ways of knowing (Emberley). By merging and juxtaposing diverse elements in non-linear modes, textual montage encourages the visual to enter the written, exposing the conditions of reading, writing and making meaning (Lupton). This opens a space of dialogue that challenges scholarly conventions surrounding “the essay form and the production of knowledge within its logics, rhetorics, and silences” (Emberley 72). This project uses an eclectic range of mass-produced cookbooks from 1928 to 1962 as source material for textual montage. These texts are intended for domestic use by women, as evidenced by their modes of direct address, and/or illustrations or photographs. This reflects the traditional construction of cooking as a gendered practice undertaken by women in Western societies within the private sphere of the home (Fleitz). While such allegiance to the sexual division of domestic labour mobilises hierarchies of race and sexuality in addition to gender (Hill Collins), domestic cookbooks represent collective social, embodied and textual practices that are constructed as being specific to women (Fleitz). Importantly, such constructions are not static. As evidenced by the revisions and amendments made to popular cookbooks over time, texts about domestic cooking are shaped by broader technological, cultural, social, and economic conditions. This is apparent in several of the source texts I have used, which have been revised or updated to acknowledge changes to ingredient availability or type (Royles Food Products), cooking techniques (Wijey), kitchen equipment (Wijey; Bentley; Howard), or health research (Davy in Royles Food Products) current at the time of their publication. In addition, three of the source texts reflect the historic relationship between women’s magazines and commercially published cookbooks (State Library of Victoria). The Delineator Cook Book (1928, taken from the New Butterick Cook Book), the Australian Women’s Weekly Cookery Book (c.1950), and Good Housekeeping’s Picture Cake Making (c.1955) are all published by popular magazine franchises, positioning domestic cookery within the sphere of consumer culture. Here, the inclusion of a text by the Australian Women’s Weekly (AWW) is particularly significant, as this franchise has achieved “trusted brand status” among many consumers within Australia, and continues to publish cookbooks today (State Library of Victoria). The enduring relationship between the AWW and domestic cooking in Australia indicates the importance of cookbooks in communicating knowledge between different generations of women, as both established and innovative foodmaking practices are circulated by a collectively known and “trusted” source. In constructing this inter-generational body of knowledge, women are of central importance as both authors and readers of cookbooks, in contrast to many other spheres of activity where their knowledge and participation has historically been subjugated or limited (Fleitz). In considering this, my inclusion of textual montage elements from cookbooks produced by, and/or used by, different generations of women acknowledges the maternal genealogy made absent within patriarchal Western thought and institutions (Irigaray). Although cookbooks are a source of instruction, they can also facilitate women’s experimentation and innovation (Supski). When women revise or recast cookbook recipes, they perform an authorship role by editing or rewriting the original text (Fleitz). Similarly, textual montage is a dynamic and performative process that complicates notions of the author (Emberley) while challenging the conventional “recipe” of writing; demonstrating the parallel between cooking and women’s writing as forms of embodied knowledge (Fleitz). In this project, textual montage aligns to the “thoughtful practice” of cooking, which entwines knowledge and practical application (Heldke 203). In writing through my body, I reject the binary opposition between thinking and doing, and advance parler-femme as a practice of enunciation (Irigaray). In cutting and reassembling the language of domestic cookery within an alternative context, I seek to open it to different modes of thought, address, and sensual affect. Here, I endeavour to present a series of playful encounters that embrace the potentiality, plurality, and mutability of language in the feminine. Fig. 1. As she is rendered Fig. 2. Re: generative organs Fig. 3. Fluid measuresReferencesAustralian Woman’s Weekly. The Australian Woman’s Weekly Cookery Book. Compiled by the Food and Cookery Experts of the Australian’s Women’s Weekly under the direction of Leila C Howard. Sydney: Consolidated Press, c.1950. Delineator Home Institute. Delineator Cook Book. Rev. ed. Ed. Mildred Maddocks Bentley. New York: Butterick, 1928. Emberley, Julia. “Body, Interrupted: Textual Montage, Traumatised Bodies, and the De-disciplining of Knowledge.” Resources for Feminist Research. 29 (2002): 69–84. Fleitz, Elizabeth. “Cooking Codes: Cookbook Discourses as Women’s Rhetorical Practices.” Present Tense. 1 (2010): 1–8. Good Housekeeping. Good Housekeeping’s Picture Cake Making. Melbourne:Colorgravure, c.1955.Heldke, Lisa M. “Foodmaking as Thoughtful Practice.” Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food. Ed. Deane W. Curtin, and Lisa Maree Heldke. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992. 203–29.Hill Collins, Patricia. “It’s all in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation.” Hypatia.13 (1998): 62–82.Irigaray, Luce. The Irigaray Reader. Ed. Margaret Whitford. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.Lupton, Ellen and Miller, J. Abbott. “Deconstruction and Graphic Design: History Meets Theory.” Visible Language. 28 (1994): 346–66.Royles Food Products. Cardiol Good Health Cook Book. Sydney: Royles Food Products, 1962.State Library of Victoria. “Research Guides: Food in Victoria”. State Library of Victoria. 9 May 2013. 28 May 2013. ‹http://guides.slv.vic.gov.au/content.php?pid=338940&sid=2771583›.Supski, Sian. “‘We Still Mourn that Book’: Cookbooks, Recipes and Foodmaking Knowledge in 1950s Australia.” Journal of Australian Studies. 28 (2005): 85–94.Wijey, Mabel. Ed. Warne’s Everyday Cookery. Revised ed. London: Frederick Warne, 1929.
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24

Wessell, Adele. "Making a Pig of the Humanities: Re-centering the Historical Narrative." M/C Journal 13, no. 5 (October 18, 2010). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.289.

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As the name suggests, the humanities is largely a study of the human condition, in which history sits as a discipline concerned with the past. Environmental history is a new field that brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to consider the changing relationships between humans and the environment over time. Critiques of anthropocentrism that place humans at the centre of the universe or make assessments through an exclusive human perspective provide a challenge to scholars to rethink our traditional biases against the nonhuman world. The movement towards nonhumanism or posthumanism, however, does not seem to have had much of an impression on history as a discipline. What would a nonhumanist history look like if we re-centred the historical narrative around pigs? There are histories of pigs as food (see for example, The Cambridge History of Food which has a chapter on “Hogs”). There are food histories that feature pork in terms of its relationship to multiethnic identity (such as Donna Gabaccia’s We Are What We Eat) and examples made of pigs to promote ethical eating (Singer). Pigs are central to arguments about dietary rules and what motivates them (Soler; Dolander). Ancient pig DNA has also been employed in studies on human migration and colonisation (Larson et al.; Durham University). Pigs are also widely used in a range of products that would surprise many of us. In 2008, Christien Meindertsma spent three years researching the products made from a single pig. Among some of the more unexpected results were: ammunition, medicine, photographic paper, heart valves, brakes, chewing gum, porcelain, cosmetics, cigarettes, hair conditioner and even bio diesel. Likewise, Fergus Henderson, who coined the term ‘nose to tail eating’, uses a pig on the front cover of the book of that name to suggest the extraordinary and numerous potential of pigs’ bodies. However, my intention here is not to pursue a discussion of how parts of their bodies are used, rather to consider a reorientation of the historical narrative to place pigs at the centre of stories of our co-evolution, in order to see what their history might say about humans and our relationships with them. This is underpinned by recognition of the inter-relationality of humans and animals. The relationships between wild boar and pigs with humans has been long and diverse. In a book exploring 10,000 years of interaction, Anton Ervynck and Peter Rowley-Conwy argue that pigs have been central to complex cultural developments in human societies and they played an important role in human migration patterns. The book is firmly grounded within the disciplines of zoology, anthropology and archaeology and contributes to an understanding of the complex and changing relationship humans have historically shared with wild boar and domestic pigs. Naturalist Lyall Watson also explores human/pig relationships in The Whole Hog. The insights these approaches offer for the discipline of history are valuable (although overlooked) but, more importantly, such scholarship also challenges a humanist perspective that credits humans exclusively with historical change and suggests, moreover, that we did it alone. Pigs occupy a special place in this history because of their likeness to humans, revealed in their use in transplant technology, as well as because of the iconic and paradoxical status they occupy in our lives. As Ervynck and Rowley-Conwy explain, “On the one hand, they are praised for their fecundity, their intelligence, and their ability to eat almost anything, but on the other hand, they are unfairly derided for their apparent slovenliness, unclean ways, and gluttonous behaviour” (1). Scientist Niamh O’Connell was struck by the human parallels in the complex social structures which rule the lives of pigs and people when she began a research project on pig behaviour at the Agricultural Research Institute at Hillsborough in County Down (Cassidy). According to O’Connell, pigs adopt different philosophies and lifestyle strategies to get the most out of their life. “What is interesting from a human perspective is that low-ranking animals tend to adopt one of two strategies,” she says. “You have got the animals who accept their station in life and then you have got the other ones that are continually trying to climb, and as a consequence, their life is very stressed” (qtd. in Cassidy). The closeness of pigs to humans is the justification for their use in numerous experiments. In the so-called ‘pig test’, code named ‘Priscilla’, for instance, over 700 pigs dressed in military uniforms were used to study the effects of nuclear testing at the Nevada (USA) test site in the 1950s. In When Species Meet, Donna Haraway draws attention to the ambiguities and contradictions promoted by the divide between animals and humans, and between nature and culture. There is an ethical and critical dimension to this critique of human exceptionalism—the view that “humanity alone is not [connected to the] spatial and temporal web of interspecies dependencies” (11). There is also that danger that any examination of our interdependencies may just satisfy a humanist preoccupation with self-reflection and self-reproduction. Given that pigs cannot speak, will they just become the raw material to reproduce the world in human’s own image? As Haraway explains: “Productionism is about man the tool-maker and -user, whose highest technical production is himself […] Blinded by the sun, in thrall to the father, reproduced in the sacred image of the same, his rewards is that he is self-born, an auto telic copy. That is the mythos of enlightenment and transcendence” (67). Jared Diamond acknowledges the mutualistic relationship between pigs and humans in Guns, Germs and Steel and the complex co-evolutionary path between humans and domesticated animals but his account is human-centric. Human’s relationships with pigs helped to shape human history and power relations and they spread across the world with human expansion. But questioning their utility as food and their enslavement to this cause was not part of the account. Pigs have no voice in the histories we write of them and so they can appear as passive objects in their own pasts. Traces of their pasts are available in humanity’s use of them in, for example, the sties built for them and the cooking implements used to prepare meals from them. Relics include bones and viruses, DNA sequences and land use patterns. Historians are used to dealing with subjects that cannot speak back, but they have usually left ample evidence of what they have said. In the process of writing, historians attempt to perform the miracle, as Curthoys and Docker have suggested, of restoration; bringing the people and places that existed in the past back to life (7). Writing about pigs should also attempt to bring the animal to life, to understand not just their past but also our own culture. In putting forward the idea of an alternative history that starts with pigs, I am aware of both the limits to such a proposal, and that most people’s only contact with pigs is through the meat they buy at the supermarket. Calls for a ban on intensive pig farming (RSPCA, ABC, AACT) might indeed have shocked people who imagine their dinner comes from the type of family farm featured in the movie Babe. Baby pigs in factory farms would have been killed a long time before the film’s sheep dog show (usually at 3 to 4 months of age). In fact, because baby pigs do grow so fast, 48 different pigs were used to film the role of the central character in Babe. While Babe himself may not have been aware of the relationship pigs generally have to humans, the other animals were very cognisant of their function. People eat pigs, even if they change the name of the form it takes in order to do so:Cat: You know, I probably shouldn’t say this, but I’m not sure if you realize how much the other animals are laughing at you for this sheep dog business. Babe: Why would they do that? Cat: Well, they say that you’ve forgotten that you’re a pig. Isn't that silly? Babe: What do you mean? Cat: You know, why pigs are here. Babe: Why are any of us here? Cat: Well, the cow’s here to be milked, the dogs are here to help the Boss's husband with the sheep, and I’m here to be beautiful and affectionate to the boss. Babe: Yes? Cat: [sighs softly] The fact is that pigs don’t have a purpose, just like ducks don’t have a purpose. Babe: [confused] Uh, I—I don’t, uh ... Cat: Alright, for your own sake, I’ll be blunt. Why do the Bosses keep ducks? To eat them. So why do the Bosses keep a pig? The fact is that animals don’t seem to have a purpose really do have a purpose. The Bosses have to eat. It’s probably the most noble purpose of all, when you come to think about it. Babe: They eat pigs? Cat: Pork, they call it—or bacon. They only call them pigs when they’re alive (Noonan). Babe’s transformation into a working pig to round up the sheep makes him more useful. Ferdinand the duck tried to do the same thing by crowing but was replaced by an alarm clock. This is a common theme in children’s stories, recalling Charlotte’s campaign to praise Wilbur the pig in order to persuade the farmer to let him live in E. B. White’s much loved children’s novel, Charlotte’s Web. Wilbur is “some pig”, “terrific”, “radiant” and “humble”. In 1948, four years before Charlotte’s Web, White had published an essay “Death of a Pig”, in which he fails to save a sick pig that he had bought in order to fatten up and butcher. Babe tried to present an alternative reality from a pig’s perspective, but the little pig was only spared because he was more useful alive than dead. We could all ask the question why are any of us here, but humans do not have to contemplate being eaten to justify their existence. The reputation pigs have for being filthy animals encourages distaste. In another movie, Pulp Fiction, Vincent opts for flavour, but Jules’ denial of pig’s personalities condemns them to insignificance:Vincent: Want some bacon? Jules: No man, I don’t eat pork. Vincent: Are you Jewish? Jules: Nah, I ain’t Jewish, I just don’t dig on swine, that’s all. Vincent: Why not? Jules: Pigs are filthy animals. I don’t eat filthy animals. Vincent: Bacon tastes gooood. Pork chops taste gooood. Jules: Hey, sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I’d never know ’cause I wouldn’t eat the filthy motherfucker. Pigs sleep and root in shit. That’s a filthy animal. I ain’t eat nothin’ that ain’t got sense enough to disregard its own feces [sic]. Vincent: How about a dog? Dogs eats its own feces. Jules: I don’t eat dog either. Vincent: Yeah, but do you consider a dog to be a filthy animal? Jules: I wouldn’t go so far as to call a dog filthy but they’re definitely dirty. But, a dog’s got personality. Personality goes a long way. Vincent: Ah, so by that rationale, if a pig had a better personality, he would cease to be a filthy animal. Is that true? Jules: Well we’d have to be talkin’ about one charming motherfuckin’ pig. I mean he’d have to be ten times more charmin’ than that Arnold on Green Acres, you know what I’m sayin’? In the 1960s television show Green Acres, Arnold was an exceptional pig who was allowed to do whatever he wanted. He was talented enough to write his own name and play the piano and his attempts at painting earned him the nickname “Porky Picasso”. These talents reflected values that are appreciated, and so he was. The term “pig” is, however, chiefly used a term of abuse, however, embodying traits we abhor—gluttony, obstinence, squealing, foraging, rooting, wallowing. Making a pig of yourself is rarely honoured. Making a pig of the humanities, however, could be a different story. As a historian I love to forage, although I use white gloves rather than a snout. I have rubbed my face and body on tree trunks in the service of forestry history and when the temperature rises I also enjoy wallowing, rolling from side to side rather than drawing a conclusion. More than this, however, pigs provide a valid means of understanding key historical transitions that define modern society. Significant themes in modern history—production, religion, the body, science, power, the national state, colonialism, gender, consumption, migration, memory—can all be understood through a history of our relationships with pigs. Pigs play an important role in everyday life, but their relationship to the economic, social, political and cultural matters discussed in general history texts—industrialisation, the growth of nation states, colonialism, feminism and so on—are generally ignored. However “natural” this place of pigs may seem, culture and tradition profoundly shape their history and their own contribution to those forces has been largely absent in history. What, then, would the contours of such a history that considered the intermeshing of humans and pigs look like? The intermeshing of pigs in early human history Agricultural economies based on domestic animals began independently in different parts of the world, facilitating increases in population and migration. Evidence for long-term genetic continuity between modern and ancient Chinese domestic pigs has been established by DNA sequences. Larson et al. have made an argument for five additional independent domestications of indigenous wild boar populations: in India, South East Asia and Taiwan, which they use to develop a picture of both pig evolution and the development and spread of early farmers in the Far East. Domestication itself involves transformation into something useful to animals. In the process, humans became transformed. The importance of the Fertile Crescent in human history has been well established. The area is attributed as the site for a series of developments that have defined human history—urbanisation, writing, empires, and civilisation. Those developments have been supported by innovations in food production and animal husbandry. Pig, goats, sheep and cows were all domesticated very early in the Fertile Crescent and remain four of the world’s most important domesticated mammals (Diamond 141). Another study of ancient pig DNA has concluded that the earliest domesticated pigs in Europe, believed to be descended from European wild boar, were introduced from the Middle East. The research, by archaeologists at Durham University, sheds new light on the colonisation of Europe by early farmers, who brought their animals with them. Keith Dobney explains:Many archaeologists believe that farming spread through the diffusion of ideas and cultural exchange, not with the direct migration of people. However, the discovery and analysis of ancient Middle Eastern pig remains across Europe reveals that although cultural exchange did happen, Europe was definitely colonised by Middle Eastern farmers. A combination of rising population and possible climate change in the ‘fertile crescent’, which put pressure on land and resources, made them look for new places to settle, plant their crops and breed their animals and so they rapidly spread west into Europe (ctd in ScienceDaily). Middle Eastern farmers colonised Europe with pigs and in the process transformed human history. Identity as a porcine theme Religious restrictions on the consumption of pigs come from the same area. Such restrictions exist in Jewish dietary laws (Kashrut) and in Muslim dietary laws (Halal). The basis of dietary laws has been the subject of much scholarship (Soler). Economic and health and hygiene factors have been used to explain the development of dietary laws historically. The significance of dietary laws, however, and the importance attached to them can be related to other purposes in defining and expressing religious and cultural identity. Dietary laws and their observance may have been an important factor in sustaining Jewish identity despite the dispersal of Jews in foreign lands since biblical times. In those situations, where a person eats in the home of someone who does not keep kosher, the lack of knowledge about your host’s ingredients and the food preparation techniques make it very difficult to keep kosher. Dietary laws require a certain amount of discipline and self-control, and the ability to make distinctions between right and wrong, good and evil, pure and defiled, the sacred and the profane, in everyday life, thus elevating eating into a religious act. Alternatively, people who eat anything are often subject to moral judgments that may also lead to social stigmatisation and discrimination. One of the most powerful and persuasive discourses influencing current thinking about health and bodies is the construction of an ‘obesity epidemic’, critiqued by a range of authors (see for example, Wright & Harwood). As omnivores who appear indiscriminate when it comes to food, pigs provide an image of uncontrolled eating, made visible by the body as a “virtual confessor”, to use Elizabeth Grosz’s term. In Fat Pig, a production by the Sydney Theatre Company in 2006, women are reduced to being either fat pigs or shrieking shallow women. Fatuosity, a blog by PhD student Jackie Wykes drawing on her research on fat and sexual subjectivity, provides a review of the play to describe the misogyny involved: “It leaves no options for women—you can either be a lovely person but a fat pig who will end up alone; or you can be a shrill bitch but beautiful, and end up with an equally obnoxious and shallow male counterpart”. The elision of the divide between women and pigs enacted by such imagery also creates openings for new modes of analysis and new practices of intervention that further challenge humanist histories. Such interventions need to make visible other power relations embedded in assumptions about identity politics. Following the lead of feminists and postcolonial theorists who have challenged the binary oppositions central to western ideology and hierarchical power relations, critical animal theorists have also called into question the essentialist and dualist assumptions underpinning our views of animals (Best). A pig history of the humanities might restore the central role that pigs have played in human history and evolution, beyond their exploitation as food. Humans have constructed their story of the nature of pigs to suit themselves in terms that are specieist, racist, patriarchal and colonialist, and failed to grasp the connections between the oppression of humans and other animals. The past and the ways it is constructed through history reflect and shape contemporary conditions. In this sense, the past has a powerful impact on the present, and the way this is re-told, therefore, also needs to be situated, historicised and problematicised. The examination of history and society from the standpoint of (nonhuman) animals offers new insights on our relationships in the past, but it might also provide an alternative history that restores their agency and contributes to a different kind of future. As the editor of Critical Animals Studies, Steve Best describes it: “This approach, as I define it, considers the interaction between human and nonhuman animals—past, present, and future—and the need for profound changes in the way humans define themselves and relate to other sentient species and to the natural world as a whole.” References ABC. “Changes to Pig Farming Proposed.” ABC News Online 22 May 2010. 10 Aug. 2010 http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/05/22/2906519.htm Against Animal Cruelty Tasmania. “Australia’s Intensive Pig Industry: The Intensive Pig Industry in Australia Has Much to Hide.” 10 Sep. 2010 http://www.aact.org.au/pig_industry.htm Babe. Dir. Chris Noonan. Universal Pictures, 1995. Best, Steven. “The Rise of Critical Animal Studies: Putting Theory into Action and Animal Liberation into Higher Education.” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 7.1 (2009): 9-53. Cassidy, Martin. “How Close are Pushy Pigs to Humans?”. BBC News Online 2005. 10 Sep. 2010 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/4482674.stmCurthoys, A., and Docker, J. “Time Eternity, Truth, and Death: History as Allegory.” Humanities Research 1 (1999) 10 Sep. 2010 http://www.anu.edu.au/hrc/publications/hr/hr_1_1999.phpDiamond, Jared. Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Dolader, Miguel-Àngel Motis. “Mediterranean Jewish Diet and Traditions in the Middle Ages”. Food: A Culinary History. Eds. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari. Trans. Clarissa Botsford, Arthus Golhammer, Charles Lambert, Frances M. López-Morillas and Sylvia Stevens. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. 224-44. Durham University. “Chinese Pigs ‘Direct Descendants’ of First Domesticated Breeds.” ScienceDaily 20 Apr. 2010. 29 Aug. 2010 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100419150947.htm Gabaccia, Donna R. We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1994. Haraway, D. “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge, 2005. 63-124. Haraway, D. When Species Meet: Posthumanities. 3rd ed. London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Henderson, Fergus. Nose to Tail Eating: A Kind of British Cooking. London: Bloomsbury, 2004. Kiple, Kenneth F., Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas. Cambridge History of Food. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Larson, G., Ranran Liu, Xingbo Zhao, Jing Yuan, Dorian Fuller, Loukas Barton, Keith Dobney, Qipeng Fan, Zhiliang Gu, Xiao-Hui Liu, Yunbing Luo, Peng Lv, Leif Andersson, and Ning Li. “Patterns of East Asian Pig Domestication, Migration, and Turnover Revealed by Modern and Ancient DNA.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, United States 19 Apr. 2010. 10 Sep. 2010 http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0912264107/DCSupplemental Meindertsma, Christien. “PIG 05049. Kunsthal in Rotterdam.” 2008. 10 Sep. 2010 http://www.christienmeindertsma.com/index.php?/books/pig-05049Naess, A. “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement.” Inquiry 16 (1973): 95-100. Needman, T. Fat Pig. Sydney Theatre Company. Oct. 2006. Noonan, Chris [director]. “Babe (1995) Memorable Quotes”. 10 Sep. 2010 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112431/quotes Plumwood, V. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993. Pulp Fiction. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Miramax, 1994. RSPCA Tasmania. “RSPCA Calls for Ban on Intensive Pig Farming.” 10 Sep. 2010 http://www.rspcatas.org.au/press-centre/rspca-calls-for-a-ban-on-intensive-pig-farming ScienceDaily. “Ancient Pig DNA Study Sheds New Light on Colonization of Europe by Early Farmers” 4 Sep. 2007. 10 Sep. 2010 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070903204822.htm Singer, Peter. “Down on the Family Farm ... or What Happened to Your Dinner When it was Still an Animal.” Animal Liberation 2nd ed. London: Jonathan Cape, 1990. 95-158. Soler, Jean. “Biblical Reasons: The Dietary Rules of the Ancient Hebrews.” Food: A Culinary History. Eds. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari. Trans. Clarissa Botsford, Arthus Golhammer, Charles Lambert, Frances M. López-Morillas and Sylvia Stevens. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. 46-54. Watson, Lyall. The Whole Hog: Exploring the Extraordinary Potential of Pigs. London: Profile, 2004. White, E. B. Essays of E. B. White. London: HarperCollins, 1979. White, E. B. Charlotte’s Web. London: HarperCollins, 2004. Wright, J., and V. Harwood. Eds. Biopolitics and the ‘Obesity Epidemic’. New York: Routledge, 2009. Wykes, J. Fatuosity 2010. 29 Aug. 2010 http://www.fatuosity.net
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25

Bolton, Michael C. "Cumming to an End." M/C Journal 7, no. 4 (October 1, 2004). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2398.

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In finding patriarchal oppression in linear narratives, early Second Wave feminist writers like Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray opposed biologically based Freudian theories that claimed the feminine was grounded in a certain essence of male-ness and female-ness. Cixous’ advocacy of écriture féminine includes her critique of traditional narrative, which she claims is structured by a sexual opposition that “has always worked for man’s profit to the point of reducing writing . . . to his laws” (883). Specifically in terms of cinema, the focus of this paper, Laura Mulvey finds similar oppression in filmic linear narratives. For her, the avant-garde’s near limitless possibilities can break this power, thus freeing “the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics and passionate detachment” (47). Similarly, Steve Neale’s “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema,” where he theorizes about placing the male body under the erotic gaze, remains immersed in a discourse on linear narrative. Some pornography theorists like Richard Dyer slightly eschew the overall plot-based notion of narrative by using the visible male orgasm as the structuring device, creating something of a narrative of ejaculation. Specifically, I am referring to Dyer’s “Idol thoughts: orgasm and self-reflexivity in gay pornography” where he states that cumming “brings the linear narrative drive that structures porn to a clear climax and end” (192). This emphasis on the male orgasm is also a tool used by some anti-porn feminists to read male-supremacy into (heterosexual) porn. Linda Williams, however, is quick to show that the money shot “is after all only male orgasm” which “can also be seen as the very limit of the visual representation of sexual pleasure,” countering some anti-porn arguments of pornography vis-à-vis the recorded male orgasm (Hard Core 101, author’s emphasis). Yet this too comes from an ever-present formalist tradition of film theory that reads meaning almost exclusively on the screen, maintaining the notion that porn is viewed as standard, commercial movies are, a notion that hardly seems thorough enough to account for the particulars of porn spectatorship. (Subsequently, Williams explores patterns of consumption in a later article entitled “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” an article which I will discuss in more detail below.) With specific attention to pornography’s effects on viewers, Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon were successful in getting certain municipalities to pass legislation banning pornography based on the detriments of the genre. (For further explanation of their position, please see the Minneapolis, Minnesota and Indianapolis, Indiana city council meeting transcripts in their book In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights.) Although the courts subsequently struck down this legislation, MacKinnon explained some of her reasoning in “Sexuality” where she asked important questions of (heterosexual) pornography’s defining woman in terms of what (heterosexual) male viewers find erotic, and her account of this definition’s role in terms of power seems fairly accurate. “Sexual meaning is not made only, or even primarily, by words and in texts. It is made in social relations of power in the world, through which process gender is also produced” (160). Yet because her argument is grounded in heterosexual porn, I must question some of her conclusions about “man” as a collective gender. In other words, do the erotics of gay porn still define woman as “what male desire requires for arousal and satisfaction and is totally tautologous with ‘female sexuality’ and ‘the female sex’” (161)? Or does man—at least in part—now fall into this category, thus disrupting the strict binaries of male and female sexuality? MacKinnon does bring in issues of same-sex desire, and her effort at inclusion should be commended. Her understanding of male-male sex, however, remains wed to the idea that dominance and submission are still defining characteristics, and that these characteristics reinforce the masculine:feminine binary, presumably in terms of sexual positioning, thus eliminating variance within male-male desire. The sum total of this is that many gender-based understandings of narrative are too closely tied to formalism, and much theory that questions the positioning of viewers—via feminist theory or otherwise—fails to account for variety within audiences. Porn theorists can use texts like Bel Ami’s Frisky Summer 1: Best Friends to correct the subtracting of marginalized groups by studying the technological characteristics of DVDs in the domestic sphere. And studying these features will allow for more in depth inquiries about geographies of consumption, a category in need of expansion for all of porn studies, not just gay porn. John Champagne favors this type of culturally-minded analysis of gay porn, focusing on consumption practices within the geographic spaces of gay porn theatres/arcades in his “‘Stop Reading Films!’: Film Studies, Close Analysis, and Gay Pornography.” Here, Champagne claims that close analyses of films of any genre act as a gatekeeper for film studies, suggesting that, through formalism, film theorists are able to ward off intrusions from other disciplines (like queer studies), preserve the film text as a privileged site of knowledge, and ensure their own place of authority (79). With regard to gay porn, Champagne claims that these acts of self-preservation film theorists perform when doing close analysis contain any perceived threat that gay porn and the gay porn theatre/arcade present. “In its psychoanalytically inflected variant in particular, it [film studies] uses close analysis to diagnose the desire of (homo)sexualized spectators, a desire it thinks it already knows and can recognize” (77). Offering the gay porn theatre/arcade as a more appropriate location for examination, Champagne aims “to understand the porno film viewing experience as part of a larger set of cultural and social rituals and practices” rather than studying it as simply another filmmaking practice (81). Going hand-in-glove with Champagne’s rejection of close analysis as a tool for porn studies, Linda Williams suggests that pornography—gay, lesbian, straight, or otherwise—is a “body genre,” defining this in terms of its desire to cause a bodily reaction (“Film Bodies” 3). In other words, porn wants to get the viewer off. Champagne’s transferring the emphasis from the text to the spectator is very appropriate for a cultural/social investigation into gay porn because of porn’s encoded desires to cause this bodily reaction. (Similarly, work could be done on the video rental store where consumption of pornography—i.e., renting a movie—could be the pretext for a desired sexual encounter.) Yet by focusing so tightly on the theatre/arcade, Champagne misses the opportunity to bridge textual analysis with consumption practices as they are acted out in the home viewing experience. I, as the home viewer, am allowed more control over the text than the theatre/arcade patron. Champagne describes a machine found in some porn theatres/arcades that cycles through movies, showing brief clips from specific scenes as a preview of what the patron could watch (86). Beyond that, the theatre/arcade patron has little control over pausing, rewinding, or fast-forwarding the film. DVDs, on the other hand, can be viewed non-linearly, something beyond comparison for theatre/arcade patrons and even exceeding what VHS offers. This ability of DVD to turn just about any porn film into a compilation movie infuses far more control over the text than ever before. Because of the overwhelming popularity of home consumption and the ever-expanding DVD market, porn research must account for these newer strategies of consumption. Like most mainstream DVDs, porn DVDs are divided into individual “chapters,” with porn DVDs usually featuring one sex scene at a time, thus acting similarly to the machine Champagne describes. The Frisky Summer DVD is divided into six chapters representing the six sex scenes, but after selecting, say, chapter 6—Ion Davidov and Johan Paulik—the DVD offers sub-chapter options of “play chapter,” “foreplay,” “oral,” “anal,” and “orgasms,” as written on the screen. By beginning with chapter six, the final scene/chapter, I am not missing vital information to understanding what will be present in this final scene because, as a body genre, the film is trying to cause a bodily reaction, trying to produce my orgasm, not necessarily needing me to follow a linear plot. In other words, what happens in chapter 1—Ion Davidov’s sex scene with Daniel Valent—has no bearing on the visceral pleasure of chapter 6. In fact, porn DVDs like Frisky Summer provide the pieces for me to construct my own sequences that meet my visceral desires. But we shouldn’t completely disregard formalist film theory because one of the offered pieces is the film as “sequenced” by the filmmakers. After all, following characters/actors from encounter to encounter could help drive the orgasmic pleasure for some viewers or possibly even satisfy other visual interests unintended by the filmmakers. Separating home porn consumption from other forms of domestic cinema consumption is that porn filmmakers must expect their product to be seen in fragments, illustrating their knowledge of porn viewer behavior. Furthermore, dividing the film into not only the individual sex scenes but also the types of sex featured in that scene suggests that the home viewer is not interested in watching the movie form beginning to end because porn’s true goal of viewer orgasm can be met more efficiently by watching a specific sexual act. Jumping right to, say, the anal sex in chapter six allows me to construct a meta-narrative that both defies the diegetic story offered by the filmmakers yet complies with the genre’s, and therefore, the filmmakers’ larger goal to produce my orgasm. And with my orgasm, the narrative truly comes to an end because, shortly after, I will presumably press stop, thus ending the diegetic narrative at a fairly random place, yet ending the meta-narrative of consumption at its standard and expected post-orgasmic conclusion. Underlining the specificity of the particular sexual act within the sex scene is that, after selecting the anal sex moments between Ion and Johan, the film does not continue on to their orgasms despite this being the next moment in the linear action. Rather, the DVD returns me to the sex act menu within their chapter, allowing me to watch the anal sex again, pick a different type of sex, or return to the chapter menu to pick a different set of actors. With these options of sexual acts within sex scenes, the filmmakers recognize both that I am not necessarily interested in watching the film from beginning to end and that even watching an entire sexual sequence could be more than I want. Furthermore, returning to the menu instead of continuing with the scene as the filmmakers’ edited it suggests that I might never want to see the actor’s orgasms anyway, challenging the formalist importance of the cum shot. An interesting note to consider with this is the time limitation selecting a specific sexual act places on the viewer. The anal sex sequence between Ion and Johan lasts 3:27. This does not guarantee the viewer enough time to reach an orgasm, a fact that appears to counter the film’s body genre qualities. Yet limited time actually results in viewer control. If 3:27 isn’t enough time to orgasm, the film’s return to the sub-chapter menu demands the viewer exercise power over the text by re-watching, rewinding, pausing, or “slow-motioning” the sequence. While the film could at one point be working against my ejaculation, it nevertheless demands that I control the text. Grounding gender-based theories on formalist traditions of narrative and heterosexist notions of spectatorship create a structured absence of marginalized sexual identities in non-linear narrative film viewing. Although my comments on this subscribe to a somewhat limited/“vanilla” idea of solo masturbation by self-identified gay men watching gay porn at home, they should be viewed as a starting point for future research that examines all forces being enacted upon porn viewers. Specifically, we can use this idea of pleasure being found between the text and the orgasm to look at both female and straight male pleasures of their using gay male porn. This middle ground between production and consumption is where I place the structuring device of gay male porn viewed by gay men and should be considered in future studies. References Champagne, John. “‘Stop Reading Films!: Film Studies, Close Analysis, and Gay Pornography.” Cinema Journal 36.4 (Summer 1997): 76-97. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1.4 (Summer 1976): 875-893. Dyer, Richard. “Idol thoughts: orgasm and self-reflexivity in gay pornography.” The Culture of Queers. London: Routledge, 2002. 187-203. Frisky Summer 1: Best Friends. DVD. Dir. George Duroy. With Ion Davidov and Johan Paulik. Bel Ami, 1995. 87 min. MacKinnon, Catharine A. “Sexuality.” The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory. Ed. Linda Nicholson. New York: Routledge, 1997. 158-180. MacKinnon, Catharine A., and Andrea Dworkin, eds. In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1997. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Feminism and Film. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 34-47. Neale, Steve. “Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema.” Feminism and Film. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 253-264. Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44.4 (Summer 1991): 2-13. —-. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”. Rev. ed. Berkeley: Univ. of Cal. Press, 1999. MLA Style Bolton, Michael C. "Cumming to an End: The Male Orgasm and Domestic Consumption of Gay Pornography." M/C Journal 7.4 (2004). 10 October 2004 <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/08_cumming.php>. APA Style Bolton, M. (2004 Oct 11). Cumming to an End: The Male Orgasm and Domestic Consumption of Gay Pornography, M/C Journal 7(4). Retrieved Oct 10 2004 from <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/08_cumming.php>
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Raj, Senthorun. "Impacting on Intimacy: Negotiating the Marriage Equality Debate." M/C Journal 14, no. 6 (November 6, 2011). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.350.

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Introduction How do we measure intimacy? What are its impacts on our social, political and personal lives? Can we claim a politics to our intimate lives that escapes the normative confines of archaic institutions, while making social justice claims for relationship recognition? Negotiating some of these disparate questions requires us to think more broadly in contemporary public debates on equality and relationship recognition. Specifically, by outlining the impacts of the popular "gay marriage" debate, this paper examines the impacts of queer theory in association with public policy and community lobbying for relationship equality. Much of the debate remains polarised: eliminating discrimination is counterposed to religious or reproductive narratives that suggest such recognition undermines the value of the "natural" heterosexual family. Introducing queer theory into advocacy that oscillates between rights and reproduction problematises indexing intimacy against normative ideas of monogamy and family. While the arguments circulated by academics, lawyers, politicians and activists have disparate political and ethical impacts, when taken together, they continue to define marriage as a public regulation of intimacy and citizenship. Citizenship, measured in democratic participation and choice, however, can only be realised through reflexive politics that value difference. Encouraging critical dialogue across disparate areas of the marriage equality debate will have a significant impact on how we make ethical claims for recognising intimacy. (Re)defining Marriage In legislative terms, marriage remains the most fundamental means through which the relationship between citizenship and intimacy is crystallised in Australia. For example, in 2004 the Federal Liberal Government in Australia passed a legislative amendment to the Marriage Act 1961 and expressly defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman. By issuing a public legislative amendment, the Government intended to privilege monogamous (in this case understood as heterosexual) intimacy by precluding same-sex or polygamous marriage. Such an exercise had rhetorical rather than legal significance, as common law principles had previously defined the scope of marriage in gender specific terms for decades (Graycar and Millbank 41). Marriage as an institution, however, is not a universal or a-historical discourse limited to legal or political constructs. Socialist feminist critiques of marriage in the 1950s conceptualised the legal and gender specific constructs in marriage as a patriarchal contract designed to regulate female bodies (Hannam 146). However, Angela McRobbie notes that within a post-feminist context, these historical realities of gendered subjugation, reproduction or domesticity have been "disarticulated" (26). Marriage has become a more democratic and self-reflexive expression of intimacy for women. David Shumway elaborates this idea and argues that this shift has emerged in a context of "social solidarity" within a consumer environment of social fragmentation (23). What this implies is that marriage now evokes a range of cultural choices, consumer practices and affective trends that are incommensurable to a singular legal or historical term of reference. Debating the Politics of Intimacy and Citizenship In order to reflect on this shifting relationship between choice, citizenship and marriage as a concept, it is necessary to highlight that marriage extends beyond private articulations of love. It is a ritualised performance of heterosexual individual (or coupled) citizenship as it entrenches economic and civil rights and responsibilities. The private becomes public. Current neo-liberal approaches to same-sex marriage focus on these symbolic and economic questions of how recognising intimacy is tied to equality. In a legal and political context, marriage is defined in s5 Marriage Act as "the union between a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life." While the Act does not imbue marriage with religious or procreative significance, such a gender dichotomous definition prevents same-sex and gender diverse partners from entering into marriage. For Morris Kaplan, this is a problem because "full equality for lesbian and gay citizens requires access to the legal and social recognition of our intimate associations" (201). Advocates and activists define the quest for equal citizenship by engaging with current religious dogma that situates marriage within a field of reproduction, whereby same-sex marriage is seen to rupture the traditional rubric of monogamous kinship and the biological processes of "gender complementarity" (Australian Christian Lobby 1). Liberal equality arguments reject such conservative assertions on the basis that desire, sexuality and intimacy are innate features of human existence and hence always already implicated in public spheres (Kaplan 202). Thus, legal visibility or state recognition becomes crucial to sustaining practices of intimacy. Problematising the broader social impact of a civil rights approach through the perspective of queer theory, the private/public distinctions that delineate citizenship and intimacy become more difficult to negotiate. Equality and queer theory arguments on same-sex marriage are difficult to reconcile, primarily because they signify the different psychic and cultural investments in the monogamous couple. Butler asserts that idealisations of the couple in legal discourse relates to norms surrounding community, family and nationhood (Undoing 116). This structured circulation of sexual norms reifies the hetero-normative forms of relationships that ought to be recognised (and are desired) by the state. Butler also interrogates this logic of marriage, as a heterosexual norm, and suggests it has the capacity to confine rather than liberate subjects (Undoing 118-20). The author's argument relies upon Michel Foucault's notion of power and subjection, where the subject is not an autonomous individual (as conceived in neo liberal discourses) but a site of disciplined discursive production (Trouble 63). Butler positions the heterosexuality of marriage as a "cultural and symbolic foundation" that renders forms of kinship, monogamy, parenting and community intelligible (Undoing 118). In this sense, marriage can be a problematic articulation of state interests, particularly in terms of perpetuating domesticity, economic mobility and the heterosexual family. As former Australian Prime Minister John Howard opines: Marriage is … one of the bedrock institutions of our society … marriage, as we understand it in our society, is about children … providing for the survival of the species. (qtd. in Wade) Howard's politicisation of marriage suggests that it remains crucial to the preservation of the nuclear family. In doing so, the statement also exemplifies homophobic anxieties towards non-normative kinship relations "outside the family". The Prime Ministers' words characterise marriage as a framework which privileges hegemonic ideas of monogamy, biological reproduction and gender dichotomy. Butler responds to these homophobic terms by alluding to the discursive function of a "heterosexual matrix" which codes and produces dichotomous sexes, genders and (hetero)sexual desires (Trouble 36). By refusing to accept the binary neo-liberal discourse in which one is either for or against gay marriage, Butler asserts that by prioritising marriage, the individual accepts the discursive terms of recognition and legitimacy in subjectifying what counts as love (Undoing 115). What this author's argument implies is that by recuperating marital norms, the individual is not liberated, but rather participates in the discursive "trap" and succumbs to the terms of a heterosexual matrix (Trouble 56). In contradistinction to Howard's political rhetoric, engaging with Foucault's broader theoretical work on sexuality and friendship can influence how we frame the possibilities of intimacy beyond parochial narratives of conjugal relationships. Foucault emphasises that countercultural intimacies rely on desires that are relegated to the margins of mainstream (hetero)sexual culture. For example, the transformational aesthetics in practices such as sadomasochism or queer polyamorous relationships exist due to certain prohibitions in respect to sex (Foucault, History (1) 38, and "Sex" 169). Foucault notes how forms of resistance that transgress mainstream norms produce new experiences of pleasure. Being "queer" (though Foucault does not use this word) becomes identified with new modes of living, rather than a static identity (Essential 138). Extending Foucault, Butler argues that positioning queer intimacies within a field of state recognition risks normalising relationships in terms of heterosexual norms whilst foreclosing the possibilities of new modes of affection. Jasbir Puar argues that queer subjects continue to feature on the peripheries of moral and legal citizenship when their practices of intimacy fail to conform to the socio-political dyadic ideal of matrimony, fidelity and reproduction (22-28). Puar and Butler's reluctance to embrace marriage becomes clearer through an examination of the obiter dicta in the recent American jurisprudence where the proscription on same-sex marriage was overturned in California: To the extent proponents seek to encourage a norm that sexual activity occur within marriage to ensure that reproduction occur within stable households, Proposition 8 discourages that norm because it requires some sexual activity and child-bearing and child-rearing to occur outside marriage. (Perry vs Schwarzenegger 128) By connecting the discourse of matrimony and sex with citizenship, the court reifies the value of marriage as an institution of the family, which should be extended to same-sex couples. Therefore, by locating the family in reproductive heterosexual terms, the court forecloses other modes of recognition or rights for those who are in non-monogamous relationships or choose not to reproduce. The legal reasoning in the case evinces the ways in which intimate citizenship or legitimate kinship is understood in highly parochial terms. As Kane Race elaborates, the suturing of domesticity and nationhood, with the rhetoric that "reproduction occur within stable households", frames heterosexual nuclear bonds as the means to legitimate sexual relations (98). By privileging a familial kinship aesthetic to marriage, the state implicitly disregards recognising the value of intimacy in non-nuclear communities or families (Race 100). Australia, however, unlike most foreign nations, has a dual model of relationship recognition. De facto relationships are virtually indistinguishable from marriage in terms of the rights and entitlements couples are able to access. Very recently, the amendments made by the Same-Sex Relationships (Equal Treatment in Commonwealth Laws - General Reform) Act 2008 (Cth) has ensured same-sex couples have been included under Federal definitions of de facto relationships, thereby granting same-sex couples the same material rights and entitlements as heterosexual married couples. While comprehensive de facto recognition operates uniquely in Australia, it is still necessary to question the impact of jurisprudence that considers only marriage provides the legitimate structure for raising children. As Laurent Berlant suggests, those who seek alternative "love plots" are denied the legal and cultural spaces to realise them ("Love" 479). Berlant's critique emphasises how current "progressive" legal approaches to same-sex relationships rely on a monogamous (heterosexual) trajectory of the "love plot" which marginalises those who are in divorced, single, polyamorous or multi-parent situations. For example, in the National Year of Action, a series of marriage equality rallies held across Australia over 2010, non-conjugal forms of intimacy were inadvertently sidelined in order to make a claim for relationship recognition. In a letter to the Sydney Star Observer, a reader laments: As a gay man, I cannot understand why gay people would want to engage in a heterosexual ritual called marriage … Why do gay couples want to buy into this ridiculous notion is beyond belief. The laws need to be changed so that gays are treated equal under the law, but this is not to be confused with marriage as these are two separate issues... (Michael 2) Marriage marks a privileged position of citizenship and consumption, to which all other gay and lesbian rights claims are tangential. Moreover, as this letter to the Sydney Star Observer implies, by claiming sexual citizenship through the rubric of marriage, discussions about other campaigns for legislative equality are effectively foreclosed. Melissa Gregg expands on such a problematic, noting that the legal responses to equality reiterate a normative relationship between sexuality and power, where only couples that subscribe to dyadic, marriage-like relationships are offered entitlements by the state (4). Correspondingly, much of the public activism around marriage equality in Australia seeks to achieve its impact for equality (reforming the Marriage Act) by positioning intimacy in terms of state legitimacy. Butler and Warner argue that when speaking of legitimacy a relation to what is legitimate is implied. Lisa Bower corroborates this, asserting "legal discourse creates norms which universalise particular modes of living…while suppressing other practices and identities" (267). What Butler's and Bower's arguments reveal is that legitimacy is obtained through the extension of marriage to homosexual couples. For example, Andrew Barr, the current Labor Party Education Minister in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), noted that "saying no to civil unions is to say that some relationships are more legitimate than others" (quoted in "Legal Ceremonies"). Ironically, such a statement privileges civil unions by rendering them as the normative basis on which to grant legal recognition. Elizabeth Povinelli argues the performance of dyadic intimacy becomes the means to assert legal and social sovereignty (112). Therefore, as Jenni Millbank warns, marriage, or even distinctive forms of civil unions, if taken alone, can entrench inequalities for those who choose not to participate in these forms of recognition (8). Grassroots mobilisation and political lobbying strategies around marriage equality activism can have the unintentional impact, however, of obscuring peripheral forms of intimacy and subsequently repudiating those who contest the movement towards marriage. Warner argues that those who choose to marry derive pride from their monogamous commitment and "family" oriented practice, a privilege afforded through marital citizenship (82). Conversely, individuals and couples who deviate from the "normal" (read: socially palatable) intimate citizen, such as promiscuous or polyamorous subjects, are rendered shameful or pitiful. This political discourse illustrates that there is a strong impetus in the marriage equality movement to legitimate "homosexual love" because it mimics the norms of monogamy, stability, continuity and family by only seeking to substitute the sex of the "other" partner. Thus, civil rights discourse maintains the privileged political economy of marriage as it involves reproduction (even if it is not biological), mainstream social roles and monogamous sex. By defining social membership and future life in terms of a heterosexual life-narrative, same-sex couples become wedded to the idea of matrimony as the basis for sustainable intimacy and citizenship (Berlant and Warner 557). Warner is critical of recuperating discourses that privilege marriage as the ideal form of intimacy. This is particularly concerning when diverse erotic and intimate communities, which are irreducible to normative forms of citizenship, are subject to erasure. Que(e)rying the Future of Ethics and Politics By connecting liberal equality arguments with Butler and Warner's work on queer ethics, there is hesitation towards privileging marriage as the ultimate form of intimacy. Moreover, Butler stresses the importance of a transformative practice of queer intimacy: It is crucial…that we maintain a critical and transformative relation to the norms that govern what will not count as intelligible and recognisable alliance and kinship. (Undoing 117) Here the author attempts to negotiate the complex terrain of queer citizenship and ethics. On one hand, it is necessary to be made visible in order to engage in political activism and be afforded rights within a state discourse. Simultaneously, on the other hand, there is a need to transform the prevailing hetero-normative rhetoric of romantic love in order to prevent pathologising bodies or rendering certain forms of intimacy as aberrant or deviant because, as Warner notes, they do not conform to our perception of what we understand to be normal or morally desirable. Foucault's work on the aesthetics of the self offers a possible transformational practice which avoids the risks Warner and Butler mention because it eludes the "normative determinations" of moralities and publics, whilst engaging in an "ethical stylization" (qtd. in Race 144). Whilst Foucault's work does not explicitly address the question of marriage, his work on friendship gestures to the significance of affective bonds. Queer kinship has the potential to produce new ethics, where bodies do not become subjects of desires, but rather act as agents of pleasure. Negotiating the intersection between active citizenship and transformative intimacy requires rethinking the politics of recognition and normalisation. Warner is quite ambivalent as to the potential of appropriating marriage for gays and lesbians, despite the historical dynamism of marriage. Rather than acting as a progressive mechanism for rights, it is an institution that operates by refusing to recognise other relations (Warner 129). However, as Alexander Duttmann notes, recognition is more complex and a paradoxical means of relation and identification. It involves a process in which the majority neutralises the difference of the (minority) Other in order to assimilate it (27). However, in the process of recognition, the Other which is validated, then transforms the position of the majority, by altering the terms by which recognition is granted. Marriage no longer simply confers recognition for heterosexual couples to engage in reproduction (Secomb 133). While some queer couples may subscribe to a monogamous relationship structure, these relationships necessarily trouble conservative politics. The lamentations of the Australian Christian Lobby regarding the "fundamental (anatomical) gender complementarity" of same-sex marriage reflect this by recognising the broader social transformation that will occur (and already does with many heterosexual marriages) by displacing the association between marriage, procreation and parenting (5). Correspondingly, Foucault's work assists in broadening the debate on relationship recognition by transforming our understanding of choice and ethics in terms of "queer friendship." He describes it as a practice that resists the normative public distinction between romantic and platonic affection and produces new aesthetics for sexual and non-sexual intimacy (Foucault, Essential 170). Linnell Secomb argues that this "double potential" alluded to in Foucault and Duttman's work, has the capacity to neutralise difference as Warner fears (133). However, it can also transform dominant narratives of sexual citizenship, as enabling marriage equality will impact on how we imagine traditional heterosexual or patriarchal "plots" to intimacy (Berlant, "Intimacy" 286). Conclusion Making an informed impact into public debates on marriage equality requires charting the locus of sexuality, intimacy and citizenship. Negotiating academic discourses, social and community activism, with broader institutions and norms presents political and social challenges when thinking about the sorts of intimacy that should be recognised by the state. The civil right to marriage, irrespective of the sex or gender of one's partner, reflects a crucial shift towards important democratic participation of non-heterosexual citizens. However, it is important to note that the value of such intimacy cannot be indexed against a single measure of legal reform. While Butler and Warner present considered indictments on the normalisation of queer intimacy through marriage, such arguments do not account for the impacts of que(e)rying cultural norms and practices through social and political change. Marriage is not a singular or a-historical construction reducible to state recognition. Moreover, in a secular democracy, marriage should be one of many forms of diverse relationship recognition open to same-sex and gender diverse couples. In order to expand the impact of social and legal claims for recognition, it is productive to rethink the complex nature of recognition, ritual and aesthetics within marriage. In doing so, we can begin to transform the possibilities for articulating intimate citizenship in plural democracies. References Australian Christian Lobby. "Submission to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee Inquiry into the Marriage Equality Amendment Bill 2009." Deakin: ACL, 2009. Australian Government. "Sec. 5." Marriage Act of 1961 (Cth). 1961. ———. Same-Sex Relationships (Equal Treatment in Commonwealth Laws - General Reform) Act 2008 (Cth). 2008. Bell, David, and John Binnie. The Sexual Citizen: Queer Politics and Beyond. Oxford: Polity P, 2000. Berlant, Lauren. "Intimacy: A Special Issue." Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 281-88. ———. "Love, a Queer Feeling." Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis. Eds. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001:432-52. Berlant, Lauren, and Michael Warner. "Sex in Public." Ed. Lauren Berlant. Intimacy. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2000: 311-30. Bower, Lisa. "Queer Problems/Straight Solutions: The Limits of a Politics of 'Official Recognition'" Playing with Fire: Queer Politics, Queer Theories. Ed. Shane Phelan. London and New York: Routledge, 1997: 267-91. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge, 1990. ———. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Duttmann, Alexander. Between Cultures: Tensions in the Struggle for Recognition. London: Verso, 2000. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality (1): The Will to Knowledge. London: Penguin Books, 1977. ———. "Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity." Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Ed. Paul Rabinow. London: Allen Lange/Penguin, 1984. 163-74. ———. Essential Works of Foucault: 1954-1984: Ethics, Vol. 1. London: Penguin, 2000. Graycar, Reg, and Jenni Millbank. "From Functional Families to Spinster Sisters: Australia's Distinctive Path to Relationship Recognition." Journal of Law and Policy 24. 2007: 1-44. Gregg, Melissa. "Normal Homes." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). 27 Aug. 2007 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/02-gregg.php›. Hannam, Jane. Feminism. London and New York: Pearson Education, 2007. Kaplan, Morris. "Intimacy and Equality: The Question of Lesbian and Gay Marriage." Playing with Fire: Queer Politics, Queer Theories. Ed. Shane Phelan. London and New York: Routledge, 1997: 201-30. "Legal Ceremonies for Same-Sex Couples." ABC Online 11 Nov. 2009. 13 Dec. 2011 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/11/2739661.htm›. McRobbie, Angela. The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change. London and New York: Sage, 2008. Michael. "Why Marriage?" Letter to the Editor. Sydney Star Observer 1031 (20 July 2010): 2. Millbank, Jenni. "Recognition of Lesbian and Gay Families in Australian Law - Part One: Couples." Federal Law Review 34 (2008): 1-44. Perry v. Schwarzenegger. 3: 09 CV 02292. United States District Court for the Northern District of California. 2010. Povinelli, Elizabeth. Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy and Carnality. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Race, Kane. Pleasure Consuming Medicine: The Queer Politics of Drugs. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2009. Secomb, Linnell. Philosophy and Love. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007. Shumway, David. Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy and the Marriage Crisis. New York: New York UP, 2003. Wade, Matt. "PM Joins Opposition against Gay Marriage as Cleric's Election Stalls." The Sydney Morning Herald 6 Aug. 2003. Warner, Michael. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999.
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Baird, Barbara. "Before the Bride Really Wore Pink." M/C Journal 15, no. 6 (November 28, 2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.584.

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

Brabazon, Tara. "Welcome to the Robbiedome." M/C Journal 4, no. 3 (June 1, 2001). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1907.

Full text
Abstract:
One of the greatest joys in watching Foxtel is to see all the crazy people who run talk shows. Judgement, ridicule and generalisations slip from their tongues like overcooked lamb off a bone. From Oprah to Rikki, from Jerry to Mother Love, the posterior of pop culture claims a world-wide audience. Recently, a new talk diva was added to the pay television stable. Dr Laura Schlessinger, the Mother of Morals, prowls the soundstage. attacking 'selfish acts' such as divorce, de facto relationships and voting Democrat. On April 11, 2001, a show aired in Australia that added a new demon to the decadence of the age. Dr Laura had been told that a disgusting video clip, called 'Rock DJ', had been televised at 2:30pm on MTV. Children could have been watching. The footage that so troubled our doyenne of daytime featured the British performer Robbie Williams not only stripping in front of disinterested women, but then removing skin, muscle and tissue in a desperate attempt to claim their gaze. This was too much for Dr Laura. She was horrified: her strident tone became piercing. She screeched, "this is si-ee-ck." . My paper is drawn to this sick masculinity, not to judge - but to laugh and theorise. Robbie Williams, the deity of levity, holds a pivotal role in theorising the contemporary 'crisis' of manhood. To paraphrase Austin Powers, Williams returned the ger to singer. But Williams also triumphed in a captivatingly original way. He is one of the few members of a boy band who created a successful solo career without regurgitating the middle of the road mantras of boys, girls, love, loss and whining about it. Williams' journey through post-war popular music, encompassing influences from both Sinatra and Sonique, forms a functional collage, rather than patchwork, of masculinity. He has been prepared to not only age in public, but to discuss the crevices and cracks in the facade. He strips, smokes, plays football, wears interesting underwear and drinks too much. My short paper trails behind this combustible masculinity, focussing on his sorties with both masculine modalities and the rock discourse. My words attack the gap between text and readership, beat and ear, music and men. The aim is to reveal how this 'sick masculinity' problematises the conservative rendering of men's crisis. Come follow me I'm an honorary Sean Connery, born '74 There's only one of me … Press be asking do I care for sodomy I don't know, yeah, probably I've been looking for serial monogamy Not some bird that looks like Billy Connolly But for now I'm down for ornithology Grab your binoculars, come follow me. 'Kids,' Robbie Williams Robbie Williams is a man for our age. Between dating supermodels and Geri 'Lost Spice' Halliwell [1], he has time to "love … his mum and a pint," (Ansen 85) but also subvert the Oasis cock(rock)tail by frocking up for a television appearance. Williams is important to theories of masculine representation. As a masculinity to think with, he creates popular culture with a history. In an era where Madonna practices yoga and wears cowboy boots, it is no surprise that by June 2000, Robbie Williams was voted the world's sexist man [2]. A few months later, in the October edition of Vogue, he posed in a British flag bikini. It is reassuring in an era where a 12 year old boy states that "You aren't a man until you shoot at something," (Issac in Mendel 19) that positive male role models exist who are prepared to both wear a frock and strip on national television. Reading Robbie Williams is like dipping into the most convincing but draining of intellectual texts. He is masculinity in motion, conveying foreignness, transgression and corruption, bartering in the polymorphous economies of sex, colonialism, race, gender and nation. His career has spanned the boy bands, try-hard rock, video star and hybrid pop performer. There are obvious resonances between the changes to Williams and alterations in masculinity. In 1988, Suzanne Moore described (the artist still known as) Prince as "the pimp of postmodernism." (165-166) Over a decade later, the simulacra has a new tour guide. Williams revels in the potency of representation. He rarely sings about love or romance, as was his sonic fodder in Take That. Instead, his performance is fixated on becoming a better man, glancing an analytical eye over other modes of masculinity. Notions of masculine crisis and sickness have punctuated this era. Men's studies is a boom area of cultural studies, dislodging the assumed structures of popular culture [3]. William Pollack's Real Boys has created a culture of changing expectations for men. The greater question arising from his concerns is why these problems, traumas and difficulties are emerging in our present. Pollack's argument is that boys and young men invest energy and time "disguising their deepest and most vulnerable feelings." (15) This masking is difficult to discern within dance and popular music. Through lyrics and dancing, videos and choreography, masculinity is revealed as convoluted, complex and fragmented. While rock music is legitimised by dominant ideologies, marginalised groups frequently use disempowered genres - like country, dance and rap genres - to present oppositional messages. These competing representations expose seamless interpretations of competent masculinity. Particular skills are necessary to rip the metaphoric pacifier out of the masculine mouth of popular culture. Patriarchal pop revels in the paradoxes of everyday life. Frequently these are nostalgic visions, which Kimmel described as a "retreat to a bygone era." (87) It is the recognition of a shared, simpler past that provides reinforcement to heteronormativity. Williams, as a gaffer tape masculinity, pulls apart the gaps and crevices in representation. Theorists must open the interpretative space encircling popular culture, disrupting normalising criteria. Multiple nodes of assessment allow a ranking of competent masculinity. From sport to business, drinking to sex, masculinity is transformed into a wired site of ranking, judgement and determination. Popular music swims in the spectacle of maleness. From David Lee Roth's skied splits to Eminem's beanie, young men are interpellated as subjects in patriarchy. Robbie Williams is a history lesson in post war masculinity. This nostalgia is conservative in nature. The ironic pastiche within his music videos features motor racing, heavy metal and Bond films. 'Rock DJ', the 'sick text' that vexed Doctor Laura, is Williams' most elaborate video. Set in a rollerdrome with female skaters encircling a central podium, the object of fascination and fetish is a male stripper. This strip is different though, as it disrupts the power held by men in phallocentralism. After being confronted by Williams' naked body, the observing women are both bored and disappointed at the lack-lustre deployment of masculine genitalia. After this display, Williams appears embarrassed, confused and humiliated. As Buchbinder realised, "No actual penis could every really measure up to the imagined sexual potency and social or magical power of the phallus." (49) To render this banal experience of male nudity ridiculous, Williams then proceeds to remove skin and muscle. He finally becomes an object of attraction for the female DJ only in skeletal form. By 'going all the way,' the strip confirms the predictability of masculinity and the ordinariness of the male body. For literate listeners though, a higher level of connotation is revealed. The song itself is based on Barry White's melody for 'It's ecstasy (when you lay down next to me).' Such intertextuality accesses the meta-racist excesses of a licentious black male sexuality. A white boy dancer must deliver an impotent, but ironic, rendering of White's (love unlimited) orchestration of potent sexuality. Williams' iconography and soundtrack is refreshing, emerging from an era of "men who cling … tightly to their illusions." (Faludi 14) When the ideological drapery is cut away, the male body is a major disappointment. Masculinity is an anxious performance. Fascinatingly, this deconstructive video has been demeaned through its labelling as pornography [4]. Oddly, a man who is prepared to - literally - shave the skin of masculinity is rendered offensive. Men's studies, like feminism, has been defrocking masculinity for some time. Robinson for example, expressed little sympathy for "whiny men jumping on the victimisation bandwagon or playing cowboys and Indians at warrior weekends and beating drums in sweat lodges." (6) By grating men's identity back to the body, the link between surface and depth - or identity and self - is forged. 'Rock DJ' attacks the new subjectivities of the male body by not only generating self-surveillance, but humour through the removal of clothes, skin and muscle. He continues this play with the symbols of masculine performance throughout the album Sing when you're winning. Featuring soccer photographs of players, coaches and fans, closer inspection of the images reveal that Robbie Williams is actually every character, in every role. His live show also enfolds diverse performances. Singing a version of 'My Way,' with cigarette in tow, he remixes Frank Sinatra into a replaying and recutting of masculine fabric. He follows one dominating masculinity with another: the Bond-inspired 'Millennium.' Some say that we are players Some say that we are pawns But we've been making money Since the day we were born Robbie Williams is comfortably located in a long history of post-Sinatra popular music. He mocks the rock ethos by combining guitars and drums with a gleaming brass section, hailing the lounge act of Dean Martin, while also using rap and dance samples. Although carrying fifty year's of crooner baggage, the spicy scent of homosexuality has also danced around Robbie Williams' career. Much of this ideology can be traced back to the Take That years. As Gary Barlow and Jason Orange commented at the time, Jason: So the rumour is we're all gay now are we? Gary: Am I gay? I am? Why? Oh good. Just as long as we know. Howard: Does anyone think I'm gay? Jason: No, you're the only one people think is straight. Howard: Why aren't I gay? What's wrong with me? Jason: It's because you're such a fine figure of macho manhood.(Kadis 17) For those not literate in the Take That discourse, it should come as no surprise that Howard was the TT equivalent of The Beatle's Ringo Starr or Duran Duran's Andy Taylor. Every boy band requires the ugly, shy member to make the others appear taller and more attractive. The inference of this dialogue is that the other members of the group are simply too handsome to be heterosexual. This ambiguous sexuality has followed Williams into his solo career, becoming fodder for those lads too unappealing to be homosexual: Oasis. Born to be mild I seem to spend my life Just waiting for the chorus 'Cause the verse is never nearly Good enough Robbie Williams "Singing for the lonely." Robbie Williams accesses a bigger, brighter and bolder future than Britpop. While the Gallagher brothers emulate and worship the icons of 1960s British music - from the Beatles' haircuts to the Stones' psychedelia - Williams' songs, videos and persona are chattering in a broader cultural field. From Noel Cowardesque allusions to the ordinariness of pub culture, Williams is much more than a pretty-boy singer. He has become an icon of English masculinity, enclosing all the complexity that these two terms convey. Williams' solo success from 1999-2001 occurred at the time of much parochial concern that British acts were not performing well in the American charts. It is bemusing to read Billboard over this period. The obvious quality of Britney Spears is seen to dwarf the mediocrity of British performers. The calibre of Fatboy Slim, carrying a smiley backpack stuffed with reflexive dance culture, is neither admitted nor discussed. It is becoming increasing strange to monitor the excessive fame of Williams in Britain, Europe, Asia and the Pacific when compared to his patchy career in the United States. Even some American magazines are trying to grasp the disparity. The swaggering king of Britpop sold a relatively measly 600,000 copies of his U.S. debut album, The ego has landed … Maybe Americans didn't appreciate his songs about being famous. (Ask Dr. Hip 72) In the first few years of the 2000s, it has been difficult to discuss a unified Anglo-American musical formation. Divergent discursive frameworks have emerged through this British evasion. There is no longer an agreed centre to the musical model. Throughout 1990s Britain, blackness jutted out of dance floor mixes, from reggae to dub, jazz and jungle. Plied with the coldness of techno was an almost too hot hip hop. Yet both were alternate trajectories to Cool Britannia. London once more became swinging, or as Vanity Fair declared, "the nerve centre of pop's most cohesive scene since the Pacific Northwest grunge explosion of 1991." (Kamp 102) Through Britpop, the clock turned back to the 1960s, a simpler time before race became 'a problem' for the nation. An affiliation was made between a New Labour, formed by the 1997 British election, and the rebirth of a Swinging London [5]. This style-driven empire supposedly - again - made London the centre of the world. Britpop was itself a misnaming. It was a strong sense of Englishness that permeated the lyrics, iconography and accent. Englishness requires a Britishness to invoke a sense of bigness and greatness. The contradictions and excesses of Blur, Oasis and Pulp resonate in the gap between centre and periphery, imperial core and colonised other. Slicing through the arrogance and anger of the Gallaghers is a yearning for colonial simplicity, when the pink portions of the map were the stable subjects of geography lessons, rather than the volatile embodiment of postcolonial theory. Simon Gikandi argues that "the central moments of English cultural identity were driven by doubts and disputes about the perimeters of the values that defined Englishness." (x) The reason that Britpop could not 'make it big' in the United States is because it was recycling an exhausted colonial dreaming. Two old Englands were duelling for ascendancy: the Oasis-inflected Manchester working class fought Blur-inspired London art school chic. This insular understanding of difference had serious social and cultural consequences. The only possible representation of white, British youth was a tabloidisation of Oasis's behaviour through swearing, drug excess and violence. Simon Reynolds realised that by returning to the three minute pop tune that the milkman can whistle, reinvoking parochial England with no black people, Britpop has turned its back defiantly on the future. (members.aol.com/blissout/Britpop.html) Fortunately, another future had already happened. The beats per minute were pulsating with an urgent affirmation of change, hybridity and difference. Hip hop and techno mapped a careful cartography of race. While rock was colonialisation by other means, hip hop enacted a decolonial imperative. Electronic dance music provided a unique rendering of identity throughout the 1990s. It was a mode of musical communication that moved across national and linguistic boundaries, far beyond Britpop or Stateside rock music. While the Anglo American military alliance was matched and shadowed by postwar popular culture, Brit-pop signalled the end of this hegemonic formation. From this point, English pop and American rock would not sail as smoothly over the Atlantic. While 1995 was the year of Wonderwall, by 1996 the Britpop bubble corroded the faces of the Gallagher brothers. Oasis was unable to complete the American tour. Yet other cultural forces were already active. 1996 was also the year of Trainspotting, with "Born Slippy" being the soundtrack for a blissful journey under the radar. This was a cultural force that no longer required America as a reference point [6]. Robbie Williams was able to integrate the histories of Britpop and dance culture, instigating a complex dialogue between the two. Still, concern peppered music and entertainment journals that British performers were not accessing 'America.' As Sharon Swart stated Britpop acts, on the other hand, are finding it less easy to crack the U.S. market. The Spice Girls may have made some early headway, but fellow purveyors of pop, such as Robbie Williams, can't seem to get satisfaction from American fans. (35 British performers had numerous cultural forces working against them. Flat global sales, the strength of the sterling and the slow response to the new technological opportunities of DVD, all caused problems. While Britpop "cleaned house," (Boehm 89) it was uncertain which cultural formation would replace this colonising force. Because of the complex dialogues between the rock discourse and dance culture, time and space were unable to align into a unified market. American critics simply could not grasp Robbie Williams' history, motives or iconography. It's Robbie's world, we just buy tickets for it. Unless, of course you're American and you don't know jack about soccer. That's the first mistake Williams makes - if indeed one of his goals is to break big in the U.S. (and I can't believe someone so ambitious would settle for less.) … Americans, it seems, are most fascinated by British pop when it presents a mirror image of American pop. (Woods 98 There is little sense that an entirely different musical economy now circulates, where making it big in the United States is not the singular marker of credibility. Williams' demonstrates commitment to the international market, focussing on MTV Asia, MTV online, New Zealand and Australian audiences [7]. The Gallagher brothers spent much of the 1990s trying to be John Lennon. While Noel, at times, knocked at the door of rock legends through "Wonderwall," he snubbed Williams' penchant for pop glory, describing him as a "fat dancer." (Gallagher in Orecklin 101) Dancing should not be decried so summarily. It conveys subtle nodes of bodily knowledge about men, women, sex and desire. While men are validated for bodily movement through sport, women's dancing remains a performance of voyeuristic attention. Such a divide is highly repressive of men who dance, with gayness infiltrating the metaphoric masculine dancefloor [8]. Too often the binary of male and female is enmeshed into the divide of rock and dance. Actually, these categories slide elegantly over each other. The male pop singers are located in a significant semiotic space. Robbie Williams carries these contradictions and controversy. NO! Robbie didn't go on NME's cover in a 'desperate' attempt to seduce nine-year old knickerwetters … YES! He used to be teenybopper fodder. SO WHAT?! So did the Beatles the Stones, the Who, the Kinks, etc blah blah pseudohistoricalrockbollocks. NO! Making music that gurlz like is NOT a crime! (Wells 62) There remains an uncertainty in his performance of masculinity and at times, a deliberate ambivalence. He grafts subversiveness into a specific lineage of English pop music. The aim for critics of popular music is to find a way to create a rhythm of resistance, rather than melody of credible meanings. In summoning an archaeology of the archive, we begin to write a popular music history. Suzanne Moore asked why men should "be interested in a sexual politics based on the frightfully old-fashioned ideas of truth, identity and history?" (175) The reason is now obvious. Femininity is no longer alone on the simulacra. It is impossible to separate real men from the representations of masculinity that dress the corporeal form. Popular music is pivotal, not for collapsing the representation into the real, but for making the space between these states livable, and pleasurable. Like all semiotic sicknesses, the damaged, beaten and bandaged masculinity of contemporary music swaddles a healing pedagogic formation. Robbie Williams enables the writing of a critical history of post Anglo-American music [9]. Popular music captures such stories of place and identity. Significantly though, it also opens out spaces of knowing. There is an investment in rhythm that transgresses national histories of music. While Williams has produced albums, singles, video and endless newspaper copy, his most important revelations are volatile and ephemeral in their impact. He increases the popular cultural vocabulary of masculinity. [1] The fame of both Williams and Halliwell was at such a level that it was reported in the generally conservative, pages of Marketing. The piece was titled "Will Geri's fling lose its fizz?" Marketing, August 2000: 17. [2] For poll results, please refer to "Winners and Losers," Time International, Vol. 155, Issue 23, June 12, 2000, 9 [3] For a discussion of this growth in academic discourse on masculinity, please refer to Paul Smith's "Introduction," in P. Smith (ed.), Boys: Masculinity in contemporary culture. Colorado: Westview Press, 1996. [4] Steve Futterman described Rock DJ as the "least alluring porn video on MTV," in "The best and worst: honour roll," Entertainment Weekly 574-575 (December 22-December 29 2000): 146. [5] Michael Bracewell stated that "pop provides an unofficial cartography of its host culture, charting the national mood, marking the crossroads between the major social trends and the tunnels of the zeitgeist," in "Britpop's coming home, it's coming home." New Statesman .(February 21 1997): 36. [6] It is important to make my point clear. The 'America' that I am summoning here is a popular cultural formation, which possesses little connection with the territory, institution or defence initiatives of the United States. Simon Frith made this distinction clear, when he stated that "the question becomes whether 'America' can continue to be the mythical locale of popular culture as it has been through most of this century. As I've suggested, there are reasons now to suppose that 'America' itself, as a pop cultural myth, no longer bears much resemblance to the USA as a real place even in the myth." This statement was made in "Anglo-America and its discontents," Cultural Studies 5 1991: 268. [7] To observe the scale of attention paid to the Asian and Pacific markets, please refer to http://robbiewilliams.com/july13scroll.html, http://robbiewilliams.com/july19scroll.html and http://robbiewilliams.com/july24scroll.html, accessed on March 3, 2001 [8] At its most naïve, J. Michael Bailey and Michael Oberschneider asked, "Why are gay men so motivated to dance? One hypothesis is that gay men dance in order to be feminine. In other words, gay men dance because women do. An alternative hypothesis is that gay men and women share a common factor in their emotional make-up that makes dancing especially enjoyable," from "Sexual orientation in professional dance," Archives of Sexual Behaviour. 26.4 (August 1997). Such an interpretation is particularly ludicrous when considering the pre-rock and roll masculine dancing rituals in the jive, Charleston and jitterbug. Once more, the history of rock music is obscuring the history of dance both before the mid 1950s and after acid house. [9] Women, gay men and black communities through much of the twentieth century have used these popular spaces. For example, Lynne Segal, in Slow Motion. London: Virago, 1990, stated that "through dancing, athletic and erotic performance, but most powerfully through music, Black men could express something about the body and its physicality, about emotions and their cosmic reach, rarely found in white culture - least of all in white male culture,": 191 References Ansen, D., Giles, J., Kroll, J., Gates, D. and Schoemer, K. "What's a handsome lad to do?" Newsweek 133.19 (May 10, 1999): 85. "Ask Dr. Hip." U.S. News and World Report 129.16 (October 23, 2000): 72. Bailey, J. Michael., and Oberschneider, Michael. "Sexual orientation in professional dance." Archives of Sexual Behaviour. 26.4 (August 1997):expanded academic database [fulltext]. Boehm, E. "Pop will beat itself up." Variety 373.5 (December 14, 1998): 89. Bracewell, Michael. "Britpop's coming home, it's coming home." New Statesman.(February 21 1997): 36. Buchbinder, David. Performance Anxieties .Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1998. Faludi, Susan. Stiffed. London: Chatto and Windus, 1999. Frith, Simon. "Anglo-America and its discontents." Cultural Studies. 5 1991. Futterman, Steve. "The best and worst: honour roll." Entertainment Weekly, 574-575 (December 22-December 29 2000): 146. Gikandi, Simon. Maps of Englishness. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Kadis, Alex. Take That: In private. London: Virgin Books, 1994. Kamp, D. "London Swings! Again!" Vanity Fair ( March 1997): 102. Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America. New York: The Free Press, 1996. Mendell, Adrienne. How men think. New York: Fawcett, 1996. Moore, Susan. "Getting a bit of the other - the pimps of postmodernism." In Rowena Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford (ed.) Male Order .London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988. 165-175. Orecklin, Michele. "People." Time. 155.10 (March 13, 2000): 101. Pollack, William. Real boys. Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 1999. Reynolds, Simon. members.aol.com/blissout/britpop.html. Accessed on April 15, 2001. Robinson, David. No less a man. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University, 1994. Segal, Lynne. Slow Motion. London: Virago, 1990. Smith, Paul. "Introduction" in P. Smith (ed.), Boys: Masculinity in contemporary culture. Colorado: Westview Press, 1996. Swart, S. "U.K. Showbiz" Variety.(December 11-17, 2000): 35. Sexton, Paul and Masson, Gordon. "Tips for Brits who want U.S. success" Billboard .(September 9 2000): 1. Wells, Steven. "Angst." NME.(November 21 1998): 62. "Will Geri's fling lose its fizz?" Marketing.(August 2000): 17. Woods, S. "Robbie Williams Sing when you're winning" The Village Voice. 45.52. (January 2, 2001): 98.
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