Academic literature on the topic 'Queer Gaming Studies'

This article argues the possibility of building not just a queer gaming experience but rather a queer game mechanic—that is, a game whose very structure of play can be theorized as queer. It presents the prototype game Go Queer, a locative media history app, as a theoretical experiment in what it might mean to play queer. Queer theorists and historiographers have demonstrated the intimate relation between queer subjects and the city; the game literalizes this dynamic, requiring players to travel the physical spaces of the city in the hopes that they will encounter queer history—now disappeared, redeveloped, forgotten. It proposes that a productive and underrepresented setting for queer play is the space of the city itself and that the hybrid reality of locative media provides particular affordances to enable particularly queer navigations, occupations, and constructions of queer urban space.

Feminist game studies scholars are still few and far between, and little has been done in the intersection of queer theory and games. Informed by feminist discussions of affect, and of emotion, this article uses an ethnographic study of queer potentials in the MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game) World of Warcraft as its core example. The article develops an understanding of online gaming by investigating embodied experiences, affective investments and circulations within game spaces. Ultimately, it asks what an online game like World of Warcraft puts in motion, and what consequences such stirring may have for ways of thinking – and feeling – games, critically, yet sensitively. How do emotions circulate in and through games? How do corporeal desires and belongings map onto games? Could certain game spaces or moments of play be termed ‘queer’?

Seemingly trivial software does important cultural work, both reflecting hegemonic norms and providing opportunities for transforming them. Software applications for music production (music apps) within the iOS app store promise to broaden the potential for musical participation through simple, “fun,” user-friendly interface design. Yet, within the dominant user interface convention, “fun” is synonymous with the experience of instant success and effortless musical mastery. Drawing on semistructured interviews conducted with developers, and an analysis of shared user interface design conventions across three case studies of apps, ThumbJam, iMaschine 2, and Skram, I argue that normative conceptions of human perfectibility are assumed to be what generates an optimal user experience. Exploring theories of “queer fun,” and the importance of “failure” in studies of video gaming, I propose alternative conceptions of “fun,” and consider how, and with what effects, these might be implemented in the world of music apps.

When children only see their friends in little squares via Google Meet or Zoom, can teachers really address concepts like the importance of teamwork or how to manage conflict? This is a learning phenomenon during the COVID-19 pandemic and the era after it. This study aims to see the role of parents as children's learning companions in terms of mentors and motivators when online education takes place. This research using photovoice within phenomenological methodology and have been doing with thematic analysis and collecting data through interviews and observations. The participants were eight parents and one female teacher as a homeroom teacher. The research findings show that although there are many obstacles in online learning for children, learning during the COVID-19 pandemic can still run by involving the role of parents and teachers as pillars of education for preschool-age children. For further research, it is hoped that the findings will be a way in solving learning problems for children. Keywords: early childhood education, parents’ role, online learning References: Adedoyin, O. B., & Soykan, E. (2020). Covid-19 pandemic and online learning: The challenges and opportunities. In Interactive Learning Environments. https://doi.org/10.1080/10494820.2020.1813180 Aras, S. (2016). Free play in early childhood education: A phenomenological study. Early Child Development and Care, 186(7). https://doi.org/10.1080/03004430.2015.1083558 Arkorful, V. (2021). The role of e-learning, advantages and disadvantages of its adoption in higher The role of e-learning, the advantages and disadvantages of its adoption in Higher Education . International Journal of Education and Research, 2(December 2014). Atiles, J. T., Almodóvar, M., Chavarría Vargas, A., Dias, M. J. A., & Zúñiga León, I. M. (2021). International responses to COVID-19: Challenges faced by early childhood professionals. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 29(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2021.1872674 Barnett, W. S., Grafwallner, R., & Weisenfeld, G. G. (2021). Corona pandemic in the United States shapes new normal for young children and their families. In European Early Childhood Education Research Journal (Vol. 29, Issue 1). https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2021.1872670 Basham, J. D., Blackorby, J., & Marino, M. T. (2020). Opportunity in Crisis: The Role of Universal Design for Learning in Educational Redesign. In Learning Disabilities: A Contemporary Journal (Vol. 18, Issue 1). Beatriks Novianti Bunga, R. Pasifikus Christa Wijaya & Indra Yohanes Kiling (2021) Studying at Home: Experience of Parents and Their Young Children in an Underdeveloped Area of Indonesia, Journal of Research in Childhood Education, DOI: 10.1080/02568543.2021.1977436 Buheji, M., Hassani, A., Ebrahim, A., da Costa Cunha, K., Jahrami, H., Baloshi, M., & Hubail, S. (2020). Children and Coping During COVID-19: A Scoping Review of Bio-Psycho-Social Factors. International Journal of Applied Psychology, 10(1). https://doi.org/10.5923/j.ijap.20201001.02 Celik, M. Y. (2021). The dual role of nurses as mothers during the pandemic period: Qualitative study. Early Child Development and Care. https://doi.org/10.1080/03004430.2021.1917561 Coulter, M., Britton, Ú., MacNamara, Á., Manninen, M., McGrane, B., & Belton, S. (2021). PE at Home: Keeping the ‘E’ in PE while home-schooling during a pandemic. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy. https://doi.org/10.1080/17408989.2021.1963425 Creswell, J. W. (2015). Educational research: Planning, conducting, and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research (Fifth edition). Pearson. Dodd, H. F., Fitzgibbon, L., Watson, B. E., & Nesbit, R. J. (2021). Children’s play and independent mobility in 2020: Results from the british children’s play survey. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 18(8). https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18084334 Duran, A. (2019). A Photovoice Phenomenological Study Exploring Campus Belonging for Queer Students of Color. Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice, 56(2). https://doi.org/10.1080/19496591.2018.1490308 Ebbeck, M., Yim, H. Y. B., Chan, Y., & Goh, M. (2016). Singaporean Parents’ Views of Their Young Children’s Access and Use of Technological Devices. Early Childhood Education Journal. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-015-0695-4 Ekyana, Luluk, Fauziddin Muhammad & Arifiyanti Nurul. (2021). Parents’ Perception: Early Childhood Social Behaviour During Physical Distancing in the Covid-19 Pandemic. JPUD: Jurnal Pendidikan Usia Dini, Volume 15 (2),DOI: https://doi.org/10.21009/JPUD.152.04 Eslava, M., Deaño, M., Alfonso, S., Conde, Á., & García-Señorán, M. (2016). Family context and preschool learning. Journal of Family Studies, 22(2). https://doi.org/10.1080/13229400.2015.1063445 Finn, L., & Vandermaas-Peeler, M. (2013). Young children’s engagement and learning opportunities in a cooking activity with parents and older siblings. Early Childhood Research and Practice, 15(1). Gee, E., Siyahhan, S., & Cirell, A. M. (2017). Video gaming as digital media, play, and family routine: Implications for understanding video gaming and learning in family contexts. Learning, Media, and Technology, 42(4). https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2016.1205600 Gelir, I., & Duzen, N. (2021). Children’s changing behaviours and routines, challenges and opportunities for parents during the COVID-19 pandemic. Education 3-13. https://doi.org/10.1080/03004279.2021.1921822 Giannini, S., Jenkins, R., & Saavedra, J. (2021). Mission: Recovering Education 2021. In UNICEF, UNESCO, and World Bank. Goodhart, F. W., Hsu, J., Baek, J. H., Coleman, A. L., Maresca, F. M., & Miller, M. B. (2006). A view through a different lens: Photovoice as a tool for student advocacy. Journal of American College Health, 55(1). https://doi.org/10.3200/JACH.55.1.53-56 Gong, S., Wang, X., Wang, Y., Qu, Y., Tang, C., Yu, Q., & Jiang, L. (2019). A descriptive qualitative study of home care experiences in parents of children with tracheostomies. Journal of Pediatric Nursing, 45. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pedn.2018.12.005 Hamaidi, D. A., Arouri, Y. M., Noufa, R. K., & Aldrou, I. T. (2021). Parents’ Perceptions of Their Children’s Experiences with Distance Learning During the COVID-19 Pandemic. International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 22(2). https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v22i2.5154 Hammersley, M., & Traianou, A. (2015). Ethics in Qualitative Research: Controversies and Contexts. In Ethics in Qualitative Research: Controversies and Contexts. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473957619 Harris, K. I. (2021). Parent Cooperative Early Childhood Settings: Empowering Family Strengths and Family Engagement for All Young Children. International Journal of Contemporary Education, 4(1). https://doi.org/10.11114/ijce.v4i1.5143 Hassinger-Das, B., Zosh, J. M., Hansen, N., Talarowski, M., Zmich, K., Golinkoff, R. M., & Hirsh-Pasek, K. (2020). Play-and-learn spaces: Leveraging library spaces to promote caregiver and child interaction. Library and Information Science Research, 42(1). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2020.101002 Henter, R., & Nastasa, L. E. (2021). Parents’ Emotion Management for Personal Well-Being When Challenged by Their Online Work and Their Children’s Online School. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.751153 Houston, S. (2017). Towards a critical ecology of child development in social work: Aligning the theories of Bronfenbrenner and Bourdieu. Families, Relationships and Societies, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.1332/204674315X14281321359847 Ihmeideh, F., AlFlasi, M., Al-Maadadi, F., Coughlin, C., & Al-Thani, T. (2020). Perspectives of family–school relationships in Qatar based on Epstein’s model of six types of parent involvement. Early Years, 40(2). https://doi.org/10.1080/09575146.2018.1438374 Iruka, I. U., DeKraai, M., Walther, J., Sheridan, S. M., & Abdel-Monem, T. (2020). Examining how rural ecological contexts influence children’s early learning opportunities. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 52. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2019.09.005 Jiles, T. (2015). Knock, knock, may I come in? An integrative perspective on professional development concerns for home visits conducted by teachers. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 16(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/1463949114567274 Kartini, K. (2021). Analisis Pembelajaran Online Anak Usia Dini Masa Pandemi COVID -19 Kota dan Perdalaman. Jurnal Obsesi : Jurnal Pendidikan Anak Usia Dini, 6(2). https://doi.org/10.31004/obsesi.v6i2.880 Kurniati, E., Nur Alfaeni, D. K., & Andriani, F. (2020). Analisis Peran Orang Tua dalam Mendampingi Anak di Masa Pandemi Covid-19. Jurnal Obsesi : Jurnal Pendidikan Anak Usia Dini, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.31004/obsesi.v5i1.541 La Paro, K. M., & Gloeckler, L. (2016). The Context of Child Care for Toddlers: The “Experience Expectable Environment”. Early Childhood Education Journal, 44(2). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-015-0699-0 Lau, E. Y. H., & Lee, K. (2021). Parents’ Views on Young Children’s Distance Learning and Screen Time During COVID-19 Class Suspension in Hong Kong. Early Education and Development, 32(6). https://doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2020.1843925 Lau, E. Y. H., Li, J. Bin, & Lee, K. (2021). Online Learning and Parent Satisfaction during COVID-19: Child Competence in Independent Learning as a Moderator. Early Education and Development, 32(6). https://doi.org/10.1080/10409289.2021.1950451 Lilawati, A. (2020). Peran Orang Tua dalam Mendukung Kegiatan Pembelajaran di Rumah pada Masa Pandemi. Jurnal Obsesi: Jurnal Pendidikan Anak Usia Dini. https://doi.org/10.31004/obsesi.v5i1.630 Lim, K. F. (2020). Emergency remote teaching and learning in the time of COVID-19. Chemistry in Australia, August. Lin, X., & Li, H. (2018). Parents’ play beliefs and engagement in young children’s play at home. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 26(2). https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2018.1441979 Michele L. Stites, Susan Sonneschein & Samantha H. Galczyk (2021) Preschool Parents’ Views of Distance Learning during COVID-19, Early Education and Development, 32:7, 923-939, DOI: 10.1080/10409289.2021.1930936 Muhdi, Nurkolis, & Yuliejantiningsih, Y. (2020). The Implementation of Online Learning in Early Childhood Education During the Covid-19 Pandemic. JPUD - Jurnal Pendidikan Usia Dini, 14(2). https://doi.org/10.21009/jpud.142.04 Ortlipp, M. (2015). Keeping and Using Reflective Journals in the Qualitative Research Process. The Qualitative Report. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2008.1579 Paat, Y. F. (2013). Working with Immigrant Children and Their Families: An Application of Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 23(8). https://doi.org/10.1080/10911359.2013.800007 Plowman, L., Stephen, C., & McPake, J. (2010). Supporting young children’s learning with technology at home and in preschool. Research Papers in Education, 25(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/02671520802584061 Rona Novick, Suzanne Brooks & Jenny Isaacs (2021) Parental Report of Preschoolers’ Jewish Day School Engagement and Adjustment During the Covid-19 Shutdown, Journal of Jewish Education, 87:4, 301-315, DOI: 10.1080/15244113.2021.1977098 Sandi Ferdiansyah, S. S., & Angin, R. (2020). Pengalaman Mahasiswa Thailand dalam Pembelajaran Daring di Universitas di Indonesia pada Masa Pandemi COVID-19. Journal of International Students, 10(S3). Sonnenschein, S., Stites, M., & Dowling, R. (2021). Learning at home: What preschool children’s parents do and what they want to learn from their children’s teachers. Journal of Early Childhood Research, 19(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/1476718X20971321 Sri Indah Pujiastuti, Sofia Hartati & Jun Wang (2022) Socioemotional Competencies of Indonesian Preschoolers: Comparisons between the Pre-Pandemic and Pandemic Periods and among DKI Jakarta, DI Yogyakarta and West Java Provinces, Early Education and Development, DOI: 10.1080/10409289.2021.2024061 Stone, K., Burgess, C., Daniel, B., Smith, J., & Stephen, C. (2017). Nurture corners in preschool settings: Involving and nurturing children and parents. Emotional and Behavioural Difficulties, 22(4). https://doi.org/10.1080/13632752.2017.1309791 Suzanne M. Egan & Chloé Beatty (2021) To school through the screens: the use of screen devices to support young children's education and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, Irish Educational Studies, 40:2, 275-283, DOI: 10.1080/03323315.2021.1932551 Thomson, S. (2007). Do’s and don’ts: Children’s experiences of the primary school playground. Environmental Education Research, 13(4). https://doi.org/10.1080/13504620701581588 Vallejo-Ruiz, M., & Torres-Soto, A. (2020). Teachers’ conceptions on the quality of the teaching and learning process in early childhood education. Revista Electronica Educare, 24(3). https://doi.org/10.15359/REE.24-3.13 Widodo, H. P. (2014). Methodological considerations in interview data transcription. International Journal of Innovation in English Language, 3(1). Wijaya, Candra., Dalimunthe, Rasyid Anwar., & Muslim. Parents’ Perspective on The Online Learning Using Zoom Application in Early Childhood Education. JPUD: Jurnal Pendidikan Usia Dini, Volume 15 Number 2. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21009/JPUD.152.06 Winship, M., Standish, H., Trawick-Smith, J., & Perry, C. (2021). Reflections on practice: Providing authentic experiences with families in early childhood teacher education. In Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education (Vol. 42, Issue 3). https://doi.org/10.1080/10901027.2020.1736695

Images of grids are employed in a number of areas of contemporary critical and cultural theory. One usage features throughout the fields of gender and sexuality studies, especially as inspired by the work of Judith Butler. Following Foucault’s formulation that disciplinary power operates as a “grid of intelligibility of the social order” (93), Butler theorises that normative modes of gender and sexuality constitute a regulatory structure through which subjectivity is rendered intelligible or not. Being off the grid – beyond its normalising mechanism – fundamentally challenges the social subject’s viability: The norm governs intelligibility, allows for certain kinds of practices and action to become recognizable as such, imposing a grid of legibility on the social and defining the parameters of what will and will not appear within the domain of the social. The question of what it is to be outside the norm poses a paradox for thinking, for if the norm renders the social field intelligible and normalizes that field for us, then being outside the norm is in some sense being defined still in relation to it. (Butler 42) During a similar period in a quite different theoretical field, media and cyberstudies scholars have reminded us of the electronic basis of contemporary media forms by referring to grids through which information and texts are transmitted. In the case of the pervasive computational matrix of the Internet, the ease, instantaneity and virtuality of transmission have often been taken to produce not rigid structure but flow – a revolutionary fluidity of global interaction but also of personal identity. The performativity of gender, sexuality and race is emphasised by the effective absence of bodies in material form from online social interaction. But as more recent cyberstudies work has shown, a disembodied inscription of identity may still operate normatively, that is with necessary recourse to the normative conceptions that make bodies legible as such. Butler’s work has not often been closely applied to cyberstudies, despite what appear to be a number of productive possibilities, such as those roughly sketched above. In this essay, I do not aim to elaborate on those possibilities in any comprehensive sense. Rather, I want to take some first steps towards seeing whether the two broad images of grid summarised above can usefully be read alongside one another. If transmission is a condition of existence in the contemporary mediascape where online interactions and connections are not supplemental to the social but are the social, is transmission possible off the grid? If the regulatory structure of the grid determines recognisability of being, can the non-normative be recognised? In thinking through the possibilities of being-as-transmission, I want to avoid the simple conclusion that digital identities are causally defined by the structural actuality of electronic grids. While the grid makes online identities possible in this literal, computational sense, I’m more interested in the figurative: are electronic grids themselves normatively produced, therefore allowing only normative conceptions of identity, despite their apparent generation of categorically fluid modes of identity? Peter Lunenfeld considers the figurative implications of the grid as it is conceived by new media. He adopts the digital design command “snap to grid” as “a metaphor for how we manipulate and think through the electronic culture that enfolds us” (Lunenfeld xvi). “Snap to grid” commands the computer to map hand-drawn images to the precise standards of digital geometry, as Lunenfeld explains: Snap a freehand sketch of a rectangular shape to a grid and it immediately becomes a flawless, Euclidean rectangle. Artists regularly disable the snap to grid function the moment they open an application because the gains in predictability and accuracy are balanced against the losses of ambiguity and expressiveness. (xvi-xvii) The question for me remains, in this metaphor, whether the freehand sketch purposely not snapped to grid is still legible within the application, itself designed by grid logic. If we unpack the metaphor in terms of online identity, which cybertheoretical orthodoxy has claimed to be ambiguous and expressive (the self as freehand sketch), a Butlerian perspective would remind us of the omnipresence of the normative frame against which non-normative identity must partly be measured. To sketch oneself as an “I” and to be recognised socially as such requires some sense of acquiescence to what has been established as within the possibility of being an “I”, even if this frame works to exclude or attempts to erase the lines of one’s sketch. Butler argues: To say that the desire to persist in one’s own being depends on norms of recognition is to say that the basis of one’s autonomy, one’s persistence as an “I” through time, depends fundamentally on a social norm that exceeds that “I”… In effect, our lives, our very persistence, depend upon such norms or, at least, on the possibility that we will be able to negotiate within them, derive our agency from the field of their operation. (32) It needs to be acknowledged here that many cybertheorists (from Haraway to Stone and Turkle, among others) have argued digital spaces including the Internet have reconceived the very ontological terms of being an “I” – of subjectivity, autonomy and agency.. In particular, questions of interactivity, collaborative practice and disembodiment force rethinking of exactly who or what the “I” might claim to include and on whose ideological terms the concept of “I” has been received. Some key aspects of the Internet do allow me to be who or what I want to be, but perhaps especially if I already act from a sociocultural and/or economic position that entails prior privilege. With this point in mind, Lisa Nakamura’s work on race destabilises “utopian” claims for the potential of Internet identity. She argues that many cyberspace practices re-establish stereotypes and normative representations of race exactly because they are conceived in a realm that seems to dispense with familiar privileges: “Bodies get tricky in cyberspace; that sense of disembodiment that is both freeing and disorienting creates a profound malaise in the user that stable images of race work to fix in place” (Nakamura 6). Similar counter-arguments can be made of the supposed liberation of the online “I” from material constraints of gender and sexuality, as if all genders and sexualities may be discursively performed online with equal facility, as if chosen from a menu. While the convincing role play of identities in online gaming and chat spaces, for instance, may be celebrated for confirming the postmodern fragmentation of the unitary subject, a significant proportion of everyday online interactions are more practically linked to the often mundane materialities of knowable selves. Moreover, invoking Butlerian performativity in relation to online gender and sexual identity must still take into account the regulatory frameworks that structure and constrain the identity discourses that iteration brings into being. In their discussion of participation in a queer female online forum, Sally Munt et al. identify ways in which new users achieve “membership” of the forum and by extension of lesbian communities offline through the peer-mentored rehearsal of what amount to normative sexuality codes. They conclude that at the same time as promising a “utopic” space for identity experimentation, the forum is also “dystopic” in that its interactions work to “compact desire into identity categories that impose disciplinary formations antithetical to liberatory ideals” (Munt et al. 136). Here the double-edged sword of queer recognition is clear. As Rob Cover puts it, “in fulfilling both the imperative of coherent sexual subjectivity and the practical needs of sexual minority community ritual and contact, the citation of the stereotype is the more intelligible process” (87). So we must ask, how can one’s various freehand sketches of gender and sexuality be recognised as a coherent “I” unless they have already been snapped to grid, that is already rendered recognisable? How can that “I” be transmitted effectively unless via a grid of legibility that regulates what is transmissible? Rather than concluding with gridlock, a successful marriage of the two broad conceptions of grid this essay is working with must move towards the productive and freeing potential of each. Just as Butler’s understanding of heteronormative social structures emphasises the emergence of “improvisational possibility [from] within a field of constraints” (15), so too digital identities must not merely relocate old norms to new media and squander the opportunities that being-as-transmission permits. As Mark Hansen proposes, our guiding question must henceforth be: can and how can we use the new media and the internet to move beyond interpellation, or more exactly, to liberate the body from its socially-imposed dependence on interpellation through preconstituted social categories of identity, subjectivity, and particularity? (114) If online identity transmission can fulfil its promise of fluidity in this ethical sense, it might serve to erase its believed distinction from the offline and guide us towards the productive uncertainty of being off the grid. We might learn “to encounter the difference that calls our grids of intelligibility into question without trying to foreclose the challenge that the difference delivers” (Butler 35). References Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Cover, Rob. “Bodies, Movements and Desires: Lesbian/Gay Subjectivity and the Stereotype.” Continuum 18.1 (2004): 81-97. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume One. Trans. Robert Hurley. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. Hansen, Mark B. N. “Digitizing the Racialized Body or The Politics of Universal Address.” SubStance 33.2 (2004): 107-133. Lunenfeld, Peter. Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media and Cultures. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. Munt, Sally R. et al. “Virtually Belonging: Risk, Connectivity, and Coming Out On-Line.” International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies 7.2/3 (2002): 125-137. Nakamura, Lisa. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity and Identity on the Internet. New York: Routledge, 2002. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Payne, Robert. "Grid: On Being-as-Transmission and Normativity." M/C Journal 9.1 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/06-payne.php>. APA Style Payne, R. (Mar. 2006) "Grid: On Being-as-Transmission and Normativity," M/C Journal, 9(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/06-payne.php>.

Wandering is an embodied movement through a landscape, cityscape, or soundscape; it is a venture that one may undertake voluntarily or reluctantly. It is similar to wayfaring and roaming, and different to walking. As a metaphor and as a figuration of subjectivity, wandering allows for a number of non-linear engagements: loitering, overhearing, wildflowering, meandering, even time travel. When coupled with an act of memory or imagination, wandering can instigate wondering, and vice versa. It can refer to the physical movement of the body through space or the abstract wandering of the mind through time; more often than not, it is both.The contributions to this special issue on ‘Wandering’ take up the theme in ways that demonstrate how straying from prescribed pathways and patterns of movement can be a transformative experience: one that renders new ways of thinking, reading, gaming, communicating, and being. For the authors featured here, wandering is deeply affectual, at times intimate and empowering, at other times disorientating, melancholy, and compulsive. Wandering provokes an awareness of the ambiances of everyday life, a response to the repression of desire, trauma, and historical violence. Wandering, of course, is traditionally associated with the city, and many of the articles here extend this scholarship, while others move the discussion of wandering to the natural environment. Historically, wandering has been connected to patriarchal, colonial modes of exploring and mapping, of claiming and naming places. Yet these articles suggest that wandering, as a mode of resistance—as a mobility that is ideologically charged—can provide new ways of being beyond heteronormativity and outside the hold of linear boundaries. In wandering rather than waiting, the wanderer inscribes opposing devices into her narrative: her movement is infused with gendered meaning and is well-equipped to reveal the relational, discursive operations of identity.Indeed, in the feature article, Ingrid Horrocks challenges neo-liberal versions of travel through an account of her ongoing research into female wandering and travel writing; her most recent book Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784-1814 presents an extensive consideration of the many complexities she outlines here, including the need to disentangle mobility from its frequent ideological equation with liberty. Horrocks explains, for example, how reluctant wandering in eighteenth and nineteenth century British literature requires a more flexible and nuanced understanding of wandering as a form of displacement. For Horrocks, the interdisciplinary field of mobilities studies is particularly illuminating. This framework allows for a tracing of the significance of both the symbolic representations of wandering in narrative and the historical conditions and lived experiences of the writers that produced wandering texts. Horrocks’s work reveals that deeper investigation into the histories of different mobilities is significant for modern conceptualisations of travel that equate movement with freedom of choice; such neo-liberal ideologies of mobility elide the structural forces and inequalities that might compel one to move—to leave home in search of work, companionship, or food. Kristina Deffenbacher also challenges conventional travel narratives—in this case, the road narrative—in her article, “Mapping Trans-Domesticity in Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto.” Deffenbacher develops the term “trans-domesticity” to explain how the film challenges not only notions of home but also understandings of domestic spaces and practices. Specifically, Deffenbacher reads Breakfast on Pluto as a queer diaspora narrative that destabilises normative bonds and structures, and in doing so, transforms the traditional road story where the protagonist leaves home in search of autonomy and independence. Reading against earlier interpretations of the protagonist’s behaviour as apolitical, Deffenbacher suggests that homemaking in public, transient spaces is a queer reclamation of domestic space through the act of wandering, which enables connection rather than dislocation.The protagonist in Breakfast in Pluto creates a home in London, and global neo-liberal London is the site of investigation in “Wandering and Placemaking in London: Iain Sinclair’s Literary Methodology.” Here, Kirsten Seale and Emily Potter examine how psychogeographer Iain Sinclair’s wandering moves beyond the chronicling of place to engage in placemaking that is materially entangled with the transformative conditions of place. Sinclair’s wandering, as Seale and Potter demonstrate, acts upon the city as much as it is an act within the city. Sinclair’s writing about London’s decrepitude contributes to a contemporary aesthetic of urban decay that is cultivated and commodified in high-end locales—an extra-textual consequence that points to the position of Sinclair’s wanderings as “more-than-literary.” In other words, Sinclair’s texts materialise versions of place that operate outside the assemblage of literary production, thereby constituting spatial events.Devin Proctor wanders in another quintessential city in “Wandering in the City: Time, Memory, and Experience in Digital Game Space.” Proctor traverses the physical, the virtual, and the temporal in his exploration of downtown New York, as constructed in the videogame Assassin’s Creed: Rogue. Accompanying Proctor on his wanderings is the memory—or the future projection—of Michel de Certeau, whose musings from the top of the World Trade Center—not-yet-built in the time of the game, not-yet-destroyed in the time of de Certeau, existing only in memory in Proctor’s own time—inform the exploration of space. Proctor wonders whether it is possible to truly wander in a controlled space, where even apparent acts of spatial disobedience—scaling buildings, running along walls—are within the “rules” of the game. For Proctor, disavowing the designed narrative of the game—ignoring quests, not seeking to progress or level up but instead simply wandering—allows the digital space to take on different meanings, and to become, in fact, another space: one that is a colourful vista of memory, fiction, and experience.In “Adapting to Loiterly Reading: Agatha Christie’s Original Adaptation of 'The Witness for the Prosecution'", Alistair Rolls takes up the theme of wandering by applying the notion to re-reading Christie’s short story “The Witness for the Prosecution” in a way that is prompted by Sarah Phelps’s screen adaptation for BBC One. Rolls applies Armelle Blin-Rolland’s notion of “vortical” reading: a model of adaptation in which no version of a text is privileged as the correct one but instead part of a textual multiplicity. Through this lens, Rolls argues that Christie’s short story can be appreciated by a wandering reader who undertakes loiterly reading, thereby moving against the grain of crime fiction: a genre, which, through its focus on the revelatory end, usually speeds a reader to a resolution. A wandering reader might see, for instance, the fetishistic narrative and partially-repressed pre-textual truths. Therefore, Phelps’s adaptation, which uses a framing device by adding a new beginning and end to the narrative, complements, rather than undercuts, Christie’s original. In this article, Rolls enacts his own form of loiterly reading. Melanie Pryor examines the work of another well-known wanderer in “Dark Peripatetic Walking as Radical Wandering in Cheryl Strayed’s Memoir Wild.” Pryor adopts John Brabour’s notion of the dark peripatetic, a kind of itinerant wandering often associated with isolation from society. Pryor transforms the notion’s negative connotations, arguing instead that, in women’s memoir, wandering in the wilderness is an act of “radical self-containment”. Pryor draws attention to the way that Strayed’s memoir offers a counterpoint to traditional patriarchal narratives of domination and colonisation of the natural world. Instead, Strayed’s writing positions her as a witness to the natural world and her own physical and internal transformation. Pryor draws our attention to the way that even Strayed’s name, changed after her divorce, suggests an empowered wandering from the traditional confines of domestic life. Like Pryor, Susan Davis in “Wandering and Wildflowering: Walking with Women into Intimacy and Ecological Action” locates wandering, not as it traditionally has occurred in the city, but in a natural ecosystem: in this case, the wallum bushland behind the beaches of South East Queensland, Australia. This complex ecosystem, Davis explains, is at once resilient, thriving in soil corrosive as battery acid, but also fragile, unable to re-grow once destroyed; yet few pay attention to this landscape. Davis presents an historical account of Australian poet Judith Wright’s and artist and writer Kathleen McArthur’s relationship with each other and this coastal heathland, arguing that both wandering and “wildflowering” provoked in the women a new artistic and ecological vision. Attuning to the more-than-human world allowed these artists to value what still is, Davis argues, a largely invisible landscape; this new vision prompted ecological activism and conservation.In “Wandering in and out of Place: Modes of Searching for the Past in Paris, Moscow, and St Petersburg”, Katherine Brabon suggests that wandering in a place can also be a mode of wandering in the past. In her analysis of W.G. Sebald’s, Patrick Modiano’s, and her own work, Brabon points to the way that the narrator’s embodied movement through place is haunted by traces of historical trauma and violence. Landscape, infused with memory and emotion, provokes a compulsive wandering; the narrators in the works Brabon describes appear almost doomed to wander in search of a past available only in fragments. These are themes Brabon also explores in her novel, The Memory Artist, which won the Vogel Literary Award in 2016, and which complements the exegetical discussion presented here. In “Wandering a Metro: Actor-Network Theory Research and Rapid Rail Infrastructure Communication”, Nicholas Richardson wanders Montreal’s underground Métro, asking of the fifty-year-old train system the Latourian question, “What do you do for a city and its people?” By wandering the Métro and interviewing its other wanderers, commuters, and workers, Richardson is able to observe the actor-network within which the train operates. Through this process, he comes to understand what a train system like Montreal’s might bring to a city such as Sydney. Richardson’s wandering is as much methodological and metaphorical as it is physical, and he does not seek to end either aspect of his foray at a finish line. Instead of drawing us towards the finality of conclusions, Richardson’s wandering opens up multiple avenues. The actor-network of the Métro is comprised not just of the train itself and its immediate users but also the artworks and architecture that give character to its spaces. Ultimately, the influence of the Métro and its actor-network spread beyond the boundaries of the train system itself; the Métro functions—as one of Richardson’s respondents puts it—as the “connective tissue” of the city. Whereas Richardson awaits an answer to his question, “What do you do for a city and its people?”, Rowan Wilken, in “Walkie-Talkies, Wandering, and Sonic Intimacy”, is concerned with the act of listening itself when urban wanderers come into contact with the sonic environments in which they live. Wilken extends the notion of wandering to the ambient soundscape by analysing two artworks, Saturday by Sabrina Raff and Walk That Sound by Lukatoyboy. Wilken positions these artworks in an avant-garde artistic tradition, the Situationist International, which emerged in the 1960s, and which proposed the use of walkie-talkies to enable urban wandering, an act of engaging with place designed to create more authentic “situations” to counteract social alienation brought about by Capitalism. The more contemporary artworks at the heart of Wilken’s analysis extend this tradition by inviting the reader to attune to overheard conversations, and form what Wilken, in an application of Dominic Pettman’s notion, calls sonic intimacy. Wilken suggests that in these works the act of overhearing invites an aural connection with strangers. Yet, such acts also evoke a disturbing undercurrent of surveillance and the Panopticon. AcknowledgementsThe editors would like to acknowledge the time, care, and insight of the reviewers who provided feedback on this issue. This often unrewarded labour deserves recognition and thanks.

Despite being a much used trope in intellectual activity at the moment, 'desire' may yet prove to be more resilient as a concept than some other much (ab)used tropes of the past (such as 'body', 'transgression', and, of course, the ever-popular [ab]use of parentheses). It may be possible, that is, that as we enter this 'new' millenium, intellectuals may continue to be able to use the word 'desire' without it signifying only that the intellectual is attempting to be screamingly fashionable (as, for example, seems to have been the fate befalling 'body', 'transgression', and the [ab]use of parentheses). The resilience of 'desire' as a concept may have something to do with intellectuals recognising that when they theorise desire, they are theorising their own intellectual activity. Empty 'desire' of all meaning and you also empty intellectual activity of meaning. Why is this? As the essays collected in this issue of M/C may suggest, the ways in which we now talk about desire are similar to the ways in which we talk about the pursuit of knowledge. In short, desire theory is also an expression of a desire for theory. The attempt to 'know' desire is in this sense also just one of the innumerable practices through which our desires are realised. This realisation is not, of course, the attainment of the object that we desire. Rather, it is the performance of desire, which entails the realisation of what psychoanalysts call the 'lack' of the object. This is to say that the pursuit of knowledge, like any other desire, is realised by continually pushing back the limit point that we might call the object of desire. In our feature article, "From the Fetish to the Factish and Back Again", for example, John Banks gives us an insight into the manifold perspectives from which desire works (or plays), in theory and practice, in his studies of computer gaming. As an ethnographer, a gamer, and a theorist, he strategically grounds these shifting perspectives in an attempt to define the notion of 'gameplay', yet he finds that gameplay itself is a decidedly unstable object for interpretation: as an experience of the game interface, as a way of talking about this experience, or as a discourse for fetishising games within a global industry, gameplay is one of the sites through which individuals and institutions contest their identities and desires, thereby "affirming the multiple and heterogeneous ontology of humans and nonhumans". As editors of this issue, our own desires were met by receiving articles from such diverse fields, all approaching the issue topic in interesting ways. Contemporary ideas surrounding the act of performance offers fertile ground for the following two articles, and just as John Banks presents us with 'manifold perspectives' on the workings of desire, so too do these articles speak from multiple perspectives; they write as practitioners, students of theory, and audience members. The stage has always been a crucible of ideas for theorists from all fields and disciplines, and happily finds a place within this issue on desire. In her article "Can't We Talk It Over in Bed?: Desiring Reconciliation in Recent Australian Theatre Productions of As You Like It and Romeo and Juliet", Melissa Western investigates the operation of desires in contemporary theatre practice and the political ramifications of this. Specifically she interrogates the practice of cross-cultural casting decisions, both in terms of post-colonial theory and political imperative, and uses two examples of recent Australian theatrical productions to illustrate her point. 'Desire' for Melissa shifts between a theoretical desire for 'other', and an apparent desire for reconciliation which lies at the core of the productions discussed. Melissa hints at a 'communal' desire, and also her own desire for good theatre. Marcel Dorney's article, "Don't Lean on the Window: Desire's Presence and Representations in Political Drama", is full of questions, both answered and open-ended, mostly centering on the theatrical staging of desire, and questions of exploitation. The thrust of Marcel's article sees 'desire' being constructed and examined both from an actor's and an audience's point of view, and he focuses on how questions of representation and perspective affect readings (exploitative or otherwise) of staged intimacy. The article is framed by a description of one scene from the 1999 production of Bulldog Front, and an account of the rehearsal processes leading to the final staging of this scene, in which two people engage in a sexual act. Moving away from the theatre, our next item takes us onto the big screen, in order to demonstrate the way in which popular cultural texts often express the communal side of desire that the previous essays have been considering. In "Grande, Decaf, Low Fat, Extra Dry Cappuccino: Postmodern Desire" Patricia Leavy observes that postmodern interrogations of consumer society make us increasingly suspicious of the objects of desire -- although the objects we desire and the choices we make seem to be 'ours' (a sense we may have of our 'selves') we are perhaps never less ourselves than when we desire or choose in the domain of simulacra. Patricia asks, "what happens to the individual when he/she discovers that the most intimate of desires is shared by countless others?" Our next essay is by Todd Holden, titled "The Evolution of Desire in Advertising: From Object-Obsession to Subject-Affection". Using advertising in Japan as a case in point, Todd points out the degree to which advertisements construct and produce desire, to the point that desire itself becomes the goal of advertising (the desire to be desiring and/or desired). He argues that as desire is constructed differently in relation to each product, the result is not a 'desire' that can be grounded conceptually in the language of polysemy; desire is understood here in terms of contingency and function -- desire as an expression of the controlling discourse of consumer capitalism. In these essays, we witness the conflict that often arises when individuals attempt to contain desire within their field of understanding, when they explain that desire is something that is excessive -- that is to say, it exceeds understanding. Axel Bruns explores this deeply unsettling tension between the desire for closure (a function of the way we have habitually engaged with texts of all kinds) and the information explosion on the WWW, in his contribution "What's the Story: The Unfulfilled Desire for Closure on the Web". In Axel's eyes, this desire for closure is confounded not simply by hypertextuality (there is a strong school of thought that argues hypertext is simply a faster variant of what happens in textuality in general) but by the sheer and continual expansiveness of the WWW -- it is impossible for anyone anymore to say that they 'know' all that there is to know on-line. Desire thus exceeds the moment of the text, which we might otherwise wish (or desire) to close around desire. The next few items explore some of desire's effects in such a way as to remind us that what desire inflects in the moment of the text is but a fraction of its effects -- desire speaks to us, changes us, and shapes our world in ways that we cannot control. In "The Subject of Howard's Desire: Passive Sentences and Political Intention", for example, Felicity Meakins casts a linguist's eyes over the draft preamble to the Australian Constitution, and observes that Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders are cast there as passive subjects, denied agency by the structure of the only sentence that gives them any recognition; while this "passivisation" reflects Liberal policy on indigenous groups, the more surprising discovery is the passivisation of all of the country's "citizens" measured against the agency given to terms referring to the nation. Howard's "desire for a mild form of nationalism" is thus reflected in the words he would have enshrined within the national constitution. In "Newly Desiring and Desired: Queer Man-Fisting Women", Simon-Astley Scholfield identifies the 'penetratrix' as a figure that embodies the shifting terrain of sexual politics at the end of the twentieth-century -- in cultural texts and sexual practices, the hegemony of the heterocentric paradigm is under threat from a figure that embodies the shift from the penetrated (the figure of castration and lack, which even the liberated 'woman-on-top' maintained) to the penetrating: to the "paradigm of woman-on-top and man-on-bottom have been added the queer figures of the woman-as-top and the man-as-bottom". Grouped together here as "Three Poems Touching on Desire", Bronwen Lea's three poems explore desire from a personal (and personalised) perspective, where the body of the text merges imperceptibly with the bodies it describes: if desire is lack, or has no object (as psychoanalysis suggests), these poems 'embody' desire -- that is to say, they return the desire of the theorists back to its proper domain: the body. Desire is thus controlled and controlling, at the level of the way in which we engage with the world and each other, and at the level of the ways we attempt to make sense of these engagements. Where, then, does that leave our pursuit of knowledge? First, we should not expect anymore to be able to answer such a question, since the pursuit of knowledge (like desire) is more about the pursuit than the knowledge -- it is the process of extending beyond ourselves, positing limits only in order to extend beyond them. This is indeed the initial limit point from which the final essay in this collection proceeds. Inspired by sitting at bus-stop across from churchgoers at mass (after all, inspiration is what the church is for [:)]), Sean Smith has hit upon a notion of desire at which he can only hint in his essay "[to be and to have]", which he does here through an engagement with some pervasive theories of desire. By positing desire as "a recognition, not of a lack, but of the necessary and perpetual circulation across the threshold ... of the array of subjectless individuations that collectively constitute us as 'human'", Sean opens out a field of possibility for reviving desire as a key to understanding ourselves -- or, perhaps, as understanding itself, understood here as a will to knowledge. As the prolegomenon to further work, this essay represents an ideally open-ended endpoint for this issue of desire, for we thirst for more... Citation reference for this article MLA style: Laurie Johnson, Marc Richards. "Editorial: 'Desire'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.5 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/edit.php>. Chicago style: Laurie Johnson, Marc Richards, "Editorial: 'Desire'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 5 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/edit.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Laurie Johnson, Marc Richards. (1999) Editorial: 'desire'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/edit.php> ([your date of access]).

Closer examination of contemporary art forms including music videos in addition to the Gothic’s literature legacy is essential, “as it is virtually impossible to ignore the relationship the Gothic holds to popular culture” (Piatti-Farnell ii). This article critically examines how Gothic themes and modes are used in the music videos of Lana Del Rey; particularly the “ways in which Gothic is dispersed through contemporary non-literary media” (Spooner and McEvoy 2). This work follows the argument laid down by Edwards and Monnet who describe Gothic’s assimilation into popular culture —Pop Gothic— as a powerful pop cultural force, not merely a subcultural or cult expression. By interpreting Del Rey’s work as a both a component of, and a contributor to, the Pop Gothic advance, themes of social climate, consumer culture, gender identity, sexuality and the male gaze can be interrogated. Indeed the potential for a collective crisis of these issues in early 21st Century western culture is exposed, “the façade of carnivalised surfaces is revealed to hide the chaos and entropy of existential emptiness.” (Yeo 17). Gothic modes have been approximated by Pop Gothic into the mainstream (Edwards and Monnet) as a driving force behind these contradictions and destabilisations. The Gothic has become ubiquitous within popular culture and continues to exert influence. This is easily reflected in the $392 million the first Twilight movie grossed at the box office (Edwards and Monnet). Examples are abundant in pop culture across music, film and television. Edwards and Monnet cite the movies Zombieland and Blade in the Pop Gothic march, along with TV shows including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Being Human, True Blood as well as Lady Gaga’s Fame Monster music album. Edwards and Monnet observe that the Gothic aesthetics of the 1980s and 1990s, “melancholy and imagery associated with death, dying and the undead” (3), shifted from the corners of subculture to the mainstream of millennial popular culture. With this shift comes the rebelliousness and melancholy that characterises Gothic texts. This is evident when a pop star of Lana Del Rey’s popularity —her Summertime Sadness video alone has over 160 million views on youtube.com (YouTube)— narratively represents themes of death and suicide repeatedly in her videos. In two of Lana Del Rey’s music videos —Blue Jeans and Born to Die— either she or a representation of her persona dies. In a third video, Summertime Sadness, her companion takes her own life and Lana ultimately follows suit. Themes of death and loss are just the most obvious of Gothic elements present in Del Rey’s work. Del Rey’s songs and videos speak of the American dream, of aestheticised beauty, of being immaculately presented, well dressed and having hair “beauty queen style”, as in Summertime Sadness. She depicts an excess of hedonistic consumption and love that knows no bounds, not even death. Much of the delivery has resonance with the Gothic; performatively, visually and musically, and shows a subversion and fatalism that juxtaposes, contests and contradicts pop cultural tropes (Macfarlane). This contrary nature of the Gothic, as characterised by Botting, can provoke a sense of otherness; the uncanny, including “displays of uncontrolled passion, violent emotion or flights of fancy to portrayals of perversion or obsession” (Gothic 2). It is argued that these characteristics have been commodified into merchandisable and mainstream stylistic representations (Edwards and Monnet). Del Rey’s visual work uses this otherness and representation of repressed darkness as subversion or contestation to the bubble gum consumerist, fairy tale sexualisation of the Katy Perry brand of neo-liberal pop music that floods the mainstream (Macfarlane). Del Rey also harnesses the Gothic mode in her music, underscoring social anxieties through moments of sound which act as “a sonic imp, this music enters perception through the back door, and there it does its destabilising work” (van Elferen 137). As potential psychosocial sources of this otherness in the Gothic (Botting, Gothic), Jung argued that as a collective consciousness by repressing our darkest side, we can be dislocated from it. Further he argued that many modern ills —conflict, war, disenfranchisement, poverty— stem from culturally rationalised divisions of ‘good vs evil’ (Tacey). Providing a space for these dark sides to surface, Swirski comments that cultural product can act "as a social barometer and a cultural diagnostic tool. It identifies social trends and cultural patterns and weaves elaborate counterfactuals- literary fictions- that hang human faces on large-scale human abstractions such as society and culture" (1). Jung proposes the large-scale social abstraction; that to truly live with ourselves we need embrace the otherness inside us— to learn to live with it (Tacey). The Gothic may enable this living with, rather than living without. Jung asserts that we now rely so much on what we can touch, taste and own, that western culture has become a “creed without substance” (Tacey 32). In more concrete terms, Hoffie argues that popular media today tells stories: in terms of disaster and crisis: weather patterns: disastrous. Climate Change: disastrous. Global Financial Crisis: disastrous. Political situations: disastrous. Unemployment: disastrous. And so on. The high-pitched wail of this lament corrodes the peaks and troughs of potential emotional responsiveness; the vapours of benumbing apathy steam upwards like a bewitching spell. All stands still. Action, like in a bad dream, seems impossible. (14) This apathy in the face of crisis or disaster is well expressed in Del Rey’s work through the Gothic influenced lyrics and videos; she describes her partner as so good looking as to be “sick as cancer” in Blue Jeans and that her lover left her because he was “chasing paper”. Represented here is the social current that the need to acquire goods in late capitalism’s climate “of unrestrained consumerism” (Heine and Thakur 2) is her lover’s priority over companionship. Revealing more of the Gothic aesthetic is that her videos and songs represent this loss, they depict “disturbances of sanity and security” (Botting, Gothic 2) and thematically reflect the social climate of “disaster and crisis” (Hoffie 14). This sense of otherness through Gothic influences of the uncanny, death and melancholy have a significant impact on creative expression creating music videos that play like a kind of half remembered nightmare (Botting, Love Your Zombie; Macfarlane). In the black and white video for Blue Jeans the opening shot shows an image of Del Rey rippling and blurred, framed by circular waves of water as black as oil. The powerful Gothic aesthetic of the abyss is rendered here, “to convey the figurative meaning of a catastrophic situation seen as likely to occur whereby the individual will sink to immeasurable intellectual, ethical or moral depths” (Edwards and Monnet 9). This abyss is represented as Del Rey sings to her ghostly tattooed lover that she will love him until “the end of time” and climaxes in the suggestion that he drowns her. As in Edwards and Monnet‘s description of zombie films, Del Rey’s videos narratively “suggest that the postmodern condition is itself a form of madness that disseminates cultural trauma and erases historical memory” (8). This view is evident in contrasting Del Rey’s interview comment that she finds conversations about feminism boring (Cooper). Yet in her song delivery and lyrics she retains an ironic tone regards feminine power. This combination helps “produce a darkly funny and carnivalesque representation of sex and waste under late capitalism” (Edwards and Monnet 8). Further evidence of these ironies and distorted juxtapositions of loss and possession are evident in the song Radio. The video —a bricolage of retrospective fashion imagery— and lyrics hint at the persistent desire for goods in US western culture (Heine and Thakur). Simultaneously in her song Radio, she is corruptibly engorged by consumption and being consumed (Mulvey) as she sings that life is “sweet like cinnamon, a fucking dream on Ritalin”. The video itself represents distorted dreams hyper-real on Ritalin. Del Rey’s work speaks of an excess; the overflow of sensations, sexual excess, of buying, of having, of owning, and at the same time the absence; of loss or not knowing what to have (Botting, Love Your Zombie). Exemplified by the lyrics in What Makes Us Girls, “do I know what I want?” and again in Radio “American dreams came true somehow, I swore I’d chase until I was dead”. Increasingly it is evident that Del Rey sings “as a woman who does not know what she wants” (Vigier 5). She illustrates the “endemic narcissism” (Hoffie 15) of contemporary western culture. Del Rey therefore clearly delineates much of “the loneliness, emptiness, and alienation that results from rampant consumerism and materialism under advanced capitalism” (Edwards and Monnet 8). As a theme of this representation, Del Rey implies a sense of commodified female sexual energy through the male gaze (Mulvey), along with a sense of wasted youth and opportunity in the carnivalesque National Anthem. The video, shot as if on Super 8 film, tells the story of Del Rey’s ‘character’ married to a hedonistic style of president. It is reminiscent of the JFK story including authentic and detailed presentation of costume —especially Del Rey’s Jackie Onassis fashions— the couple posing in presidential gardens with handsome mixed-race children. Lavish lifestyles are depicted whilst the characters enjoy drinking, gambling and consumerist excess, Del Rey sings "It's a love story for the new age, For the six page, We're on a quick sick rampage, Wining and dining, Drinking and driving, Excessive buying, Overdose and dyin'". In National Anthem sexual excess is one of the strongest themes communicated. Repeatedly depicted are distinct close up shots of his hand on her thigh, and vice versa. Without being sexually explicit in itself, it is an overtly sexual reference, communicating something of sexual excess because of the sheer number of times it is highlighted in close-up shots. This links to the idea of the Gothic use of jouissance, a state of: excessive energies that burst in and beyond circuits of pleasure: intensities are read in relation to a form of subjectivity that finds itself briefly and paradoxically in moments of extreme loss. (Botting, Love Your Zombie 22) Del Rey represents these moments of loss —of herself, of her man, of her power, of her identity being subsumed by his— as intense pleasure, indicated in the video through sexual referencing. Botting argues that these excesses create anxieties; that in the pursuit of postmodern excess, of ownership, of consumption: the subject internalises the inconsistencies and contradictions of capitalism, manifesting pathologies not of privation but overabundance: stress, eating disorders, self-harming, and a range of anxieties. (Love Your Zombie 22) These anxieties are further expressed in National Anthem. Del Rey sings to her lover that he cannot keep his “pants on” and she must “hold you like a python”. The python in this tale simultaneously symbolises the exotic, erotic and dangerous entrapment by her male suitor. Edwards and Monnet argue for the Gothic monster, whose sign is further referenced as Del Rey swims with crocodiles in Blue Jeans. Here the male power, patriarchy and dominance is represented as monstrous. In the video she shares the pool with her beau yet we only see Del Rey swim and writhe with the crocodiles. Analogous of her murderous lover, this adds a powerful otherness to the scene and reinforces the symbols of threatening masculinity and impeding disaster. This expression of monstrousness creates a cathartic tension as it “puts the ‘pop’ in Pop Goth: its popularity is based on the frisson of selling simultaneous aversion from and attraction to self-destruction and cultural taboo” (Edwards and Monnet 9). In a further representation of anxieties Del Rey conforms to the sexual object persona in large part through her retro pin-up iconography —meticulous attention to costume, continuous posing and pouting— and song lyrics (Buszek). As in National Anthem her lyrics talk of devotion and male strength to protect and to “keep me safe in his bell tower”. Her videos, whilst they may show some of her strength, ultimately reside in patriarchal resolution (Mulvey). She is generally confounded by the male figures in her videos appearing to be very much alone and away from them: most notably in Blue Jeans, Born to Die and Video Games. In two cases it is suggested she is murdered by the male figures of her love. Her costume and appearance —iconic 1960’s swimsuits, pantsuits and big hairstyles in National Anthem— portray something of the retro pin-up. Buszek argues that at one time “young feminists may poke fun at the pin-up, but they do so in ways that betray affinities with, even affection for, the genre itself” (3). Del Rey simultaneously adheres to and confronts these normative gender roles, as is characteristic of the Gothic mode (Botting, Gothic). These very Gothic contradictions are also evident in Del Rey’s often ironic or mocking song delivery, undermining apparent heteronormative sexual and gender positioning. In National Anthem she sings, as if parodying women who might sincerely ask, “do you think he’ll buy me lots of diamonds?”. Her conformity is however, subverted. In Del Rey’s videos, clear evidence exists in her facial expressions where she consistently portrays Gothic elements of uncertainty, sorrow, grief and a pervading sense that she does not belong in this world (Botting, Gothic). Whilst depicted as a brooding and mourning widow —simultaneously playing the mistress luxuriating on a lion skin rug— in National Anthem Del Rey sings, “money is the anthem of success” without a smile or sense of any attachment to the lyrics. In the same song she sings “God you’re so handsome” without a trace of glee, pleasure or optimism. In the video for Blue Jeans she sings, “I will love you til the end of time” staring sorrowfully into the distance or directly at the camera. This confident yet ‘dead stare’ emphasises the overall juxtaposition of the largely positive lyrical expression, with the sorrowful facial expression and low sung notes. Del Rey signifies repeatedly that something is amiss; that the American dream is over and that even with apparent success within this sphere, there exists only emptiness and isolation (Botting, Love Your Zombie). Further contradictions exist as Lana Del Rey walks this blurred line —as is the Gothic mode— between heteronormative and ambiguous gender roles (Botting, Gothic; Edwards and Monnet). Lana Del Rey oscillates between positions of strength and independence —shown in her deadpan to-camera delivery— to that of weakness and subjugation. As she plays narrator, Del Rey symbolically reclaims some power as she retells the tragic story of Born to Die from her throne. Represented here Del Rey’s persona exerts a troubled malevolence, with two tigers calmly sat by her side: her benevolent pets, or symbols of contrived excess. She simultaneously presents the angelic —resplendent in sheer white dress and garland ‘crown’ headdress of the spurned bride in the story— and the stoic as she stares down the camera. Del Rey is powerful and in many senses threatening. At one point she draws a manicured thumbnail across her neck in a cut-throat gesture; a movement echoed later by her lover. Her character ultimately walks symbolically —and latently— to her death. She neither remedies her position as subservient, subordinate female nor revisits any kind of redemption for the excessive male dominance in her videos. The “excess is countered by greater excess” (Botting Love Your Zombie 27) and leads to otherness. In this reading of Del Rey’s work, there are representations that remain explicitly Pop Gothic, eliciting sensations of paranoia and fear, overloading her videos with these signs (Yeo). These signs elicit the otherness of the Gothic mode; expressed in visual symbols of violence, passion or obsession (Botting, Gothic). In our digital visual age, subjecting an eager viewer to this excess of signs creates the conditions for over-reading of a growing gender or consumerist paranoia, enabled by the Gothic, “paranoia stems from an excessive over-reading of signs and is a product of interpretation, misinterpretation and re-interpretation based on one’s knowledge or lack of it” (Yeo 22). Del Rey stimulates these sensations of paranoia partly through interlaying intertextual references. She does this thematically —Gothic melancholy— and pop culturally channelling Marilyn Monroe and other fashion iconography, as well as through explicit textual references, as in her most recent single Ultraviolence. In Ultraviolence, Del Rey sings “He hit me and it felt like a kiss”. Effortlessly and simultaneously she celebrates and lays bare her pain; however the intertextual reference to the violent controversy of the film A Clockwork Orange serves to aestheticise the domestic violence she describes. With Del Rey it may be that as meaning is sought amongst the texts as Macfarlane wrote about Lady Gaga, Del Rey’s “truth is ultimately irrelevant in the face of its interlayed performance” (130). Del Rey’s Gothic mode of ambiguity, of transgressed boundaries and unclear lines, shows “this ambience of perpetually deferred climax is no stranger to contemporary culture” (Hoffie 15) and may go some way to expressing something of the “lived experience of her audience” (Vigier 1). Hermes argues that in post-feminist pop culture, strong independent post-feminist women can be characterised by their ability to break traditional taboos, question or hold up for interrogation norms and traditions, but that ultimately narrative arches tend to restore the patriarchal norm. Edwards and Monnet assert that the Gothic in Pop Gothic cultural representation can become “post-race, post-sexuality, post-gender” (6). In places Del Ray exhibits this postmodernism but through the use of Gothic mode goes outside political debates and blurs clear lines of feminist discourse (Botting, Love Your Zombie). Whilst a duality in the texts exists; comments on consumerism, the emptiness of capitalist society and a suicidal expression of hopelessness, are undermined as she demonstrates conformity to subservient gender roles and her ambiguously ironic need to be “young and beautiful”. To be consumed by her man thus defines her value as an object within a consumerist neo-liberal trope (Jameson). This analysis goes some way to confirming Hermes’ assertion that in this post-feminist climate there has been a “loss of a political agenda, or the foundation for a new one, where it signposts the overcoming of unproductive old distinctions between feminist and feminine” (79). Hermes further argues, with reference to television shows Ally McBeal and Sex and the City, that presentation of female characters or personas has moved forward; the man is no longer the lone guarantor of a woman’s happiness. Yet many of the tropes in Del Rey’s work are familiar; overwhelming love for her companion equal only to the emphasis on physical appearance. Del Rey breaks taboos —she is powerful, sexual and a romantic predator, without being a demon seductress— and satirises consumerist excess and gender inequality; yet she remains sexually and politically subservient to the whim and sometimes violently expressed or implied male gaze (Mulvey). Del Rey may well represent something of Vigier’s assertion that whilst society has clear direction for the ‘success’ of women, “that real liberation and genuine satisfaction elude them” (1). In closing, there is no clear answer as to whether Del Rey is a Beauty Queen or Gothic Princess; she is neither and she is both. In Vigier’s words, “self-exploitation or self-destruction cannot be the only choices open to young women today” (13). Del Rey’s work is provocative on multiple levels. It hints at the pull of rampant consumerism and the immediacy of narcissistic desires, interlinked with contradictions which indicate the potential for social crises. This is shown in Del Rey’s use of the Gothic — otherness, the monstrous, darkness and death— and its juxtaposition with heteronormative gender representations which highlights the persistent commodification of the female body, its subjugation to male power and the potential for deep anxieties in 21st-century identity. References Blue Jeans. Dir. Yoann Lemoine. Perf. Lana Del Rey. Interscope Records, 2012. Botting, Fred. Gothic. New York: Routledge, 2014. Botting, Fred. "Love Your Zombie." The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture. Ed. Edwards, Justin and Agnieszka Monnet. New York: Routledge, 2012. 19-36. Buszek, Maria. Pin-Up Grrrls Feminism, Sexuality and Popular Culture. London: Duke University Press, 2006. Cooper, Duncan. "Lana Del Rey Cover Interview." Fader, June 2014. Edwards, Justin, and Agnieszka Monnet. "Introduction." The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture. Eds. Justin Edwards and A. Monnet. New York: Routledge, 2012. 1-18. Heine, Jorge, and Ramesh Thakur. The Dark Side of Globalisation. New York: UN UP, 2011. Hermes, Joke. "The Tragic Success of Feminism." Feminism in Popular Culture. Eds. Joanne Hollows and Rachel Moseley. New York: Berg, 2006. 79-95. Hoffie, Pat. "Deadly Ennui." Artlink Magazine 32.4 (2012): 15-16. Jameson, Fredric. "Globalisation and Political Strategy." New Left Review 2.4 (2000): 49-68. Lana Del Rey. "Radio." Born To Die. Interscope Records, 2012. "Lana Del Rey - Summertime Sadness" YouTube, n.d. 12 June 2014 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVjsGKrE6E8›. Lana Del Rey. "This Is What Makes Us Girls." Born To Die. Interscope Records, 2012. Macfarlane, K. "The Monstrous House of Gaga." The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture. Ed. Justin Edwards and A. Monnet. New York: Routledge, 2012. 114-134. Mestrovic, Stjepan. Postemotional Society. London: Sage, 1997. Mulvey, Laura. Visual and other Pleasures. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. National Anthem. Dir. Anthony Mandler. Perf. Lana Del Rey. Interscope Records, 2012. Paglia, Camille. Lady Gaga and the Death of Sex. 12 Sep. 2010. 2 June 2014 ‹http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/public/magazine/article389697.ece›. Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. "Introduction: a Place for Contemporary Gothic." Aeternum: the Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies 1.1 (2014): i-iv. Spooner, Catherine, and Emma McEvoy. The Routledge Companion to Gothic. New York: Routledge, 2007. Summertime Sadness. Dir. Chris Sweeney. Perf. Lana Del Rey. Interscope Records, 2013. Swirski, Peter. American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature, Social Thought, and Political History. New York: Routledge, 2011. Tacey, David. The Jung Reader. New York: Routledge, 2012. Van Elferen, Isabella. "Spectural Liturgy, Transgression, Ritual and Music in Gothic." The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture. Eds. Justin Edwards and A. Monnet. New York: Routledge, 2012. 135-147. Vigier, Catherine. "The Meaning of Lana Del Rey." Zeteo: The Journal of Interdisciplinary Writing Fall (2012): 1-16. Yeo, David. "Gothic Paranoia in David Fincher's Seven, The Game and Fight Club." Aeternum: The Journal Of Contemporary Gothic Studies 1.1 (2014): 16-25. Young and Beautiful. Dir. Chris Sweeney. Perf. Lana Del Rey. Interscope Records, 2013.

In 1999, the TV movie Shark Attack depicted an attack by mutant great white sharks on the population of Cape Town. By the time the third entry in the series, Shark Attack 3, aired in 2002, mutant great whites had lost their lustre and were replaced as antagonists with the megalodon: a giant shark originating not in any laboratory, but history, having lived from approximately 23 to 3.6 million years ago. The megalodon was resurrected again in May 2021 through a trifecta of events. A video of a basking shark encounter in the Atlantic went viral on the social media platform TikTok, due to users misidentifying it as a megalodon caught on tape. At the same time a boy received publicity for finding a megalodon tooth on a beach in South Carolina on his fifth birthday (Scott). And finally, the video game Stranded Deep, in which a megalodon is featured as a major enemy, was released as one of the monthly free games on the PlayStation Plus gaming service. These examples form part of a larger trend of alleged megalodon sightings in recent years, emerging as a component of the modern resurgence of cryptozoology. In the words of Bernard Heuvelmans, the Belgian zoologist who both popularised the term and was a leading figure of the field, cryptozoology is the “science of hidden animals”, which he further explained were more generally referred to as ‘unknowns’, even though they are typically known to local populations—at least sufficiently so that we often indirectly know of their existence, and certain aspects of their appearance and behaviour. It would be better to call them animals ‘undescribed by science,’ at least according to prescribed zoological rules. (1-2) In other words, a large aspect of cryptozoology as a field is taking the legendary creatures of non-Western mythology and finding materialist explanations for them compatible with Western biology. In many ways, this is a relic of the era of European imperialism, when many creatures of Africa and the Americas were “hidden animals” to European eyes (Dendle 200-01; Flores 557; Guimont). A major example of this is Bigfoot beliefs, a large subset of which took Native American legends about hairy wild men and attempted to prove that they were actually sightings of relict Gigantopithecus. These “hidden animals”—Bigfoot, Nessie, the chupacabra, the glawackus—are referred to as ‘cryptids’ by cryptozoologists (Regal 22, 81-104). Almost unique in cryptozoology, the megalodon is a cryptid based entirely on Western scientific development, and even the notion that it survives comes from standard scientific analysis (albeit analysis which was later superseded). Much like living mammoths and Bigfoot, what might be called the ‘megalodon as cryptid hypothesis’ serves to reinforce a fairy tale of its own. It reflects the desire to believe that there are still areas of the Earth untouched enough by human destruction to sustain massive animal life (Dendle 199-200). Indeed, megalodon’s continued existence would help absolve humanity for the oceanic aspect of the Sixth Extinction, by its role as an alternative apex predator; cryptozoologist Michael Goss even proposed that whales and giant squids are rare not from human causes, but precisely because megalodons are feeding on them (40). Horror scholar Michael Fuchs has pointed out that shark media, particularly the 1975 film Jaws and its 2006 video game adaptation Jaws Unleashed, are imbued with eco-politics (Fuchs 172-83). These connections, as well as the modern megalodon’s surge in popularity, make it notable that none of Syfy’s climate change-focused Sharknado films featured a megalodon. Despite the lack of a Megalodonado, the popular appeal of the megalodon serves as an important case study. Given its scientific origin and dynamic relationship with popular culture, I argue that the ‘megalodon as cryptid hypothesis’ illustrates how the boundaries between ‘hard’ science and mythology, fiction and reality, as well as ‘monster’ and ‘animal’, are not as firm as advocates of the Western science tradition might believe. As this essay highlights, science can be a mythology of its own, and monsters can serve as its gods of the gaps—or, in the case of megalodon, the god of the depths. Megalodon Fossils: A Short History Ancient peoples of various cultures likely viewed fossilised teeth of megalodons in the area of modern-day Syria (Mayor, First Fossil Hunters 257). Over the past 2500 years, Native American cultures in North America used megalodon teeth both as curios and cutting tools, due to their large size and serrated edges. A substantial trade in megalodon teeth fossils existed between the cultures inhabiting the areas of the Chesapeake Bay and Ohio River Valley (Lowery et al. 93-108). A 1961 study found megalodon teeth present as offerings in pre-Columbian temples across Central America, including in the Mayan city of Palenque in Mexico and Sitio Conte in Panama (de Borhegyi 273-96). But these cases led to no mythologies incorporating megalodons, in contrast to examples such as the Unktehi, a Sioux water monster of myth likely inspired by a combination of mammoth and mosasaur fossils (Mayor, First Americans 221-38). In early modern Europe, megalodon teeth were initially referred to as ‘tongue stones’, due to their similarity in size and shape to human tongues—just one of many ways modern cryptozoology comes from European religious and mystical thought (Dendle 190-216). In 1605, English scholar Richard Verstegan published his book A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities, which included an engraving of a tongue stone, making megalodon teeth potentially the subject of the first known illustration of any fossil (Davidson 333). In Malta, from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, megalodon teeth, known as ‘St. Paul’s tongue’, were used as charms to ward off the evil eye, dipped into drinks suspected of being poisoned, and even ground into powder and consumed as medicine (Zammit-Maempel, “Evil Eye” plate III; Zammit-Maempel, “Handbills” 220; Freller 31-32). While megalodon teeth were valued in and of themselves, they were not incorporated into myths, or led to a belief in megalodons still being extant. Indeed, save for their size, megalodon teeth were hard to distinguish from those of living sharks, like great whites. Instead, both the identification of megalodons as a species, and the idea that they might still be alive, were notions which originated from extrapolations of the results of nineteenth and twentieth century European scientific studies. In particular, the major culprit was the famous British 1872-76 HMS Challenger expedition, which led to the establishment of oceanography as a branch of science. In 1873, Challenger recovered fossilised megalodon teeth from the South Pacific, the first recovered in the open ocean (Shuker 48; Goss 35; Roesch). In 1959, the zoologist Wladimir Tschernezky of Queen Mary College analysed the teeth recovered by the Challenger and argued (erroneously, as later seen) that the accumulation of manganese dioxide on its surface indicated that one had to have been deposited within the last 11,000 years, while another was given an age of 24,000 years (1331-32). However, these views have more recently been debunked, with megalodon extinction occurring over two million years ago at the absolute latest (Pimiento and Clements 1-5; Coleman and Huyghe 138; Roesch). Tschernezky’s 1959 claim that megalodons still existed as of 9000 BCE was followed by the 1963 book Sharks and Rays of Australian Seas, a posthumous publication by ichthyologist David George Stead. Stead recounted a story told to him in 1918 by fishermen in Port Stephens, New South Wales, of an encounter with a fully white shark in the 115-300 foot range, which Stead argued was a living megalodon. That this account came from Stead was notable as he held a PhD in biology, had founded the Wildlife Preservation Society of Australia, and had debunked an earlier supposed sea monster sighting in Sydney Harbor in 1907 (45-46). The Stead account formed the backbone of cryptozoological claims for the continued existence of the megalodon, and after the book’s publication, multiple reports of giant shark sightings in the Pacific from the 1920s and 1930s were retroactively associated with relict megalodons (Shuker 43, 49; Coleman and Huyghe 139-40; Goss 40-41; Roesch). A Monster of Science and Culture As I have outlined above, the ‘megalodon as cryptid hypothesis’ had as its origin story not in Native American or African myth, but Western science: the Challenger Expedition, a London zoologist, and an Australian ichthyologist. Nor was the idea of a living megalodon necessarily outlandish; in the decades after the Challenger Expedition, a number of supposedly extinct fish species had been discovered to be anything but. In the late 1800s, the goblin shark and frilled shark, both considered ‘living fossils’, had been found in the Pacific (Goss 34-35). In 1938, the coelacanth, also believed by Western naturalists to have been extinct for millions of years, was rediscovered (at least by Europeans) in South Africa, samples having occasionally been caught by local fishermen for centuries. The coelacanth in particular helped give scientific legitimacy to the idea, prevalent for decades by that point, that living dinosaurs—associated with a legendary creature called the mokele-mbembe—might still exist in the heart of Central Africa (Guimont). In 1976, a US Navy ship off Hawaii recovered a megamouth shark, a deep-water species completely unknown prior. All of these oceanic discoveries gave credence to the idea that the megalodon might also still survive (Coleman and Clark 66-68, 156-57; Shuker 41; Goss 35; Roesch). Indeed, Goss has noted that prior to 1938, respectable ichthyologists were more likely to believe in the continued existence of the megalodon than the coelacanth (39-40). Of course, the major reason why speculation over megalodon survival had such public resonance was completely unscientific: the already-entrenched fascination with the fact that it had been a locomotive-sized killer. This had most clearly been driven home by a 1909 display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. There, Bashford Dean, an ichthyologist at the museum, reconstructed an immense megalodon jaw, complete with actual fossil teeth. However, due to the fact that Dean assumed that all megalodon teeth were approximately the same size as the largest examples medially in the jaws, Dean’s jaw was at least one third larger than the likely upper limit of megalodon size. Nevertheless, the public perception of the megalodon remained at the 80-foot length that Dean extrapolated, rather than the more realistic 55-foot length that was the likely approximate upper size (Randall 170; Shuker 47; Goss 36-39). In particular, this inaccurate size estimate became entrenched in public thought due to a famous photograph of Dean and other museum officials posing inside his reconstructed jaw—a photograph which appeared in perhaps the most famous piece of shark fiction of all time, Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film Jaws. As it would turn out, the megalodon connection was itself a relic from the movie’s evolutionary ancestor, Peter Benchley’s novel, Jaws, from the year before. In the novel, the Woods Hole ichthyologist Matt Hooper (played by Richard Dreyfuss in the film) proposes that megalodons not only still exist, but they are the same species as great white sharks, with the smaller size of traditional great whites being due to the fact that they are simply on the small end of the megalodon size range (257-59). Benchley was reflecting on what was then the contemporary idea that megalodons likely resembled scaled-up great white sharks; something which is no longer as accepted. This was particularly notable as a number of claimed sightings stated that the alleged megalodons were larger great whites (Shuker 48-49), perhaps circuitously due to the Jaws influence. However, Goss was apparently unaware of Benchley’s linkage when he noted in 1987 (incidentally the year of the fourth and final Jaws movie) that to a megalodon, “the great white shark of Jaws would have been a stripling and perhaps a between-meals snack” (36). The publication of the Jaws novel led to an increased interest in the megalodon amongst cryptozoologists (Coleman and Clark 154; Mullis, “Cryptofiction” 246). But even so, it attracted rather less attention than other cryptids. From 1982-98, Heuvelmans served as president of the International Society of Cryptozoology, whose official journal was simply titled Cryptozoology. The notion of megalodon survival was addressed only once in its pages, and that as a brief mention in a letter to the editor (Raynal 112). This was in stark contrast to the oft-discussed potential for dinosaurs, mammoths, and Neanderthals to remain alive in the present day. In 1991, prominent British cryptozoologist Karl Shuker published an article endorsing the idea of extant megalodons (46-49). But this was followed by a 1998 article by Ben S. Roesch in The Cryptozoology Review severely criticising the methodology of Shuker and others who believed in the megalodon’s existence (Roesch). Writing in 1999, Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark, arguably the most prominent post-Heuvelmans cryptozoologists, were agnostic on the megalodon’s survival (155). The British palaeozoologist Darren Naish, a critic of cryptozoology, has pointed out that even if Shuker and others are correct and the megalodon continues to live in deep sea crevasses, it would be distinct enough from the historical surface-dwelling megalodon to be a separate species, to which he gave the hypothetical classification Carcharocles modernicus (Naish). And even the public fascination with the megalodon has its limits: at a 24 June 2004 auction in New York City, a set of megalodon jaws went on sale for $400,000, but were left unpurchased (Couzin 174). New Mythologies The ‘megalodon as cryptid hypothesis’ is effectively a fairy tale born of the blending of science, mythology, and most importantly, fiction. Beyond Jaws or Shark Attack 3—and potentially having inspired the latter (Weinberg)—perhaps the key patient zero of megalodon fiction is Steve Alten’s 1997 novel Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror, which went through a tortuous development adaptation process to become the 2018 film The Meg (Mullis, “Journey” 291-95). In the novel, the USS Nautilus, the US Navy’s first nuclear submarine and now a museum ship in Connecticut, is relaunched in order to hunt down the megalodon, only to be chomped in half by the shark. This is a clear allusion to Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea (1870), where his Nautilus (namesake of the real submarine) is less successfully attacked by a giant cuttlefish (Alten, Meg 198; Verne 309-17). Meanwhile, in Alten’s 1999 sequel The Trench, an industrialist’s attempts to study the megalodon are revealed as an excuse to mine helium-3 from the seafloor to build fusion reactors, a plot financed by none other than a pre-9/11 Osama bin Laden in order to allow the Saudis to take over the global economy, in the process linking the megalodon with a monster of an entirely different type (Alten, Trench 261-62). In most adaptations of Verne’s novel, the cuttlefish that attacks the Nautilus is replaced by a giant squid, traditionally seen as the basis for the kraken of Norse myth (Thone 191). The kraken/giant squid dichotomy is present in the video game Stranded Deep. In it, the player’s unnamed avatar is a businessman whose plane crashes into a tropical sea, and must survive by scavenging resources, crafting shelters, and fighting predators across various islands. Which sea in particular does the player crash into? It is hard to say, as the only indication of specific location comes from the three ‘boss’ creatures the player must fight. One of them is Abaia, a creature from Melanesian mythology; another is Lusca, a creature from Caribbean mythology; the third is a megalodon. Lusca and Abaia, despite being creatures of mythology, are depicted as a giant squid and a giant moray eel, respectively. But the megalodon is portrayed as itself. Stranded Deep serves as a perfect distillation of the megalodon mythos: the shark is its own mythological basis, and its own cryptid equivalent. References Alten, Steven. Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Alten, Steven. The Trench. New York: Pinnacle Books, 1999. Atherton, Darren. Jaws Unleashed. Videogame. Hungary: Appaloosa Interactive, 2006. Benchley, Peter. Jaws: A Novel. New York: Doubleday, 1974. Coleman, Loren, and Jerome Clark. Cryptozoology A to Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. Coleman, Loren, and Patrick Huyghe. The Field Guide to Lake Monsters, Sea Serpents, and Other Mystery Denizens of the Deep. Los Angeles: TarcherPerigee, 2003. Couzin, Jennifer. “Random Samples.” Science 305.5681 (2004): 174. Davidson, Jane P. “Fish Tales: Attributing the First Illustration of a Fossil Shark’s Tooth to Richard Verstegan (1605) and Nicolas Steno (1667).” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 150 (2000): 329–44. De Borhegyi, Stephan F. “Shark Teeth, Stingray Spines, and Shark Fishing in Ancient Mexico and Central America.” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 17.3 (1961): 273–96. Dendle, Peter. “Cryptozoology in the Medieval and Modern Worlds.” Folklore 117.2 (2006): 190–206. Flores, Jorge, “Distant Wonders: The Strange and the Marvelous between Mughal India and Habsburg Iberia in the Early Seventeenth Century.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49.3 (2007): 553–81. Freller, Thomas. “The Pauline Cult in Malta and the Movement of the Counter-Reformation: The Development of Its International Reputation.” The Catholic Historical Review 85.1 (1999): 15–34. Fuchs, Michael. “Becoming-Shark? Jaws Unleashed, the Animal Avatar, and Popular Culture’s Eco-Politics.” Beasts of the Deep: Sea Creatures and Popular Culture. Jon Hackett and Seán Harrington. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2018. 172–83. Goss, Michael. “Do Giant Prehistoric Sharks Survive?” Fate 40.11 (1987): 32–41. Guimont, Edward. “Hunting Dinosaurs in Central Africa.” Contingent Magazine, 18 Mar. 2019. 26 May 2021 <http://contingentmagazine.org/2019/03/18/hunting-dinosaurs-africa/>. Heuvelmans, Bernard. “What is Cryptozoology?” Trans. Ron Westrum. Cryptozoology 1 (1982): 1–12. Jaws. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Universal Pictures, 1975. Lowery, Darrin, Stephen J. Godfrey, and Ralph Eshelman. “Integrated Geology, Paleontology, and Archaeology: Native American Use of Fossil Shark Teeth in the Chesapeake Bay Region.” Archaeology of Eastern North America 39 (2011): 93–108. Mayor, Adrienne. The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Mayor, Adrienne. Fossil Legends of the First Americans. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. Meg, The. Dir. Jon Turteltaub. Warner Brothers, 2018. Mullis, Justin. “Cryptofiction! Science Fiction and the Rise of Cryptozoology.” The Paranormal and Popular Culture: A Postmodern Religious Landscape. Eds. Darryl Caterine and John W. Morehead. London: Routledge, 2019. 240–52. Mullis, Justin. “The Meg’s Long Journey to the Big Screen.” Jaws Unmade: The Lost Sequels, Prequels, Remakes, and Rip-Offs. John LeMay. Roswell: Bicep Books, 2020. 291–95. Naish, Darren. “Tales from the Cryptozoologicon: Megalodon!” Scientific American, 5 Aug. 2013. 27 May 2021 <https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/cryptozoologicon-megalodon-teaser/>. Pimiento, Catalina, and Christopher F. Clements. “When Did Carcharocles Megalodon Become Extinct? A New Analysis of the Fossil Record.” PLoS One 9.10 (2014): 1–5. Randall, John E. “Size of the Great White Shark (Carcharodon).” Science 181.4095 (1973): 169–70. Raynal, Michel. “The Linnaeus of the Zoology of Tomorrow.” Cryptozoology 6 (1987): 110–15. Regal, Brian. Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads, and Cryptozoology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Roesch, Ben S. “A Critical Evaluation of the Supposed Contemporary Existence of Carcharodon Megalodon.” Internet Archive, 1999. 28 May 2021 <https://web.archive.org/web/20131021005820/http:/web.ncf.ca/bz050/megalodon.html>. Scott, Ryan. “TikTok of Giant Shark Terrorizing Tourists Ignites Megalodon Theories.” Movieweb, 27 May 2021. 28 May 2021 <https://movieweb.com/giant-shark-tiktok-video-megalodon/>. Shark Attack. Dir. Bob Misiorowski. Martien Holdings A.V.V., 1999. Shark Attack 3: Megalodon. Dir. David Worth. Nu Image Films, 2002. Shuker, Karl P.N. “The Search for Monster Sharks.” Fate 44.3 (1991): 41–49. Stead, David G. Sharks and Rays of Australian Seas. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1963. Stranded Deep. Australia: Beam Team Games, 2015. Thone, Frank. “Nature Ramblings: Leviathan and the Kraken.” The Science News-Letter 33.12 (1938): 191. Tschernezky, Wladimir. “Age of Carcharodon Megalodon?” Nature 184.4695 (1959): 1331–32. Verne, Jules. Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. 1870. New York: M. A. Donohue & Company, 1895. Weinberg, Scott. “Shark Attack 3: Megalodon.” eFilmCritic! 3 May 2004. 20 Sep. 2021 <https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=9135&reviewer=128>. Zammit-Maempel, George. “The Evil Eye and Protective Cattle Horns in Malta.” Folklore 79.1 (1968): 1–16. ———. “Handbills Extolling the Virtues of Fossil Shark’s Teeth.” Melita Historica 7.3 (1978): 211–24.

This thesis seeks to explore the commonalities between religion and video games, ultimately making the argument that video games employ religion as a tool to make some deeper commentary on (in this case) American society and culture. This will be done through a detailed analysis of the game play, narrative, and religious elements at work in three different video games, as seen through the lenses of Queer Theory and Civil Religion. Furthermore, it will attempt to show that, just as gamers are struggling with their previously insular community opening up to the outside world, America has also not yet figured out what role video games can fulfill in society. This thesis seeks to provide one possible answer: the potential for video games to become tools of inquiry, sites of disruption, and, like film and books, provide commentary on our values as a society.

106 scholarly articles This is a compendium of touchstone articles by prominent communication, rhetorical, and cultural studies scholars about topics of interest to scholars and critics of popular and political culture. Articles provide authoritative surveys of concepts such as rhetorical construction of bodies, Marxist, feminist, and poststructuralist traditions, materialisms, social movements, race and anti-racist critique, whiteness, surveillance and security, visual communication, globalization, social media and digital communication/cyberculture, performance studies, the “post-human” turn, critical organizational communication, public memory, gaming, cultural industries, colonialism and postcolonialism, The Birmingham and Frankfurt Schools, commodity culture, critical health culture studies, nation and identity, public spheres, psychoanalytic theory and methods, affect theory, anti-Semitism, queer studies, critical argumentation studies, diaspora, development, intersectionality, Islamophobia, subaltern studies, spatial studies, rhetoric and cultural studies, neoliberalism, critical pedagogy, urban studies, deconstruction, audience studies, labor, war, age studies, motherhood studies, popular culture, communication in the Global South, and more. The work also surveys critical thinkers for cultural studies including Stuart Hall, Antonio Gramsci, Jesus Martin Barbero, Angela Davis, Ernesto Laclau, Raymond Williams, Giles Deleuze, Jurgen Habermas, Frantz Fanon, Chandra Mohanty, Gayatri Spivak, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Juan Carlos Rodriguez, Gloria Anzaldua, Paolo Freire, Donna Haraway, Georgio Agamben, Slavoj Zizek, W.E.B. DuBois, Sara Ahmed, Paul Gilroy, Enrique Dussel, Michael Warner, Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Mignolo, Edward Said, Alain Badiou, Homi Bhabha, among others. Each entry is distinguished by lists of key references and suggestions for further reading. The collection is sure to be a vital resource for faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates seeking authoritative overviews of key concepts and people in communication and critical cultural studies.

In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes that by examining the process of history we can “discover the differential exercise of power that makes some narratives possible and silences others.” Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities examines the process of history in the narrative of the digital humanities and deconstructs its history as a straight line from the beginnings of humanities computing. By discussing alternatives histories of the digital humanities that address queer gaming, feminist game studies praxis, Cold War military-industrial complex computation, the creation of the environmental humanities, monolingual discontent in DH, the hidden history of DH in English studies, radical media praxis, cultural studies and DH, indigenous futurities, Pacific Rim postcolonial DH, the issue of scale and DH, the radical, indigenous, feminist histories of the digital database, and the possibilities for an antifascist DH, this collection hopes to re-set discussions of the straight, white origin myths of DH. Thus, this collection hopes to reexamine the silences in such a straight and white masculinist history and delineates how power comes into play to shape this straight, white DH narrative. A number of the pieces in this volume go back to the origin myth of the digital humanities to reassess the hagiography of Father Busa by reconsidering and recontextualizing his legacy and his work in relation to media archaeology, politics, Cold War maneuvers, mechanized genocide, the Third Reich, and the military-industrial complex as it has organized various fields, including Asian Studies. This reassessment of comparative genealogies — vis-à-vis Foucault — undergirds an alternative history of the Jesuit hagiography we have so far been unwilling to reexamine for its narrative use in embellishing an origin hagiography/historiography for digital humanities. Other pieces intertwine the digital humanities with other fields — area studies, Asian American Studies, cultural studies, literary studies, and environmental studies — in order to reexamine how the intersections and juxtapositions reveal silences in these histories. And finally, a number of pieces considers alternative praxes in rethinking these histories, whether it is an essay that is a game or a reevaluation of feminist media praxis.