Journal articles on the topic 'Queer theory – Europe'

Este trabajo analiza la utilización del vocablo queer en los análisis socioculturales del cronista mexicano Carlos Monsiváis. Mientras que en Estados Unidos y Europa lo queer se convierte en teoría deconstructivista, en México Monsiváis (erudito por excelencia de los estudios sobre la sexualidad) emplea dicho término para estudiar la feminidad de algunos homosexuales en el ambiente gay. Dado que Monsiváis jamás pretende ser un académico o teórico queer, el término le sirve como herramienta para revelar la feminización de la imagen nacional mexicana y los discursos machistas mexicanos que se oponen a ella. El presente trabajo estudia los niveles sociales y las geografías queer como referentes que Monsiváis utiliza para manejar este concepto. This essay analyzes how Mexican chronicler Carlos Monsiváis wields the term queer in his sociocultural analyses. Whereas in the United States and Europe queer is transformed into a deconstructivist theory, Monsiváis (expert par excellence within Mexican sexual studies) uses the term to study feminized homosexuals in gay environments. Since Monsiváis never claims to be a queer academic or theoretician, the term serves as a tool to reveal the feminization of the Mexican national image within Mexican male chauvinist discourses. This essay analyzes social status and queer geographies as framing referents that define how Monsiváis utilizes queer conceptually.

Abstract This article examines the significance of music and musical performance in Teleny, or the Reverse of the Medal (1893), an anonymous pornographic novel attributed by some scholars to Oscar Wilde. It draws upon historical material on late-Victorian concert venues, queer literary sub-cultures and sexology to illuminate the representation of musical spaces in the text. Teleny exists in two different versions: an English text, which is set in Paris, and a French text, which is set in London. The opening section of the article suggests that Teleny’s dynamic engagement with cosmopolitan cultural exchange between Paris and London is brought into sharper focus by situating the musical performances in the novel in the precise built environment of London’s Queen Hall. The second section explores the novel’s concern with queer geographies (the Orient, Eastern Europe) in the context of other texts that address music and homosexual identity in the period. The third section examines the significance of space in the novel’s presentation of musical listening, arguing that its focus on the materiality of sound and the haptic transmission of desire responds to sexological conceptions of embodied musical response by homosexual subjects. The significance of this sensory experience of listening is understood in the light of Sara Ahmed’s theorization of ‘queer phenomenology’. Finally, the article traces the significance of musical allusions to songs by Franz Schubert to show how they form part of the novel’s broader concerns with the spatial articulation of same-sex desire and the representation of queer urban geographies.

Abstract This article analyzes queer literary politics and the engagement with cultural precursors in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century in works by Cuban writer Ena Lucía Portela and Argentine writer María Moreno. The lack of a clearly defined tradition of lesbian/queer literature by women in Cuba and Argentina leads these two writers to appropriate or invent their own during periods of increasing liberalization in their respective countries. At first glance, Portela and Moreno’s joyful gestures of what this essay conceptualizes as “creative plagiarism” appear to signal their reveling in a cosmopolitan commons, largely situated in the United States and Europe, via Paris of the années folles (Crazy Years), from which fragments can be drawn to create queer counter-canons. However, the article concludes that through their highly intertextual works both writers reflect critically on the location of the so-called cosmopolitan in queer literary genealogies and on power dynamics and hierarchies among both authors and characters and different creative forms, including academic writing. The article argues that while the diegesis of their texts is largely set outside their local contexts, both writers’ works are deeply located in Cuba and Argentina. Ultimately, Portela and Moreno claim authority for creative writers themselves, as well as their nonliterary cocreators, reflecting critically on literary scholarship.

In the summer of 2018 at the first Balkan Society for Theory and Practice workshop that took place in Prizren, Kosova, scholars, activists, and artists came together to engage in a very much needed debate about the past, present, and future of anti-capitalist politics, feminism, queer and trans* studies, critical race theory, postcolonial and decolonial critique in the context of the post-socialist Balkan countries and former Eastern Europe. The idea for this tri-logue came out of a late night and early morning conversations based on common concerns and collaborations that have taken various forms through years of exchange and engagement with one another. It is a discussion based on the questions posed in the open call for this special issue Breaking with Transition: Decolonial and Postcolonial Perspectives in Eastern Europe. To articulate some crucial critical points through this text, we speak about the conflicts and tensions, as well as the need to envisage important analytical turns and political tactics within our ongoing struggles against turbo-racializing capitalism.

This article opens up Yeats’s Calvary (1920) for new contemporary queer theatrical interpretations by addressing the tension between dramaturgies of exclusion and inclusion as well as between the authority of masculinity and the transgressive counter-authority of effeminacy and melancholy masculinities. Due to Yeats’s anti-democratic and elitist remarks and his problematic responses to authoritarian political performance in Europe and Ireland, his theatre is often seen as a space which fosters exclusion, conventional notions of heroism, and sexual polarization. Even though the authoritarian and elitist aspects of Yeats’s life and work cannot be denied, his rich queer and feminist networks, and most importantly his sympathy for Oscar Wilde and Roger Casement changed and shaped the representations of gender in his plays in considerable ways. Thanks to these influences, Yeats’s drama took significant steps towards creating space for a queer dramaturgical epistemology which refuses totalizing and homogenizing (hetero)normative frames, mostly those of hyper-masculinity, Carlylian views of heroism and sexual/gender polarization. Through the lens of performance and queer theory, this article highlights the anti-normative and anti-authoritarian potential of Yeats’s theatre in the context of Wilde’s influence. Yeats does not mention Wilde in his notes to Calvary, but his essays about Wilde prove that he identified the hardships of Wilde’s life with those of Christ and also Lazarus even more than two decades after Wilde’s death. This study also illustrates how the use of the unhappy Lazarus motif and the implicit references to the myth of Narcissus in Calvary can serve to express sympathy for Wilde and precarious, stigmatized lives in general and can thus convey vital messages about queerness today.

Anti-gender campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against equality, edited by Roman Kuhar and David Patternote, consists of various subchapters with a common theme – the analysis of anti-gender movements that are appearing and consolidating across Europe. According to the authors, the movements’ common background is an opposition to the so called ‘gender ideology’ or ‘gender theory’. In these anti-gender movements and campaigns, ‘gender ideology’ is perceived as an ideology that aims to destabilize and even destroy social values that are seen as cornerstones of Western civilization, namely, the notion of ‘biological sex’, heterosexuality, family, and freedom. To formulate it differently, ‘gender ideology’ is perceived to be socially dangerous because of the effect sexual and reproductive rights, women’s rights, and LGBTIQ+ rights have on the taken-for-granted and privileged status of heterosexuality and of a specific family form, that is, family with a ‘male’ and ‘female’ parent (‘heterosexual family’). Namely, with feminist and LGBTIQ+ movements (where LGBTIQ+ stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer people) and their accomplishments throughout history, heteronormativity cannot simply be taken for granted anymore; moreover, it is destabilized to such a degree that its explicit and direct defence is made necessary: its common sense status needs to be rebuilt and stabilized by ‘unmasking’ what ‘gender ideology’ supposedly stands for and by revealing its ‘threatening’ consequences.

Kathleen Frederickson “Getting the Goods in Little Dorrit: Quarantine’s Queer Logistics” (pp. 159–183) Most queer readings of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857) have focused on Miss Wade as a figure of proto-sexological pathology. Flipping critical attention to Tattycoram instead allows us to reexamine sexuality and quarantine in economic terms. Dickens chooses quarantine over other possible spaces of touch and confinement because it flags Tattycoram’s entry into the plot around these economics of circulation—the ability to profit from the movement rather than the production of commodities. In the 1820s, when Little Dorrit is set, a vocal anti-quarantine lobby was stridently lamenting the financial losses occasioned by holding goods in quarantine as they came into Europe from the Levant—a lament that was especially loud when it came to the costs incurred by northern mill owners who were importing increasingly large quantities of cotton from plague-prone Egypt. Dickens invokes the quarantine as the origin point of the connection between Tattycoram and Miss Wade to route a set of Gothic thematics through a scanty but significant plot structure that relies on what I call “logistical aesthetics,” by which I mean logistics rendered as form and tone, even when emptied of substantial parts of its diegetic function. Little Dorrit mixes its interest in the circulation of capital with the economics of inheritance, figured most prominently in the movement of the iron box containing the details of Arthur Clennam’s parentage. Tattycoram’s couriering of this box borrows the logistical urgency of anti-quarantine critique seemingly in the service of narrative resolution, drawing on logistics as a formal resource that substitutes narrative value for an absented economic value that, the novel suggests, occupies the place of her queerness. This joint focus on delivery and inheritance, moreover, strongly shapes the politics of kinship, intimacy, and desire for Tattycoram and Miss Wade.

AbstractCameroonians recently invented a new word to characterize the state of their country: anusocratie (the rule of the anus). This became central in the moral panic from 2000 onwards over a supposed proliferation of homosexuality. Anusocratie links such same-sex practices to illicit enrichment by the national elites and their involvement with secret associations of Western provenance, such as Freemasonry, Rosicrucians and the Illuminati. This article tries to unravel this conceptual knot of homosexuality, the occult (Freemasonry) and illicit enrichment: first, by historicizing it. Of interest in the Cameroonian case is the fact that a similar link is mentioned in one of the first ethnographies, Günther Tessmann's Die Pangwe. Freemasonry is clearly a colonial imposition on the country, but the link between same-sex practices and enrichment has a longer history. Second, a comparison with similar ideas elsewhere on the continent can also open up wider perspectives. The link with illicit enrichment does not figure in classical conceptions of ‘homosexuality’ as developed in Europe, yet it strongly emerges from examples from all over Africa. Both Achille Mbembe and Joseph Tonda show that this image of the anus – anal penetration – articulates popular concerns about staggering inequalities. Yet, this aspect is ignored in debates about growing ‘homophobia’ in Africa. A confrontation with classical texts from Western queer theory (Bersani, Mieli) can help us discover other layers in African discourses, notably an emphasis on sexual diversity as an answer to homophobia. It can also serve to relativize the linking of sexual practices to sexual identities, which is still seen as self-evident in much queer theory of Western provenance.

F. O. Matthiessen was a key player in an event which took place at Schloss Leopoldskron in Salzburg in the summer of 1947 and which launched the legendary Salzburg Seminar and may be considered the birth of American studies in Europe. Matthiessen's reflections on this remarkable session, From the Heart of Europe, remains outstanding in its conjuring of a humanist vision amidst ruins. This travelogue, his last major—if largely forgotten—work published shortly before his suicide, has been variously reassessed as an elegiac document of his tragic failure, as a politically deluded scholar, and as a groundbreaking foray into sketching out a radically alternate transnational understanding of American studies avant la lettre. These highly diverging perspectives on Matthiessen's final book, in particular, and on the professional and personal troubles during his last years, more generally, account for the lasting myth-making fascination with Matthiessen, which has left its mark not only on academic discourses ranging from socialist criticism to queer theory but may also be found in the novels of May Sarton (Faithful Are the Wounds) and Mark Merlis (American Studies). Hence, this article reflects on Matthiessen's impact on the 1947 seminar and traces the legacy of this controversial founding father of American studies.

Teo Hernández (Ciudad Hidalgo 1939‐Paris 1992) began a prolific career as an experimental filmmaker after entering a self-imposed exile in Paris in 1966. With no formal training, he completed dozens of films on the amateur format of Super 8 before his untimely death at the height of the AIDS epidemic in France. Hernández’s cinema cannot be separated from his postcolonial experience as an undocumented immigrant in Europe. Based on his audio-visual and written work, this article examines how the filmmaker elaborated a unique film theory grounded in an auto-ethnographic appropriation of primitivist tropes. Through this queer exilic cinema, Hernández crafted an authorial persona around the figure of a shamanic filmmaker. I take the films Nuestra senõra de París/Our Lady of Paris (Hernández 1981‐82) and Pas de ciel/No Sky (Hernández 1987) as a point of departure to examine the construction of a cinematic ritual capable of inducing trance in the body of the spectator and the filmmaker.

Recalling Beckett's treatment of failure ( Three Dialogues, 1949; Worstward Ho, 1983), this article considers ‘fidelity to failure’ as a performative and political issue. In dealing with both the aesthetics and ethics of Beckett's failure, the article is informed by recent publications and events within the field ( Kenny ; Morin ; Maprayil; 2020 ). These interventions build upon a body of literature on Beckett ( McMullan, 1994 ; Calder, 2001 ; Anderton, 2016 ; Thomas, 2018) and culture ( Bersani and Dutoit, 1993 ; Ridout, 2006 ; Bailes, 2011 ; Halberstam, 2011 ). The article examines the phenomenon of failure within Beckettian production and wider ethical implications surrounding the (mis)appropriations of ‘failing better’. Having established the uses – and misuses – of this phrase, the article proceeds in three interlinked parts: a) aesthetic failure in Beckett's creative practice through to his legacy in experimental theatre and popular culture; b) performance more broadly, including intersections with disability culture and queer studies; and c) performative interventions in public discourse, from Brexit in Europe to the 2016 US Presidential Election as well as social movements such as Black Lives Matter.

This article asks what is wrong with national literature departments. Traditional literature departments, even with various politically conscious additions – women writers, authors of colour, postcolonial conditions, linguistic minorities, queer theory – assume by their very structure a romantic notion of the nation state, of borders and of linguistics as a major aspect of national identity and canonicity. The article considers the early German Romantics to see how they understood the twinning of nation and culture, and how this is baggage that Western universities still carry, even as they try to open themselves to other cultures. ‘Frühromantiker’ such as Friedrich Schlegel, A.W. Schlegel, Novalis and Fichte (along with Chateaubriand) idealize the Middle Ages as a time of great unity in Europe, and understand nationhood to have a divine aspect. Recently, the idea of the university and of national literature departments is being fundamentally rethought. Said, Bernheimer, Moebius, Reading, Foucault, Spivak, Bauman – to name just a few – have all worried about the place of literature in the light of globalisation, the dominance of Europe in literature departments, and the place of minority discourses. The article suggests that Comparative Literature may be the hope for the future in literary studies, because it is a field that by definition combines linguistic, cultural and political perspectives in its approach to texts. At the same time, however, comparative literature has traditionally been dominated by Eurocentrism, which has been the source of much criticism. Should the dominant languages of Europe be set aside to make room for the less known, less powerful ones? The article sees the European project of community as a source of hope, analogous to comparative literature, in facing both the challenge and cultural wealth of diversity.

The main objective of this article is to provide a multi-faceted and spatially-sensitive reflection on sex work. Taking as a point of departure subversive feminist politics on the one hand and the much contingent notion of citizenship on the other, I intend to present various forms of prostitution as potentially positive and empowering modes of sexual and emotional auto-creation. Informed by the leading research of the subject, as well as inspired and educated by Australia-based Dr Elizabeth Smith from La Trobe University in Melbourne, who had researched and presented female sex workers as self-caring and subversive subjects who make own choices and derive satisfaction from their occupation, I wish to seek academic justice for all those women (and men or trans people, for that matter) in the sex industry who feel stigmatized by political pressure and ultra-feminist circles across Europe. Translating Dr Smith’s significant research into European (and Polish) social realities would be a valuable contribution to the local discussions on gender and sexuality, and axes they intersect with. More importantly, however, a framework of a conceptual interdisciplinary approach needs to be adopted—one in which a specific queer form of lesbian feminist reflection is combined with human geography, both of which have much to offer to various strands of sociological theory and practice. Therefore, as a queer lesbian scholar based in Poland, I would like to diverge a bit from my usual topic in order to pay an academic and activist tribute to the much neglected strand of sociology of sex work. However, my multi-faceted and interdisciplinary academic activity allows me to combine the matter in question with the field of lesbian studies. Both a female sex worker and a lesbian have been culturally positioned through the lens of what so-called femininity is, without a possibility to establish control over their own subjectivities. Hence, on the one hand the article is going to be an academic re-interpretation of sex work as such, but on the other, methodological possibilities of acknowledging and researching lesbian sex workers will be additionally considered with special attention to feminist epistemologies and praxis. While a sensitivity to a given locality is of utmost importance when dealing with gender and sexuality issues, I would like to suggest a somewhat overall approach to investigating both female empowerment through sex work and lesbian studies inclusive of sex workers. Importantly, the more common understandings of the sex industry need to be de-constructed in order for a diversity of transgressive discourses to emerge.

The article comprehensively presents little known Estonian contribution to the recognition of first meteorite impact structures in Europe, related to works of Julius Kaljuvee (Kalkun; 1869–1940) and Ivan Reinwald (Reinwaldt; 1878–1941). As an active educator specialized in geoscience, Kaljuvee was the first to hypothesize in 1922 that Kaali lake cirque in Saaremaa Island, Estonia, was created by meteorite impact. Thanks to mining engineer Reinwald, this assumption was accepted since 1928 due to the exhaustive field and borehole works of the latter (also as a result of exploration by several German scholars, including renowned Alfred Wegener). The impact origin of Kaali structure was proved finally in 1937 by finding of meteoritic iron splinters (as the first European site). Reinwald was not only outstanding investigator of meteorite cratering process, but also successful propagator of the Estonian discoveries in Anglophone mainstream science in 1930s. In addition, in his 1933 book, Kaljuvee first highlighted an impact explanation of enigmatic Ries structure in Bavaria, as well as probable magmatic activation in distant regions due to “the impulse of a giant meteorite”. He also outlined ideas of the inevitable periodic cosmic collisions in geological past (“rare event” theory nowadays), and resulting biotic crises. In a general conceptual context, the ideas of Kaljuvee were in noteworthy direct or indirect link with concepts of the great French naturalists – Laplace, Cuvier and Élie de Beaumont. However, some other Kaljuvee’s notions, albeit recurrent also later in geoscientific literature, are queer at the present time (e.g., the large-body impact as a driving force of continental drift and change the Earth axis, resulting in the Pleistocene glaciation). Thus, the Kaljuvee thought-provocative but premature dissertation is rather a record of distinguishing erudite activity, but not a real neocatastrophic landmark in geosciences history. Nevertheless, several concepts of Kaljuvee were revived as the key elements in the current geological paradigm.

This a r t i d e discusses the the seductive element of looking at females in breeches (female parts where women dress like men) through the eyes of queer theory, but also highlights the risks with such an undertaking. The a r t i d e also discussed the subversive n a t u r e of women in drag in productions of m o d e r n opera, an area where this aspect is sadly u n d e r r a t e d . Rosenberg gives a few examples f r om her research around drag and relätes this to Rudolf Dekkers' and Lotte van der Pol's survey Kvinnor i manskläder: En avvikande tradition; Europa 1500-1800 /Women in drag. A divergent tradition; Europé 1500-1990/.

Did medieval women who wore the crown share a common notion of queenship or recognize their own membership in a privileged group? Throughout medieval Europe the most salient images of queenship were those of wife, mother, and intercessor, familiar to the general population through Biblical and literary sources. This essay suggests that medieval Mediterranean queens were, in fact, aware of the power and influence that their role as intercessor afforded them. Two texts composed by the Aragonese queen Violant de Bar are used to shed light on a notion of queenship seemingly understood by her contemporaries, both male and female. The proemi or prologue of the queen’s address on judicial reform to the Catalano-Aragonese corts generals of 1388-1389 and a lengthy letter (1421) to queen María of Castile reference the responsibilities of the queen in mediating tensions and hostilities between the king and his rivals. From these documents, one gleans that queenship in early fifteenth-century Mediterranean Europe appears to have been viewed by its practitioners as a divinely-appointed office that entailed grave responsibility, as well as influence, by means of its emphasis on intercession.

La semiópera The Indian Queen (1695) de Henry Purcell constituye un elemento sobresaliente de la diferenciación discursiva y axiológica que suscitó en Europa el Descubrimiento de América. Apoyándose en la teoría y el método de la semántica interpretativa, este trabajo trata de mostrar la novedad y la posterior continuidad temática que, en las letras y dentro del panorama musical europeo, supusieron esta pieza musical y la obra teatral homónima (1664) de Howardy Dryden que inspiró el libreto de la pieza musical; en las letras españolas, por el contrario, los discursos de tema indiano se diversificaban, pero alcanzando sólo incidentalmente al discurso operístico. Desde el punto de vista dialógico, y contrariamente a las crónicas de la conquista retenidas para este trabajo, las piezas operística y teatral otorgan un privilegio absoluto al universo de interlocución de los personajes indígenas a la vez que los re-evalúan positivamente.

Este artículo plantea un análisis de Noches de adrenalina de la poeta peruana Carmen Ollé, a partir de la noción de cuerpo performático y afecto. El sujeto poético cuestiona los roles impuestos a las mujeres por la sociedad androcéntrica y manifiesta el desplazamiento migratorio de la periferia (Lima) a Europa (el centro). Asimismo, Ollé propone la liberación del cuerpo apoyada en teóricos de la Anti-Psiquiatría y la Psiquiatría Radical como una crítica implícita a la Psiquiatría, el Psicoanálisis y la religión. Por ello, postula la emergencia de un deseo queer.

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), the founder of modern nursing, had influence on the whole of Europe. Nightingale has become the archetype of the queen of nurses and the latter can be used to understand different nursing cultures. The aim of the research is to analyse the manifestation and development of the nursing queen archetype retrospectively in the context of the history of Estonian nursing. The research method involves studying and interpreting historical photographs, documents, and biographies as well as secondary sources. The historical-cultural context provides a framework for analysing the development of nursing, taking into account Pierre Bourdieu’s theory. Data collection and analysis was conducted between 2019 and 2021. There were four developmental periods in the history of Estonian nursing: beginning in the early eighteenth century, the Republic of Estonia (1918–1940), the Soviet period (1940–1991), and the re-independent Republic of Estonia (since 1991). In periods of rapid change, the leaders (Anna Erma, Anette Massov, Ilve-Teisi Remmel) emerged, who became the equivalents to Nightingale or the queens for Estonian nurses.

O principal objetivo deste estudo é apresentar o ‘mínimo paremiológico’ do português europeu, isto é, a lista dos provérbios mais conhecidos e mais frequentemente utilizados pela generalidade dos falantes da comunidade linguística do português europeu. Para o estabelecimento do ‘mínimo paremiológico’ do português europeu foram utilizados diferentes procedimentos metodológicos ao longo de cinco anos. Numa primeira fase, coligiu-se uma base de dados digital com mais de 114.000 entradas (provérbios e variantes) e fez-se uma primeira seleção manual dos provérbios considerados mais usuais, tendo-se depois calculado a concordância entre anotadores, que foi bastante elevada. Procedeu-se também ao cálculo da frequência de provérbios e variantes (n. de ocorrências) em várias fontes: (1) em dicionários e coletâneas de provérbios; (2) num corpus de textos jornalísticos (CETEMPúblico, Santos & Rocha, 2001); (3) em manuais escolares de Português e de Português Língua não Materna; e (4) em dois motores de busca (Google e Bing). Procedeu-se ainda à aplicação de dois questionários distintos, online. Obteve-se assim uma lista de 318 provérbios – o mínimo paremiológico do português europeu. A lista dos 318 provérbios poderá́ ter diversas aplicações, quer para o desenvolvimento de instrumentos de diagnóstico ou terapia de certas patologias da linguagem, quer para a aprendizagem de português como língua estrangeira.

AbstractMargaret Cavendish was an unusually public figure in early modern England. She published widely under her own name on several secular subjects, including natural philosophy, inequality of the sexes, and educational theory. This article explores the development of Cavendish's educational theories through a detailed account of her life, which took place in three discrete stages. First, it examines her youth, when she was informally educated by family members and private tutors. It then follows her education as she traveled to Europe with her embattled queen and met her husband, William Cavendish. And finally, it shows that with William's support and patronage, Cavendish returned to England at the Restoration as a confident and mature female author. In doing so, this article addresses questions related to Cavendish's pedagogical beliefs, why those beliefs sometimes differed from her own experiences, and how she communicated these ideas through her literature.

The PhD dissertation “Social and political roles of Women connected with power and authority in Crusader States and Byzantium from the first to the fourth Crusade” was written under the supervision of dr hab. Rafał Kosiński prof. UwB. The work concerns women’s participation in power and authority and their hidden influence in Crusader States and Byzantium in the twelfth century. Its purpose is to compare women’s roles in politics in Western Europe, Outremer and Byzantine Empire. Moreover this work is concentrated on establishing differences and similarities between overmentioned countries and it attempts to explain their causes. It uses mostly narrative sources in Latin and Greek. Sociological theory of social roles (created by Florian Znaniecki and Erving Goffman) was used as an analytical method. Thanks to it the work established nine basic tasks connected to the social role of queen, empress or generally female ruler. Based on that were created models of ideal female ruler in the West, Crusader states and Byzantium, which could be compared relatively easily.

AbstractWhen Hamlet reflects on the charged power of the tragic theater, the figure who haunts his imagination is Hecuba, Queen of Troy, whose tragedy came to define the genre in sixteenth-century Europe. As a bereaved mourner who seeks revenge, Hecuba offers a female version of Hamlet. Yet even while underscoring her tragic power, Shakespeare simultaneously establishes a new model of tragic protagonist, challenging the period’s longstanding identification of tragedy with women. In exploring why both Hamlet and Shakespeare are preoccupied with Hecuba, this article argues that ignoring the impact of Greek plays in sixteenth-century England has left a gap in our understanding of early modern tragedy. Attending to Hecuba highlights Shakespeare’s innovations to a genre conventionally centered on female grief. In invoking Hecuba as an icon of tragedy, Shakespeare both reflects on and transforms women’s place in the genre.

This article explores allegations of sexual scandal connected with premodern royal women in Europe and China. It begins by assessing expectations of queenly ideals, particularly the emphasis given to female chastity in European and Chinese culture. This forms a foundation for an extended discussion of tales of sexual impropriety of both real and legendary queens from China in the third century BCE to eighteenth century Europe. This survey highlights three key themes: the idea of dangerous and destructive beauty, the topos of the wanton and promiscuous queen and perceptions of transgressive affairs. Finally, the article assesses the connection between the portrayal of the sexual scandal of royal women in contemporary sources with the way in which these women’s lives are represented in modern media, particularly films and television series. Ultimately, it demonstrates that allegations of sexual scandal could both be a means to attack these women (and their royal husbands) in their lifetimes and could have long lasting negative impact on the memory of their lives, resulting in their political power, agency and activity being obscured by an emphasis on their love lives and supposed affairs.

IntroductionAsthma-related morbidity and mortality in the UK is higher than elsewhere in Europe. Although the reasons for this are largely unclear, one explanation could be a higher prevalence of poorly controlled asthma in the UK. Findings from our earlier study found that, in a sample of 766 children with asthma, 45.7% had poorly controlled asthma. Our earlier study also showed that adherence to inhaled corticosteroids was low. Subsequent focus groups identified concerns regarding embarrassment and bullying as barriers to adherence, as well as forgetfulness and incorrect medication beliefs. Following this, a school-based self-management intervention has been developed, aimed to improve asthma control and self-management behaviours.Methods and analysisThe theory-based cluster randomised controlled trial tests an intervention comprising two components: (1) a theatre workshop for all children in years 7 and 8, and (2) self-management workshops for children with asthma. The COM-B model was used to guide the development of the intervention. Questionnaire data will be collected in schools at baseline, immediately post intervention, and 3, 6 and 12 months post intervention. The data collected at 6 months will measure the effect of the intervention against the baseline data. The primary outcome will be asthma control, measured using the Asthma Control Test. All the data will be analysed quantitatively using generalised linear and non-linear mixed effects models.Ethics and disseminationEthical approval was obtained by the Queen Mary University of London Ethics Committee on 12 April 2018. Regular meetings will be held with key patient and public stakeholders to plan the key messages from this research. Key messages from the study will also be tweeted via the project twitter account (@SchoolsAsthma). The findings of the study will be submitted for presentation at conferences, as well as written into a manuscript.Trial registration numberMGU0400

Ferdinand Augustin Hallerstein (1703–1774) (Chinese name Liu Songling) was a Slovenian Jesuit, astronomer and mathematician who made an important contribution to the development of science and astronomy in 18th century China. He arrived in Beijing in 1739, and in 1746 was appointed to succeed Ignatius Kogler as Head of the Imperial Board of Astronomy, a position he would hold until his own death nearly 30 years later. Throughout his four decades in China, Hallerstein maintained a rich correspondence with family members, other Jesuits in Europe, and even with the Queen of Portugal, Maria Anna. He was also a corresponding member of the Royal Societies of London, Paris and St. Petersburg. His letters have only recently been collected and edited.The present paper will focus on Hallerstein’s letters and what they tell us about the life and art of the celebrated Jesuit painter, Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–766), especially during the reign of the Emperor Qianlong (1711–799). After a brief introduction on Hallerstein’s life and work, by means of comparative analyses and using an interdisciplinary approach, the paper will explore a) Hallerstein’s views on Castiglione and his art, and b) Chinese court painting and Castiglione’s position at the court. It will conclude with new evidence concerning Castiglione’s artistic achievements.

Abstract As a metaphysical poet, Richard Crashaw (1613-1649) is recognized for his stylistic experimentation and deep religious faith. In the course of his short life, he became a fellow at Cambridge, was later introduced to Queen Henrietta Marie, Charles I’s wife, in France after his exile during the Interregnum, converted to Catholicism from Anglicanism and was highly influenced by Baroque poetry and the martyrdom of St. Teresa of Avila in his style and themes. He is a poet with a “most holy, humble and genuine soul” and in the last six years of his life, which coincided with a period of great crisis in both personal and professional spheres, he worked intensively on the religious phase of his literary career (Shepherd 1914, p. 1). He reflected his devotion to St. Teresa and to God in his religious poems. Within this context, this study analyses Crashaw’s two Teresian poems, “A Hymn to the Name and Honour of the Admirable Saint Teresa” and “The Flaming Heart” featuring the themes of the quest for divine love and unification with the divine along with Crashaw’s divergence from other metaphysical poets, his affection for the European style(s), and his religious views concerning both his country and other countries in Europe.

Although the court of Turin’s role in the new balance of power in Europe during the War of the Spanish Succession is well known, far less is known about the strategic function of its collateral courts, such as the court of the princes of Savoy-Carignano. Based on the correspondence of the Savoy ambassador to Madrid, Costanzo Operti (1690–95), this article focuses on these courts to demonstrate the formal and informal diplomatic interplay among male and female aristocrats from 1640 to the end of the seventeenth century. One such noblewoman, Olimpia Mancini of Carignano-Soissons, was an Italian who grew up in the French court and maintained a close relationship with Louis XIV. As the wife of a prince of the Savoy-Carignano branch, she held important positions in Turin, Paris, and Madrid. Mother to the famous prince and military warrior Eugene of Savoy, after she lost her powerful status in France, she sought to find a place in the Madrid court as lady-in-waiting to Queen Marie Louise de Orléans. Her mother-in-law, Marie de Bourbon-Soissons, played an outstanding role in maintaining the honour and prestige of the court of Carignano.

When called upon to hosta banquet celebrating the forthcoming Great Exhibition of 1851, the world's first display of international industry, the Mayor of York turned to the period's most renowned chef for the catering. The Frenchman Alexis Soyer, who had recently resigned from his position at the Reform Club in Pall Mall, had made a name for himself in Britain through a combination of extravagant culinary endeavours and popular household cookery books. The banquet at York was an important occasion; joining Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's Consort, was a long list of national luminaries from Victorian high society and the political world. Soyer did not disappoint the Mayor, or his guests. TheTimescommented that amongst the vast array of international cuisines on offer was featured “one dish, to which turtles, ortolans, and other rich denizens of land and sea had contributed, [which] cost not less than 100l.” The paper noted with satisfaction that the feast was consumed before an “emblematical device representing Britannia in her conventional attire receiving the industrial products of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America” (“The Banquet at York” 5). That this emblem provided the backdrop to such cosmopolitan fare was salient: it spoke to the way in which the production and consumption of food would become a crucial motif in the positive representation of globalisation as it was understood at the Exhibition; it also highlighted the important role that the Victorian metropolis would fulfil in the realisation of this new world order. Certainly, the internationalist bent of Soyer's cooking seemed entirely appropriate to the luminaries gathered at the York banquet, and it was no doubt with the French chef's culinary scope in their minds as well as their stomachs that the Exhibition's organisers invited Soyer to submit a tender to provide refreshments at the display itself (Soyer 197).

The article examines the activities of the Russian diplomatic mission in Naples in 1802-1808 based on the correspondence between brothers Alexander and Konstantin Bulgakov. In accordance with the tropological methodology of the historian Hayden White, tragic and novel metanarratives are distinguished in describing the relationship between the Kingdom of Naples, Russia, and the countries of Western Europe at the beginning of the 19th century. The narration of the events in accordance with the tragic plot reveals the confrontation between the hero and the world, Napoleon and the coalition of European states led by Austria, Britain, and Russia. At the same time, the transformation of the tragedy into the novel in historical terms presupposes a change in the established world order after the end of the era of the Napoleonic Wars, which the decisions of the Congress of Vienna consolidated in 18141815. The basis of the plot in the selected metanarratives is the life of Ferdinand IV, the king of Naples, and his family; Napoleon’s military actions in Italy; diplomatic and military assistance to Naples from Russia and the life of Russians in Naples and Palermo; the events of the Patriotic War of 1812; the messianic role of Emperor Alexander in the victory over Napoleon’s army. The influence of the actions of the allied forces in 1813-1815 and the decisions of the Congress of Vienna on the emergence of national liberation movements in Italy and the subsequent unification of the country is revealed. The spatial centers of the Bulgakovs’ epistolary works are Naples, Palermo, Rome, the capitals of four empires (Paris, Vienna, London, Petersburg), and related historical figures (King Ferdinand IV and his wife Maria Carolina of Austria (sister of Marie Antoinette, the French queen), Napoleon, Joseph Bonaparte, Joachim Murat, Austrian Emperor Francis II, Russian Emperor Alexander I, Pope Pius VII, Admiral and Secretary of State of the Kingdom of Naples John Acton, Russian envoys in Naples and Rome A.Ya. Italinsky and sine, and others. The article analyzes the conceptual sphere and poetics of the “Neapolitan” text of Russian literature. In the letters, the image of Naples is presented through the situation of a meeting of Southern and Northern Europe, Naples and Petersburg, monarchy and republic, Catholicism and Orthodoxy, history and modernity. Naples is perceived as a special communicative space associated with the diplomatic activities of both brothers, with their circle of communication, and aesthetically with a private letter as a kind of an ego-document. The perception of Naples as an island state, as an “earthly paradise at the foot of a volcano”, as a city of the Lazzaroni and carnival culture brings the correspondence between the Bulgakov brothers close with descriptions of this city in Russian travelogues of the late 18th - first third of the 19th centuries. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

NOTICIAS / NEWS (“transfer”, 2018) 1) LIBROS – CAPÍTULOS DE LIBRO / BOOKS – BOOK CHAPTERS 1. Bandia, Paul F. (ed.). (2017). Orality and Translation. London: Routledge. <<www.routledge.com/Orality-and-Translation/Bandia/p/book/9781138232884>> 2. Trends in Translation and Interpretin, Institute of Translation & Interpreting<<www.iti.org.uk/news-media-industry-jobs/news/819-iti-publishes-trends-e-book>> 3. Schippel, Larisa & Cornelia Zwischenberger. (eds). (2017). Going East: Discovering New and Alternative Traditions in Translation Studies. Berlin: Frank & Timme.<<www.frank-timme.de/verlag/verlagsprogramm/buch/verlagsprogramm/bd-28-larisa-schippelcornelia-zwischenberger-eds-going-east-discovering-new-and-alternative/backPID/transkulturalitaet-translation-transfer.html>> 4. Godayol, Pilar. (2017). Tres escritoras censuradas: Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan y Mary McCarthy. Granada: Comares.<<www.editorialcomares.com/TV/articulo/3149-Tres_escritoras_censuradas.html>> 5. Vanacker, Beatrijs & Tom Toremans. (eds). (2016). Pseudotranslation and Metafictionality/Pseudo-traduction: enjeux métafictionnels. Special issue of Interférences Littéraires.<<www.interferenceslitteraires.be/nr19>> 6. Jiménez-Crespo, Miguel A. (2017). Crowdsourcing and Online Collaborative Translations: Expanding the Limits of Translation Studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. <<https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/btl.131>> 7. Quality Assurance and Assessment Practices in Translation and Interpreting<<www.igi-global.com/publish/call-for-papers/call-details/2640>> 8. Hurtado Albir, Amparo. (ed.). (2017). Researching Translation Competence by PACTE Group. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.<<www.benjamins.com/#catalog/books/btl.127/main>> 9. Taivalkoski-Shilov, Kristiina, Liisa Tittula and Maarit Koponen. (eds). (2017). Communities in Translation and Interpreting. Toronto: Vita Traductiva, York University<<http://vitatraductiva.blog.yorku.ca/publication/communities-in-translation-and-interpreting>> 10. Giczela-Pastwa, Justyna and Uchenna Oyali (eds). (2017). Norm-Focused and Culture-Related Inquiries in Translation Research. Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Summer School 2014. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.<<www.peterlang.com/view/product/25509>> 11. Castro, Olga & Emek Ergun (eds). (2017). Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives. London: Routledge.<<www.routledge.com/Feminist-Translation-Studies-Local-and-Transnational-Perspectives/Castro-Ergun/p/book/9781138931657>> 12. Call for papers: New Trends in Translation Studies. Series Editor: Prof. Jorge Díaz-Cintas, Centre for Translation Studies (CenTraS), University College London.<<(www.ucl.ac.uk/centras)>>, <<www.peterlang.com/view/serial/NEWTRANS>> 13. Valero-Garcés, Carmen & Rebecca Tipton. (eds). (2017). Ideology, Ethics and Policy Development in Public Service Interpreting and Translation. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.<<www.multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?isb=9781783097517>> 14. Mahyub Rayaa, Bachir & Mourad Zarrouk. 2017. A Handbook for Simultaneous Interpreting Training from English, French and Spanish to Arabic / منهج تطبيقي في تعلّم الترجمة الفورية من الانجليزية والفرنسية والإسبانية إلى العربية. Toledo: Escuela de Traductores.<<https://issuu.com/escueladetraductorestoledo/docs/cuaderno_16_aertefinal_version_web>> 15. Lapeña, Alejandro L. (2017). A pie de escenario. Guía de traducción teatral. Valencia: JPM ediciones.<<http://jpm-ediciones.es/catalogo/details/56/11/humanidades/a-pie-de-escenario>> 16. Mével, Alex. (2017). Subtitling African American English into French: Can We Do the Right Thing? Oxford: Peter Lang.<<www.peterlang.com/view/product/47023>> 17. Díaz Cintas, Jorge & Kristijan Nikolić. (eds). (2017). Fast-Forwarding with Audiovisual Translation. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.<<www.multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?K=9781783099368>> 18. Taibi, Mustapha. (ed.). (2017). Translating for the Community. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.<<www.multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?isb= 9781783099122>> 19. Borodo, Michał. (2017). Translation, Globalization and Younger Audiences. The Situation in Poland. Oxford: Peter Lang.<<www.peterlang.com/view/product/81485>> 20. Reframing Realities through Translation Cambridge Scholars Publishing<<https://cambridgescholarsblog.wordpress.com/2017/07/28/call-for-papers-reframing-realities-through-translation>> 21. Gansel, Mireille. 2017. Translation as Transhumance. London: Les Fugitives<<www.lesfugitives.com/books/#/translation-as-transhumance>> 22. Goźdź-Roszkowski, S. and G. Pontrandolfo. (eds). (2018). Phraseology in Legal and Institutional Settings. A Corpus-based Interdisciplinary Perspective. London: Routledge<<www.routledge.com/Phraseology-in-Legal-and-Institutional-Settings-A-Corpus-based-Interdisciplinary/Roszkowski-Pontrandolfo/p/book/9781138214361>> 23. Deckert, Mikołaj. (ed.). (2017). Audiovisual Translation – Research and Use. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.<<www.peterlang.com/view/product/80659>> 24. Castro, Olga; Sergi Mainer & Svetlana Page. (eds). (2017). Self-Translation and Power: Negotiating Identities in European Multilingual Contexts. London: Palgrave Macmillan.www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137507808 25. Gonzalo Claros, M. (2017). Cómo traducir y redactar textos científicos en español. Barcelona: Fundación Dr. Antonio Esteve.<<www.esteve.org/cuaderno-traducir-textos-cientificos>> 26. Tian, Chuanmao & Feng Wang. (2017).Translation and Culture. Beijing: China Social Sciences Press.<<http://product.dangdang.com/25164476.html>> 27. Malamatidou, Sofia. (2018). Corpus Triangulation: Combining Data and Methods in Corpus-Based Translation Studies. London: Routledge.<<www.routledge.com/Corpus-Triangulation-Combining-Data-and-=Methods-in-Corpus-Based-Translation/Malamatidou/p/book/9781138948501>> 28. Jakobsen, Arnt L. and Bartolomé Mesa-Lao. (eds). (2017). Translation in Transition: Between Translation, Cognition and Technology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.<<https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/btl.133>> 29. Santaemilia, José. (ed.). (2017). Traducir para la igualdad sexual / Translating for Sexual Equality. Granada: Comares.<<www.editorialcomares.com/TV/articulo/3198-Traducir_para_la_igualdad_sexual.html>> 30. Levine, Suzanne Jill & Katie Lateef-Jan. (eds). (2018). Untranslatability Goes Global. London: Routledge.<<www.routledge.com/Untranslatability-Goes-Global/Levine-Lateef-Jan/p/book/9781138744301>> 31. Baer, Brian J. & Klaus Kindle. (eds). (2017). Queering Translation, Translating the Queer. Theory, Practice, Activism. New York: Routledge.<<www.routledge.com/Queering-Translation-Translating-the-Queer-Theory-Practice-Activism/Baer-Kaindl/p/book/9781138201699>> 32. Survey: The translation of political terminology<<https://goo.gl/forms/w2SQ2nnl3AkpcRNq2>> 33. Estudio de encuesta sobre la traducción y la interpretación en México 2017<<http://italiamorayta.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/ENCUESTAS.pdf>> 34. Beseghi, Micòl. (2017). Multilingual Films in Translation: A Sociolinguistic and Intercultural Study of Diasporic Films. Oxford: Peter Lang.<<www.peterlang.com/view/product/78842>> 35. Vidal Claramonte, María Carmen África. (2017). Dile que le he escrito un blues: del texto como partitura a la partitura como traducción en la literatura latinoamericana. Madrid: Iberoamericana.<<www.iberoamericana-vervuert.es/FichaLibro.aspx?P1=104515>> 36. Figueira, Dorothy M. & Mohan, Chandra. (eds.). (2017). Literary Culture and Translation. New Aspects of Comparative Literature. Delhi: Primus Books. ISBN: 978-93-84082-51-2.<<www.primusbooks.com>> 37. Tomiche, Anne. (ed.). (2017). Le Comparatisme comme aproche critique / Comparative Literature as a Critical Approach. Tome IV: Traduction et transfers / Translation and Transferts. París: Classiques Garnier. ISBN: 978-2-406-06533-3. 2) REVISTAS / JOURNALS 1. Call for papers: The Translator, special issue on Translation and Development, 2019. Contact: jmarais@ufs.ac.za 2. Call for papers: Applied Language LearningContact: jiaying.howard@dliflc.edu<<www.dliflc.edu/resources/publications/applied-language-learning>> 3. Panace@: Revista de Medicina, Lenguaje y Traducción; special issue on “La comunicación escrita para pacientes”, vol. 44<<www.tremedica.org/panacea/PanaceaActual.htm>> 4. mTm, issue 9<<www.mtmjournal.gr/default.asp?catid=435>> 5. Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies, Volume 4 Issue 3 (November 2017)<<http://explore.tandfonline.com/cfp/ah/aptis>>, <<www.tandfonline.com/rtis>> 6. Call for papers: The Journal of Translation Studies, special issue on Translation and Social Engagement in the Digital AgeContact: Sang-Bin Lee, sblee0110@naver.com 7. Current Trends in Translation Teaching and Learning E<<www.cttl.org>> 8. Translation and Interpreting Studies, 15 (1), Special issue on The Ethics of Non-Professional Translation and Interpreting in Public Services and Legal Settings<<www.atisa.org/call-for-papers>> 9. Call for papers: Translation & Interpreting – The International Journal of Translation and Interpreting Research, Special issue on Translation of Questionnaires in Cross-national and Cross-cultural Research<<www.trans-int.org/index.php/transint/announcement/view/19>> 10. Revista Digital de Investigación en Docencia Universitaria (RIDU), Special issue on Pedagogía y didáctica de la traducción y la interpretación<<http://revistas.upc.edu.pe/index.php/docencia/pages/view/announcement>> 11. Translation, Cognition & Behavior<<https://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/tcb/main>> 12. FITISPos International Journal, vol. 4 (2017)Shedding Light on the Grey Zone: A Comprehensive View on Public Services Interpreting and Translation<<www3.uah.es/fitispos_ij>> 13. Post-Editing in Practice: Process, Product and NetworksSpecial issue of JoSTrans, The Journal of Specialised Translation, 31<<www.jostrans.org/Post-Editing_in_Practice_Jostrans31.pdf>> 14. Call for papers: MonTI 10 (2018), Special issue on Retos actuales y tendencias emergentes en traducción médica<<https://dti.ua.es/es/monti/convocatorias.htm>> 15. Call for papers: trans‐kom Special Issue on Industry 4.0 meets Language and Knowledge Resources.Contact: Georg Löckinger (georg.loeckinger@fh‐wels.at)<<http://trans-kom.eu/index-en.html>> 16. Translaboration: Exploring Collaboration in Translation and Translation in CollaborationSpecial Issue, Target, vol 32(2), 2020.<<www.benjamins.com/series/target/cfp_target_32.pdf>> 17. redit, Revista Electrónica de Didáctica de la Traducción e Interpretación, nº11.<<www.revistas.uma.es/index.php/redit>> 18. Call for papers: InVerbis, special issue on Translating the Margin: Lost Voices in the Aesthetic Discourse, June 2018.Contact: alessandra.rizzo@unipa.it & karen.Seago1@city.ac.uk<<www.unipa.it/dipartimenti/dipartimentoscienzeumanistiche/CFP-Translating-the-margin-Lost-voices-in-the-aesthetic-discourse>> 19. trans-kom, Vol. 10 (1), 2017. <<www.trans-kom.eu>> 20. JoSTrans, The Journal of Specialised Translation, issue 28 (July 2017).<<www.jostrans.org/issue28/issue28_toc.php>> 21. Call for papers: InVerbis, special issue on Translating the Margin: Lost Voices in the Aesthetic Discourse, June 2018.<<www.unipa.it/dipartimenti/scienzeumanistiche/.content/documenti/CFPInverbis.pdf>> 22. Call for papers: TTR, special Issue on Lost and Found in Transcultural and Interlinguistic Translation/La traduction transculturelle et interlinguistique : s’y perdre et s’y retrouver<<http://professeure.umoncton.ca/umcm-merkle_denise/node/30>> 23. Call for proposals for thematic issues:Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies (LANS – TTS)<<https://lans-tts.uantwerpen.be>> 24. Call for papers: trans‑kom, special issue on Didactics for Technology in Translation and InterpretingVol. 11(2), December 2018.Contact: aietimonografia@gmail.com / carmen.valero@uah.es 25. Journal of Languages for Special PurposesVol 22/2, New Perspectives on the Translation of Advertising<<https://ojsspdc.ulpgc.es/ojs/index.php/LFE/issue/view/53>>Vol 23/1, Linguistics, Translation and Teaching in LSP<<https://ojsspdc.ulpgc.es/ojs/index.php/LFE/issue/view/72>> 26. Call for papers: Parallèles, special issue on La littérature belge francophone en traduction (in French), Volume 32(1), 2020.Contact: katrien.lievois@uantwerpen.be & catherine.gravet@umons.ac.be 27. Call for papers: Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies, Volume 5(1), 2018.<<www.tandfonline.com/rtis>> 28. Target, special issue on Translaboration: Exploring Collaboration in Translation and Translation in Collaboration<<www.benjamins.com/series/target/cfp_target_32.pdf>> 29. Research in Language, special issue on Translation and Cognition: Cases of Asymmetry, Volume 15(2).<<www.degruyter.com/view/j/rela.2017.15.issue-2/issue-files/rela.2017.15.issue-2.xml>> 30. Call for papers: Translation Spaces, special issue on Translation in Non-governmental Organisations, 7(1), 2018.<<www.reading.ac.uk/web/files/modern-languages-and-european-studies/CfP_SI_Translation_Spaces-translation_in_NGOs.pdf>> 31. Call for papers: Translating the Margin: Lost Voices in the Aesthetic Discourse, special issue of InVerbis (2018).<<www.unipa.it/dipartimenti/scienzeumanistiche/CFP-Translating-the-margin-Lost-voices-in-the-aesthetic-discourse>> 32. Call for papers: Translation and Disruption: Global and Local Perspectives, special issue of Revista Tradumàtica (2018).Contact: akiko.sakamoto@port.ac.uk; jonathan.evans@port.ac.uk and olga.torres.hostench@uab.cat 33. Call for papers: JoSTrans. The Journal of Specialised Translation 33 (January 2020), Special Issue on ‘Experimental Research and Cognition in Audiovisual Translation’. Guest editors: Jorge Díaz Cintas & Agnieszka Szarkowska. Deadline for proposals: 19 February 2018<<http://www.jostrans.org/>> 34. Dragoman – Journal of Translation Studies<<www.dragoman-journal.org/books>> 35. Call for papers: Translation Spaces 7(1) 2018, special issue on Translation in Non-governmental Organisations<<www.reading.ac.uk/web/files/modern-languages-and-european-studies/CfP_SI_Translation_Spaces-translation_in_NGOs-public-extended_deadline.pdf>> 36. Call for papers: Public Service Interpreting and Translation and New Technologies Participation through Communication with Technology, special issue of FITISPos International Journal, Vol 5 (2018).Contact: Michaela Albl-Mikasa (albm@zhaw.ch) & Stefanos Vlachopoulos (stefanos@teiep.gr) 37. Sendebar, Vol. 28 (2017)<<http://revistaseug.ugr.es/index.php/sendebar>> 38. Ranzato, Irene. (2016). North and South: British Dialects in Fictional Dialogue, special issue of Status Quaestionis – Language, Text, Culture, 11.<<http://statusquaestionis.uniroma1.it/index.php/statusquaestionis>> 39. Translation Studies 10 (2), special issue on Indirect Translation.<<www.tandfonline.com/toc/rtrs20/current>> 40. Translation & Interpreting – Special issue on Research Methods in Interpreting Studies, Vol 9 (1), 2017. 41. Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts, special issue on Between Specialised Texts and Institutional Contexts – Competence and Choice in Legal Translation, edited by V. Dullion, 3 (1), 2017.<<https://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/ttmc.3.1/toc>> 42. Translation and Performance, 9 (1), 2017<<https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/tc/index.php/TC/issue/view/1879>> 3) CONGRESOS / CONFERENCES 1. ATISA IX: Contexts of Translation and InterpretingUniversity of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA, 29 March – 1 April 2018<<www.atisa.org/sites/default/files/CFP_ATISA_2018_FINAL.pdf> 2. V International Translating Voices Translating Regions – Minority Languages, Risks, Disasters and Regional CrisesCentre for Translation Studies (CenTraS) at UCL and Europe House, London, UK, 13-15 December 2017.<<www.ucl.ac.uk/centras/translation-news-and-events/v-translating-voices>> 3. Translation and Health Humanities: The Role of Translated Personal Narratives in the Co-creation of Medical KnowledgeGenealogies of Knowledge I Translating Political and Scientific Thought across Time and Space, University of Manchester, UK7-9 December 2017.<<http://genealogiesofknowledge.net/2017/02/20/call-panel-papers-translation-health-humanities-role-translated-personal-narratives-co-creation-medical-knowledge>> 4. Fourth International Conference on Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation (NPIT4), Stellenbosch University, South Africa, 22-24 May 2018.<<http://conferences.sun.ac.za/index.php/NPIT4/npit4>> 5. I International Conference on Interdisciplinary Approaches for Total Communication: Education, Healthcare and Interpreting within Disability Settings, University of Málaga, Spain, 12-14 December 2017.<<https://ecplusproject.uma.es/cfp-iciatc>> 6. Translation & Minority 2: Freedom and DifferenceUniversity of Ottawa, Canada, 10-11 November 2017.<<https://translationandminority.wordpress.com>> 7. Staging the Literary Translator: Roles, Identities, PersonalitiesUniversity of Vienna, Austria, 17-19 May 2018.<<http://translit2018.univie.ac.at/home>> 8. IATIS 2018 – Translation and Cultural MobilityPanel 9: Translating Development: The Importance of Language(s) in Processes of Social Transformation in Developing CountriesHong Kong, 3-6 July 2018.<<www.iatis.org/index.php/6th-conference-hong-kong-2018/item/1459-panels#Panel09>> 9. Fun for All 5: Translation and Accessibility in Video Games Conference, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, 7-8 June 2018.<<http://jornades.uab.cat/videogamesaccess>> 10. ACT/Unlimited! 2 Symposium, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, 6 June 2018.<<http://pagines.uab.cat/act/content/actunlimited-2-symposium>> 11. IATIS 2018 – Translation and Cultural MobilityPANEL 06: Museum Translation: Encounters across Space and TimeHong Kong Baptist University, 3-6 July 2018.<<www.iatis.org/index.php/6th-conference-hong-kong-2018/item/1459-panels#Panel06>> 12. IATIS 2018 – Translation and Cultural Mobility PANEL 12: Advances in Discourse Analysis in Translation Studies: Theoretical Models and Applications Hong Kong Baptist University3-6 July 2018.<<www.iatis.org/index.php/6th-conference-hong-kong-2018/item/1459-panels#Panel12>> 13. Understanding Quality in Media Accessibility, Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, 5 June 2018. <<http://pagines.uab.cat/umaq/content/umaq-conference>> 14. Managing Anaphora in Discourse: Towards an Interdisciplinary Approach, University of Grenoble Alpes, France, 5-6 April 2018.<<http://saesfrance.org/4071-2>> 15. Traduire les voix de la nature / Translating the Voices of Nature, Paris, France, 25-26 May 2018.<<www.utu.fi/en/units/hum/units/languages/mts/Documents/CFP.pdf>> 16. IATIS 2018 – Translation and Cultural MobilityPANEL 10: Audiovisual Translation as Cross-cultural Mediation – New Trajectories for Translation and Cultural Mobility?Hong Kong Baptist University, 3-6 July 2018. <<www.iatis.org/index.php/6th-conference-hong-kong-2018/item/1459-panels#Panel10>> 17. The Fourth International Conference on Research into the Didactics of Translation, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain20-22 June 2018.<<http://grupsderecerca.uab.cat/pacte/en/firstcircular>> 18. I Coloquio Internacional Hispanoafricano de Lingüística, Literatura y Traducción. España en contacto con África, su(s) pueblo(s) y su(s= cultura(s) Universidad FHB de Cocody-Abidjan, Costa de Marfil 7-9 March 2018.<<www.afriqana.org/encuentros.php>> 19. Transius Conference 2018, Geneva, Switzerland, 18-20 June 2018.<<http://transius.unige.ch/en/conferences-and-seminars/conferences/18/>> 20. 39th International GERAS Conference - Diachronic Dimensions in Specialised Varieties of English: Implications in Communications, Didactics and Translation Studies, University of Mons, Belgium15-17 March 2018.<<www.geras.fr/index.php/presentation/breves/2-uncategorised/245-cfp-39th-international-geras-conference>> 21. 31st Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Translation Studies - Translation and Adaptation, University of Regina, Canada, 28-30 May 2018.<<https://linguistlist.org/issues/28/28-3413.html>> 22. 2nd Valencia/Napoli Colloquium on Gender and Translation: Translating/Interpreting LSP through a Gender PerspectiveUniversità di Napoli 'L'Orientale', Italy, 8-9 February 2018.Contact: eleonorafederici@hotmail.com 23. Ninth Annual International Translation Conference: Translation in the Digital Age: From Translation Tools to Shifting Paradigms, Hamad Bin Khalifa’s Translation & Interpreting Institute (TII), Doha, Qatar, 27-28 March 2018.<<www.tii.qa/9th-annual-translation-conference-translation-digital-age-translation-tools-shifting-paradigms>> 24. ACT/Unlimited! 2 Symposium – Quality Training, Quality Service in Accessible Live Events, Barcelona, Spain, 6 June 2018.<<http://pagines.uab.cat/act/content/actunlimited-2-symposium>> 25. Fourth International Conference on Research into the Didactics of Translation, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, 20-22 June 2018.<<http://grupsderecerca.uab.cat/pacte/en/secondcircular2018>> 26. Talking to the World 3. International Conference in T&I Studies – Cognition, Emotion, and Creativity, Newcastle University, UK, 17-18 September 2018.<<www.ncl.ac.uk/sml/news-events/news/item/talkingtotheworld3ticonference.html>> 27. Translation & Interpreting in the Digital Era, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, South Korea, 29-30 January 2018.Contact: itri@hufs.ac.kr 28. 7th META-NET Annual Conference: Towards a Human Language Project, Hotel Le Plaza, Brussels, Belgium, 13-14 November 2017.<<www.meta-net.eu/events/meta-forum-2017>> 4) CURSOS – SEMINARIOS – POSGRADOS / COURSES – SEMINARS – MA PROGRAMMES 1. Certificate / Diploma / Master of Advanced Studies in Interpreter Training (online), FTI, University of Geneva, Switzerland,4 September 2017 - 10 September 2019.<<www.unige.ch/formcont/masit>> 2. Master’s Degree in Legal Translation, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London, UK.<<http://ials.sas.ac.uk/study/courses/llm-legal-translation>> 3. Certificat d’Université en Interprétation en contexte juridique : milieu judiciaire et secteur des demandes d’asile, University of Mons, Belgium.<<http://hosting.umons.ac.be/php/centrerusse/agenda/certificat-duniversite-en-interpretation-en-contexte-juridique-milieu-judiciaire-et-secteur-des-demandes-dasile.html>> 4. Online MA in Translation and Interpreting ResearchUniversitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain.Contact: monzo@uji.es<<www.mastertraduccion.uji.es>> 5. MA in Intercultural Communication, Public Service Interpreting and Translation 2017-2018, University of Alcalá, Madrid, Spain.<<www3.uah.es/master-tisp-uah/introduction-2/introduction>> 6. Research Methods in Translation and Interpreting StudiesUniversity of Geneva, Switzerland.<<www.unige.ch/formcont/researchmethods-distance1>><<www.unige.ch/formcont/researchmethods-distance2>> 7. La Traducción audiovisual y el aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Spain, 4 December 2017.<<https://goo.gl/3zpMgY>> 8. Fifth summer school in Chinese-English Translation and Interpretation (CETIP), University of Ottawa, Canada, 23 July – 17 August 2018.<<http://arts.uottawa.ca/translation/summer-programs>> 9. First summer school in Arabic – English Translation and Interpretation (AETP), University of Ottawa, Canada, 23 July – 17 August 2018.<<http://arts.uottawa.ca/translation/summer-programs>> 10. Third summer school in translation pedagogy (TTPP)University of Ottawa, Canada, 23 July – 17 August 2018.<<http://arts.uottawa.ca/translation/summer-programs>> 4) PREMIOS/AWARDS 1. The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation<<http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/womenintranslation>

The text is an intervention in post-secularist and anti-fundamentalist philosophy of affective alterity. It attempts to reconstruct the philosophical tradition of affective alterity and to construct a theory of it. Homosexuality is affective alterity, the other love of Thou and I. We explore dynamic religions in their openness to the Other. Emphasis is on Judaism and the "Love the stranger" postulate in the Hebrew Bible; we go back to biblical and rabbinical literature as well as Erich Fromm's and Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic interpretations of them. The idea of hospitality, rooted in the Bible and the Koran, was revived by Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Griselda Pollock, and Geoffrey H. Hartman. It is of urgent importance in Poland where fundamentalist misogyny and homophobia increase. In our paper, queer rights are examined as human rights - and this is again pertinent in Eastern Europe. The methodology of the intersection of cultural analysis and Jewish studies here are inspired by Mieke Bal and Ernst van Alphen. The particular connection between Jewishness and queerness is stressed by Daniel Boyarin, Ann Pellegrini and Alisa Solomon; as we write, it is to be found in today's Poland in the Shterndlech Iton Babel magazine, published by the younger generation. Also, the feminist studies of Maria Janion, Kazimiera Szczuka and Bozena Uminska are of significance here. We end with visual culture productions: the queer or omni-sexual art exhibition against nationalist censorship Love and Democracy, curated by Pawel Leszkowicz in Poznan (2005), and in Gdansk (2006). Throughout the paper we propose our understanding of love. The text whose part is entitled "Faith and Democracy" is a sequel to our Polish-language book Love and Democracy. Reflexions on the Homosexual Question in Poland (2005) with an extensive English summary. Our loves, our subjectivities are despised and disrespected, but created in art, philosophical research, and activism. Let us exercise (in) love.

Abstract This chapter addresses books published in the field of visual culture in 2019 and is divided into three sections: 1. Race and Art; 2. Art and the Body; 3. Art in Eastern Europe The books under review cover a broad range of subjects within their specialities, but reflect general trends in contemporary writing and study in the field of visual culture. The first section looks at two publications that deal with the black experience in art: Darby English’s To Describe a Life: Notes from the Intersection of Art and Race Terror and The Place Is Here, edited by Nick Aikens and Elizabeth Robles. The second section examines books that see art through bodies: Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism’s Legendary Art School, edited by Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler; Sculpture, Sexuality and History: Encounters in Literature, Culture and the Arts from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, edited by Jana Funke and Jess Grove; and Queer Difficulty in Art and Poetry: Rethinking the Sexed Body in Verse and Visual Culture, edited by Jongwoo Jeremy Kim and Christopher Reed. The third and final section looks at publications about art and eastern Europe: Marta Filipová’s Modernity, History, and Politics in Czech Art and Klara Kemp-Welch’s Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe, 1965–1981.

He is, surely, the only heterosexual male in the country who could get away with being photographed half-naked and smothered in baby oil for GQ and still come over as an icon of masculinity. (GQ October 2002. Article on Beckham as GQ’s Sportsman of the Year, 264) Indeed. Let us tear our thoughts away from the image of David basted in oil and consider the extract as one of innumerable examples of the media fascination with Beckham. Given his penetration in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa, we can take as self-evident that Beckham is a quantifiably significant figure in contemporary global popular culture. By any measure of celebrity and any taxonomy of fame (Turner 15-23), Beckham qualifies as a striking example. He has inevitably appeared in a number of recent academic publications as an exemplar of celebrity and sports culture (Whannel, Turner, Cashmore and Parker) and, more notably in Cashmore’s book, as the focus of a social biography (Beckham). In his book Understanding Celebrity, Turner provides a comprehensive overview of the vast literature which has developed on issues of celebrity and fame, painting a broad picture of concerns divided between the significance of the apparent explosion in celebrity ‘culture’ and the focus on celebrities themselves. Within the literature on the social significance of celebrity culture, we can discern two key themes. First, celebrity culture is a manifestation of globalised commodity consumerism in advanced capitalism and second, its social function as a system of meanings and values which is supplanting traditional resources for self and social identities in late modern culture, including structures such as class, gender/sexuality, ethnicity and nationality. Whilst the authors mentioned above both draw on and contribute to these arguments, their focus remains broad, citing Beckham as a key manifestation of the complex interdependence between globalised sports and media industries, and transformations in gender and consumption. For example, although Cashmore’s book is solidly researched on the impact of media finance on football and has a sound argument on the significance of consumerism, he is prone to generalisations about the transformations in masculinity and celebrity culture which he suggests are central to understanding Beckham’s significance. Turner suggests that there needs to be more focused empirical work on the specific construction of celebrity since ‘modern celebrity…is a product of media representation: understanding it demands close attention to the representational repertoires and patterns employed in this discursive regime’ (8). This is how this short piece offers a contribution to the literature – drawing on a qualitative analysis of articles on Beckham, my discussion focuses on the meanings of Beckham’s celebrity and whether they can tell us something about the way the culture of fame operates. I have drawn selectively from my data, but a fuller discussion of both the data and grounded theory methodology can be found in a previous article (Rahman). Out of the six categories of meaning established through the grounded theory procedures used in the study, my contention is that masculinity is a core nexus in ‘cultural circuitry’ (Hall) – making the stories relevant, understandable, and often controversial. Moreover, the accompanying photo spreads often create a tension with the text, emphasising dissonant/controversial images which testifies to a dynamic of respect/ridicule in the representations. To be more precise, there is a construction of deference to Beckham’s professional status and to the Beckham family as the premier celebrity unit in the UK. Deference to and respect for their status is evident not only in those magazines which have paid for the privilege of access, but also the more gossip orientated celebrity weeklies such as Heat (18-24 May: 6-8): ‘those lucky enough to be asked to join David and Victoria enjoyed one the most extravagant soirees in recent memory. The sheer scale of the £350000 shindig was stunning, even by the standards of Celebville’s most extravagant couple’. Coupled with this respect is a sense of ridicule, often in discrete publications, but also within the same magazine and even sometimes the same article. Ridicule undercuts the celebrity credentials of extravagance and glamour with an implication of tackiness and vulgarity, and this gentle undercurrent becomes stronger when linked to Beckham’s fashion icon status: We’ve supported David through the highlights and lowlights of his various haircuts: the streaked curtains, the skinhead and his travis bickle style mohican. But this latest look is a ‘do too far’ – more village idiot than international style icon… (Heat 13-19 April: 24-5) This dynamic of respect/ridicule relies heavily on another dynamic; that of queer/normative invocation and recuperation. It is not only his fashion icon status being ridiculed here but also his status as a heterosexual masculine icon: People say you’re vain. Do you think so? You can see why people might think you’re a bit of a big girl’s blouse, because you have manicures, sunbeds and bleach your hair. You’re also one of the few footballers to become a gay icon. (Marie Claire June 2002: cover of Beckham, and 69-76) His gender/sexuality is anchored in hetero-family/masculine status but is somewhat dissonant in terms of vanity/grooming and gay icon status. ‘Queerying’ Beckham is not just a technique of ridicule (how very old fashioned that would be!) but also a deliberate destabilisation of ontological anchors which induces a sense of dissonance: An example from Heat (20-26 July 2002) has the cover byline ‘Phwoar! Another new look for Becks’ with a trail for a story on pages 18-20 which has a photograph of Beckham with his nail varnish highlighted and the text: David sported a new blonde barnet and a fitted black suit, and despite the controversy caused by his pink nail varnish he still managed to look macho and absolutely beautiful. This demonstrates some feminisation of Beckham but is counterbalanced by the very masculine anchor of ‘macho’. There is a recognition that the highlighted ambiguity in gender coding is potentially disruptive or controversial and hence it is recuperated – ‘he still managed to look macho’. GQ from June 2002 repeats the play on gender and sexuality, with a cover photo of Beckham lying down, bare torso but in a suit and hat, with one hand showing a ring and nail varnish, and the other in the waistband of his trousers. Inside, on pages 142-55, there follow seven full pages of photos and an interview conducted by David Furnish, a family friend of the Beckhams but also Elton John’s partner and so one of the most visible gay men in celebrity culture. However, rather than any danger of queering by association, the presence of Furnish seems only to enhance the mega-celebrity and hetero status, since he is careful to sound all the right notes of family, football and fatherhood in his questions in the text. Rather, it is the photospread which induces the queerness in this example, with four of Beckham’s naked torso in baby oil, of which one is him in unbuttoned cut-off denim shorts on a weights bench – very retro 1970s gay. In his history of male sports celebrities, Whannel suggests that Beckham is an exceptional figure, both because he is one of the few footballers in the UK to achieve full celebrity status, but also because he transgresses the discipline and work ethic associated with sporting bodies, indulging himself through conspicuous and narcissistic consumption (212). Whannel notes Beckham’s emergence during the development of a men’s style press in the UK, documented thoroughly in Nixon’s study of men’s magazines, which provides an account of the historical moment from 1984-1990 which saw the emergence of ‘new man’ imagery. Drawing on Mort’s contention that this is the first period which showed men being sexualised – a representational strategy previously applied only to women – Nixon concurs with Mort that this moment marks the beginning of men being addressed as a specific gender. However, these images of Beckham push at the boundaries of ‘new man’ constructions and ‘respectable’ images of sporting bodies, suggesting that the deliberate, indelicate and delicious sexualisation of Beckham’s body derives its power from the ‘danger’ this presents to sporting masculinity as well as simply heterosexual masculinity. Thus we need ‘family, fatherhood’ and ‘football’ to anchor the ‘queer’ Beckham. Given these and more recent images (Vanity Fair cover in July 2004, for example), we might be tempted to agree with Cashmore and Parker and Whannel that Beckham is indeed a ‘postmodern’ or ‘hybrid’ celebrity, appearing singularly able to float free of context and to signify many different meanings to many different groups. But the brief examples of the queer/normative dynamic presented here suggest that this is too glib an answer, precisely because there seems to be an explicit recognition of this dynamic: the editor of GQ says of Beckham that ‘he is in touch with his feminine side, but he is so obviously heterosexual that he can afford to be’ (Hot Stars 2-8 Nov. 2002: 36-9). The deliberate induction of dissonance suggests a reflexivity about the constructedness of these representations; a knowing indication that queerying Beckham’s masculinity is not the reality of Beckham, but rather that the queerying is perhaps a hyper reality as Baudrillard might have it. Beckham does not float ‘free’: dialectical signs are precisely mapped onto him. Dyer argues that film stars could be read as signs for specific versions of individuality, but crucially, that these signs reflect the dominant ideological constructions of class, ethnicity and gender/sexuality. In one example, he demonstrates how the sexually transgressive and potentially lesbian elements of Jane Fonda’s star persona are recuperated through the emphasis on her nationality and ethnicity, her ‘all-Americanness’ (81). Similarly, Beckham’s queerness is deliberately deployed as a sign, to be neutralised by heterosexual signs, thus recuperating the ideological dominance of a heteronormative culture. Beckham’s masculinity can be read as a ‘sign’, divorced from traditional referents and re-marked into a queer sign, specifically to promote consumption through the heady mix of respected status and apparently exciting transgression as a key aspect of this status. But this is a simulation, not indicating any ‘real’ queering of either the subject, or indeed of the assumed audience who have to make sense of the sign. Rather, the potential to remark Beckham as ‘queer’ seems to indicate that whilst heterosexual masculinity can be a sign, so perhaps too does queer itself become a sign, similarly divorced from its traditional referents. The ‘reality’ is thus simulated through pre-determined codes of representation, and one such code seems to be that gender transgression is culturally significant. Dialectical signs are mapped onto a reality/hyper reality dynamic, with queerness presented knowingly as the hyper real – after all, the reality is that Beckham is ‘so obviously heterosexual…’ It is possible to argue that the dynamics at work in making these representations effective can be understood as dialectical since there are opposing momentums at work in the construction of celebrity and fame. The respect/ridicule dynamic demonstrates that constructions of celebrity cannot be uncritically deferential. The gentle and knowing ridicule is a collusion between the media(tors) and the audience: an indication that this relationship is the true romance of celebrity culture rather than that between fans and icons. And why should this be so? Precisely because the media needs to continue to feed the desires of the audience but there is no guarantee that the desire will continue when an icon’s star wanes – unless of course, watching the decline is as much part of the romance as building the respect. Marshall argues that celebrity legitimises the individuality central to the lock between consumer capitalism and liberal democracy and the respect/ridicule dynamic exemplifies this function. The necessary continuation of consumption produces a dialectical dynamic, wherein both respect and ridicule exist to permit easy shifts in emphasis whilst maintaining the attention on the celebrity, which promotes continued consumption. Beckham’s own demonisation and rehabilitation in the wake of France 98 testifies convincingly to the necessity for continuity of producing items for consumption, no matter what the spin. Furthermore, the recent scandals over alleged infidelities has generated a production spike in the amount of images and words produced, whilst this time, not directly attacking Beckham. The queer constructions of Beckham amplify respect/ridicule along a specific dimension, supplying a dialectic of its own. The modes of meaning surrounding Beckham do indicate a shift in the possible effective constructions of masculinity, with the incorporation of a feminised interest in fashion (hairstyles, nail varnish, presentation in general) and the affirmation of gay icon/object of desire. It is in these constructions of dissonance that the de-essentialising of masculinity occurs, which may be the productive moment of disruption for those receiving the images and texts, and incorporating them into their own meaning systems around Beckham, footballers, masculinities, heteronormativity. The fact that these queer moments are possible may be testament enough to Beckham’s social significance; he is in the right place at the right time (with the right body and profession) to be our cultural lightning conductor for contemporary anxieties around gender/sexuality. However, the dialectic of queering Beckham has a synthesis which suggests that the route into queerness is not as important as the route out. These are only fleeting materialisations of the queer David Beckham – flashes of fleshy dissonance glimpsed briefly before the recuperation into the heterosexual subject, coded by footie, family and fatherhood. The newer dissonant properties of masculinity are literally contextualised within ideological codes of heterosexuality. The evident theatricalisation and appropriation may appear to signal a productive route into queerness – from heterosexual to queer (the pink nail varnish, the oiled fashion shoots, the gay gym denim cut offs shot), but what if it is actually working in reverse? What if the cultural effectivity is achieved by appropriating and theatricalising from gay/transgender to heterosexual? – de-essentialising ‘queer’ for productive dissonance and amusement, but safe in the knowledge that there is a secure and policed route out of ‘queerness’ – the encoded red carpet of heterosexual masculinity. The possibilities of a queer visibility are thus denied through the recuperative effects of the dialectics at work. The ridiculing of his gender transgressions may be necessarily gentle, in order to walk the tightrope of respect/ridicule, but they nonetheless assume that transgressions are problematic. Furthermore, the reality/hyper reality dynamic deploys queer as a ‘sign’ precisely in order to effect a recuperation of a normative version of ‘reality’. It seems that the weight of a predominantly heteronormative culture reinforces the dialectics in celebrity culture, making the unproblematic visibility of queer subjects improbable. After all, in these examples – focused one on the world’s premier celebrities – ‘queer’ itself is not actually cool – it seems that only the simulation of queer is cool. Within contemporary fame, perhaps straight is really the new queer? References Cashmore, E. Beckham. 2nd ed. Oxford: Polity Press, 2004. Cashmore, E., and A. Parker. “One David Beckham? Celebrity, Masculinity and the Soccerati.” Sociology of Sport Journal 20.3 (2003): 214-31. Dyer, R. Stars. 2nd ed. London: BFI, 1998. Hall, S. “Encoding/Decoding.” Reprinted from original 1977 publication at Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Culture, Media, Language. Ed. S. Hall. London: Unwin Hyman, 1990. Marshall, P.D. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. London: U of Minneapolis P, 1997. Mort, F. “Boy’s Own? Masculinity, Style and Popular Culture.” Male Order. Unwrapping Masculinity. Eds. J. Chapman and J. Rutherford. London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1998. 193-224. Nixon, S. Hard Looks: Masculinities, Spectatorship and Contemporary Consumption. London: UCL Press, 1996. Rahman, M. “David Beckham as a Historical Moment in the Representation of Masculinity.” Labour History Review 69.2 (Aug. 2004): 219-34. Turner, G. Understanding Celebrity. London: Sage, 2004. Whannel, G. Media Sport Stars: Masculinities and Moralities. London: Routledge, 2002. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Rahman, Mohmin. "Is Straight the New Queer?: David Beckham and the Dialectics of Celebrity." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/15-rahman.php>. APA Style Rahman, M. (Nov. 2004) "Is Straight the New Queer?: David Beckham and the Dialectics of Celebrity," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/15-rahman.php>.

Nas narrativas híbridas amalgamam-se tanto o discurso histórico quanto o ficcional, muitas vezes buscando uma reelaboração de registros anteriores, a partir de releituras críticas de um passado escrito pelo colonizador europeu. Neste artigo, apresentamos a análise de duas obras da literatura infantojuvenil que entrecruzam ficção e história por meio dessa releitura crítica, com o objetivo de aproximá-las à modalidade proposta por Fleck: o romance histórico contemporâneo de mediação. Para tanto, a base teórica está nos pressupostos de Cadermatori, Coelho, Santiago, Fleck, entre outros. Por meio da análise realizada, evidenciam-se aspectos formais das obras Anacaona: The Golden Flower Queen. La Reina Flor de Oro, de Viviana S. Torres, e Degredado em Santa Cruz, de Sonia Sant’Anna. A abordagem proposta é possível e pertinente para as obras apresentadas com os pressupostos teóricos sobre o romance histórico contemporâneo de mediação.

Neste artigo, apresentamos duas cenas de uma aula de português como língua de herança na Alemanha e demonstramos como os conceitos de cultura(s) como uma programação coletiva da mente (Woodside, 2010) e território(s) são úteis para entendermos como uma professora brasileira é surpreendida pelo modo como os seus alunos germânico-brasileiros, nascidos e criados na Alemanha, interpretam o texto-objeto de Ensino (uma propaganda verbo-visual impressa). Os apontamentos interculturais que realizamos nos auxiliam a acessar e a compreender circunstâncias que perfazem o trabalho com exemplares de textos no contexto de ensino-aprendizagem de língua de herança, o que, por sua vez, aponta para especificidades do trabalho do professor, que já atua ou quer atuar, nesse contexto. ANDRADE, Mariana Kuntz. Autenticidade de materiais e ensino de línguas estrangeiras. Pandaemonium Germanicum, v. 20, n. 31, p. 1-29, 2017.­BRONCKART, Jean Paul; MACHADO, Anna Rachel. Procedimentos de análise de texto sobre o trabalho educacional. In: MACHADO, Anna Rachel (Org.). O ensino como trabalho: uma abordagem discursiva. Londrina: EDUEL, 2004, p. 131-163.­CASTELLOTTI, V. & MOORE, D. Social Representations of Languages and Teaching. Guide for the Development of Language Education Policies in Europe From Linguistic Diversity to Plurilingual Education. Strasbourg, Council of Europe, 2002. http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/source/castellottimooreen.pdf ­CELANI, Maria Antonieta Alba. A Relevância da Lingüística Aplicada na Formação de uma Política Educacional Brasileira. In: FORTKAMP, M.B.M.; TOMITCH, L.M.B. (Orgs.) Aspectos da lingüística aplicada. Florianópolis: Insular, 2000.­DURANTI, Alessandro. Theories of culture. In: DURANTI, Alessandro. The Anthropology of Intentions Language in a World of Others, Cambridge (U.K.): University Printing House, 2015, p. 23- 50. ­DUBOIS, D.; MONDADA, L. Construção dos objetos de discurso e categorização: uma abordagem dos processos de referenciação. In: CAVALCANTE, Mônica Magalhães; RODRIGUES, Bernadete Biasi; CIULLA, Alena (Orgs.). Referenciação. São Paulo: Contexto, 2003.ERICKSON, Frederick. What makes school ethnography “ethnographic”? In: Council on Anthropology and Education Newsletter/Antropology & Education Quarterly, v. 4 (2). Boston: Little Brown, 1973. p. 10-19FLORES, Cristina; BARBOSA, Pilar. Clíticos no português de herança de emigrantes bilingues de segunda geração. Textos Seleccionados, XXVI Encontro da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística, p. 81-98, 2011.GUARDADO, Martin. Discourse, Ideology and Heritage Language Socialization. Micro and Macro Perspectives. Boston; Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Series: Contributions to the Sociology of Language. Volume 104, 2018.­GEERTZ, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. ­HANCOCK, Black Hawk. Embodiment. A dispositional Approach to Racial and Cultural Analysis. In: JEROLMACK, Colin; KHAN, Shamus (Ed). Approaches to Etnography. Analysis and Representation in Participant Observation. New York, Oxford University Press, 2018, p.155-183.­HAESBAERT, Rogério. O mito da desterritorialização: Do “fim dos territórios” à multiterritorialidade. Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil, 2004.­MACHADO, A. R. (Org.). O ensino como trabalho: uma abordagem discursiva. Londrina, PR: Eduel, 2004.MARCUSCHI, Luiz Antônio. O léxico: lista, rede ou cognição? In: NEGRI, Lígia; FOLTRAN, Maria José; OLIVEIRA, Roberta Pires de (Org.). Sentido e significação: em torno da obra de Rodolfo Ilari. São Paulo: Contexto, 2004.MATENCIO, Maria de Lourdes. (2006). Formação do professor e representações sociais de língua(gem): por uma lingüística implicada. Filologia e Linguística Portuguesa, (8), 2006, p. 439-449. http://www.revistas.usp.br/flp/article/view/59765/62874­MODL, Fernanda de Castro; LEURQUIN, Eulália Vera Lúcia Fraga. Lusofonia em seus contextos de ensino, aprendizagem e formação de professores. Fólio – Revista de Letras, Vitória da Conquista, v.10, n.1, jan-jun de 2018, p. 333-340. ­MODL, Fernanda de Castro; BIAVATI, Nádia Dolores Fernandes. CULTURA ESCOLAR E DESNATURALIZAÇÃO DO OLHAR. Fólio – Revista de Letras, Vitória da Conquista, v. 8, n. 2, fev. 2018. ISSN 2176-4182. Disponível em: http://periodicos2.uesb.br/index.php/folio/article/view/2767­MODL, Fernanda de Castro. Rules of Behavior and Interaction in German and Brazilian Classrooms: (Inter)Cultural Uses of the Word in Schools. 1a. ed. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2017. v. 1, 184 p.­MODL, Fernanda de Castro; LEURQUIN, Eulália. LUSOFONIA EM SEUS DIVERSOS CONTEXTOS DE ENSINO, APRENDIZAGEM E FORMAÇÃO DE PROFESSORES. Fólio – Revista de Letras, Vitória da Conquista, v. 10, n. 1, ago. 2018. ISSN 2176-4182. Disponível em: <http://periodicos2.uesb.br/index.php/folio/article/view/4169MOITA LOPES, L. P. (Org.) 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One of the most distinct places the politics of affect have played out in Australia of late has been in the struggles around the mandatory detention of undocumented migrants; specifically, in arguments about the amount of compassion border control practices should or do entail. Indeed, in 1990 the newly established Joint Standing Committee on Migration (JSCM) published its first report, Illegal Entrants in Australia: Balancing Control and Compassion. Contemporaneous, thought not specifically concerned, with the establishment of mandatory detention for asylum seekers, this report helped shape the context in which detention policy developed. As the Bureau of Immigration and Population Research put it in their summary of the report, “the Committee endorsed a tough stance regarding all future illegal entrants but a more compassionate stance regarding those now in Australia” (24). It would be easy now to frame this report in a narrative of decline. Under a Labor government the JSCM had at least some compassion to offer; since the 1996 conservative Coalition victory any such compassion has been in increasingly short supply, if not an outright political liability. This is a popular narrative for those clinging to the belief that Labor is still, in some residual sense, a social-democratic party. I am more interested in the ways the report’s subtitle effectively predicted the framework in which debates about detention have since been constructed: control vs. compassion, with balance as the appropriate mediating term. Control and compassion are presented as the poles of a single governmental project insofar as they can be properly calibrated; but at the same time, compassion is presented as an external balance to the governmental project (control), an extra-political restriction of the political sphere. This is a very formal way to put it, but it reflects a simple, vernacular theory that circulates widely among refugee activists. It is expressed with concision in Peter Mares’ groundbreaking book on detention centres, Borderlines, in the chapter title “Compassion as a vice”. Compassion remains one of the major themes and demands of Australian refugee advocates. They thematise compassion not only for the obvious reasons that mandatory detention involves a devastating lack thereof, and that its critics are frequently driven by intense emotional connections both to particular detainees and TPV holders and, more generally, to all who suffer the effects of Australian border control. There is also a historical or conjunctural element: as Ghassan Hage has written, for the last ten years or so many forms of political opposition in Australia have organised their criticisms in terms of “things like compassion or hospitality rather than in the name of a left/right political divide” (7). This tendency is not limited to any one group; it ranges across the spectrum from Liberal Party wets to anarchist collectives, via dozens of organised groups and individuals varying greatly in their political beliefs and intentions. In this context, it would be tendentious to offer any particular example(s) of compassionate activism, so let me instead cite a complaint. In November 2002, the conservative journal Quadrant worried that morality and compassion “have been appropriated as if by right by those who are opposed to the government’s policies” on border protection (“False Refugees” 2). Thus, the right was forced to begin to speak the language of compassion as well. The Department of Immigration, often considered the epitome of the lack of compassion in Australian politics, use the phrase “Australia is a compassionate country, but…” so often they might as well inscribe it on their letterhead. Of course this is hypocritical, but it is not enough to say the right are deforming the true meaning of the term. The point is that compassion is a contested term in Australian political discourse; its meanings are not fixed, but constructed and struggled over by competing political interests. This should not be particularly surprising. Stuart Hall, following Ernesto Laclau and others, famously argued that no political term has an intrinsic meaning. Meanings are produced – articulated, and de- or re-articulated – through a dynamic and partisan “suturing together of elements that have no necessary or eternal belongingness” (10). Compassion has many possible political meanings; it can be articulated to diverse social (and antisocial) ends. If I was writing on the politics of compassion in the US, for example, I would be talking about George W. Bush’s slogan of “compassionate conservatism”, and whatever Hannah Arendt meant when she argued that “the passion of compassion has haunted and driven the best men [sic] of all revolutions” (65), I think she meant something very different by the term than do, say, Rural Australians for Refugees. As Lauren Berlant has written, “politicized feeling is a kind of thinking that too often assumes the obviousness of the thought it has” (48). Hage has also opened this assumed obviousness to question, writing that “small-‘l’ liberals often translate the social conditions that allow them to hold certain superior ethical views into a kind of innate moral superiority. They see ethics as a matter of will” (8-9). These social conditions are complex – it isn’t just that, as some on the right like to assert, compassion is a product of middle class comfort. The actual relations are more dynamic and open. Connections between class and occupational categories on the one hand, and social attitudes and values on the other, are not given but constructed, articulated and struggled over. As Hall put it, the way class functions in the distribution of ideologies is “not as the permanent class-colonization of a discourse, but as the work entailed in articulating these discourses to different political class practices” (139). The point here is to emphasise that the politics of compassion are not straightforward, and that we can recognise and affirm feelings of compassion while questioning the politics that seem to emanate from those feelings. For example, a politics that takes compassion as its basis seems ill-suited to think through issues it can’t put a human face to – that is, the systematic and structural conditions for mandatory detention and border control. Compassion’s political investments accrue to specifiable individuals and groups, and to the harms done to them. This is not, as such, a bad thing, particularly if you happen to be a specifiable individual to whom a substantive harm has been done. But compassion, going one by one, group by group, doesn’t cope well with situations where the form of the one, or the form of the disadvantaged minority, constitutes not only a basis for aid or emancipation, but also violently imposes particular ideas of modern western subjectivity. How does this violence work? I want to answer by way of the story of an Iranian man who applied for asylum in Australia in 2004. In the available documents he is referred to as “the Applicant”. The Applicant claimed asylum based on his homosexuality, and his fear of persecution should he return to Iran. His asylum application was rejected by the Refugee Review Tribunal because the Tribunal did not believe he was really gay. In their decision they write that “the Tribunal was surprised to observe such a comprehensive inability on the Applicant’s part to identify any kind of emotion-stirring or dignity-arousing phenomena in the world around him”. The phenomena the Tribunal suggest might have been emotion-stirring for a gay Iranian include Oscar Wilde, Alexander the Great, Andre Gide, Greco-Roman wrestling, Bette Midler, and Madonna. I can personally think of much worse bases for immigration decisions than Madonna fandom, but there is obviously something more at stake here. (All quotes from the hearing are taken from the High Court transcript “WAAG v MIMIA”. I have been unable to locate a transcript of the original RRT decision, and so far as I know it remains unavailable. Thanks to Mark Pendleton for drawing my attention to this case, and for help with references.) Justice Kirby, one of the presiding Justices at the Applicant’s High Court appeal, responded to this with the obvious point, “Madonna, Bette Midler and so on are phenomena of the Western culture. In Iran, where there is death for some people who are homosexuals, these are not in the forefront of the mind”. Indeed, the High Court is repeatedly critical and even scornful of the Tribunal decision. When Mr Bennett, who is appearing for the Minister for Immigration in the appeal begins his case, he says, “your Honour, the primary attack which seems to be made on the decision of the –”, he is cut off by Justice Gummow, who says, “Well, in lay terms, the primary attack is that it was botched in the Tribunal, Mr Solicitor”. But Mr Bennett replies by saying no, “it was not botched. If one reads the whole of the Tribunal judgement, one sees a consistent line of reasoning and a conclusion being reached”. In a sense this is true; the deep tragicomic weirdness of the Tribunal decision is based very much in the unfolding of a particular form of homophobic rationality specific to border control and refugee determination. There have been hundreds of applications for protection specifically from homophobic persecution since 1994, when the first such application was made in Australia. As of 2002, only 22% of those applications had been successful, with the odds stacked heavily against lesbians – only 7% of lesbian applicants were successful, against a shocking enough 26% of gay men (Millbank, Imagining Otherness 148). There are a number of reasons for this. The Tribunal has routinely decided that even if persecution had occurred on the basis of homosexuality, the Applicant would be able to avoid such persecution if she or he acted ‘discreetly’, that is, hid their sexuality. The High Court ruled out this argument in 2003, but the Tribunal maintains an array of effective techniques of homophobic exclusion. For example, the Tribunal often uses the Spartacus International Gay Guide to find out about local conditions of lesbian and gay life even though it is a tourist guide book aimed at Western gay men with plenty of disposable income (Dauvergne and Millbank 178-9). And even in cases which have found in favour of particular lesbian and gay asylum seekers, the Tribunal has often gone out of its way to assert that lesbians and gay men are, nevertheless, not the subjects of human rights. States, that is, violate no rights when they legislate against lesbian and gay identities and practices, and the victims of such legislation have no rights to protection (Millbank, Fear 252-3). To go back to Madonna. Bennett’s basic point with respect to the references to the Material Girl et al is that the Tribunal specifically rules them as irrelevant. Mr Bennett: The criticism which is being made concerns a question which the Tribunal asked and what is very much treated in the Tribunal’s judgement as a passing reference. If one looks, for example, at page 34 – Kirby J: This is where Oscar, Alexander and Bette as well as Madonna turn up? Mr Bennett: Yes. The very paragraph my learned friend relies on, if one reads the sentence, what the Tribunal is saying is, “I am not looking for these things”. Gummow J: Well, why mention it? What sort of training do these people get in decision making before they are appointed to this body, Mr Solicitor? Mr Bennett: I cannot assist your Honour on that. Gummow J: No. Well, whatever it is, what happened here does not speak highly of the results of it. To gloss this, Bennett argues that the High Court are making too much of an irrelevant minor point in the decision. Mr Bennett: One would think [based on the High Court’s questions] that the only things in this judgement were the throwaway references saying, “I wasn’t looking for an understanding of Oscar Wilde”, et cetera. That is simply, when one reads the judgement as a whole, not something which goes to the centre at all… There is a small part of the judgement which could be criticized and which is put, in the judgement itself, as a subsidiary element and prefaced with the word “not”. Kirby J: But the “not” is a bit undone by what follows when I think Marilyn [Monroe] is thrown in. Mr Bennett: Well, your Honour, I am not sure why she is thrown in. Kirby J: Well, that is exactly the point. Mr Bennett holds that, as per Wayne’s World, the word “not” negates any clause to which it is attached. Justice Kirby, on the other hand, feels that this “not” comes undone, and that this undoing – and the uncertainty that accrues to it – is exactly the point. But the Tribunal won’t be tied down on this, and makes use of its “not” to hold gay stereotypes at arm’s length – which is still, of course, to hold them, at a remove that will insulate homophobia against its own illegitimacy. The Tribunal defends itself against accusations of homophobia by announcing specifically and repeatedly, in terms that consciously evoke culturally specific gay stereotypes, that it is not interested in those stereotypes. This unconvincing alibi works to prevent any inconvenient accusations of bias from butting in on the routine business of heteronormativity. Paul Morrison has noted that not many people will refuse to believe you’re gay: “Claims to normativity are characteristically met with scepticism. Only parents doubt confessions of deviance” (5). In this case, it is not a parent but a paternalistic state apparatus. The reasons the Tribunal did not believe the applicant [were] (a) because of “inconsistencies about the first sexual experience”, (b) “the uniformity of relationships”, (c) the “absence of a “gay” circle of friends”, (d) “lack of contact with the “gay” underground” and [(e)] “lack of other forms of identification”. Of these the most telling, I think, are the last three: a lack of gay friends, of contact with the gay underground, or of unspecified other forms of identification. What we can see here is that even if the Tribunal isn’t looking for the stereotypical icons of Western gay culture, it is looking for the characteristic forms of Western gay identity which, as we know, are far from universal. The assumptions about the continuities between sex acts and identities that we codify with names like lesbian, gay, homosexual and so on, often very poorly translate the ways in which non-Western populations understand and describe themselves, if they translate them at all. Gayatri Gopinath, for example, uses the term “queer diaspor[a]... in contradistinction to the globalization of “gay” identity that replicates a colonial narrative of development and progress that judges all other sexual cultures, communities, and practices against a model of Euro-American sexual identity” (11). I can’t assess the accuracy of the Tribunal’s claims regarding the Applicant’s social life, although I am inclined to scepticism. But if the Applicant in this case indeed had no gay friends, no contact with the gay underground and no other forms of identification with the big bad world of gaydom, he may obviously, nevertheless, have been a Man Who Has Sex With Men, as they sometimes say in AIDS prevention work. But this would not, either in the terms of Australian law or the UN Convention, qualify him as a refugee. You can only achieve refugee status under the terms of the Convention based on membership of a ‘specific social group’. Lesbians and gay men are held to constitute such groups, but what this means is that there’s a certain forcing of Western identity norms onto the identity and onto the body of the sexual other. This shouldn’t read simply as a moral point about how we should respect diversity. There’s a real sense that our own lives as political and sexual beings are radically impoverished to the extent we fail to foster and affirm non-Western non-heterosexualities. There’s a sustaining enrichment that we miss out on, of course, in addition to the much more serious forms of violence others will be subject to. And these are kinds of violence as well as forms of enrichment that compassionate politics, organised around the good refugee, just does not apprehend. In an essay on “The politics of bad feeling”, Sara Ahmed makes a related argument about national shame and mourning. “Words cannot be separated from bodies, or other signs of life. So the word ‘mourns’ might get attached to some subjects (some more than others represent the nation in mourning), and it might get attached to some objects (some losses more than others may count as losses for this nation)” (73). At one level, these points are often made with regard to compassion, especially as it is racialised in Australian politics; for example, that there would be a public outcry were we to detain hypothetical white boat people. But Ahmed’s point stretches further – in the necessary relation between words and bodies, she asks not only which bodies do the describing and which are described, but which are permitted a relation to language at all? If “words cannot be separated from bodies”, what happens to those bodies words fail? The queer diasporic body, so reductively captured in that phrase, is a case in point. How do we honour its singularity, as well as its sociality? How do we understand the systematicity of the forces that degrade and subjugate it? What do the politics of compassion have to offer here? It’s easy for the critic or the cynic to sneer at such politics – so liberal, so sentimental, so wet – or to deconstruct them, expose “the violence of sentimentality” (Berlant 62), show “how compassion towards the other’s suffering might sustain the violence of appropriation” (Ahmed 74). These are not moves I want to make. A guiding assumption of this essay is that there is never a unilinear trajectory between feelings and politics. Any particular affect or set of affects may be progressive, reactionary, apolitical, or a combination thereof, in a given situation; compassionate politics are no more necessarily bad than they are necessarily good. On the other hand, “not necessarily bad” is a weak basis for a political movement, especially one that needs to understand and negotiate the ways the enclosures and borders of late capitalism mass-produce bodies we can’t put names to, people outside familiar and recognisable forms of identity and subjectivity. As Etienne Balibar has put it, “in utter disregard of certain borders – or, in certain cases, under covers of such borders – indefinable and impossible identities emerge in various places, identities which are, as a consequence, regarded as non-identities. However, their existence is, none the less, a life-and-death question for large numbers of human beings” (77). Any answer to that question starts with our compassion – and our rage – at an unacceptable situation. But it doesn’t end there. References Ahmed, Sara. “The Politics of Bad Feeling.” Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal 1.1 (2005): 72-85. Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. Balibar, Etienne. We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Trans. James Swenson. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. Berlant, Lauren. “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy and Politics.” Cultural Studies and Political Theory. Ed. Jodi Dean. Ithaca and Cornell: Cornell UP, 2000. 42-62. Bureau of Immigration and Population Research. Illegal Entrants in Australia: An Annotated Bibliography. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1994. Dauvergne, Catherine and Jenni Millbank. “Cruisingforsex.com: An Empirical Critique of the Evidentiary Practices of the Australian Refugee Review Tribunal.” Alternative Law Journal 28 (2003): 176-81. “False Refugees and Misplaced Compassion” Editorial. Quadrant 390 (2002): 2-4. Hage, Ghassan. Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society. Annandale: Pluto, 2003. Hall, Stuart. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso, 1988. Joint Standing Committee on Migration. Illegal Entrants in Australia: Balancing Control and Compassion. Canberra: The Committee, 1990. Mares, Peter. Borderline: Australia’s Treatment of Refugees and Asylum Seekers. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2001. Millbank, Jenni. “Imagining Otherness: Refugee Claims on the Basis of Sexuality in Canada and Australia.” Melbourne University Law Review 26 (2002): 144-77. ———. “Fear of Persecution or Just a Queer Feeling? Refugee Status and Sexual orientation in Australia.” Alternative Law Journal 20 (1995): 261-65, 299. Morrison, Paul. The Explanation for Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity. New York: New York UP, 2001. Pendleton, Mark. “Borderline.” Bite 2 (2004): 3-4. “WAAG v MIMIA [2004]. HCATrans 475 (19 Nov. 2004)” High Court of Australia Transcripts. 2005. 17 Oct. 2005 http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/HCATrans/2004/475.html>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style McGrath, Shane. "Compassionate Refugee Politics?." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/02-mcgrath.php>. APA Style McGrath, S. (Dec. 2005) "Compassionate Refugee Politics?," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/02-mcgrath.php>.

IntroductionThe European will to modify the natural world emerged through English landscape design during the eighteenth century. Released from the neo-classical aesthetic dichotomy of the beautiful and the ugly, new categories of the picturesque and the sublime gestured towards an affective relationship to nature. Europeans began to see the world as a picture, the elements of which were composed as though part of a theatrical scene. Quite literally, as I shall discuss below, gardens were “composed with ‘pantomimic’ elements – ruins of castles and towers, rough hewn bridges, Chinese pagodas and their like” (McGillivray 134–35) transforming natural vistas into theatrical scenes. Such a transformation was made possible by a habit of spectating that was informed by the theatrical metaphor or theatrum mundi, one version of which emphasised the relationship between spectator and the thing seen. The idea of the natural world as an aesthetic object first developed in poetry and painting and then through English landscape garden style was wrought in three dimensions on the land itself. From representations of place a theatrical transformation occurred so that gardens became a places of representation.“The Genius of the Place in All”The eighteenth century inherited theatrum mundi from the Renaissance, although the genealogy of its key features date back to ancient times. Broadly speaking, theatrum mundi was a metaphorical expression of the world and humanity in two ways: dramaturgically and formally. During the Renaissance the dramaturgical metaphor was a moral emblem concerned with the contingency of human life; as Shakespeare famously wrote, “men and women [were] merely players” whose lives consisted of “seven ages” or “acts” (2.7.139–65). In contrast to the dramaturgical metaphor with its emphasis on role-playing humanity, the formalist version highlighted a relationship between spectator, theatre-space and spectacle. Rooted in Renaissance neo-Platonism, the formalist metaphor configured the world as a spectacle and “Man” its spectator. If the dramaturgical metaphor was inflected with medieval moral pessimism, the formalist metaphor was more optimistic.The neo-Platonist spectator searched in the world for a divine plan or grand design and spectatorship became an epistemological challenge. As a seer and a knower on the world stage, the human being became the one who thought about the world not just as a theatre but also through theatre. This is apparent in the etymology of “theatre” from the Greek theatron, or “seeing place,” but the word also shares a stem with “theory”: theaomai or “to look at.” In a graceful compression of both roots, Martin Heidegger suggests a “theatre” might be any “seeing place” in which any thing being beheld offers itself to careful scrutiny by the beholder (163–65). By the eighteenth century, the ancient idea of a seeing-knowing place coalesced with the new empirical method and aesthetic sensibility: the world was out there, so to speak, to provide pleasure and instruction.Joseph Addison, among others, in the first half of the century reconsidered the utilitarian appeal of the natural world and proposed it as the model for artistic inspiration and appreciation. In “Pleasures of the Imagination,” a series of essays in The Spectator published in 1712, Addison claimed that “there is something more bold and masterly in the rough careless strokes of nature, than in the nice touches and embellishments of art,” and compared to the beauty of an ordered garden, “the sight wanders up and down without confinement” the “wide fields of nature” and is “fed with an infinite variety of images, without any certain stint or number” (67).Yet art still had a role because, Addison argues, although “wild scenes [. . .] are more delightful than any artificial shows” the pleasure of nature increases the more it begins to resemble art; the mind experiences the “double” pleasure of comparing nature’s original beauty with its copy (68). This is why “we take delight in a prospect which is well laid out, and diversified, with fields and meadows, woods and rivers” (68); a carefully designed estate can be both profitable and beautiful and “a man might make a pretty landskip of his own possessions” (69). Although nature should always be one’s guide, nonetheless, with some small “improvements” it was possible to transform an estate into a landscape picture. Nearly twenty years later in response to the neo-Palladian architectural ambitions of Richard Boyle, the third Earl of Burlington, and with a similarly pictorial eye to nature, Alexander Pope advised:To build, to plant, whatever you intend,To rear the Column, or the Arch to bend,To swell the Terras, or to sink the Grot;In all, let Nature never be forgot.But treat the Goddess like a modest fair,Nor over-dress, nor leave her wholly bare;Let not each beauty ev’ry where be spy’d,Where half the skill is decently to hide.He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds,Surprizes, varies, and conceals the Bounds.Consult the Genius of the Place in all;That tells the Waters or to rise, or fall,Or helps th’ ambitious Hill the heav’ns to scale,Or scoops in circling theatres the Vale,Calls in the Country, catches opening glades, Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,Now breaks or now directs, th’ intending Lines;Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs. (Epistle IV, ll 47–64) Whereas Addison still gestured towards estate management, Pope explicitly advocated a painterly approach to garden design. His epistle articulated some key principles that he enacted in his own garden at Twickenham and which would inform later garden design. No matter what one added to a landscape, one needed to be guided by nature; one should be moderate in one’s designs and neither plant too much nor too little; one must be aware of the spectator’s journey through the garden and take care to provide variety by creating “surprises” that would be revealed at different points. Finally, one had to find the “spirit” of the place that gave it its distinct character and use this to create the cohesion in diversity that was aspired to in a garden. Nature’s aestheticisation had begun with poetry, developed into painting, and was now enacted on actual natural environments with the emergence of English landscape style. This painterly approach to gardening demanded an imaginative, emotional, and intellectual engagement with place and it stylistically rejected the neo-classical geometry and regularity of the baroque garden (exemplified by Le Nôtre’s gardens at Versailles). Experiencing landscape now took on a third dimension as wealthy landowners and their friends put themselves within the picture frame and into the scene. Although landscape style changed during the century, a number of principles remained more or less consistent: the garden should be modelled on nature but “improved,” any improvements should not be obvious, pictorial composition should be observed, the garden should be concerned with the spectator’s experience and should aim to provoke an imaginative or emotional engagement with it. During the seventeenth century, developments in theatrical technology, particularly the emergence of the proscenium arch theatre with moveable scenery, showed that poetry and painting could be spectacularly combined on the stage. Later in the eighteenth century the artist and stage designer Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg combined picturesque painting aesthetics with theatrical design in works such as The Wonders of Derbyshire in 1779 (McGillivray 136). It was a short step to shift the onstage scene outside. Theatricality was invoked when pictorial principles were applied three dimensionally; gardens became sites for pastoral genre scenes that ambiguously positioned their visitors both as spectators and actors. Theatrical SceneryGardens and theatres were explicitly connected. Like “theatre,” the word “garden” was sometimes used to describe a collection, in book form, which promised “a whole world of items” which was not always “redeemable” in “straightforward ways” (Hunt, Gardens 54–55). Theatrum mundi could be emblematically expressed in a garden through statues and architectural fabriques which drew spectators into complex chains of associations involving literature, art, and society, as they progressed through it.In the previous century, writes John Dixon Hunt, “the expectation of a fine garden [. . .] was that it work upon its visitor, involving him [sic] often insidiously as a participant in its dramas, which were presented to him as he explored its spaces by a variety of statues, inscriptions and [. . .] hydraulically controlled automata” (Gardens 54). Such devices, which featured heavily in the Italian baroque garden, were by the mid eighteenth century seen by English and French garden theorists to be overly contrived. Nonetheless, as David Marshall argues, “eighteenth-century garden design is famous for its excesses [. . .] the picturesque garden may have aimed to be less theatrical, but it aimed no less to be theater” (38). Such gardens still required their visitors’ participation and were designed to deliver an experience that stimulated the spectators’ imaginations and emotions as they moved through them. Theatrum mundi is implicit in eighteenth-century gardens through a common idea of the world reimagined into four geographical quadrants emblematically represented by fabriques in the garden. The model here is Alexander Pope’s influential poem, “The Temple of Fame” (1715), which depicted the eponymous temple with four different geographic faces: its western face was represented by western classical architecture, its east face by Chinese, Persian, and Assyrian, its north was Gothic and Celtic, and its south, Egyptian. These tropes make their appearance in eighteenth-century landscape gardens. In Désert de Retz, a garden created between 1774 and 1789 by François Racine de Monville, about twenty kilometres west of Paris, one can still see amongst its remaining fabriques: a ruined “gothic” church, a “Tartar” tent (it used to have a Chinese maison, now lost), a pyramid, and the classically inspired Temple of Pan. Similar principles underpin the design of Jardin (now Parc) Monceau that I discuss below. Retz: Figure 1. Tartar tent.Figure 2. Temple of PanStowe Gardens in Buckinghamshire has a similar array of structures (although the classical predominates) including its original Chinese pavillion. It, too, once featured a pyramid designed by the architect and playwright John Vanbrugh, and erected as a memorial to him after his death in 1726. On it was carved a quote from Horace that explicitly referenced the dramaturgical version of theatrum mundi: You have played, eaten enough and drunk enough,Now is time to leave the stage for younger men. (Garnett 19) Stowe’s Elysian Fields, designed by William Kent in the 1730s according to picturesque principles, offered its visitor two narrative choices, to take the Path of Virtue or the Path of Vice, just like a re-imagined morality play. As visitors progressed along their chosen paths they would encounter various fabriques and statues, some carved with inscriptions in either Latin or English, like the Vanbrugh pyramid, that would encourage associations between the ancient world and the contemporary world of the garden’s owner Richard Temple, Lord Cobham, and his circle. Stowe: Figure 3. Chinese Pavillion.Figure 4. Temple of VirtueKent’s background was as a painter and scene designer and he brought a theatrical sensibility to his designs; as Hunt writes, Kent particularly enjoyed designing “recessions into woodland space where ‘wings’ [were] created” (Picturesque 29). Importantly, Kent’s garden drawings reveal his awareness of gardens as “theatrical scenes for human action and interaction, where the premium is upon more personal experiences” and it this spatial dimension that was opened up at Stowe (Picturesque 30).Picturesque garden design emphasised pictorial composition that was similar to stage design and because a garden, like a stage, was a three-dimensional place for human action, it could also function as a set for that action. Unlike a painting, a garden was experiential and time-based and a visitor to it had an experience not unlike, to cautiously use an anachronism, a contemporary promenade performance. The habit of imaginatively wandering through a theatre in book-form, moving associatively from one item to the next, trying to discern the author’s pattern or structure, was one educated Europeans were used to, and a garden provided an embodied dimension to this activity. We can see how this might have been by visiting Parc Monceau in Paris which still contains remnants of the garden designed by Louis Carrogis (known as Carmontelle) for the Duc de Chartres in the 1770s. Carmontelle, like Kent, had a theatrical background and his primary role was as head of entertainments for the Orléans family; as such he was responsible for designing and writing plays for the family’s private theatricals (Hays 449). According to Hunt, Carmontelle intended visitors to Jardin de Monceau to take a specific itinerary through its “quantity of curious things”:Visitors entered by a Chinese gateway, next door to a gothic building that served as a chemical laboratory, and passed through greenhouses and coloured pavilions. Upon pressing a button, a mirrored wall opened into a winter garden painted with trompe-l’œil trees, floored with red sand, filled with exotic plants, and containing at its far end a grotto in which supper parties were held while music was played in the chamber above. Outside was a farm. Then there followed a series of exotic “locations”: a Temple of Mars, a winding river with an island of rocks and a Dutch mill, a dairy, two flower gardens, a Turkish tent poised, minaret-like, above an icehouse, a grove of tombs [. . .], and an Italian vineyard with a classical Bacchus at its center, regularly laid out to contrast with an irregular wood that succeeded it. The final stretches of the itinerary included a Naumachia or Roman water-theatre [. . .], more Turkish and Chinese effects, a ruined castle, yet another water-mill, and an island on which sheep grazed. (Picturesque 121) Monceau: Figure 5. Naumachia.Figure 6. PyramidIn its presentation of a multitude of different times and different places one can trace a line of descent from Jardin de Monceau to the great nineteenth-century World Expos and on to Disneyland. This lineage is not as trite as it seems once we realise that Carmontelle himself intended the garden to represent “all times and all places” and Pope’s four quadrants of the world were represented by fabriques at Monceau (Picturesque 121). As Jardin de Monceau reveals, gardens were also sites for smaller performative interventions such as the popular fêtes champêtres, garden parties in which the participants ate, drank, danced, played music, and acted in comedies. Role playing and masquerade were an important part of the fêtes as we see, for example, in Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Fêtes Vénitiennes (1718–19) where a “Moorishly” attired man addresses (or is dancing with) a young woman before an audience of young men and women, lolling around a fabrique (Watteau). Scenic design in the theatre inspired garden designs and gardens “featured prominently as dramatic locations in intermezzi, operas, and plays”, an exchange that encouraged visitors to gardens to see themselves as performers as much as spectators (Hunt, Gardens 64). A garden, particularly within the liminal aegis of a fête was a site for deceptions, tricks, ruses and revelations, assignations and seductions, all activities which were inherently theatrical; in such a garden visitors could find themselves acting in or watching a comedy or drama of their own devising. Marie-Antoinette built English gardens and a rural “hamlet” at Versailles. She and her intimate circle would retire to rustic cottages, which belied the opulence of their interiors, and dressed in white muslin dresses and straw hats, would play at being dairy maids, milking cows (pre-cleaned by the servants) into fine porcelain buckets (Martin 3). Just as the queen acted in pastoral operas in her theatre in the grounds of the Petit Trianon, her hamlet provided an opportunity for her to “live” a pastoral fantasy. Similarly, François Racine de Monville, who commissioned Désert de Retz, was a talented harpist and flautist and his Temple of Pan was, appropriately, a music room.Versailles: Figure 7. Hamlet ConclusionRichard Steele, Addison’s friend and co-founder of The Spectator, casually invoked theatrum mundi when he wrote in 1720: “the World and the Stage [. . .] have been ten thousand times observed to be the Pictures of one another” (51). Steele’s reiteration of a Renaissance commonplace revealed a different emphasis, an emphasis on the metaphor’s spatial and spectacular elements. Although Steele reasserts the idea that the world and stage resemble each other, he does so through a third level of abstraction: it is as pictures that they have an affinity. World and stage are both positioned for the observer within complementary picture frames and it is as pictures that he or she is invited to make sense of them. The formalist version of theatrum mundi invokes a spectator beholding the world for his (usually!) pleasure and in the process nature itself is transformed. No longer were natural landscapes wildernesses to be tamed and economically exploited, but could become gardens rendered into scenes for their aristocratic owners’ pleasure. Désert de Retz, as its name suggests, was an artfully composed wilderness, a version of the natural world sculpted into scenery. Theatrum mundi, through the aesthetic category of the picturesque, emerged in English landscape style and effected a theatricalised transformation of nature that was enacted in the aristocratic gardens of Europe.ReferencesAddison, Joseph. The Spectator. No. 414 (25 June 1712): 67–70. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.Garnett, Oliver. Stowe. Buckinghamshire. The National Trust, 2011.Hays, David. “Carmontelle's Design for the Jardin de Monceau: A Freemasonic Garden in Late-Eighteenth-Century France.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 32.4 (1999): 447–62.Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.Hunt, John Dixon. Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992.———. The Picturesque Garden in Europe. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002.Marshall, David. The Frame of Art. Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750–1815. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005.Martin, Meredith S. Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de' Medici to Marie-Antoinette. Harvard: Harvard UP, 2011.McGillivray, Glen. "The Picturesque World Stage." Performance Research 13.4 (2008): 127–39.Pope, Alexander. “Epistle IV. To Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington.” Epistles to Several Persons. London, 1744. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.———. The Temple of Fame: A Vision. By Mr. Pope. 2nd ed. London, 1715. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Ed. Agnes Latham. London: Routledge, 1991.Steele, Richard. The Theatre. No. 7 (23 January 1720).

From elephants to ABBA fans, silicon to hormone, the following discussion uses a new research method to look at printed text, motion pictures and a teenage rebel icon. If by ‘print’ we mean a mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium, then printing has been with us since before microdot security prints were painted onto cars, before voice prints, laser prints, network servers, record pressings, motion picture prints, photo prints, colour woodblock prints, before books, textile prints, and footprints. If we accept that higher mammals such as elephants have a learnt culture, then it is possible to extend a definition of printing beyond Homo sapiens. Poole reports that elephants mechanically trumpet reproductions of human car horns into the air surrounding their society. If nothing else, this cross-species, cross-cultural reproduction, this ‘ability to mimic’ is ‘another sign of their intelligence’. Observation of child development suggests that the first significant meaningful ‘impression’ made on the human mind is that of the face of the child’s nurturer – usually its mother. The baby’s mind forms an ‘impression’, a mental print, a reproducible memory data set, of the nurturer’s face, voice, smell, touch, etc. That face is itself a cultural construct: hair style, makeup, piercings, tattoos, ornaments, nutrition-influenced skin and smell, perfume, temperature and voice. A mentally reproducible pattern of a unique face is formed in the mind, and we use that pattern to distinguish ‘familiar and strange’ in our expanding social orbit. The social relations of patterned memory – of imprinting – determine the extent to which we explore our world (armed with research aids such as text print) or whether we turn to violence or self-harm (Bretherton). While our cultural artifacts (such as vellum maps or networked voice message servers) bravely extend our significant patterns into the social world and the traversed environment, it is useful to remember that such artifacts, including print, are themselves understood by our original pattern-reproduction and impression system – the human mind, developed in childhood. The ‘print’ is brought to mind differently in different discourses. For a reader, a ‘print’ is a book, a memo or a broadsheet, whether it is the Indian Buddhist Sanskrit texts ordered to be printed in 593 AD by the Chinese emperor Sui Wen-ti (Silk Road) or the US Defense Department memo authorizing lower ranks to torture the prisoners taken by the Bush administration (Sanchez, cited in ABC). Other fields see prints differently. For a musician, a ‘print’ may be the sheet music which spread classical and popular music around the world; it may be a ‘record’ (as in a ‘recording’ session), where sound is impressed to wax, vinyl, charged silicon particles, or the alloys (Smith, “Elpida”) of an mp3 file. For the fine artist, a ‘print’ may be any mechanically reproduced two-dimensional (or embossed) impression of a significant image in media from paper to metal, textile to ceramics. ‘Print’ embraces the Japanese Ukiyo-e colour prints of Utamaro, the company logos that wink from credit card holographs, the early photographs of Talbot, and the textured patterns printed into neolithic ceramics. Computer hardware engineers print computational circuits. Homicide detectives investigate both sweaty finger prints and the repeated, mechanical gaits of suspects, which are imprinted into the earthy medium of a crime scene. For film makers, the ‘print’ may refer to a photochemical polyester reproduction of a motion picture artifact (the reel of ‘celluloid’), or a DVD laser disc impression of the same film. Textualist discourse has borrowed the word ‘print’ to mean ‘text’, so ‘print’ may also refer to the text elements within the vision track of a motion picture: the film’s opening titles, or texts photographed inside the motion picture story such as the sword-cut ‘Z’ in Zorro (Niblo). Before the invention of writing, the main mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium was the humble footprint in the sand. The footprints of tribes – and neighbouring animals – cut tracks in the vegetation and the soil. Printed tracks led towards food, water, shelter, enemies and friends. Having learnt to pattern certain faces into their mental world, children grew older and were educated in the footprints of family and clan, enemies and food. The continuous impression of significant foot traffic in the medium of the earth produced the lines between significant nodes of prewriting and pre-wheeled cultures. These tracks were married to audio tracks, such as the song lines of the Australian Aborigines, or the ballads of tramping culture everywhere. A typical tramping song has the line, ‘There’s a track winding back to an old-fashion shack along the road to Gundagai,’ (O’Hagan), although this colonial-style song was actually written for radio and became an international hit on the airwaves, rather than the tramping trails. The printed tracks impressed by these cultural flows are highly contested and diverse, and their foot prints are woven into our very language. The names for printed tracks have entered our shared memory from the intersection of many cultures: ‘Track’ is a Germanic word entering English usage comparatively late (1470) and now used mainly in audio visual cultural reproduction, as in ‘soundtrack’. ‘Trek’ is a Dutch word for ‘track’ now used mainly by ecotourists and science fiction fans. ‘Learn’ is a Proto-Indo-European word: the verb ‘learn’ originally meant ‘to find a track’ back in the days when ‘learn’ had a noun form which meant ‘the sole of the foot’. ‘Tract’ and ‘trace’ are Latin words entering English print usage before 1374 and now used mainly in religious, and electronic surveillance, cultural reproduction. ‘Trench’ in 1386 was a French path cut through a forest. ‘Sagacity’ in English print in 1548 was originally the ability to track or hunt, in Proto-Indo-European cultures. ‘Career’ (in English before 1534) was the print made by chariots in ancient Rome. ‘Sleuth’ (1200) was a Norse noun for a track. ‘Investigation’ (1436) was Latin for studying a footprint (Harper). The arrival of symbolic writing scratched on caves, hearth stones, and trees (the original meaning of ‘book’ is tree), brought extremely limited text education close to home. Then, with baked clay tablets, incised boards, slate, bamboo, tortoise shell, cast metal, bark cloth, textiles, vellum, and – later – paper, a portability came to text that allowed any culture to venture away from known ‘foot’ paths with a reduction in the risk of becoming lost and perishing. So began the world of maps, memos, bills of sale, philosophic treatises and epic mythologies. Some of this was printed, such as the mechanical reproduction of coins, but the fine handwriting required of long, extended, portable texts could not be printed until the invention of paper in China about 2000 years ago. Compared to lithic architecture and genes, portable text is a fragile medium, and little survives from the millennia of its innovators. The printing of large non-text designs onto bark-paper and textiles began in neolithic times, but Sui Wen-ti’s imperial memo of 593 AD gives us the earliest written date for printed books, although we can assume they had been published for many years previously. The printed book was a combination of Indian philosophic thought, wood carving, ink chemistry and Chinese paper. The earliest surviving fragment of paper-print technology is ‘Mantras of the Dharani Sutra’, a Buddhist scripture written in the Sanskrit language of the Indian subcontinent, unearthed at an early Tang Dynasty site in Xian, China – making the fragment a veteran piece of printing, in the sense that Sanskrit books had been in print for at least a century by the early Tang Dynasty (Chinese Graphic Arts Net). At first, paper books were printed with page-size carved wooden boards. Five hundred years later, Pi Sheng (c.1041) baked individual reusable ceramic characters in a fire and invented the durable moveable type of modern printing (Silk Road 2000). Abandoning carved wooden tablets, the ‘digitizing’ of Chinese moveable type sped up the production of printed texts. In turn, Pi Sheng’s flexible, rapid, sustainable printing process expanded the political-cultural impact of the literati in Asian society. Digitized block text on paper produced a bureaucratic, literate elite so powerful in Asia that Louis XVI of France copied China’s print-based Confucian system of political authority for his own empire, and so began the rise of the examined public university systems, and the civil service systems, of most European states (Watson, Visions). By reason of its durability, its rapid mechanical reproduction, its culturally agreed signs, literate readership, revered authorship, shared ideology, and distributed portability, a ‘print’ can be a powerful cultural network which builds and expands empires. But print also attacks and destroys empires. A case in point is the Spanish conquest of Aztec America: The Aztecs had immense libraries of American literature on bark-cloth scrolls, a technology which predated paper. These libraries were wiped out by the invading Spanish, who carried a different book before them (Ewins). In the industrial age, the printing press and the gun were seen as the weapons of rebellions everywhere. In 1776, American rebels staffed their ‘Homeland Security’ units with paper makers, knowing that defeating the English would be based on printed and written documents (Hahn). Mao Zedong was a book librarian; Mao said political power came out of the barrel of a gun, but Mao himself came out of a library. With the spread of wireless networked servers, political ferment comes out of the barrel of the cell phone and the internet chat room these days. Witness the cell phone displays of a plane hitting a tower that appear immediately after 9/11 in the Middle East, or witness the show trials of a few US and UK lower ranks who published prints of their torturing activities onto the internet: only lower ranks who published prints were arrested or tried. The control of secure servers and satellites is the new press. These days, we live in a global library of burning books – ‘burning’ in the sense that ‘print’ is now a charged silicon medium (Smith, “Intel”) which is usually made readable by connecting the chip to nuclear reactors and petrochemically-fired power stations. World resources burn as we read our screens. Men, women, children burn too, as we watch our infotainment news in comfort while ‘their’ flickering dead faces are printed in our broadcast hearths. The print we watch is not the living; it is the voodoo of the living in the blackout behind the camera, engaging the blood sacrifice of the tormented and the unfortunate. Internet texts are also ‘on fire’ in the third sense of their fragility and instability as a medium: data bases regularly ‘print’ fail-safe copies in an attempt to postpone the inevitable mechanical, chemical and electrical failure that awaits all electronic media in time. Print defines a moral position for everyone. In reporting conflict, in deciding to go to press or censor, any ‘print’ cannot avoid an ethical context, starting with the fact that there is a difference in power between print maker, armed perpetrators, the weak, the peaceful, the publisher, and the viewer. So many human factors attend a text, video or voice ‘print’: its very existence as an aesthetic object, even before publication and reception, speaks of unbalanced, and therefore dynamic, power relationships. For example, Graham Greene departed unscathed from all the highly dangerous battlefields he entered as a novelist: Riot-torn Germany, London Blitz, Belgian Congo, Voodoo Haiti, Vietnam, Panama, Reagan’s Washington, and mafia Europe. His texts are peopled with the injustices of the less fortunate of the twentieth century, while he himself was a member of the fortunate (if not happy) elite, as is anyone today who has the luxury of time to read Greene’s works for pleasure. Ethically a member of London and Paris’ colonizers, Greene’s best writing still electrifies, perhaps partly because he was in the same line of fire as the victims he shared bread with. In fact, Greene hoped daily that he would escape from the dreadful conflicts he fictionalized via a body bag or an urn of ashes (see Sherry). In reading an author’s biography we have one window on the ethical dimensions of authority and print. If a print’s aesthetics are sometimes enduring, its ethical relationships are always mutable. Take the stylized logo of a running athlete: four limbs bent in a rotation of action. This dynamic icon has symbolized ‘good health’ in Hindu and Buddhist culture, from Madras to Tokyo, for thousands of years. The cross of bent limbs was borrowed for the militarized health programs of 1930s Germany, and, because of what was only a brief, recent, isolated yet monstrously horrific segment of its history in print, the bent-limbed swastika is now a vilified symbol in the West. The sign remains ‘impressed’ differently on traditional Eastern culture, and without the taint of Nazism. Dramatic prints are emotionally charged because, in depicting Homo sapiens in danger, or passionately in love, they elicit a hormonal reaction from the reader, the viewer, or the audience. The type of emotions triggered by a print vary across the whole gamut of human chemistry. A recent study of three genres of motion picture prints shows a marked differences in the hormonal responses of men compared to women when viewing a romance, an actioner, and a documentary (see Schultheiss, Wirth, and Stanton). Society is biochemically diverse in its engagement with printed culture, which raises questions about equality in the arts. Motion picture prints probably comprise around one third of internet traffic, in the form of stolen digitized movie files pirated across the globe via peer-to-peer file transfer networks (p2p), and burnt as DVD laser prints (BBC). There is also a US 40 billion dollar per annum legitimate commerce in DVD laser pressings (Grassl), which would suggest an US 80 billion per annum world total in legitimate laser disc print culture. The actively screen literate, or the ‘sliterati’ as I prefer to call them, research this world of motion picture prints via their peers, their internet information channels, their television programming, and their web forums. Most of this activity occurs outside the ambit of universities and schools. One large site of sliterate (screen literate) practice outside most schooling and official research is the net of online forums at imdb.com (International Movie Data Base). Imdb.com ‘prints’ about 25,000,000 top pages per month to client browsers. Hundreds of sliterati forums are located at imdb, including a forum for the Australian movie, Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan). Ten years after the release of Muriel’s Wedding, young people who are concerned with victimization and bullying still log on to http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/> and put their thoughts into print: I still feel so bad for Muriel in the beginning of the movie, when the girls ‘dump’ her, and how much the poor girl cried and cried! Those girls were such biartches…I love how they got their comeuppance! bunniesormaybemidgets’s comment is typical of the current discussion. Muriel’s Wedding was a very popular film in its first cinema edition in Australia and elsewhere. About 30% of the entire over-14 Australian population went to see this photochemical polyester print in the cinemas on its first release. A decade on, the distributors printed a DVD laser disc edition. The story concerns Muriel (played by Toni Collette), the unemployed daughter of a corrupt, ‘police state’ politician. Muriel is bullied by her peers and she withdraws into a fantasy world, deluding herself that a white wedding will rescue her from the torments of her blighted life. Through theft and deceit (the modus operandi of her father) Muriel escapes to the entertainment industry and finds a ‘wicked’ girlfriend mentor. From a rebellious position of stubborn independence, Muriel plays out her fantasy. She gets her white wedding, before seeing both her father and her new married life as hollow shams which have goaded her abandoned mother to suicide. Redefining her life as a ‘game’ and assuming responsibility for her independence, Muriel turns her back on the mainstream, image-conscious, female gang of her oppressed youth. Muriel leaves the story, having rekindled her friendship with her rebel mentor. My methodological approach to viewing the laser disc print was to first make a more accessible, coded record of the entire movie. I was able to code and record the print in real time, using a new metalanguage (Watson, “Eyes”). The advantage of Coding is that ‘thinks’ the same way as film making, it does not sidetrack the analyst into prose. The Code splits the movie print into Vision Action [vision graphic elements, including text] (sound) The Coding splits the vision track into normal action and graphic elements, such as text, so this Coding is an ideal method for extracting all the text elements of a film in real time. After playing the film once, I had four and a half tightly packed pages of the coded story, including all its text elements in square brackets. Being a unique, indexed hard copy, the Coded copy allowed me immediate access to any point of the Muriel’s Wedding saga without having to search the DVD laser print. How are ‘print’ elements used in Muriel’s Wedding? Firstly, a rose-coloured monoprint of Muriel Heslop’s smiling face stares enigmatically from the plastic surface of the DVD picture disc. The print is a still photo captured from her smile as she walked down the aisle of her white wedding. In this print, Toni Collette is the Mona Lisa of Australian culture, except that fans of Muriel’s Wedding know the meaning of that smile is a magical combination of the actor’s art: the smile is both the flush of dreams come true and the frightening self deception that will kill her mother. Inserting and playing the disc, the text-dominant menu appears, and the film commences with the text-dominant opening titles. Text and titles confer a legitimacy on a work, whether it is a trade mark of the laser print owners, or the household names of stars. Text titles confer status relationships on both the presenters of the cultural artifact and the viewer who has entered into a legal license agreement with the owners of the movie. A title makes us comfortable, because the mind always seeks to name the unfamiliar, and a set of text titles does that job for us so that we can navigate the ‘tracks’ and settle into our engagement with the unfamiliar. The apparent ‘truth’ and ‘stability’ of printed text calms our fears and beguiles our uncertainties. Muriel attends the white wedding of a school bully bride, wearing a leopard print dress she has stolen. Muriel’s spotted wild animal print contrasts with the pure white handmade dress of the bride. In Muriel’s leopard textile print, we have the wild, rebellious, impoverished, inappropriate intrusion into the social ritual and fantasy of her high-status tormentor. An off-duty store detective recognizes the printed dress and calls the police. The police are themselves distinguished by their blue-and-white checked prints and other mechanically reproduced impressions of cultural symbols: in steel, brass, embroidery, leather and plastics. Muriel is driven in the police car past the stenciled town sign (‘Welcome To Porpoise Spit’ heads a paragraph of small print). She is delivered to her father, a politician who presides over the policing of his town. In a state where the judiciary, police and executive are hijacked by the same tyrant, Muriel’s father, Bill, pays off the police constables with a carton of legal drugs (beer) and Muriel must face her father’s wrath, which he proceeds to transfer to his detested wife. Like his daughter, the father also wears a spotted brown print costume, but his is a batik print from neighbouring Indonesia (incidentally, in a nation that takes the political status of its batik prints very seriously). Bill demands that Muriel find the receipt for the leopard print dress she claims she has purchased. The legitimate ownership of the object is enmeshed with a printed receipt, the printed evidence of trade. The law (and the paramilitary power behind the law) are legitimized, or contested, by the presence or absence of printed text. Muriel hides in her bedroom, surround by poster prints of the pop group ABBA. Torn-out prints of other people’s weddings adorn her mirror. Her face is embossed with the clown-like primary colours of the marionette as she lifts a bouquet to her chin and stares into the real time ‘print’ of her mirror image. Bill takes the opportunity of a business meeting with Japanese investors to feed his entire family at ‘Charlie Chan’’s restaurant. Muriel’s middle sister sloppily wears her father’s state election tee shirt, printed with the text: ‘Vote 1, Bill Heslop. You can’t stop progress.’ The text sets up two ironic gags that are paid off on the dialogue track: “He lost,’ we are told. ‘Progress’ turns out to be funding the concreting of a beach. Bill berates his daughter Muriel: she has no chance of becoming a printer’s apprentice and she has failed a typing course. Her dysfunction in printed text has been covered up by Bill: he has bribed the typing teacher to issue a printed diploma to his daughter. In the gambling saloon of the club, under the arrays of mechanically repeated cultural symbols lit above the poker machines (‘A’ for ace, ‘Q’ for queen, etc.), Bill’s secret girlfriend Diedre risks giving Muriel a cosmetics job. Another text icon in lights announces the surf nightclub ‘Breakers’. Tania, the newly married queen bitch who has made Muriel’s teenage years a living hell, breaks up with her husband, deciding to cash in his negotiable text documents – his Bali honeymoon tickets – and go on an island holiday with her girlfriends instead. Text documents are the enduring site of agreements between people and also the site of mutations to those agreements. Tania dumps Muriel, who sobs and sobs. Sobs are a mechanical, percussive reproduction impressed on the sound track. Returning home, we discover that Muriel’s older brother has failed a printed test and been rejected for police recruitment. There is a high incidence of print illiteracy in the Heslop family. Mrs Heslop (Jeannie Drynan), for instance, regularly has trouble at the post office. Muriel sees a chance to escape the oppression of her family by tricking her mother into giving her a blank cheque. Here is the confluence of the legitimacy of a bank’s printed negotiable document with the risk and freedom of a blank space for rebel Muriel’s handwriting. Unable to type, her handwriting has the power to steal every cent of her father’s savings. She leaves home and spends the family’s savings at an island resort. On the island, the text print-challenged Muriel dances to a recording (sound print) of ABBA, her hand gestures emphasizing her bewigged face, which is made up in an impression of her pop idol. Her imitation of her goddesses – the ABBA women, her only hope in a real world of people who hate or avoid her – is accompanied by her goddesses’ voices singing: ‘the mystery book on the shelf is always repeating itself.’ Before jpeg and gif image downloads, we had postcard prints and snail mail. Muriel sends a postcard to her family, lying about her ‘success’ in the cosmetics business. The printed missal is clutched by her father Bill (Bill Hunter), who proclaims about his daughter, ‘you can’t type but you really impress me’. Meanwhile, on Hibiscus Island, Muriel lies under a moonlit palm tree with her newly found mentor, ‘bad girl’ Ronda (Rachel Griffiths). In this critical scene, where foolish Muriel opens her heart’s yearnings to a confidante she can finally trust, the director and DP have chosen to shoot a flat, high contrast blue filtered image. The visual result is very much like the semiabstract Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Utamaro. This Japanese printing style informed the rise of European modern painting (Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc., were all important collectors and students of Ukiyo-e prints). The above print and text elements in Muriel’s Wedding take us 27 minutes into her story, as recorded on a single page of real-time handwritten Coding. Although not discussed here, the Coding recorded the complete film – a total of 106 minutes of text elements and main graphic elements – as four pages of Code. Referring to this Coding some weeks after it was made, I looked up the final code on page four: taxi [food of the sea] bq. Translation: a shop sign whizzes past in the film’s background, as Muriel and Ronda leave Porpoise Spit in a taxi. Over their heads the text ‘Food Of The Sea’ flashes. We are reminded that Muriel and Ronda are mermaids, fantastic creatures sprung from the brow of author PJ Hogan, and illuminated even today in the pantheon of women’s coming-of-age art works. That the movie is relevant ten years on is evidenced by the current usage of the Muriel’s Wedding online forum, an intersection of wider discussions by sliterate women on imdb.com who, like Muriel, are observers (and in some cases victims) of horrific pressure from ambitious female gangs and bullies. Text is always a minor element in a motion picture (unless it is a subtitled foreign film) and text usually whizzes by subliminally while viewing a film. By Coding the work for [text], all the text nuances made by the film makers come to light. While I have viewed Muriel’s Wedding on many occasions, it has only been in Coding it specifically for text that I have noticed that Muriel is a representative of that vast class of talented youth who are discriminated against by print (as in text) educators who cannot offer her a life-affirming identity in the English classroom. Severely depressed at school, and failing to type or get a printer’s apprenticeship, Muriel finds paid work (and hence, freedom, life, identity, independence) working in her audio visual printed medium of choice: a video store in a new city. Muriel found a sliterate admirer at the video store but she later dumped him for her fantasy man, before leaving him too. One of the points of conjecture on the imdb Muriel’s Wedding site is, did Muriel (in the unwritten future) get back together with admirer Brice Nobes? That we will never know. While a print forms a track that tells us where culture has been, a print cannot be the future, a print is never animate reality. At the end of any trail of prints, one must lift one’s head from the last impression, and negotiate satisfaction in the happening world. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Memo Shows US General Approved Interrogations.” 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. 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