Journal articles on the topic 'Women's Association for Foreign Missions'

By the 1910s, the international consortium of women involved in the interdenominational Protestant Young Women’s Christian Association (ywca) faced a reckoning. Over the previous decade, a largely European and North Americanywcaleadership had expanded successfully what it called the “association movement” into countries it designated as foreign mission territories, establishing dozens of multifunctional community centers across the Asian continent. With their religious, educational, recreational, and vocational programming,ywcas proved adaptable to a wide variety of settings. This success, however, brought the challenge of indigenization, a challenge that sharpened as Western women came to terms with anti-colonial agitation and egalitarian Gospel rhetoric of foreign mission. Detailing theywcaof the United States’s administration of theywcas of Japan and Turkey in the early 20thCentury, this article contends that interpersonal and organizational negotiations of power ultimately gave rise to transnational partnerships that thrived as theu.s.women’s missionary movement ebbed.

Although women have been very prominent in foreign missions for more than a century, they have generally played a secondary role in the field of missiology. Most mission boards and seminary faculties have been male-dominated, except for a time in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when women formed their own “female agencies” and training schools. During this period women made significant practical and scholarly contributions to mission strategy. With the demise of the women's missionary movement, however, such opportunities sharply declined. That is now beginning to change. In recent decades women have once again become more involved in the strategy of missions, especially in areas involving women's work, cross-cultural communication, literature, education, lifestyle, urban ministries, and mission specializations.

The news about the great victories of the Gallant Little Serbia in the Great War spread far and wide. Following on the appeals from the Serbian legations and the Serbian Red Cross, assistance was arriving from all over the world. First medical missions and medical and other help arrived from Russia. It was followed by the medical missions from Great Britain, France, Greece, The Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, America, etc. Material help and individual volunteers arrived from Poland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Norway, India, Japan, Egypt, South America, and elsewhere. The true friends of Serbia formed various funds under the auspices of the Red Cross Society, and other associations. In September 1914, the Serbian Relief Fund was established in London, while in Scotland the first units of the Scottish Women?s Hospitals for Foreign Service were formed in November of the same year. The aim of this work was to keep the memory of the Scottish Women?s Hospitals in Serbia, and with the Serbs in the Great War. In the history of the Serbian nation during the Great War a special place was held by the Scottish Women?s Hospitals - a unique humanitarian medical mission. It was the initiative of Dr. Elsie Maud Inglis (1864-1917), a physician, surgeon, promoter of equal rights for women, and with the support of the Scottish Federation of Woman?s Suffrage Societies. The SWH Hospitals, which were completely staffed by women, by their participation in the Great War, also contributed to gender and professional equality, especially in medicine. Many of today?s achievements came about thanks to the first generations of women doctors, who fought for equality in choosing to study medicine, and working in the medical field, in time of war and peacetime.

The news about the great victories of the Gallant Little Serbia in the Great War spread far and wide. Following on the appeals from the Serbian legations and the Serbian Red Cross, assistance was arriving from all over the world. First medical missions and medical and other help arrived from Russia. It was followed by the medical missions from Great Britain, France, Greece, the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, America, etc. Material help and individual volunteers arrived from Poland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Norway, India, Japan, Egypt, South America, and elsewhere. The true friends of Serbia formed various funds under the auspices of the Red Cross Society, and other associations. In September 1914, the Serbian Relief Fund was established in London, while in Scotland the first units of the Scottish Women?s Hospitals for Foreign Service were formed in November of the same year. The aim of this work was to keep the memory of the Scottish Women?s Hospitals in Serbia and with the Serbs in the Great War. In the history of the Serbian nation during the Great War, a special place was held by the Scottish Women?s Hospitals ? a unique humanitarian medical mission. It was the initiative of Dr. Elsie Maud Inglis (1864?1917), a physician, surgeon, promoter of equal rights for women, and with the support of the Scottish Federation of Woman?s Suffrage Societies. The Scottish Women?s Hospitals, which were completely staffed by women, by their participation in the Great War, also contributed to gender and professional equality, especially in medicine. Many of today?s achievements came about thanks to the first generations of women doctors, who fought for equality in choosing to study medicine, and working in the medical field, in time of war and peacetime.

This work concerns involvement of the foreign medical missions during the Serbian Liberation Wars from 1912 until 1918, the work of their members immediately behind the front lines and in the back, healing of the wounded and the diseased, especially at the time of the great epidemics of typhoid fever, and also the efforts of numerous Serbian friends who collected the funds and material for equipping and sending of those missions. An American mission which came first to Serbia, soon after the beginning of the war operations and which was led by Dr. Edward Ryan, was specially mentioned. For many smaller of bigger missions, it is known that they acted in some of the Serbian war zones. A special attention was paid to the work of The Scottish Women's Hospital, its formation and means of funding, work in war conditions, attitudes towards wounded Serbs and posture during the Serbian retreat before the German, Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian occupying armies. This text is largely the author's own view of his two books on medical assistance which the Serbs received from their friends from abroad (Medical Missions at Serbian Battlefields 1912-1918 and The Scottish Women with the Serbs 1914-1918). The first of these booklets contains a list with over 1350 names (of which, approximately 700 are the medical doctors), and the other 1230, were based on the author's personal inspection of the available literature and materials, significantly increased the official data of the Serbian Red Cross about the number of medical staff who reached Serbian battlefields: doubles them for the Balkan wars, while in the Great war they were at least five times greater.

AbstractThis article traces the transformation of gender within nineteenth century American Protestant missions, through comparing the life and post-humus memorializations of Sarah Lanman Smith, a missionary for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Ottoman Syria during 1830s. Through examining the ways that Sarah defined her own identity and gender in relation to different commemorations of her life and work, this article demonstrates that 'Sarah' was increasingly read through the lens of an narrowed binary of gender. This was done through selectively editing her history in a manner that focused upon the education of women and girls, thus affirming the emerging concept of 'women's work for women'. In so doing, this article re-introduces the life of Sarah Smith, deconstructs the way that she was remembered, and presents a new perspective on the dynamic and ever-changing culture that supported and defined nineteenth century Protestant missions. L'article retrace la transformation du genre au sein des missions américaines au 19ème siècle au travers d'une analyse de la vie et des mémorialisations posthumes de Sarah Lanman Smith, une missionnaire de l'American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, qui travailla en Syrie ottomane durant les années 1830. L'article montre, au travers d'une analyse de l'identité et du genre de Sarah et de l'analyse de commémorations de sa vie et de son travail que « Sarah » devint avec le temps de plus en plus comprise au travers d'un prisme binaire du genre. Cette réduction s'opéra par l'édition sélective de son histoire qui se centra dorénavant sur l'éducation des femmes et des filles, confirmant ainsi le concept émergent du « travail de femme pour les femmes ». Ce faisant, l'article restore la vie de Sarah Smith, déconstruit la manière dont on en vint à se souvenir d'elle, et présente une perspective nouvelle sur la culture dynamique et changeante des missions protestantes du 19ème siècle.

Globalization through developed nations encouraged the Malay culture to compete and adapt to the most popular foreign culture globally. In Malay fashion culture, the difficulties in recognizing values related to customs, lead to the loss of national pride; it shows practicalities or pragmatism not only transforms physical appearance but also changes the way of appreciating Malay clothing values. The combination methodologies of the textual and visual content analysis concluded with interviews. The design principles of 'MCCC' displayed clothing content-characteristic reflected Malay fashion, possesses clothing details component that has social, and cultural values and attributes portraying myriad achievements acknowledged by society. Keywords: Malay Women; Malay Clothing; Fashion Design Reflection; Design Principles Model eISSN: 2398-4287© 2022. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians/Africans/Arabians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. DOI

Abstract This article examines the writings of Finnish missionaries: what the missionaries wrote about local people and cultures and how the content of their writings changed during the latter part of the 20th century, which was a period of major political and cultural change in the countries where the missionaries worked. The data consists of 526 writings published in the major Finnish mission journal Suomen Lähetyssanomat during the years 1946-1989. The primary methodological approach is quantitative, and the data is mainly analysed in a descriptive manner. Statistical tests are utilized to show the association between independent and dependent variables. The results are interpreted with the help of the concept of otherness. Missionaries’ writings reveal a more positive attitude towards local people than local cultures, but during the study period a change towards a more positive attitude to culture can be detected. The longer the history of Finnish missions in a particular region, the more positive the missionaries’ attitudes towards local people are. During the study period, the problem-oriented descriptions of cultures shift to solution-oriented descriptions. These changes indicate efforts towards a positive interpretation of otherness. The study reveals the possibilities that quantitative analysis may open up for mission studies.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the impact of the Russian-Ukrainian war on the functioning and development of the European External Action Service. The authors investigated the main stages of the evolution of the European diplomatic service from the time of the establishment of the first information offices of the European Coal and Steel Association in the fifties of the twentieth century to the formation of the European External Action Service in 2009 as part of the reform defined by the Treaty of Lisbon. From the moment of the establishment of the European Communities until the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon, the European diplomatic service was carried out by information missions of the Communities and missions of the European Commission, and later by the Directorate General headed by the European Commissioner for Foreign Affairs and Neighborhood Policy. The competence of these bodies was derived from the powers of the European Commission, therefore the sphere of activity of the European diplomatic service was limited mainly or exclusively to economic issues, and defense and military-political issues remained outside the attention of common European diplomacy. After the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, the European External Action Service was headed by the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. Their formal powers extend to all aspects of foreign policy, but in fact, until 2022, European diplomacy focused on economic issues and was not ready to effectively counter Russian aggression by diplomatic means. Therefore, the needs of guaranteeing the military-political security of the European Union itself, its member states and partners require a review of the institutional mechanism of the European External Action Service in terms of strengthening its role in solving military-political, defense and security issues, in particular, regarding the introduction of centralized models of adoption joint decisions.

This study evaluates the effects that short-term, foreign, Catholic medical mission trips had on the religiosity of the United States-based participants. The subjects of this study participated in Catholic medical missions to Chiapas State, Mexico, in 2014 and 2015. Twenty-two of forty-two participants responded to a survey to assess for any changes in their religiosity and associated attitudes and behaviors. The results revealed that participation in the medical mission was associated with a significant increase in non-organizational religious activity, intrinsic religiosity, concern for health disparities and the burden of illness in the developing world, the promotion of further missions, the provision of service and/or monetary aid to the poor in the missionary's local community, and an increased likelihood to discuss the Christian faith in conversations with others. There was no statistically significant association with organizational religious activity or local participation in evangelization activities. Summary This article reports on the changes seen in the religious attitudes and charitable works performed following participation in a short-term medical mission. After serving on a mission trip to Mexico, we found that United States-based missionaries had an increase in their private religious activities, felt closer to God, were more likely to help the poor in their own neighborhoods, and were more likely to discuss their Christian faith than prior to the mission trip. We discuss possible reasons for these changes.

Purun woven is a local cultural inheritance that must be preserved its local wisdom. Currently, there are many product derivatives from this craft, one of which is a tote bag that is useful for reducing plastic waste when going shopping to malls and markets. This tote bag made from the purun swamp plant that grows around swamp and peat land in South Kalimantan Province is better known as the purun basket. The Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (UMKM) and local creative industries, especially in Banjarbaru City, which has started to innovate with this purun basket has made the purun basket more widely known to foreign countries, including doing ribbon embroidery techniques on the purun basket media. Therefore, it is necessary to socialize this form of ribbon embroidery innovation to the public so that it is more widely known. This service aims to introduce additional skills in ribbon embroidery techniques to the administrators of the Women's Organization Association (GOW) of Banjarbaru City, as well as to increase the enthusiasm of the purun craftsmen in Banjarbaru City. The hope is that these skills can increase income for audiences that come from the administrators of the Women's Organization Association (GOW) of Banjarbaru City in spare time. The results of this service were enthusiastically welcomed by the management, who are also residents of the City of Banjarbaru and a special award among craftsmen because their work is widely recognized

Among the books Oregon missionaries Elkanah and Mary Walker kept in their mission home at Tshimakain was a Bible in which was written a quotation attributed to Martin Luther: “Men are never more unfit for the sacrament, than when they think themselves most fit—and never more fit and prepared for duty than when most humbld ‘sic’ and ashamed in a sense of their own unfitness.” Fitness founded in unfitness, ability based on inability, and autonomy grounded in dependence were qualities that the Walker' sponsor, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), encouraged in its emissaries. The country's first foreign missionary program was established in 1810 by a small group of New Divinity ministers. Dominating the rural pulpits in New England and New York during the Second Great Awakening, New Divinity preachers aimed to legitimate their conception of revival and conversion by appealing to the earlier revival theology of Jonathan Edwards. In the process, they insisted that predestination and free grace did not violate human free will and moral responsibility. Based on these convictions antebellum ABCFM missionaries, including the Oregon group, learned to assess their own spiritual condition and calling. However, the internal conflicts prompted by New Divinity understandings of the conversion experience alternatively produced debilitating and vitalizing effects that continued to trouble these women and men throughout their missionary careers. In effect, the vocation of the missionaries of the Whitman-Spalding mission proceeded from an uncommonly heroic effort to achieve a salvation that could not be guaranteed by their own theology. Moreover, contemporary clashing views regarding the nature and social role of women became intertwined with this disabling discourse. This, in turn, limited the Oregon women's conception of themselves and their capacities as missionaries.

"In Finland we really felt architecture", Lithuanian architect Vytautas Čekanauskas used to say remembering his first study trip to Finland in 1959. Impact of Nordic design is often emphasised when discussing Baltic design of the State Socialist period. When new residential districts in the 1960s were built among the trees in existing pine forests, as happened in Āgenskalna Priedesin Riga, Mustamäe in Tallinn, and Lazdynai in Vilnius, then Tapiola in Helsinki was most often cited as inspiration. Indeed, as opportunities for tourist travel and foreign exchange programs increased in the late 1950s, the Soviet Architects' Association began to organize professional delegations that included several representatives from each of the Baltic republics, dispatched on fact-finding missions to Finland. But why Nordic concept of regionalism became so important in the formation of the Baltic post-war modernism ? In the paper it is argued, that Finnish modern architecture, that was experienced at first hand during the study trips, was perceived as an acceptable model for the Baltic architects who wished to belong to the international community of modern architecture, yet retaining a national idiom and being distinctive within the USSR.

While the European Union (EU) has been finding itself increasingly involved in providing security in its “near abroad,” the proposal of a “Stabilisation and Association Process for Countries of South-Eastern Europe” has marked the commencement of a nearly all-encompassing commitment to progress in the countries of the Western Balkans. In this context, Kosovo—for which the European perspective of the Western Balkans has been declared open—provides a text book example covering all aspects of external assistance as well as security and defense policies. Among the latter, the European Union Rule of Law Mission in the territory of Kosovo (EULEX Kosovo) is indeed characterized by a number of extraordinary factors and circumstances. It is not only EULEX Kosovo's unparalleled European and local staff size or its partly executive mandate that set this EU mission apart from other civilian missions of the Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) which have thus far been deployed to the Western Balkans. Unsurprisingly, the complexity of the mission has generated difficulty in comprehending its deployment, mandate and implementation. Yet, against the backdrop of the 2003 Security Strategy which makes the credibility of the EU's foreign policy dependent on its achievements in the Balkans, a clear understanding of EULEX Kosovo appears paramount.

The Studenica Monastery, built in 1186 A.D., the royal mausoleum of the Nemanjic Dynasty, is considered the forerunner of the Serbian statehood and conscience because in it the first school and hospital were established. It is also where the first book was written in Serbian language. Studenica, as the cradle of the Serbian medicine, produced - and through the following eight centuries, nurtured many educators and iconic figures of the Serbian cultural tradition. Among them was St. Sava, the first Serbian Archbishop, whose name is also borne by one of the highest Serbian civilian orders, which is awarded for extreme dedication and philanthropy in Serbia and worldwide. This here is an attempt to preserve the memory of the philanthropist Hannah Henkin Hardy, who was also personally awarded one of these Serbian orders. Hannah Henkin Hardy (1886-1944) was born in Worchester, U.K., completed a medical school in Melbourne, Australia, and arrived in Serbia in January 1915 together with the first Scottish Women's Hospitals. In Kragujevac, together with the Serbian physicians, and the 'Kolo srpskih sestara,' Mrs. Hardy established the League of Serbian Women to jointly fight the great typhus epidemic. She also founded the out-patients ambulances for the poor in Kragujevac, as well as the soup kitchens, and took part in various humanitarian activities. Mrs. Hardy and her husband Samuel Hardy, together with some other philanthropists, repaired the war-damaged Church of St. George in Topola. She joined the Serbian refugees in their escape from the invading enemy forces to the Adriatic Coast through the dangerous snowbound mountains of Albania and Montenegro. She remembered the suffering of the Serbian people and the dedicated humanitarian activities of the Serbian medical corps and foreign medical missions for the rest of her life. Mrs. and Mr. Hardy dedicated their lives to philanthropy and humanitarian work, helping small and suffering peoples and nations.

This study aims to analyze the process of Timor-Leste's accession to Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in light of its use of three-level games approach. Timor-Leste is located in Southeast Asia, but is the only country in the region that has not yet joined the regional association. Timor-Leste delegations have visited ASEAN member states on several missions to strengthen the capacity of diplomatic officials from this new nation, while also taking the opportunity to express their intention to join ASEAN. To date, however, there has been no formal commitment yet to join ASEAN. This has led some observers to ask why Timor-Leste appears to be dragging its heels on their membership application. This study presents a critical analysis Timor-Leste's potential ASEAN membership and ASEAN's position in relation to existing member with a particular focus on the factors informing its slow progress. We argue that Timor-Leste's primary aim in joining ASEAN is to secure the legitimacy of an independent state and to secure a bridgehead to the international community through the membership of regional cooperative institution. Recognizing that the pursuit of regional stability is prioritized by ASEAN member states in their considerations of Timor-Leste's potential membership, the ambiguity and delays in Timor-Leste's accession to ASEAN can be related to earlier debates that accompanied the membership applications of Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar and Cambodia during the phase of the ASEAN's expansion since the 1990 as well as to its complex relationship to Indonesia – the largest ASEAN member state -, under which Timor-Leste was previously incorporated. This study thus explains not only the possible foreign policy implications of Timor-Leste's flirtation with ASEAN membership, but also highlights variables will have a major impact on ASEAN integration in the future.

Jakarta is a melting pot of cultures from various ethnics and also foreign countries. Even so, Jakarta also has a native population, namely the Betawi ethnic group, who now mostly live on the outskirts of Jakarta because of the development of the capital region. Betawi cuisine is part of an integral Betawi tribe. This Betawi culinary can become one of Indonesia's superior cultural potentials that has special characteristics, high quality and identity, and has a creative ethos and differs creativity, as well as added value economically, technologically and culturally.This research identifies the potential of Betawi culinary to support Jakarta tourism. In addition to culinary, souvenirs can be brought in the form of food and crafts that reflect cultural character. The research method was carried out using a qualitative approach with a grounded theory method. Researchers conducted a desk study activity on culinary tourism potential, compiled a list of Betawi culinary potentials, confirmed the potential of the interviewees (snacks, main food, lunch, dessert, drinks) and made conclusions. The report preparation method is carried out using literature study, field observations, and discussions with informants in the field from the Betawi Women's Association, Betawi Cultural Institute (LKB), Betawi culinary entrepreneurs, and the Jakarta Tourism Office.The achievement of this research is the identification of Ginger Coffee to be used as a potential for souvenirs typical of Betawi which contain locality elements as a basis for developing tourism destinations in Jakarta in particular and Indonesia in general.

Jakarta is a melting pot of cultures from various ethnics and also foreign countries. Even so, Jakarta also has a native population, namely the Betawi ethnic group, who now mostly live on the outskirts of Jakarta because of the development of the capital region. Betawi cuisine is part of an integral Betawi tribe. This Betawi culinary can become one of Indonesia's superior cultural potentials that has special characteristics, high quality and identity, and has a creative ethos and differs creativity, as well as added value economically, technologically and culturally. This research identifies the potential of Betawi culinary to support Jakarta tourism. In addition to culinary, souvenirs can be brought in the form of food and crafts that reflect cultural character. The research method was carried out using a qualitative approach with a grounded theory method. Researchers conducted a desk study activity on culinary tourism potential, compiled a list of Betawi culinary potentials, confirmed the potential of the interviewees (snacks, main food, lunch, dessert, drinks) and made conclusions. The report preparation method is carried out using literature study, field observations, and discussions with informants in the field from the Betawi Women's Association, Betawi Cultural Institute (LKB), Betawi culinary entrepreneurs, and the Jakarta Tourism Office. The achievement of this research is the identification of Ginger Coffee to be used as a potential for souvenirs typical of Betawi which contain locality elements as a basis for developing tourism destinations in Jakarta in particular and Indonesia in general

Introduction. In the 21st century, there is an active involvement of universities in inclusive processes; however, against the backdrop of increasing diversity, new types of inequality arise in higher education. The processes of transformation of organisational cultures in universities and their research agenda under the influence of inclusion need to be studied.The aim of the present research was to analyse the convergence of concepts of academic and inclusive excellence in foreign universities of the world level, the impact of convergence on their missions, the values expressed in official strategies, the research agenda and the infrastructure of scientific collaborations.Methodology and research methods. The authors conducted a content analysis of three strategies of world-class University associations (the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the Association of Universities in Canada, the League of European Research Universities), nine strategies for the development of universities in the USA and Canada, the European Union, and Australia. A scientometric analysis of Web of Science metadata was performed using the VOSViewer software.Results and scientific novelty. The current research confirms the convergence of values of academic excellence and inclusion in research universities. It is revealed that the concept of inclusive excellence of the university is an enriched version of its academic excellence and denotes a set of university strategies and practices aimed at achieving the best results in training, research and services through maintaining diversity and inclusive processes. The world's leading universities are actively involved in the process of creating an inclusive friendly environment and services, which are accessible to all members of the educational process, regardless of their social status and development characteristics. When universities reach academic heights, they recognise inclusion as the next level of their development. In turn, inclusion becomes a factor in the movement of the university towards academic excellence. The key characteristics and contradictions of the convergence of the concepts of inclusive and academic excellence of universities are identified. The local models of inclusive excellence of universities and the contexts, which influence these models, are described. The gaps between educational policies and research agendas of leading universities are revealed. The clusters of international studies on inclusive processes in higher education are highlighted.Practical significance. Russian universities, which implement the federal programme for improvement of international competitiveness based on the values of academic excellence, are developing in accordance with global trends. Therefore, the model of inclusive excellence of the university can be used in practical terms to implement inclusive strategies and overcome social inequality both at the university and outside of it within the framework of a new educational initiative of Russia on academic leadership.

Although economists regularly use sports to study labor-market outcomes, nearly all sports-related studies focus on men. Instead, this paper looks at career breaks and career exits for women's basketball, with a focus on race/ethnicity and country of birth. Data are from the start of the Women's National Basketball Association in 1997 through the 2019 season. White players and foreign-born players have higher likelihoods of leaving the league, conditional on player demographics and productivity.

Our aim here is to strengthen the links between the world-systems perspective and research ongender inequality. Grounding our analysis in theories assessing the connections between genderrelationships and world-system processes, we empirically explore (]) the extent to whichwomen's status in nations overlaps with the world-system position of those nations and (2) theinfluence of women's status within nations on a variety of national characteristics. We find thatwomen's status has a moderately strong association with world-system position, which suggeststhat macro-comparative research may confound the respective effects on a variety of socialcharacteristics of women's status and world-system position if indicators of both factors are notincluded in analyses. We also find that, controlling for world-system position, GDP per capita,and urbanization, in nations where women have higher status (variously measured), total fertilityrates, infant mortality rates, military expenditures, and inflows of foreign direct investinent arelower, and public health care expenditures and per capita meat consumption are higher. Theseresults suggest that women's status likely has social effects that can be seen on the macro-level,and that world-systems analysts should pay more attention to theories of gender in their research.

Objective Training monitoring is an important part of scientific training, and also accumulated a large amount of data, but the analysis and evaluation of biochemical indicators are mostly concentrated on the level of experience and the general, phased and individualized research application of statistical methods. The data mining technology is applied to the analysis and evaluation of the biochemical indexes of competitive sports, the analysis of the data is carried out in the deep level, the potential, new and useful information and knowledge are extracted, and the new exploration ideas are carried out for the analysis of the biochemical indexes of competitive sports, and a more reliable and more powerful data branch is provided for the scientific and efficient training support. Methods Using the literature data method, logic analysis method and expert interview method, the application of the current data mining technology in the analysis of biochemical indicators is summarized. Results The scientific analysis and evaluation of athletes' physical function status has been the focus of domestic and foreign coaches and sports researchers. The application of data mining technology in sports biochemical indicators is also becoming more and more extensive. For example, Mao Jie and others applied the gray ART clustering model analysis method to the monitoring of competitive sports biochemical indicators. Through this data mining model, the coach can easily judge the athlete's competitive physical condition, and can provide a scientific basis for correct training according to the different competitive conditions of each athlete, using different training guidance programs and training methods. Ma Jing et al. explored the feasibility of applying decision tree algorithm and association rules in volleyball biochemical analysis. It was found that C5.0 decision tree and Apriori association rule algorithm can be used to predict and analyze the technical level of women's volleyball players. Li Guangjun and others successfully applied the association rule data mining to the biochemical data analysis of canoeists, and provided a basis for scientific decision-making and analysis of sports training and athlete selection. Zhang Hui designed a data mining system for sports biochemical index based on association rules. The results show that the system has fast data mining rate, short time consuming and high reliability. It provides a more scientific evaluation standard for the data mining of sports biochemical index, and also provides a basis for the future training program. Conclusions With the development of competitive sports, in order to achieve new heights, the application of data mining technology to vast biochemical data is of great significance for the establishment of scientific training evaluation methods and standards, and is also the inevitable development of future sports scientific research.

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Introduction The first “Aquarius Festival” came together in Canberra, at the Australian National University, in the autumn of 1971 and was reprised in 1973 in the small rural town of Nimbin, in northern New South Wales. Both events reflected the Zeitgeist in what was, in some ways, an inchoate expression of the so-called “counterculture” (Roszak). Rather than attempting to analyse the counterculture as a discrete movement with a definable history, I enlist the theory of cultural memes to read the counter culture as a Dawkinsian cluster meme, with this paper offered as “testimonio”, a form of quasi-political memoir that views shifts in the culture through the lens of personal experience (Zimmerman, Yúdice). I track an evolving personal, “internal” topography and map its points of intersection with the radical social, political and cultural changes spawned by the “consciousness revolution” that was an integral part of the counterculture emerging in the 1970s. I focus particularly on the notion of “consciousness raising”, as a Dawkinsian memetic replicator, in the context of the idealistic notions of the much-heralded “New Age” of Aquarius, and propose that this meme has been a persistent feature of the evolution of the “meme cluster” known as the counterculture. Mimesis and the Counterculture Since evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins floated the notion of cultural memes as a template to account for the evolution of ideas within political cultures, a literature of commentary and criticism has emerged that debates the strengths and weaknesses of his proposed model and its application across a number of fields. I borrow the notion to trace the influence of a set of memes that clustered around the emergence of what writer Marilyn Ferguson called The Aquarian Conspiracy, in her 1980 book of that name. Ferguson’s text, subtitled Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time, was a controversial attempt to account for what was known as the “New Age” movement, with its late millennial focus on social and personal transformation. That focus leads me to approach the counterculture (a term first floated by Theodore Roszak) less as a definable historical movement and more as a cluster of aspirational tropes expressing a range of aspects or concerns, from the overt political activism through to experimental technologies for the transformation of consciousness, and all characterised by a critical interrogation of, and resistance to, conventional social norms (Ferguson’s “personal and social transformation”). With its more overtly “spiritual” focus, I read the “New Age” meme, then, as a sub-set of this “cluster meme”, the counterculture. In my reading, “New Age” and “counterculture” overlap, sharing persistent concerns and a broad enough tent to accommodate the serious—the combative political action of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), say, (see Elbaum)—to the light-hearted—the sport of frisbee for example (Stancil). The interrogation of conventional social and political norms inherited from previous generations was a prominent strategy across both movements. Rather than offering a sociological analysis or history of the ragbag counterculture, per se, my discussion here focuses in on the particular meme of “consciousness raising” within that broader set of cultural shifts, some of which were sustained in their own right, some dropping away, and many absorbed into the dominant mainstream culture. Dawkins use of the term “meme” was rooted in the Greek mimesis, to emphasise the replication of an idea by imitation, or copying. He likened the way ideas survive and change in human culture to the natural selection of genes in biological evolution. While the transmission of memes does not depend on a physical medium, such as the DNA of biology, they replicate with a greater or lesser degree of success by harnessing human social media in a kind of “infectivity”, it is argued, through “contagious” repetition among human populations. Dawkins proposed that just as biological organisms could be said to act as “hosts” for replicating genes, in the same way people and groups of people act as hosts for replicating memes. Even before Dawkins floated his term, French biologist Jacques Monod wrote that ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role. (165, emphasis mine) Ideas have power, in Monod’s analysis: “They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighbouring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains” (Monod, cited in Gleick). Emblematic of the counterculture were various “New Age” phenomena such as psychedelic drugs, art and music, with the latter contributing the “Aquarius” meme, whose theme song came from the stage musical (and later, film) Hair, and particularly the lyric that runs: “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius”. The Australian Aquarius Festivals of 1971 and 1973 explicitly invoked this meme in the way identified by Monod and the “Aquarius” meme resonated even in Australia. Problematising “Aquarius” As for the astrological accuracy of the “Age of Aquarius meme”, professional astrologers argue about its dating, and the qualities that supposedly characterise it. When I consulted with two prominent workers in this field for the preparation of this article, I was astonished to find their respective dating of the putative Age of Aquarius were centuries apart! What memes were being “hosted” here? According to the lyrics: When the moon is in the seventh house And Jupiter aligns with Mars Then peace will guide the planets And love will steer the stars. (Hair) My astrologer informants assert that the moon is actually in the seventh house twice every year, and that Jupiter aligns with Mars every two years. Yet we are still waiting for the outbreak of peace promised according to these astrological conditions. I am also informed that there’s no “real” astrological underpinning for the aspirations of the song’s lyrics, for an astrological “Age” is not determined by any planet but by constellations rising, they tell me. Most important, contrary to the aspirations embodied in the lyrics, peace was not guiding the planets and love was not about to “steer the stars”. For Mars is not the planet of love, apparently, but of war and conflict and, empowered with the expansiveness of Jupiter, it was the forceful aggression of a militaristic mind-set that actually prevailed as the “New Age” supposedly dawned. For the hippified summer of love had taken a nosedive with the tragic events at the Altamont speedway, near San Francisco in 1969, when biker gangs, enlisted to provide security for a concert performance by The Rolling Stones allegedly provoked violence, marring the event and contributing to a dawning disillusionment (for a useful coverage of the event and its historical context see Dalton). There was a lot of far-fetched poetic licence involved in this dreaming, then, but memes, according to Nikos Salingaros, are “greatly simplified versions of patterns”. “The simpler they are, the faster they can proliferate”, he writes, and the most successful memes “come with a great psychological appeal” (243, 260; emphasis mine). What could be retrieved from this inchoate idealism? Harmony and understanding Sympathy and trust abounding No more falsehoods or derisions Golden living dreams of visions Mystic crystal revelation And the mind’s true liberation Aquarius, Aquarius. (Hair) In what follows I want to focus on this notion: “mind’s true liberation” by tracing the evolution of this project of “liberating” the mind, reflected in my personal journey. Nimbin and Aquarius I had attended the first Aquarius Festival, which came together in Canberra, at the Australian National University, in the autumn of 1971. I travelled there from Perth, overland, in a Ford Transit van, among a raggedy band of tie-dyed hippie actors, styled as The Campus Guerilla Theatre Troupe, re-joining our long-lost sisters and brothers as visionary pioneers of the New Age of Aquarius. Our visions were fueled with a suitcase full of potent Sumatran “buddha sticks” and, contrary to Biblical prophesies, we tended to see—not “through a glass darkly” but—in psychedelic, pop-, and op-art explosions of colour. We could see energy, man! Two years later, I found myself at the next Aquarius event in Nimbin, too, but by that time I inhabited a totally different mind-zone, albeit one characterised by the familiar, intense idealism. In the interim, I had been arrested in 1971 while “tripping out” in Sydney on potent “acid”, or LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide); had tried out political engagement at the Pram Factory Theatre in Melbourne; had camped out in protest at the flooding of Lake Pedder in the Tasmanian wilderness; met a young guru, started meditating, and joined “the ashram”—part of the movement known as the Divine Light Mission, which originated in India and was carried to the “West” (including Australia) by an enthusiastic and evangelical following of drug-toking drop-outs who had been swarming through India intent on escaping the dominant culture of the military-industrial complex and the horrors of the Vietnam War. Thus, by the time of the 1973 event in Nimbin, while other festival participants were foraging for “gold top” magic mushrooms in farmers’ fields, we devotees had put aside such chemical interventions in conscious awareness to dig latrines (our “service” project for the event) and we invited everyone to join us for “satsang” in the yellow, canvas-covered, geodesic dome, to attend to the message of peace. The liberation meme had shifted through a mutation that involved lifestyle-changing choices that were less about alternative approaches to sustainable agriculture and more about engaging directly with “mind’s true liberation”. Raising Consciousness What comes into focus here is the meme of “consciousness raising”, which became the persistent project within which I lived and worked and had my being for many years. Triggered initially by the ingestion of those psychedelic substances that led to my shocking encounter with the police, the project was carried forward into the more disciplined environs of my guru’s ashrams. However, before my encounter with sustained spiritual practice I had tried to work the shift within the parameters of an ostensibly political framework. “Consciousness raising” was a form of political activism borrowed from the political sphere. Originally generated by Mao Zedong in China during the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the vested colonial interests that were choking Chinese nationalism in the 1940s, to our “distant, foreign brains” (Monod), as Western revolutionary romantics, Chairman Mao and his Little Red Book were taken up, in a kind of international counterculture solidarity with revolutionaries everywhere. It must be admitted, this solidarity was a fairly superficial gesture. Back in China it might be construed as part of a crude totalitarian campaign to inculcate Marxist-Leninist political ideas among the peasant classes (see Compestine for a fictionalised account of traumatic times; Han Suyin’s long-form autobiography—an early example of testimonio as personal and political history—offers an unapologetic account of a struggle not usually construed as sympathetically by Western commentators). But the meme (and the processes) of consciousness raising were picked up by feminists in the United States in the late 1960s and into the 1970s (Brownmiller 21) and it was in this form I encountered it as an actor with the politically engaged theatre troupe, The Australian Performing Group, at Carlton’s Pram Factory Theatre in late 1971. The Performance Group I performed as a core member of the Group in 1971-72. Decisions as to which direction the Group should take were to be made as a collective, and the group veered towards anarchy. Most of the women were getting together outside of the confines of the Pram Factory to raise their consciousness within the Carlton Women’s Liberation Cell Group. While happy that the sexual revolution was reducing women’s sexual inhibitions, some of the men at the Factory were grumbling into their beer, disturbed that intimate details of their private lives—and their sexual performance—might be disclosed and raked over by a bunch of radical feminists. As they began to demand equal rights to orgasm in the bedroom, the women started to seek equal access within the performance group, too. They requested rehearsal time to stage the first production by the Women’s Theatre Group, newly formed under the umbrella of the wider collective. As all of the acknowledged writers in the Group so far were men—some of whom had not kept pace in consciousness raising—scripts tended to be viewed as part of a patriarchal plot, so Betty Can Jump was an improvised piece, with the performance material developed entirely by the cast in workshop-style rehearsals, under the direction of Kerry Dwyer (see Blundell, Zuber-Skerritt 21, plus various contributors at www.pramfactory.com/memoirsfolder/). I was the only male in the collective included in the cast. Several women would have been more comfortable if no mere male were involved at all. My gendered attitudes would scarcely have withstood a critical interrogation but, as my partner was active in launching the Women’s Electoral Lobby, I was given the benefit of the doubt. Director Kerry Dwyer liked my physicalised approach to performance (we were both inspired by the “poor theatre” of Jerzy Grotowski and the earlier surrealistic theories of Antonin Artaud), and I was cast to play all the male parts, whatever they would be. Memorable material came up in improvisation, much of which made it into the performances, but my personal favorite didn’t make the cut. It was a sprawling movement piece where I was “born” out of a symbolic mass of writhing female bodies. It was an arduous process and, after much heaving and huffing, I emerged from the birth canal stammering “SSSS … SSSS … SSMMMO-THER”! The radical reversioning of culturally authorised roles for women has inevitably, if more slowly, led to a re-thinking of the culturally approved and reinforced models of masculinity, too, once widely accepted as entirely biologically ordained rather than culturally constructed. But the possibility of a queer re-versioning of gender would be recognised only slowly. Liberation Meanwhile, Dennis Altman was emerging as an early spokesman for gay, or homosexual, liberation and he was invited to address the collective. Altman’s stirring book, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation, had recently been published, but none of us had read it. Radical or not, the Group had shown little evidence of sensitivity to gender-queer issues. My own sexuality was very much “oppressed” rather than liberated and I would have been loath to use “queer” to describe myself. The term “homosexual” was fraught with pejorative, quasi-medical associations and, in a collective so divided across strict and sometimes hostile gender boundaries, deviant affiliations got short shrift. Dennis was unsure of his reception before this bunch of apparent “heteros”. Sitting at the rear of the meeting, I admired his courage. It took more self-acceptance than I could muster to confront the Group on this issue at the time. Somewhere in the back of my mind, “homosexuality” was still something I was supposed to “get over”, so I failed to respond to Altman’s implicit invitation to come out and join the party. The others saw me in relationship with a woman and whatever doubts they might have carried about the nature of my sexuality were tactfully suspended. Looking back, I am struck by the number of simultaneous poses I was trying to maintain: as an actor; as a practitioner of an Artaudian “theatre of cruelty”; as a politically committed activist; and as a “hetero”-sexual. My identity was an assemblage of entities posing as “I”; it was as if I were performing a self. Little gay boys are encouraged from an early age to hide their real impulses, not only from others—in the very closest circle, the family; at school; among one’s peers—but from themselves, too. The coercive effects of shaming usually fix the denial into place in our psyches before we have any intellectual (or political) resources to consider other options. Growing up trying to please, I hid my feelings. In my experience, it could be downright dangerous to resist the subtle and gross coercions that applied around gender normativity. The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, of the British object-relations school, argues that when the environment does not support the developing personality and requires the person to sacrifice his or her own spontaneous needs to adapt to environmental demands, there is not even a resting-place for individual experience and the result is a failure in the primary narcissistic state to evolve an individual. The “individual” then develops as an extension of the shell rather than that of the core [...] What there is left of a core is hidden away and is difficult to find even in the most far-reaching analysis. The individual then exists by not being found. The true self is hidden, and what we have to deal with clinically is the complex false self whose function is to keep this true self hidden. (212) How to connect to that hidden core, then? “Mind’s true liberation...” Alienated from the performative version of selfhood, but still inspired by the promise of liberation, even in the “fuzzy” form for which my inchoate hunger yearned (sexual liberation? political liberation? mystical liberation?), I was left to seek out a more authentic basis for selfhood, one that didn’t send me spinning along the roller-coaster of psychedelic drugs, or lie to me with the nostrums of a toxic, most forms of which would deny me, as a sexual, moral and legal pariah, the comforts of those “anchorage points to the social matrix” identified by Soddy (cited in Mol 58). My spiritual inquiry was “counter” to these institutionalised models of religious culture. So, I began to read my way through a myriad of books on comparative religion. And to my surprise, rather than taking up with the religions of antique cultures, instead I encountered a very young guru, initially as presented in a simply drawn poster in the window of Melbourne’s only vegetarian restaurant (Shakahari, in Carlton). “Are you hungry and tired of reading recipe books?” asked the figure in the poster. I had little sense of where that hunger would lead me, but it seemed to promise a fulfilment in ways that the fractious politics of the APG offered little nourishment. So, while many of my peers in the cities chose to pursue direct political action, and others experimented with cooperative living in rural communes, I chose the communal lifestyle of the ashram. In these different forms, then, the conscious raising meme persisted when other challenges raised by the counterculture either faded or were absorbed in the mainstream. I finally came to realise that the intense disillusionment process I had been through (“dis-illusionment” as the stripping away of illusions) was the beginning of awakening, in effect a “spiritual initiation” into a new way of seeing myself and my “place” in the world. Buddhist teachers might encourage this very kind of stripping away of false notions as part of their teaching, so the aspiration towards the “true liberation” of the mind expressed in the Aquarian visioning might be—and in my case, actually has been and continues to be—fulfilled to a very real extent. Gurus and the entire turn towards Eastern mysticism were part of the New Age meme cluster prevailing during the early 1970s, but I was fortunate to connect with an enduring set of empirical practices that haven’t faded with the fashions of the counterculture. A good guitarist would never want to play in public without first tuning her instrument. In a similar way, it is now possible for me to tune my mind back to a deeper, more original source of being than the socially constructed sense of self, which had been so fraught with conflicts for me. I have discovered that before gender, and before sexuality, in fact, pulsing away behind the thicket of everyday associations, there is an original, unconditioned state of beingness, the awareness of which can be reclaimed through focused meditation practices, tested in a wide variety of “real world” settings. For quite a significant period of time I worked as an instructor in the method on behalf of my guru, or mentor, travelling through a dozen or so countries, and it was through this exposure that I was able to observe that the practices worked independently of culture and that “mind’s true liberation” was in many ways a de-programming of cultural indoctrinations (see Marsh, 2014, 2013, 2011 and 2007 for testimony of this process). In Japan, Zen roshi might challenge their students with the koan: “Show me your original face, before you were born!” While that might seem to be an absurd proposal, I am finding that there is a potential, if unexpected, liberation in following through such an inquiry. As “hokey” as the Aquarian meme-set might have been, it was a reflection of the idealistic hope that characterised the cluster of memes that aggregated within the counterculture, a yearning for healthier life choices than those offered by the toxicity of the military-industrial complex, the grossly exploitative effects of rampant Capitalism and a politics of cynicism and domination. The meme of the “true liberation” of the mind, then, promised by the heady lyrics of a 1970s hippie musical, has continued to bear fruit in ways that I could not have imagined. References Altman, Dennis. Homosexual Oppression and Liberation. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1972. Blundell, Graeme. The Naked Truth: A Life in Parts. 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During the War on Terror, the United States military has been conducting an increasing number of foreign campaigns by remote control using drones—also called unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs)—to extend the reach of military power and augment the technical precision of targeted strikes while minimizing bodily risk to American combatants. Stationed on bases throughout the southwest, operators fly weaponized drones over the Middle East. Viewing the battle zone through a computer screen that presents them with imagery captured from a drone-mounted camera, these combatants participate in war from a safe distance via an interface that resembles a video game. Increasingly, this participation takes the form of targeted killing. Despite their relative physical safety, in 2008 reports began mounting that like boots-on-the-ground combatants, many drone operators seek the services of chaplains or other mental health professionals to deal with the emotional toll of their work (Associated Press; Schachtman). Questions about the nature of the stress or trauma that drone operators experience have become a trope in news coverage of drone warfare (see Bumiller; Bowden; Saleton; Axe). This was exemplified in May 2013, when former Air Force drone pilot Brandon Bryant became a public figure after speaking to National Public Radio about his remorse for participating in targeted killing strikes and his subsequent struggle with post-traumatic stress (PTS) (Greene and McEvers). Stories like Bryant’s express American culture’s struggle to understand the role screen-mediated, remotely controlled killing plays in shifting the location of combatants’s sense of moral agency. That is, their sense of their ability to act based on their own understanding of right and wrong. Historically, one of the primary ways that psychiatry has conceptualized combat trauma has been as combatants’s psychological response losing their sense of moral agency on the battlefield (Lifton).This articleuses the popular science fiction novel Ender's Game as an analytic lens through which to examine the ways that screen-mediated warfare may result in combat trauma by investigating the ways in which it may compromise moral agency. The goal of this analysis is not to describe the present state of drone operators’s experience (see Asaro), but rather to compare and contrast contemporary public discourses on the psychological impact of screen-mediated war with the way it is represented in one of the most influential science fiction novels of all times (The book won the Nebula Award in 1985, the Hugo Award in 1986, and appears on both the Modern Library 100 Best Novels and American Library Association’s “100 Best Books for Teens” lists). In so doing, the paper aims to counter prevalent modes of critical analysis of screen-mediated war that cannot account for drone operators’s trauma. For decades, critics of postmodern warfare have denounced how fighting from inside tanks, the cockpits of planes, or at office desks has removed combatants from the experiences of risk and endangerment that historically characterized war (see Gray; Levidow & Robins). They suggest that screen-mediation enables not only physical but also cognitive and emotional distance from the violence of war-fighting by circumscribing it in a “magic circle.” Virtual worlds scholars adopted the term “magic circle” from cultural historian Johan Huizinga, who described it as the membrane that separates the time and space of game-play from those of real life (Salen and Zimmerman). While military scholars have long recognized that only 2% of soldiers can kill without hesitation (Grossman), critics of “video game wars” suggest that screen-mediation puts war in a magic circle, thereby creating cyborg human-machine assemblages capable of killing in cold blood. In other words, these critics argue that screen-mediated war distributes agency between humans and machines in such a way that human combatants do not feel morally responsible for killing. In contrast, Ender’s Game suggests that even when militaries utilize video game aesthetics to create weapons control interfaces, screen-mediation alone ultimately cannot blur the line between war and play and thereby psychically shield cyborg soldiers from combat trauma.Orson Scott Card’s 1985 novel Ender’s Game—and the 2013 film adaptation—tells the story of a young boy at an elite military academy. Set several decades after a terrible war between humans and an alien race called the buggers, the novel follows the life of a boy named Ender. At age 6, recruiters take Andrew “Ender” Wiggin from his family to begin military training. He excels in all areas and eventually enters officer training. There he encounters a new video game-like simulator in which he commands space ship battalions against increasingly complex configurations of bugger ships. At the novel’s climax, Ender's mentor, war hero Mazer Rackham, brings him to a room crowded with high-ranking military personnel in order to take his final test on the simulator. In order to win Ender opts to launch a massive bomb, nicknamed “Little Doctor”, at the bugger home world. The image on his screen of a ball of space dust where once sat the enemy planet is met by victory cheers. Mazer then informs Ender that since he began officer training, he has been remotely controlling real ships. The video game war was, "Real. Not a game" (Card 297); Ender has exterminated the bugger species. But rather than join the celebration, Ender is devastated to learn he has committed "xenocide." Screen-mediation, the novel shows, can enable people to commit acts that they would otherwise find heinous.US military advisors have used the story to set an agenda for research and development in augmented media. For example, Dr. Michael Macedonia, Chief Technology Officer of the Army Office for Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation told a reporter for the New York Times that Ender's Game "has had a lot of influence on our thinking" about how to use video game-like technologies in military operations (Harmon; Silberman; Mead). Many recent programs to develop and study video game-like military training simulators have been directly inspired by the book and its promise of being able to turn even a six-year-old into a competent combatant through well-structured human-computer interaction (Mead). However, it would appear that the novel’s moral regarding the psychological impact of actual screen-mediated combat did not dissuade military investment in drone warfare. The Air Force began using drones for surveillance during the Gulf War, but during the Global War on Terror they began to be equipped with weapons. By 2010, the US military operated over 7,000 drones, including over 200 weapons-ready Predator and Reaper drones. It now invests upwards of three-billion dollars a year into the drone program (Zucchino). While there are significant differences between contemporary drone warfare and the plot of Ender's Game—including the fact that Ender is a child, that he alone commands a fleet, that he thinks he is playing a game, and that, except for a single weapon of mass destruction, he and his enemies are equally well equipped—for this analysis, I will focus on their most important similarities: both Ender and actual drone operators work on teams for long shifts using video game-like technology to remotely control vehicles in aerial combat against an enemy. After he uses the Little Doctor, Mazer and Graff, Ender's long-time training supervisors, first work to circumvent his guilt by reframing his actions as heroic. “You're a hero, Ender. They've seen what you did, you and the others. I don't think there's a government on Earth that hasn't voted you their highest metal.” “I killed them all, didn't I?” Ender asked. “All who?” asked Graff. “The buggers? That was the idea.” Mazer leaned in close. “That's what the war was for.” “All their queens. So I killed all their children, all of everything.” “They decided that when they attacked us. It wasn't your fault. It's what had to happen.” Ender grabbed Mazer's uniform and hung onto it, pulling him down so they were face to face. “I didn't want to kill them all. I didn't want to kill anybody! I'm not a killer! […] but you made me do it, you tricked me into it!” He was crying. He was out of control. (Card 297–8)The novel up to this point has led us to believe that Ender at the very least understands that what he does in the game will be asked of him in real life. But his traumatic response to learning the truth reveals that he was in the magic circle. When he thinks he is playing a game, succeeding is a matter of ego: he wants to be the best, to live up to the expectations of his trainers that he is humanity’s last hope. When the magic circle is broken, Ender reconsiders his decision to use the Little Doctor. Tactics he could justify to win the game, reframed as real military tactics, threaten his sense of himself as a moral agent. Being told he is a hero provides no solace.Card wrote the novel during the Cold War, when computers were coming to play an increasingly large role in military operations. Historians of military technology have shown that during this time human behavior began to be defined in machine-like, functionalist terms by scientists working on cybernetic systems (see Edwards; Galison; Orr). Human skills were defined as components of large technological systems, such as tanks and anti-aircraft weaponry: a human skill was treated as functionally the same as a machine one. The only issue of importance was how all the components could work together in order to meet strategic goals—a cybernetic problem. The reasons that Mazer and Graff have for lying to Ender suggest that the author believed that as a form of technical augmentation, screen-mediation can be used to evacuate individual moral agency and submit human will to the command of the larger cybernetic system. Issues of displaced agency in the military cyborg assemblage are apparent in the following quote, in which Mazer compares Ender himself to the bomb he used to destroy the bugger home world: “You had to be a weapon, Ender. Like a gun, like the Little Doctor, functioning perfectly but not knowing what you were aimed at. We aimed you. We're responsible. If there was something wrong, we did it” (298). Questions of distributed agency have also surfaced in the drone debates. Government and military leaders have attempted to depersonalize drone warfare by assuring the American public that the list of targets is meticulously researched: drones kill those who we need killed. Drone warfare, media theorist Peter Asaro argues, has “created new and complex forms of human-machine subjectivity” that cannot be understood by considering the agency of the technology alone because it is distributed between humans and machines (25). While our leaders’s decisions about who to kill are central to this new cyborg subjectivity, the operators who fire the weapons nevertheless experience at least a retrospective sense of agency. As phenomenologist John Protevi notes, in the wake of wars fought by modern military networks, many veterans diagnosed with PTS still express guilt and personal responsibility for the outcomes of their participation in killing (Protevi). Mazer and Graff explain that the two qualities that make Ender such a good weapon also create an imperative to lie to him: his compassion and his innocence. For his trainers, compassion means a capacity to truly think like others, friend or foe, and understand their motivations. Graff explains that while his trainers recognized Ender's compassion as an invaluable tool, they also recognized that it would preclude his willingness to kill.It had to be a trick or you couldn't have done it. It's the bind we were in. We had to have a commander with so much empathy that he would think like the buggers, understand them and anticipate them. So much compassion that he could win the love of his underlings and work with them like a perfect machine, as perfect as the buggers. But somebody with that much compassion could never be the killer we needed. Could never go into battle willing to win at all costs. If you knew, you couldn't do it. If you were the kind of person who would do it even if you knew, you could never have understood the buggers well enough. (298)In learning that the game was real, Ender learns that he was not merely coming to understand a programmed simulation of bugger behavior, but their actual psychology. Therefore, his compassion has not only helped him understand the buggers’ military strategy, but also to identify with them.Like Ender, drone operators spend weeks or months following their targets, getting to know them and their routines from a God’s eye perspective. They both also watch the repercussions of their missions on screen. Unlike fighter pilots who drop bombs and fly away, drone operators use high-resolution cameras and fly much closer to the ground both when flying and assessing the results of their strikes. As one drone operator interviewed by the Los Angeles Times explained, "When I flew the B-52, it was at 30,000 to 40,000 feet, and you don't even see the bombs falling … Here, you're a lot closer to the actual fight, or that's the way it seems" (Zucchino). Brookings Institute scholar Peter Singer has argued that in this way screen mediation actually enables a more intimate experience of violence for drone operators than airplane pilots (Singer).The second reason Ender’s trainers give for lying is that they need someone not only compassionate, but also innocent of the horrors of war. The war veteran Mazer explains: “And it had to be a child, Ender,” said Mazer. “You were faster than me. Better than me. I was too old and cautious. Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart. But you didn't know. We made sure you didn't know" (298). When Ender discovers what he has done, he loses not only his innocence but his sense of himself as a moral agent. After such a trauma, his heart is no longer whole.Actual drone operators are, of course, not kept in a magic circle, innocent of the repercussions of their actions. Nor do they otherwise feel as though they are playing, as several have publicly stated. Instead, they report finding drone work tedious, and some even play video games for fun (Asaro). However, Air Force recruitment advertising makes clear analogies between the skills they desire and those of video game play (Brown). Though the first generations of drone operators were pulled from the ranks of flight pilots, in 2009 the Air Force began training them from the ground. Many drone operators, then, enter the role having no other military service and may come into it believing, on some level, that their work will be play.Recent military studies of drone operators have raised doubts about whether drone operators really experience high rates of trauma, suggesting that the stresses they experience are seated instead in occupational issues like long shifts (Ouma, Chappelle, and Salinas; Chappelle, Psy, and Salinas). But several critics of these studies have pointed out that there is a taboo against speaking about feelings of regret and trauma in the military in general and among drone operators in particular. A PTS diagnosis can end a military career; given the Air Force’s career-focused recruiting emphasis, it makes sense that few would come forward (Dao). Therefore, it is still important to take drone operator PTS seriously and try to understand how screen-mediation augments their experience of killing.While critics worry that warfare mediated by a screen and joystick leads to a “‘Playstation’ mentality towards killing” (Alston 25), Ender's Game presents a theory of remote-control war wherein this technological redistribution of the act of killing does not, in itself, create emotional distance or evacuate the killer’s sense of moral agency. In order to kill, Ender must be distanced from reality as well. While drone operators do not work shielded by the magic circle—and therefore do not experience the trauma of its dissolution—every day when they leave the cyborg assemblage of their work stations and rejoin their families they still have to confront themselves as individual moral agents and bear their responsibility for ending lives. In both these scenarios, a human agent’s combat trauma serves to remind us that even when their bodies are physically safe, war is hell for those who fight. This paper has illustrated how a science fiction story can be used as an analytic lens for thinking through contemporary discourses about human-technology relationships. However, the US military is currently investing in drones that are increasingly autonomous from human operators. This redistribution of agency may reduce incidence of PTS among operators by decreasing their role in, and therefore sense of moral responsibility for, killing (Axe). Reducing mental illness may seem to be a worthwhile goal, but in a world wherein militaries distribute the agency for killing to machines in order to reduce the burden on humans, societies will have to confront the fact that combatants’s trauma cannot be a compass by which to measure the morality of wars. Too often in the US media, the primary stories that Americans are told about the violence of their country’s wars are those of their own combatants—not only about their deaths and physical injuries, but their suicide and PTS. To understand war in such a world, we will need new, post-humanist stories where the cyborg assemblage and not the individual is held accountable for killing and morality is measured in lives taken, not rates of mental illness. ReferencesAlston, Phillip. “Report of the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, Addendum: Study on Targeted Killings.” United Nations Human Rights Council (2010). Asaro, Peter M. “The Labor of Surveillance and Bureaucratized Killing: New Subjectivities of Military Drone Operators”. Social Semiotics 23.2 (2013): 196-22. Associated Press. “Predator Pilots Suffering War Stress.” Military.com 2008. Axe, David. “How to Prevent Drone Pilot PTSD: Blame the ’Bot.” Wired June 2012.Bowden, Mark. “The Killing Machines: How to Think about Drones.” The Atlantic Sep. 2013.Brown, Melissa T. Enlisting Masculinity: The Construction of Gender in US Military Recruiting Advertising during the All-Volunteer Force. London: Oxford University Press, 2012. Bumiller, Elisabeth. “Air Force Drone Operators Report High Levels of Stress.” New York Times 18 Dec. 2011: n. pag. Card, Orson Scott. Ender’s Game. Tom Doherty Associates, Inc., 1985. Chappelle, Wayne, D. Psy, and Amber Salinas. “Psychological Health Screening of Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) Operators and Supporting Units.” Paper presented at the Symposium on Mental Health and Well-Being across the Military Spectrum, Bergen, Norway, 12 April 2011: 1–12. Dao, James. “Drone Pilots Are Found to Get Stress Disorders Much as Those in Combat Do.” New York Times 22 Feb. 2013: n. pag. Edwards, Paul N. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.Galison, Peter. “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision.” Critical Inquiry 21.1 (1994): 228.Gray, Chris Hables “Posthuman Soldiers in Postmodern War.” Body & Society 9.4 (2003): 215–226. 27 Nov. 2010.Greene, David, and Kelly McEvers. “Former Air Force Pilot Has Cautionary Tales about Drones.” National Public Radio 10 May 2013.Grossman, David. On Killing. Revised. Boston: Back Bay Books, 2009. Harmon, Amy. “More than Just a Game, But How Close to Reality?” New York Times 3 Apr. 2003: n. pag. Levidow, Les, and Robins. Cyborg Worlds: The Military Information Society. London: Free Association Books, 1989. Lifton, Robert Jay. Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans: Neither Victims nor Executioners. New York: Random House, 1973. Mead, Corey. War Play: Video Games and the Future of Armed Conflict. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. Orr, Jackie. Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.Ouma, J.A., W.L. Chappelle, and A. Salinas. Facets of Occupational Burnout among US Air Force Active Duty and National Guard/Reserve MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper Operators. Air Force Research Labs Technical Report AFRL-SA-WP-TR-2011-0003. Wright-Patterson AFB, OH: Air Force Research Laboratory. 2011.Protevi, John. “Affect, Agency and Responsibility: The Act of Killing in the Age of Cyborgs.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7.3 (2008): 405–413. Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Saleton, William. “Ghosts in the Machine: Do Remote-Control War Pilots Get Combat Stress?” Slate.com Aug. 2008. Schachtman, Nathan. “Shrinks Help Drone Pilots Cope with Robo-Violence.” Wired Aug. 2008.Silberman, Steve. “The War Room.” Wired Sep. 2004: 1–5.Singer, P.W. Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Penguin Press, 2009. Zucchino, David. “Drone Pilots Have Front-Row Seat on War, from Half a World Away.” Los Angeles Times 21 Feb. 2010: n. pag.

Women in federal politics are under-represented today and always have been. At no time in the history of the federal parliament have women achieved equal representation with men. There have never been an equal number of women in any federal cabinet. Women have never held an equitable number of executive positions of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) or the Liberal Party. Australia has had only one female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, and she was the recipient of sexist treatment in the parliament and the media. A 2019 report by Plan International found that girls and women, were “reluctant to pursue a career in politics, saying they worry about being treated unfairly.” The Report author said the results were unsurprisingwhen you consider how female politicians are still treated in Parliament and the media in this country, is it any wonder the next generation has no desire to expose themselves to this world? Unfortunately, in Australia, girls grow up seeing strong, smart, capable female politicians constantly reduced to what they’re wearing, comments about their sexuality and snipes about their gender.What voters may not always see is how women in politics respond to sexist treatment, or to bullying, or having to vote against their principles because of party rules, or to having no support to lead the party. Rather than being political victims and quitting, there is a ground-swell of women who are fighting back. The rage they feel at being excluded, bullied, harassed, name-called, and denied leadership opportunities is being channelled into rage against the structures that deny them equality. The rage they feel is building resilience and it is building networks of women across the political divide. This article highlights some female MPs who are “maintaining the rage”. It suggests that the rage that is evident in their public responses is empowering them to stand strong in the face of adversity, in solidarity with other female MPs, building their resilience, and strengthening calls for social change and political equality.Her-story of Women’s MovementsThroughout the twentieth century, women stood for equal rights and personal empowerment driven by rage against their disenfranchisement. Significant periods include the early 1900s, with suffragettes gaining the vote for women. The interwar period of 1919 to 1938 saw women campaign for financial independence from their husbands (Andrew). Australian women were active citizens in a range of campaigns for improved social, economic and political outcomes for women and their children.Early contributions made by women to Australian society were challenges to the regulations and of female sexuality and reproduction. Early twentieth century feminist organisations such The Women’s Peace Army, United Association of Women, the Australian Federation of Women’s Societies for Equal Citizenship, the Union of Australian Women, the National Council of Women, and the Australian Federation of Women Voters, proved the early forerunners to the 1970s Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM). It was in many of these early campaigns that the rage expressed in the concept of the “personal is political” (Hanisch) became entrenched in Australian feminist approaches to progressive social change. The idea of the “personal is political” encapsulated that it was necessary to challenge and change power relations, achievable when women fully participated in politics (van Acker 25). Attempts by women during the 1970s to voice concerns about issues of inequality, including sexuality, the right to abortion, availability of childcare, and sharing of household duties, were “deemed a personal problem” and not for public discussion (Hanisch). One core function of the WLM was to “advance women’s positions” via government legislation or, as van Acker (120) puts it, the need for “feminist intervention in the state.” However, in advocating for policy reform, the WLM had no coherent or organised strategy to ensure legislative change. The establishment of the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL), together with the Femocrat strategy, sought to rectify this. Formed in 1972, WEL was tasked with translating WLM concerns into government policy.The initial WEL campaign took issues of concern to WLM to the incoming Whitlam government (1972-1975). Lyndall Ryan (73) notes: women’s liberationists were the “stormtroopers” and WEL the “pragmatic face of feminism.” In 1973 Whitlam appointed Elizabeth Reid, a member of WLM, as Australia’s first Women’s Advisor. Of her appointment, Reid (3) said, “For the first time in our history we were being offered the opportunity to attempt to implement what for years we had been writing, yelling, marching and working towards. Not to respond would have felt as if our bluff had been called.” They had the opportunity in the Whitlam government to legislatively and fiscally address the rage that drove generations of women to yell and march.Following Reid were the appointments of Sara Dowse and Lyndall Ryan, continuing the Femocrat strategy of ensuring women were appointed to executive bureaucratic roles within the Whitlam government. The positions were not well received by the mainly male-dominated press gallery and parliament. As “inside agitators” (Eisenstein) for social change the central aim of Femocrats was social and economic equity for women, reflecting social justice and progressive social and public policy. Femocrats adopted a view about the value of women’s own lived experiences in policy development, application and outcome. The role of Senator Susan Ryan is of note. In 1981, Ryan wrote and introduced the Sex Discrimination Bill, the first piece of federal legislation of its type in Australia. Ryan was a founding member of WEL and was elected to the Senate in 1975 on the slogan “A woman’s place is in the Senate”. As Ryan herself puts it: “I came to believe that not only was a woman’s place in the House and in the Senate, as my first campaign slogan proclaimed, but a feminist’s place was in politics.” Ryan, the first Labor woman to represent the ACT in the Senate, was also the first Labor woman appointed as a federal Minister.With the election of the economic rationalist Hawke and Keating Governments (1983-1996) and the neoliberal Howard Government (1996-2007), what was a “visible, united, highly mobilised and state-focused women’s movement” declined (Lake 260). This is not to say that women today reject the value of women’s voices and experiences, particularly in politics. Many of the issues of the 1970s remain today: domestic violence, unequal pay, sexual harassment, and a lack of gender parity in political representation. Hence, it remains important that women continue to seek election to the national parliament.Gender Gap: Women in Power When examining federal elections held between 1972 and 2016, women have been under-represented in the lower house. In none of these elections have women achieved more than 30 per cent representation. Following the 1974 election less that one per cent of the lower house were women. No women were elected to the lower house at the 1975 or 1977 election. Between 1980 and 1996, female representation was less than 10 per cent. In 1996 this rose to 15 per cent and reached 29 per cent at the 2016 federal election.Following the 2016 federal election, only 32 per cent of both chambers were women. After the July 2016 election, only eight women were appointed to the Turnbull Ministry: six women in Cabinet and two women in the Outer Cabinet (Parliament of Australia). Despite the higher representation of women in the ALP, this is not reflected in the number of women in the Shadow Cabinet. Just as female parliamentarians have never achieved parity, neither have women in the Executive Branch.In 2017, Australia was ranked 50th in the world in terms of gender representation in parliament, between The Philippines and South Sudan. Globally, there are 38 States in which women account for less than 10 per cent of parliamentarians. As at January 2017, the three highest ranking countries in female representation were Rwanda, Bolivia and Cuba. The United Kingdom was ranked 47th, and the United States 104th (IPU and UNW). Globally only 18 per cent of government ministers are women (UNW). Between 1960 and 2013, 52 women became prime ministers worldwide, of those 43 have taken office since 1990 (Curtin 191).The 1995 United Nations (UN) Fourth World Conference on Women set a 30 per cent target for women in decision-making. This reflects the concept of “critical mass”. Critical mass proposes that for there to be a tipping balance where parity is likely to emerge, this requires a cohort of a minimum of 30 per cent of the minority group.Gender scholars use critical mass theory to explain that parity won’t occur while there are only a few token women in politics. Rather, only as numbers increase will women be able to build a strong enough presence to make female representation normative. Once a 30 per cent critical mass is evident, the argument is that this will encourage other women to join the cohort, making parity possible (Childs & Krook 725). This threshold also impacts on legislative outcomes, because the larger cohort of women are able to “influence their male colleagues to accept and approve legislation promoting women’s concerns” (Childs & Krook 725).Quotas: A Response to Gender InequalityWith women representing less than one in five parliamentarians worldwide, gender quotas have been introduced in 90 countries to redress this imbalance (Krook). Quotas are an equal opportunity measure specifically designed to re-dress inequality in political representation by allocating seats to under-represented groups (McCann 4). However, the effectiveness of the quota system is contested, with continued resistance, particularly in conservative parties. Fine (3) argues that one key objection to mandatory quotas is that they “violate the principle of merit”, suggesting insufficient numbers of women capable or qualified to hold parliamentary positions.In contrast, Gauja (2) suggests that “state-mandated electoral quotas work” because in countries with legislated quotas the number of women being nominated is significantly higher. While gender quotas have been brought to bear to address the gender gap, the ability to challenge the majority status of men has been limited (Hughes).In 1994 the ALP introduced rule-based party quotas to achieve equal representation by 2025 and a gender weighting system for female preselection votes. Conversely, the Liberal Party have a voluntary target of reaching 50 per cent female representation by 2025. But what of the treatment of women who do enter politics?Fig. 1: Portrait of Julia Gillard AC, 27th Prime Minister of Australia, at Parliament House, CanberraInside Politics: Misogyny and Mobs in the ALPIn 2010, Julia Gillard was elected as the leader of the governing ALP, making her Australia’s first female Prime Minister. Following the 2010 federal election, called 22 days after becoming Prime Minister, Gillard was faced with the first hung parliament since 1940. She formed a successful minority government before losing the leadership of the ALP in June 2013. Research demonstrates that “being a female prime minister is often fraught because it challenges many of the gender stereotypes associated with political leadership” (Curtin 192). In Curtin’s assessment Gillard was naïve in her view that interest in her as the country’s first female Prime Minister would quickly dissipate.Gillard, argues Curtin (192-193), “believed that her commitment to policy reform and government enterprise, to hard work and maintaining consensus in caucus, would readily outstrip the gender obsession.” As Curtin continues, “this did not happen.” Voters were continually reminded that Gillard “did not conform to the traditional.” And “worse, some high-profile men, from industry, the Liberal Party and the media, indulged in verbal attacks of a sexist nature throughout her term in office (Curtin 192-193).The treatment of Gillard is noted in terms of how misogyny reinforced negative perceptions about the patriarchal nature of parliamentary politics. The rage this created in public and media spheres was double-edged. On the one hand, some were outraged at the sexist treatment of Gillard. On the other hand, those opposing Gillard created a frenzy of personal and sexist attacks on her. Further attacking Gillard, on 25 February 2011, radio broadcaster Alan Jones called Gillard, not only by her first-name, but called her a “liar” (Kwek). These attacks and the informal way the Prime Minister was addressed, was unprecedented and caused outrage.An anti-carbon tax rally held in front of Parliament House in Canberra in March 2011, featured placards with the slogans “Ditch the Witch” and “Bob Brown’s Bitch”, referring to Gillard and her alliance with the Australian Greens, led by Senator Bob Brown. The Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and other members of the Liberal Party were photographed standing in front of the placards (Sydney Morning Herald, Vertigo). Criticism of women in positions of power is not limited to coming from men alone. Women from the Liberal Party were also seen in the photo of derogatory placards decrying Gillard’s alliances with the Greens.Gillard (Sydney Morning Herald, “Gillard”) said she was “offended when the Leader of the Opposition went outside in the front of Parliament and stood next to a sign that said, ‘Ditch the witch’. I was offended when the Leader of the Opposition stood next to a sign that ascribed me as a man’s bitch.”Vilification of Gillard culminated in October 2012, when Abbott moved a no-confidence motion against the Speaker of the House, Peter Slipper. Abbott declared the Gillard government’s support for Slipper was evidence of the government’s acceptance of Slipper’s sexist attitudes (evident in allegations that Slipper sent a text to a political staffer describing female genitals). Gillard responded with what is known as the “Misogyny speech”, pointing at Abbott, shaking with rage, and proclaiming, “I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man” (ABC). Apart from vilification, how principles can be forsaken for parliamentary, party or electoral needs, may leave some women circumspect about entering parliament. Similar attacks on political women may affirm this view.In 2010, Labor Senator Penny Wong, a gay Member of Parliament and advocate of same-sex marriage, voted against a bill supporting same-sex marriage, because it was not ALP policy (Q and A, “Passion”). Australian Marriage Equality spokesperson, Alex Greenwich, strongly condemned Wong’s vote as “deeply hypocritical” (Akersten). The Sydney Morning Herald (Dick), under the headline “Married to the Mob” asked:a question: what does it now take for a cabinet minister to speak out on a point of principle, to venture even a mild criticism of the party position? ... Would you object if your party, after fixing some areas of discrimination against a minority group of which you are a part, refused to move on the last major reform for that group because of ‘tradition’ without any cogent explanation of why that tradition should remain? Not if you’re Penny Wong.In 2017, during the postal vote campaign for marriage equality, Wong clarified her reasons for her 2010 vote against same-sex marriage saying in an interview: “In 2010 I had to argue a position I didn’t agree with. You get a choice as a party member don’t you? You either resign or do something like that and make a point, or you stay and fight and you change it.” Biding her time, Wong used her rage to change policy within the ALP.In continuing personal attacks on Gillard, on 19 March 2012, Gillard was told by Germaine Greer that she had a “big arse” (Q and A, “Politics”) and on 27 August 2012, Greer said Gillard looked like an “organ grinder’s monkey” (Q and A, “Media”). Such an attack by a prominent feminist from the 1970s, on the personal appearance of the Prime Minister, reinforced the perception that it was acceptable to criticise a woman in this position, in ways men have never been. Inside Politics: Leadership and Bullying inside the Liberal PartyWhile Gillard’s leadership was likely cut short by the ongoing attacks on her character, Liberal Deputy leader Julie Bishop was thwarted from rising to the leadership of the Liberal Party, thus making it unlikely she will become the Liberal Party’s first female Prime Minister. Julie Bishop was Australia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs from 2013 to 2018 and Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party from 2007 to 2018, having entered politics in 1998.With the impending demise of Prime Minister Turnbull in August 2018, Bishop sought support from within the Liberal Party to run for the leadership. In the second round of leadership votes Bishop stood for the leadership in a three-cornered race, coming last in the vote to Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison. Bishop resigned as the Foreign Affairs Minister and took a seat on the backbench.When asked if the Liberal Party would elect a popular female leader, Bishop replied: “When we find one, I’m sure we will.” Political journalist Annabel Crabb offered further insight into what Bishop meant when she addressed the press in her red Rodo shoes, labelling the statement as “one of Julie Bishop’s chilliest-ever slapdowns.” Crabb, somewhat sardonically, suggested this translated as Bishop listing someone with her qualifications and experience as: “Woman Works Hard, Is Good at Her Job, Doesn't Screw Up, Loses Out Anyway.”For political journalist Tony Wright, Bishop was “clearly furious with those who had let their testosterone get the better of them and their party” and proceeded to “stride out in a pair of heels in the most vivid red to announce that, despite having resigned the deputy position she had occupied for 11 years, she was not about to quit the Parliament.” In response to the lack of support for Bishop in the leadership spill, female members of the federal parliament took to wearing red in the parliamentary chambers signalling that female members were “fed up with the machinations of the male majority” (Wright).Red signifies power, strength and anger. Worn in parliament, it was noticeable and striking, making a powerful statement. The following day, Bishop said: “It is evident … that there is an acceptance of a level of behaviour in Canberra that would not be tolerated in any other workplace across Australia" (Wright).Colour is political. The Suffragettes of the early twentieth century donned the colours of purple and white to create a statement of unity and solidarity. In recent months, Dr Kerryn Phelps used purple in her election campaign to win the vacated seat of Wentworth, following Turnbull’s resignation, perhaps as a nod to the Suffragettes. Public anger in Wentworth saw Phelps elected, despite the electorate having been seen as a safe Liberal seat.On 21 February 2019, the last sitting day of Parliament before the budget and federal election, Julie Bishop stood to announce her intention to leave politics at the next election. To some this was a surprise. To others it was expected. On finishing her speech, Bishop immediately exited the Lower House without acknowledging the Prime Minister. A proverbial full-stop to her outrage. She wore Suffragette white.Victorian Liberal backbencher Julia Banks, having declared herself so repelled by bullying during the Turnbull-Dutton leadership delirium, announced she was quitting the Liberal Party and sitting in the House of Representatives as an Independent. Banks said she could no longer tolerate the bullying, led by members of the reactionary right wing, the coup was aided by many MPs trading their vote for a leadership change in exchange for their individual promotion, preselection endorsements or silence. Their actions were undeniably for themselves, for their position in the party, their power, their personal ambition – not for the Australian people.The images of male Liberal Members of Parliament standing with their backs turned to Banks, as she tended her resignation from the Liberal Party, were powerful, indicating their disrespect and contempt. Yet Banks’s decision to stay in politics, as with Wong and Bishop is admirable. To maintain the rage from within the institutions and structures that act to sustain patriarchy is a brave, but necessary choice.Today, as much as any time in the past, a woman’s place is in politics, however, recent events highlight the ongoing poor treatment of women in Australian politics. Yet, in the face of negative treatment – gendered attacks on their character, dismissive treatment of their leadership abilities, and ongoing bullying and sexism, political women are fighting back. They are once again channelling their rage at the way they are being treated and how their abilities are constantly questioned. They are enraged to the point of standing in the face of adversity to bring about social and political change, just as the suffragettes and the women’s movements of the 1970s did before them. The current trend towards women planning to stand as Independents at the 2019 federal election is one indication of this. Women within the major parties, particularly on the conservative side of politics, have become quiet. Some are withdrawing, but most are likely regrouping, gathering the rage within and ready to make a stand after the dust of the 2019 election has settled.ReferencesAndrew, Merrindahl. Social Movements and the Limits of Strategy: How Australian Feminists Formed Positions on Work and Care. Canberra. Australian National University. 2008.Akersten, Matt. “Wong ‘Hypocrite’ on Gay Marriage.” SameSame.com 2010. 12 Sep. 2016 <http://www.samesame.com.au/news/5671/Wong-hypocrite-on-gay-marriage>.Banks, Julia. Media Statement, 27 Nov. 2018. 20 Jan. 2019 <http://juliabanks.com.au/media-release/statement-2/>.Childs, Sarah, and Mona Lena Krook. “Critical Mass Theory and Women’s Political Representation.” Political Studies 56 (2008): 725-736.Crabb, Annabel. “Julie Bishop Loves to Speak in Code and She Saved Her Best One-Liner for Last.” ABC News 28 Aug. 2018. 20 Jan. 2019 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-28/julie-bishop-women-in-politics/10174136>.Curtin, Jennifer. “The Prime Ministership of Julia Gillard.” Australian Journal of Political Science 50.1 (2015): 190-204.Dick, Tim. “Married to the Mob.” Sydney Morning Herald 26 July 2010. 12 Sep. 2016 <http://m.smh.com.au/federal-election/married-to-the-mob-20100726-0r77.html?skin=dumb-phone>.Eisenstein, Hester. Inside Agitators: Australian Femocrats and the State. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1996.Fine, Cordelia. “Do Mandatory Gender Quotas Work?” The Monthly Mar. 2012. 6 Feb. 2018 <https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2012/march/1330562640/cordelia-fine/status-quota>.Gauja, Anika. “How the Liberals Can Fix Their Gender Problem.” The Conversation 13 Oct. 2017. 16 Oct. 2017 <https://theconversation.com/how-the-liberals-can-fix-their-gender-problem- 85442>.Hanisch, Carol. “Introduction: The Personal is Political.” 2006. 18 Sep. 2016 <http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html>.Hughes, Melanie. “Intersectionality, Quotas, and Minority Women's Political Representation Worldwide.” American Political Science Review 105.3 (2011): 604-620.Inter-Parliamentary Union. Equality in Politics: A Survey of Women and Men in Parliaments. 2008. 25 Feb. 2018 <http://archive.ipu.org/pdf/publications/equality08-e.pdf>.Inter-Parliamentary Union and United Nations Women. Women in Politics: 2017. 2017. 29 Jan. 2018 <https://www.ipu.org/resources/publications/infographics/2017-03/women-in-politics-2017>.Krook, Mona Lena. “Gender Quotas as a Global Phenomenon: Actors and Strategies in Quota Adoption.” European Political Science 3.3 (2004): 59–65.———. “Candidate Gender Quotas: A Framework for Analysis.” European Journal of Political Research 46 (2007): 367–394.Kwek, Glenda. “Alan Jones Lets Rip at ‘Ju-liar’ Gillard.” Sydney Morning Herald 25 Feb. 2011. 12 Sep. 2016 <http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/alan-jones-lets-rip-at-juliar-gillard-20110224-1b7km.html>.Lake, Marilyn. Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1999.McCann, Joy. “Electoral Quotas for Women: An International Overview.” Parliament of Australia Library 14 Nov. 2013. 1 Feb. 2018 <https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp1314/ElectoralQuotas>.Parliament of Australia. “Current Ministry List: The 45th Parliament.” 2016. 11 Sep. 2016 <http://www.aph.gov.au/about_parliament/parliamentary_departments/parliamentary_library/parliamentary_handbook/current_ministry_list>.Plan International. “Girls Reluctant to Pursue a Life of Politics Cite Sexism as Key Reason.” 2018. 20 Jan. 2019 <https://www.plan.org.au/media/media-releases/girls-have-little-to-no-desire-to-pursue-a-career-in-politics>.Q and A. “Mutilation and the Media Generation.” ABC Television 27 Aug. 2012. 28 Sep. 2016 <http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s3570412.htm>.———. “Politics and Porn in a Post-Feminist World.” ABC Television 19 Mar. 2012. 12 Sep. 2016 <http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s3451584.htm>.———. “Where Is the Passion?” ABC Television 26 Jul. 2010. 23 Mar. 2018 <http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s2958214.htm?show=transcript>.Reid, Elizabeth. “The Child of Our Movement: A Movement of Women.” Different Lives: Reflections on the Women’s Movement and Visions of Its Future. Ed. Jocelynne Scutt. Ringwood: Penguin 1987. 107-120.Ryan, L. “Feminism and the Federal Bureaucracy 1972-83.” Playing the State: Australian Feminist Interventions. Ed. Sophie Watson. Sydney: Allen and Unwin 1990.Ryan, Susan. “Fishes on Bicycles.” Papers on Parliament 17 (Sep. 1992). 1 Mar. 2018 <https://www.aph.gov.au/~/~/link.aspx?_id=981240E4C1394E1CA3D0957C42F99120>.Sydney Morning Herald. “‘Pinocchio Gillard’: Strong Anti-Gillard Emissions at Canberra Carbon Tax Protest.” 23 Mar. 2011. 12 Sep. 2016 <http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/pinocchio-gillard-strong-antigillard-emissions-at-canberra-carbon-tax-protest-20110323-1c5w7.html>.———. “Gillard v Abbott on the Slipper Affair.” 10 Oct. 2012. 12 Sep. 2016 <http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-10-09/gillard-vs-abbott-on-the-slipper-affair/4303618>.United Nations Women. 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In April 2022, I found myself in the Harold Pinter Theatre on the West End, waiting to watch Jodie Comer star as protagonist Tessa Ensler in Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie. Surprised that after two years of on-and-off-again lockdowns due to COVID-19, I had finally made it all the way overseas to see this Australian play on the British stage, I asked the person next to me if they were excited to see the show. She was a young, twenty-something woman who smiled and said, “I can’t wait to see Jodie Comer in the flesh”. I asked what she knew about the play, and she told me a friend had given her a ticket because she was a Jodie Comer fan and that she did not know anything about the play before coming tonight. I was apprehensive on her behalf, knowing she was about to see a profound performance of a woman processing her own rape on stage, without forewarning. I realised in this moment how far this play had come in a brief period, from its first small run at the Stables Theatre in Sydney to London’s West End, in spite of a global pandemic. After the play ended, I turned to ask my neighbour what she thought. She was crying. After several moments, she praised Comer’s performance, launching into her thoughts on how powerful this play was, how profound an impact it could have for discussions of sexual assault. Prima Facie’s international success, emerging in the wake of the #MeToo movement and COVID-19 pandemic, seems like no coincidence. The negative impact of these two cataclysmic and simultaneous—in that they have impacted and intersected in Western society since their initial emergence—events on the collective health and wellbeing of society cannot be understated (Sehrbrock). They highlight the need to consider how we can enact change within our structural systems to foster frameworks that support our most vulnerable. If we acknowledge the potential for contemporary theatre as a site for political change, we can evaluate its vital role in the wake of such events in framing the problematic issues that exist within society, such as rape culture, as something we can and should critically reflect upon; something Prima Facie has the power to do. While Prima Facie does not have the ability to lessen the impact of COVID-19, its run on the West End marked the beginning of a return—in Western countries at least—to live theatre and events, and as such, a return to the commentary on life and society that theatre can provide. Leading theatre scholar Lisa Fitzpatrick asserts that contemporary rape plays “emerge from personal and collective experience” (220), showing us that contemporary theatre like Prima Facie is created both because of, and to provide a discourse on, real-world situations. This article will argue that Prima Facie has immense value in reshaping what wellbeing means to us in light of these global events—particularly in relation to the #MeToo Movement, which centred women's voices and experiences in contemporary legal and political spheres—and thus shows the possibility for shifting policies, practices, and perceptions to promote and protect the self. The play expertly interrogates the political, legal, and social systems in which those in a liberal democracy, like Australia—and by extension, the UK and USA—all live; those which arguably have been established with the overall wellbeing and benefit of society in mind. The play’s protagonist, Tessa Ensler, is an accomplished criminal barrister who has built her career representing defendants accused of sexual assault. When Tessa herself is the victim of a rape, she faces the reality that society’s legal and political systems, while pursuing 'legal truth’—the idea that truth in a courtroom is often shaped by cultural beliefs and perceptions, rather than objective truth (Tidmarsh and Hamilton 2)—, do not make adequate adjustments for a woman’s lived experience of sexual assault. Shannon Taylor elaborates on this from her own experience as a sexual assault victim when she states that fact is capitulated and, under the male gaze of patriarchy and arguments of legal dialect where concepts of truth, morality, ethics and justice are foreign entities, the experience, the evidence of survivors is oftentimes rendered useless, or at best fragmented, diluted, sanitised, modified. (Taylor 64) Victims of sexual assault are in a unique position as the complainant and (usually) sole witness in a prosecution case and thus bear a greater burden than many other types of crimes (Taslitz 6). These cases can fail to recognise the trauma undergone by a woman in such a position, and the struggle to provide convincing evidence in legal prosecution—or, as in most cases, absolution—of the defendant. Moreover, the staggeringly low conviction rate for sexual assault, which sits at less than one percent (Daly and Bouhours 566), does not bode well for an alleged victim’s confidence in reporting such a crime, or agreeing to stand trial if an eventual prosecution were to happen. The audience is positioned to witness Tessa peel back the patriarchal layers of the legal system and look at the socio-cultural barriers that have held victims of sexual assault back from achieving justice: “we do not interrogate the law’s own assumptions, instead we persist in interrogating the victim … there cannot be any more excuses. It must change” (Miller 93). Thus, the spectators of Prima Facie are left with the play’s final words, “something has to change” (Miller 97), lingering on, challenging them to conceive of a system where the wellbeing of sexual assault victims is prioritised alongside the pursuit of legal truth. It ultimately calls for a revision of the systems that exist, and for the promotion of significant, systemic change, both to better the wellbeing of individual victims, but also our society as a whole. Miller attacks these systems in a strategic manner, persuading the audience into sharing in this belief that for society to achieve wellbeing for all its members, it must ameliorate the parts that neglect and damage our most vulnerable. Tessa’s journey over the course of the play has the power to threaten these systems within society, highlighting the ways in which they expose victims of sexual assault to re-traumatisation, social rejection, and a statistically likely loss in court (Spohn 89). Tessa’s story arc is presented to the audience as symptomatic of the systems—specifically the law—that uphold problematic representations of rape and its victims in society. Tessa is first presented to the audience as a young, determined criminal barrister with an uncompromising stance towards the sexual assault cases she takes on. She argues that it is not her job to determine if the crime happened, but rather “find holes in the case and keep the police honest. Protect society” (Miller 31). Tessa holds firm to the belief that the law is fair and just, that innocent until proven guilty is “the bedrock of how you keep a society civilised” (Miller 30) and “if a few guilty people get off then it’s because the job wasn’t done well enough by the prosecutor and the police” (Miller 35). The audience watch Tessa cross-examine alleged victims of rape; doing so with disarming frankness, posturing that she is testing the law, “test[ing] her word, her version of the story” (Miller 41). In reality, she is conforming to the long-held socio-cultural belief that, despite rape being a deeply personal trauma against oneself, complainants must remain clear and “composed” (Miller 41) to have a chance at winning their case within the rules of the law, upheld via gendered scripts of what a rape victim should look like (Donat and D’Emilio; Fraser; Herman; Ullman). Feminist scholar Tara Roeder grapples with this struggle for women who testify in rape cases, as they “will indeed find themselves under intense pressure to tell clear, concise, and coherent accounts of the violence they have undergone” (18), which can serve to challenge and deny their experience if not presented in the neat package that the legal system demands. This ideology begins to waiver when Tessa is sexually assaulted by her colleague Julian. In acting out the particulars of her own rape on stage—by not only someone Tessa knows, but someone she works with and has been dating—Tessa reminds the audience that rape is not only more pervasive and common in society than acknowledged, but that it can often happen in a way that is less clear cut than is often socially understood. Tessa becomes the voice of reason in a culturally complex issue, positioned on both ‘sides’ of the law—a defence barrister and later victim—and thus in an impossible situation of an adversarial legal system which demands that one side wins and the other loses. This highlights the problematic nature of legal processes being a game, where the ‘winner’ of the case is which lawyer tells the best version of their client’s story (Miller 35). What this system fails to acknowledge is that the reality of attending a trial—where they are in many ways positioned as being ‘on trial’—and having to recall an immense bodily and mental trauma whilst on the stand may often expose rape victims to social ostracism and denial. Additionally, in many cases the absence of corroborative evidence in a rape case is enough to tip the scales in favour of the defendant, yet this is the paradoxical nature of rape: sometimes all you have is your word against theirs. Literature and Human Rights scholar Eleni Coundouriotis unpacks the mechanics of this tension in her article “You Only Have Your Word”, making it evident that “the sexual assault complainant’s testimony has unique significance because it carries most of the burden of proof on the issue of consent” (366), and, despite being a witness to the crime being committed, their testimony can be easily dissected within a trial, and positioned to the judge or jury—depending on the case—as not true by its very nature of being a story. For legal truth, however, it must be ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ as to whether the crime was committed: a difficult thing to determine in issues of consent, as “the defence doesn’t have to prove she did not consent[,] you just have to point out that HE DID NOT KNOW there was NO CONSENT. That it was reasonable for him to think it was okay” (Miller 40). The ultimate difficulty in trying a rape case is that there will almost always be ‘reasonable’ doubt as to the events that took place. The audience sees Tessa process this in real time after she is raped, where she acknowledges the fallibility of the law—and her own previously espoused beliefs—in the attempted prosecution of alleged rapists, and in protecting the women who have been raped. It is only when Tessa faces the same system as a victim, complainant, and witness that she begins to question whether the legal system deserves her unwavering faith. Tessa realises while giving her own testimony that it is more likely that “the events described by the victim in her testimony are usually ambiguous” (Harrison et al. 27) and thus less likely to fit the ‘rape script’ expected of them. Tessa once believed that the peripheral details of a rape (such as what the victim was wearing, how her hands were positioned, how often she attempted to say no, how much she had to drink) are key to determining the legitimacy of the rape occurring. Yet as Tessa herself learns: “as a victim-survivor, let me tell you that the rape and perpetrator are vividly recalled, the peripheral details not so clearly” (Miller 94). Only upon experiencing this first-hand is Tessa—and by extension the audience—able to see that the legal system is not actually fair and just in all cases. Miller emphasises this arduous process for rape victims, reinforcing that it can be re-traumatising to “relive their humiliating experience and then doubted as to their motives for reporting a hideous crime against their person” (7). As the audience go on this journey with Tessa, they are exposed to the idea that to establish better personal and legal outcomes for rape victims, we must reshape the way in which we not only try rape cases, but how we perceive victims themselves. Tessa’s rape is portrayed as emblematic of a larger societal issue that is rooted in the structural systems that have long favoured those accused of sexual assault, rather than those victimised by it. Andrew Taslitz captures this when he states that “despite several decades of a renewed women’s movement and increasing attention to the problem of rape, judges and juries continue to be sceptical of rape, demanding greater proof than for many other types of crimes and demonstrating deep suspicion of victims” (6). Prima Facie shows the law’s inability—shaped by preconceived rape stereotypes coupled with complex patriarchal gender dynamics—to try rape cases in a way that accounts for the lived experience of women and the complicated nuances of rape. Prima Facie proposes that the law’s inadequate grasp of the victim’s mental state after the event, and inability to find ways to interrogate or prosecute the accused in a manner that protects their victims, are to its detriment. This is not to say that the solution for rape cases is to absolve victims from having to testify about their experience, but to explore other methods for pinpointing the truth without re-traumatising victims. In the writer’s note of Prima Facie, Miller reinforces this idea when she posits that “for Tessa, seeing the law for what it is, an imperfect human construct, constantly evolving within social changes, frees her to find her voice and call us all to action” (9). Prima Facie does not attempt to provide solutions, but challenges us to consider how we are complicit in the systems that do not protect some of its vulnerable members, and thus ask ourselves what we can do to reimagine the way society could and should change for the better. What Prima Facie does successfully is to politicise the criminal justice system to question our ability to evolve as a society if we are effectively unable to interrogate how the law is failing its most vulnerable. Miller builds a relatable and engaging narrative of an individual who understands and supports the system but is confronted with the reality that she is unable to receive justice within this system. In doing so, the audience is presented with a subversive rape narrative—that is, a narrative in which the patriarchal structures that protect and uphold rape culture are being interrogated and challenged to reveal their flaws and demand socio-cultural change—that is not only hard to ignore, but one that challenges us to consider how these systems are working against us to impede our achievement of individual and collective wellbeing. Roeder captures the nuanced power of subversive rape stories filtering into social conscience, asserting that “the continued construction—and the ethical reception—of rape narratives … can not only help victims of violence regain control of their own experience but are valuable in expanding narrowly conceived social constructions of what rape victims ‘are like’” (27-8). Miller’s play positions the audience as witness to a relatable, witty, and intelligent woman as the victim of such a crime who can rebuild herself in the aftermath, despite the system’s fallibilities and inclination to silence and erase her experience. Like the audience member who sat beside me at Prima Facie’s West End debut, and who had such an emotional reaction to the play’s subject matter, it is easy to see how bearing witness to Tessa’s rape and the subsequent trial is vital. It can generate necessary discourse about the value in challenging these systems to promote individual wellbeing for victims of sexual assault, and by extension, push us towards creating a better, more just society. Tessa’s experience in the court room is “shaped by the male experience, its cases decided by generations of male judges and its statutes legislated by generations of male politicians” (Miller 7), which she highlights can fail to accept a victim’s testimony as truth if it does not fit within the patriarchal rules of ‘rape’. The audience are encouraged through Tessa’s story to consider their own complicity in such systems, as a direct result of societal misconceptions about rape and rape victims being shaped by the male—or patriarchal—experience. The audience are presented with multiple rape narratives in Prima Facie, leading us to see Tessa’s trial, testimony, and cross-examination, aptly titled in the play as “the Silencing” (Miller 81), as the hardest to watch. Miller weaves a complex tapestry, which reminds us that fundamentally, each story of rape varies in its particulars; there is no one narrative that can contain these explosive and singular moments of disruption. Yet, placed beside each other, these experiences … function as a reminder of the complex power associated with not only the telling, but the hearing, of such stories. (Roeder 28) After the audience is led to this conclusion, the play’s voice of reckoning demands of them that something must change—and that this change begins with them. Miller does not ask this only of the average theatre-goer, but of those who have the power to make a difference. For its opening run with Griffin Theatre Company in Sydney, Prima Facie staged a one-night performance specifically for female judges, barristers, solicitors, lawyers, and politicians, followed by what Miller describes as “a long and exciting discussion where played out before me was an authentic intersection between art and social change” (Miller 8). Miller saw the positive reception to the play as “a beacon of hope for future generations” (Miller 8), as she witnessed the Law Reform Commission attend a matinee, and a series of boys’ schools attend the production. Additionally, many performances internationally and in Australia have been followed by poignant Q&As, positioning this play as a site for political and social change. This is achieved by placing the production team alongside professionals within the field of law to promote these discussions. Miller saw the potential for this play not only to challenge social perceptions of rape held by people within society, but also as a driving force for enacting real and tangible change to the systems by generating discourse with those who, like (the fictional) Tessa, work within such systems. Similarly, for its West End debut, Prima Facie collaborated with The Schools Consent Project, gifting tickets to partner school groups, providing support to students who attended, and donating some of its profits to this not-for-profit organisation. The founder of The Schools Consent Project, Kate Parker, spoke of this collaboration as crucial, in that the play shines a critical spotlight on the themes of consent, the criminal justice system and the female experience – topics we discuss daily with young people in classrooms across the country in our lawyer-led workshops on consent. The production is radical for a West End stage, as is its willingness to have a wider community reach. We are very excited about the impact of this partnership on the behaviour and thinking of the young people we work with. (qtd. in Wood, par. 3) The targeted community outreach linked to its West End run has propelled Prima Facie’s impact beyond the theoretical—or fictional—and into the practical, promoting new ways of thinking about the systems within which society operate, and encouraging those who will effectively dominate the system’s future to consider ways in which we can change. The collective wellbeing of society and its individuals can be brought about by the types of theatrical narratives that have emerged in the contemporary era, like Prima Facie, as it encourages a necessary discourse about the pervasiveness of rape and the fallibilities of the (still) patriarchal systems we have in place through which to examine and test accusations of this kind. This fallibility is preventing society from becoming better; improving for the greater good of all who belong to it. For us to do so, we must consider how our collective complicity in such systems has only contributed to its success in neglecting rape victims at their most vulnerable. Lester Brathwaite captures this eloquently in his review of Prima Facie’s Broadway review for Entertainment Weekly when he writes: “the emotional and physical toll of a performance like this, and the truths it brings to light, is akin to a public service” (par. 16). The play and performance’s ability to reveal the layers of oppression that sit beneath the surface of society and force the audience to look within are powerful, and potentially transformative. References Bix, Brian H. "Linguistic Meaning and Legal Truth." Law and Language: Current Legal Issues. Vol. 15. Eds. Michael Freeman and Fiona Smith. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. 34-44. Coundouriotis, Eleni. “‘You Only Have Your Word’: Rape and Testimony.” Human Rights Quarterly 35. 2 (2013): 365–85. Daly, Kathleen, and Brigitte Bouhours. “Rape and Attrition in the Legal Process: A Comparative Analysis of Five Countries.” Crime and Justice 39.1 (2010): 565–650. Donat, P., and J. D'Emilio. “A Feminist Redefinition of Rape and Sexual Assault: Historical Foundations and Change.” Journal of Social Issues 48 (1992): 9–22. Fitzpatrick, Lisa. “Signifying Rape: Problems of Representing Sexual Violence on Stage.” Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives: Violence and Violation. Eds. Sorcha Gunne and Zoe Brigley Thompson. London: Routledge, 2010. 154–165. Fraser, Courtney. “From Ladies First to Asking for It: Benevolent Sexism in the Maintenance of Rape Culture.” California Law Review 103 (2015): 141–203. Harrison D.H. Lee, Jason M. Tangen, Blake M. McKimmie, and Barbara M. Masser. “Guided by the Rape Schema: The Influence of Event Order on How Jurors Evaluate the Victim’s Testimony in Cases of Rape.” Psychology, Crime & Law 29.1 (2022): 25–55. Herman, Dianne F. “The Rape Culture.” Culture 1.10 (1988): 45–53. Miller, Suzie. Prima Facie. London: Nick Hern Books, 2022. Roeder, Tara. “‘You Have to Confess’: Rape and the Politics of Storytelling.” Journal of Feminist Scholarship 9 (2015): 18–29. Sehrbrock, Joachim. “Social Justice on the Couch: Collapse and Repair of Social Thirdness.” British Journal of Psychotherapy 37.4 (2021): 673–689. Spohn, Cassia. “Sexual Assault Case Processing: The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same.” International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 9.1 (2020): 86–94. Taslitz, Andrew E. Rape and the Culture of the Courtroom. New York: NYU Press, 1999. Taylor, Shannon. “Sexual Assault and the Law – a Diary of a Victim/Survivor's Experience.” Women against Violence: An Australian Feminist Journal 5 (1998): 64–72. Tidmarsh, Patrick, and Gemma Hamilton. “Misconceptions of Sexual Crimes against Adult Victims: Barriers to Justice.” Australian Institute of Criminology: Trends & Issues in Crime and Criminal Justice 611 (2020): 1–18. Ullman, Sarah E. “The Social Context of Talking about Sexual Assault.” Talking about Sexual Assault: Society's Response to Survivors. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2010. Wood, Alex. “West End Prima Facie with Jodie Comer Partners with Schools Consent Project.” WhatsOnStage, 15 Mar. 2022. <https://www.whatsonstage.com/london-theatre/news/west-end-prima-facie-jodie-comer-school-consent_56107.html>.