Journal articles on the topic 'Women gamblers Victoria Psychology'

Previous studies have found significant differences between men and women who have sought help for problems associated with their gambling. While this raises the possibility of differing treatment needs, much of the research into treating problem gamblers is based on all-male samples. This article seeks to remedy this situation by reporting on sex differences in the treatment of 1,520 problem gamblers, almost half of whom are female, who sought help in the state of Victoria, Australia, between July 1996 and June 1997. In contrast to the primarily external concerns such as employment and legal matters reported by males, females attending for problem gambling counseling were more likely to report problems with their physical and intrapersonal functioning and were more likely to report resolution of their problems. Male clients were more likely to have their cases closed and be referred to other agencies for assistance.

In this qualitative study, 25 females were interviewed who gambled frequently on the Internet. This paper describes the women's views about the Internet as a place to gamble and the associated risks. Volunteers were recruited from a wide range of sources in the UK and included 16 problem gamblers and 9 frequent gamblers. The women identified a number of features of the Internet that made it easy to gamble, such as its accessibility from home, its anonymity, and its privacy. The Internet was seen as less of a male domain and a place where women could learn to gamble. Frequent gamblers saw Internet gambling as a fun and social activity. All women recognised that they were at risk of excessive Internet gambling, and frequent gamblers had developed strategies to reduce these risks. The paper concludes with some measures that could identify and support those at risk.

The purpose of this study was to ascertain the frequency of gambling involvement and the prevalence of problem gambling among horse race gamblers and to discover whether problem gambling in this sample is associated with a history of trauma. Among a sample of 266 South African horse-race gamblers (94% men and 6% women, M age 46.8 yr., SD = 13.9, range 18–85 years), 31.2% were classified as probable pathological gamblers and 19.9% with problem gambling. Major weekly gambling activities included racetrack betting (82%), purchase of lottery tickets or scratch tickets (35%), purchase of sports lottery tickets (23%), and using casino type games (18%). Trauma history was significantly associated with gambling severity.

This report presents the results of a grounded theory analysis produced from in-depth interviews with 14 women participating in group counselling for problem gambling. Themes emerged from this analysis that provided insights into effective counselling practices for women problem gamblers. The results explore the impact of a group therapy approach in addressing the needs of these women. Participants indicated that perceived effectiveness of counselling groups was situated in accessibility, gender-specific clusters, and following specific treatment formats in group meetings designed for gamblers. This paper outlines implications for improving problem gambling treatment within the context of the experiences of the women in this study.

The present study examined the temporal characteristics of play exhibited by recreational slot machine players. 12 women ( M = 24 yr., range 22–28) played a computerized version of a slot machine with probability of payoff, i.e., a winning spin, ranging from .2 to .6. Intertrial intervals or the time between the termination of one trial to the initiation of the next trial varied within subjects as a function of wins and losses. Winning trials were associated with larger intertrial intervals and losing trials with smaller intertrial intervals for 10 of the 12 women. No differences were found across probability levels between subjects. Results are discussed in terms of the postreinforcement pause that occurs on specific schedules of reinforcement.

This study follows up one in which was derived a two-item screening questionnaire for pathological gambling. In the previous study, the two-item screening questionnaire had sensitivity of .99 and specificity of .91. In this study, testing 295 men (116 pathological gamblers and 179 controls) and 128 women (30 pathological gamblers and 98 controls), sensitivity was 1.00 and specificity .85. In the previous study, the predictive value of a positive result was .92 and of a negative result .99. In this sample, the predictive value of a positive result was .78 and of a negative result 1.00. These results indicate the two questions represent a useful screening device for a DSM-IV diagnosis of pathological gambling.

With recent introduction of poker machines in Australia, there have been claims of increases in the number of women with gambling-related problems. Research in the United States indicates, however, that men have a higher incidence of pathological gambling. The aims of this study were to ascertain among game machine users in a major city in Australia whether (a) more women than men exhibited symptoms of pathological gambling, (b) women reported higher guilt associated with their gambling, and (c) gamblers' self-assessment on several mood states was predictive of pathological gambling. A modified version of the South Oaks Gambling Screen was administered to 104 users of game machines (44 men, 60 women) sampled from patrons at gaming venues in Melbourne, Australia. Data indicated no significant sex difference in the proportion of pathological gamblers or in gambling-related guilt. Self-assessment of Happiness, Propensity for Boredom, and Loneliness, significantly predicted scores on the South Oaks Gambling Screen, with Unhappiness a significant independent predictor of pathological gambling. This may suggest that gambling acts to fill a need in the lives of unhappy people or that individuals who lack control over their gambling report higher unhappiness. Further research is needed to discover this relationship.

This study aims to examine relationship between age, gambling behaviour, dysfunctional psychological symptoms, and other comorbid addictive behaviours. Secondly, it aims to study the differences between the aforementioned variables according to gambler profiles based on impulsivity and emotional regulation. A sample of 95 participants conformed the clinical sample (93.5% men and 6.5% women). Results suggest that difficulties in emotion regulation and impulsivity are associated with gambling disorder, video game abuse, and dysfunctional psychological symptomatology. Likewise, two clusters have been observed, the first one is composed of participants with fewer difficulties in emotion regulation, less psychopathological severity, and greater impulsivity. The second cluster is composed of participants with greater difficulties in emotion regulation, as well as greater psychopathological and gambling severity. These results highlight the relevance of understanding different gambler profiles in order to design prevention and treatment strategies adapted to each person.

The present study assessed gambling appraisals and specific coping styles among 400 young male (n = 230) and female (n = 170) gamblers. Of particular interest was to determine whether gender variations in stress-related responses are associated with the degree of gambling pathology, depressive symptoms, and attitude to seeking treatment. Results showed that greater appraisals of threat, illusions of control, and negative outcome expectancies were associated with higher levels of gambling pathology, particularly among males. Further, among women, gambling propensity was associated with reduced social support seeking, whereas for men gambling pathology was primarily accounted for by increased use of wishful thinking. These coping strategies, combined with other internally oriented emotion-focused strategies, mediated the relation between gambling and depressive symptoms. Not surprisingly, more positive attitudes to treatment seeking were reported by those with a greater propensity to use problem-solving and support seeking coping efforts. The utility of assessing specific components that comprise a gambler’s stress-response is discussed.

Interviews with 30 women in two shires in Victoria, Australia, confirmed that domestic violence increased following the catastrophic Black Saturday bushfires on February 7, 2009. As such research is rare, it addresses a gap in the disaster and interpersonal violence literature. The research that exists internationally indicates that increased violence against women is characteristic of a postdisaster recovery in developing countries. The relative lack of published research from primary data in developed countries instead reflects our resistance to investigating or recognizing increased male violence against women after disasters in developed countries. This article begins with an overview of this literature. The primary research was qualitative, using in-depth semistructured interviews to address the research question of whether violence against women increased in the Australian context. The sample of 30 women was aged from 20s to 60s. Recruitment was through flyers and advertisements, and interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, and checked by participants. Analysis was inductive, using modified grounded theory. Seventeen women gave accounts of new or increased violence from male partners that they attribute to the disaster. A key finding is that, not only is there both increased and new domestic violence but formal reporting will not increase in communities unwilling to hear of this hidden disaster. Findings are reported within a framework of three broad explanations. In conclusion, although causation is not claimed, it is important to act on the knowledge that increased domestic violence and disasters are linked.

The aim of this study was to investigate the frequency of breast self-examination (BSE) and components underlying compliance or non-compliance using the Health Belief Model (HBM) adapted by Champion (1993). Purposive sampling was used to obtain participants from community groups and the general population within the Northern Suburbs of Victoria, Australia. The 87 participants were women aged between 18 and 64, with a mean age of 34 years. The research hypotheses were supported and are consistent with previous research findings using American participants. Using multiple regression, the overall model of the HBM variables and the frequency of BSE were significant ( F(6,80) = 13.3443, p<.0001), indicating that frequency of BSE is significantly related to perception of seriousness of the disease, confidence in performing BSE, perception of susceptibility to breast cancer, the benefits of— and barriers to— performing BSE, and level of health motivation. Perceived confidence in performing BSE and perception of personal susceptibility to breast cancer were most strongly related to frequency of BSE and accounted for a significant amount of the variance of the HBM.

The current study aimed to carved the impact of death anxiety on quality of life among cancer patients. The study focused to find out the difference of death anxiety in the context of gender and socio-demographic factors; and to seek out the impact of death anxiety on the quality of life of cancer patients. Purposive sampling technique was opted to collect the N= 110 cancer patients from Victoria hospital Bahawalpur and the Minar hospital Multan though the cross-sectional survey research design. The instrument was adopted from Lemming fear of death anxiety scale and WHOQOL. To cognizant the study Correlation t-test was computed which put forth that women cancer patients have a positive correlation between death anxiety and the quality of life. The conclusion is there is an impact of death anxiety on quality of life among patients who were hospitalized. Death anxiety has a negative impact on quality of life among cancer patients. Patients both male and female experience death anxiety at a certain level that may impact their quality of life, cancer patients who were hospitalized they have more death anxiety than other cancer patients. Septate Psychological counseling sessions can assist to decline the death anxiety among cancer patients.

This paper examines the way the state welfare system deals with young women who are subject to statutory orders and their need for support as they move towards independence. Young women’s views of their needs are highlighted. Evidence is drawn from the author’s and other relevant Australian and overseas research. The issues are examined within the context of general community trends and policy and practice implications are studied using Community Services Victoria as a case example.A variety of social and economic factors are leading to young people in the general community living with their parents for longer periods of time. In contrast, young people subject to statutory orders, especially young women, are often being discharged from these orders - and thus isolated from adult guidance - shortly after they pass their mid-teens.Assumptions about these young women’s needs - that they no longer require nor wish for support and are ready for complete independence at this early age - are challenged. The legal, organisational and practice constraints which reinforce these assumptions are analysed. The apparent contradiction arising from young women refusing services which they also say they require, is also discussed.The author demonstrates that there is a need for a reconceptualisation of the issue. A new kind of partnership between workers and young women on statutory orders is needed and a policy and administrative framework which facilitates this. The implications of the findings for practice and policy - and especially the important contribution ttiat young women’s views can make to the development of social policy - are presented.

Abstract Background and aims The aims were to examine how socio-demographics and gambling behavior relate to both primary and additional gambling motives, and whether the gambling motives change during a one-year-period. Methods The Finnish Gambling Harms Survey data was used. Gambling motives were measured with a categorical question. Gambling severity was measured using the Problem and Pathological Gambling Measure (PPGM). Using the first-wave data including only past-year gamblers (n = 5,684), five logistic regression models were utilized to explore the associations of gambling motives with socio-demographics and gambling behavior. The stability of gambling motives was assessed with McNemar’s test using longitudinal data (n = 2,078). Results Gambling for positive feeling was associated with younger age, high income, high gambling involvement and at-risk gambling. Monetary motive was associated with female gender, high gambling involvement, online or mixed-mode and at-risk gambling. Supporting worthy causes was associated with older age, monthly and weekly gambling, and land-based gambling. Socializing was associated with younger age and gambling occasionally on land-based venues with multiple game types. Finally, the motive to escape was intensified among 25–34-year-olds, homemakers, and those with high gambling involvement and at-risk or problem gambling. Gambling motives remained relatively stable for one year. Discussion and conclusions Gender and age profiles varied in different motives. Positive feeling, socializing and escape motive was heightened among younger respondents while supporting worthy causes was heightened among the oldest. Women gambled for money more often than men. Escape motive was associated with problem gambling. Longer follow-up is needed to confirm the longitudinal results.

Aim: To compare the frequency of surgical site infections in patients with primary closure versus delayed primary closure in contaminated abdominal surgeries. Study duration: 7th August 2020 to 6th February 2021 Study design & setting: Randomized controlled trial in the Department of Surgery, Bahawal Victoria Hospital, Bahawalpur. Methods: A sample size of eighty two patients presented with the complaint of contaminated abdomen surgical procedures of any gender between the age of 20-60 years have been The calculated sample size was eighty two i.e. forty one in each group with 5% level of significance, the surgical site infections in patients with major closure as 42.5% and with delayed closure as 17.5%. Sampling technique was Non-probability, consecutive sampling. All subjects presented with contaminated stomach surgical procedures as per operational definitions and age twenty to sixty years have been included in the study. The patients with malignant ascites was excluded from the study. Patients with records of penetrating/blunt stomach injuries, with persistent steroid use i.e. >1 month and patients with persistent renal failure Results: The age of women mean in group A was 37.68±7.37 years and in group B was 36.44 ± 8.12 years. Majority of the subjects were forty eight (58.54%) have been between twenty to forty years of age. Out of eighty two patients, fifty seven (69.51%) have been men and 25 (30.49%). The surgical site contamination in group A (primary closure) as eleven (26.83%) and in Group B (delayed primary closure) as four (9.76%) respectively with p-value of 0.046. Conclusion: Therefore it is concluded that frequency of surgical site infections is much less in patients with delayed major closure in contaminated abdomen surgeries as in compare to main closure. Keywords: Surgical site infections, delayed primary closure, Prolene.

The role of Teachers has been transformed in recent years due to the increasingly complex educational demands and responsibilities that come from the students’ families. The aim of the present study was to investigate how Elementary School Teachers in Brazil and Uruguay perceive and evaluate the demands they receive from families, and how prepared they think they are to face this reality. A qualitative, exploratory and transcultural method was used, based on the technique of Focal Groups, with one group being conducted in Brazil (10 participants) and anther one in Uruguay (9 participants). In both groups, participants were women, with experience in public and private schools. Data were treated using the Content Analysis technique and results pointed out two main themes: Academic Formation and Family Demands. The analysis showed several similarities in the relationship between family and school in daily practice - both in Brazil and Uruguay - especially regarding the Teacher’s role. It was observed that Teachers still face some challenges in set out their roles for themselves and the families. Teachers have also shown they have insufficient resources to work with the diversity of family demands and it is possible to think that they would benefit from spaces of reflection and sensitivity development, in order to better discriminate these demands. Thus, it may be said that it is necessary to inaugurate a deep discussion about what it means to form Teachers to work with families.ResumoO papel dos professores tem se transformado nos últimos anos devido às demandas e responsabilidades educacionais, cada vez mais complexas, que derivam das famílias de seus alunos. O objetivo deste estudo foi investigar como os professores de ensino fundamental do Brasil e Uruguai percebem e avaliam as demandas que recebem das famílias e o quão preparados se sentem para enfrentar essa realidade. Foi utilizado método qualitativo, exploratório e transcultural, a partir da técnica do Grupo Focal, sendo conduzido um grupo no Brasil (10 participantes) e um no Uruguai (9 participantes). Em ambos os grupos, os participantes foram mulheres, com experiência nas redes pública e privada. Os dados foram tratados a partir da técnica de Análise de Conteúdo e os resultados apontaram dois temas principais: Formação Acadêmica e Demandas das Famílias. A análise evidenciou inúmeras semelhanças na relação que a família e a escola estabelecem na prática diária - tanto no Brasil quanto no Uruguai - especialmente no que diz respeito ao papel docente. Observou-se a dificuldade dos professores em delimitar seu papel para si e para as famílias. Os professores também se mostraram com poucos recursos para trabalhar com a diversidade de demandas familiares e é possível pensar que eles se beneficiariam de espaços de reflexão e desenvolvimento de sensibilidade para poder discriminar essas demandas. Assim, pode-se dizer que é necessário inaugurar uma discussão profunda sobre o que significa formar os professores para o trabalho com as famílias.ResumenEl papel de los docentes se ha transformado en los últimos años debido a las exigencias y responsabilidades educativas cada vez más complejas que derivan de las familias de sus alumnos. El objetivo de este estudio consistió en investigar cómo docentes de educación primaria de Brasil y Uruguay perciben y evalúan las demandas que reciben de las familias y cuán preparados se sienten para enfrentar esa realidad. El diseño fue cualitativo, exploratorio y transcultural, utilizando la técnica de Grupo Focal, siendo uno brasileño (10 participantes) y uno uruguayo (9 participantes). En ambos grupos los participantes fueron mujeres, con experiencia tanto en la red pública como privada. Los datos fueron tratados con Análisis de Contenido y los resultados apuntaron a dos grandes temas: Formación Académica y Demandas de las Familias. El análisis permite comprobar innumerables semejanzas en la relación que familia y escuela establecen en la práctica cotidiana tanto en Brasil como en el Uruguay, sobre todo en lo que se refiere al rol docente. Se observa la dificultad que las docentes expresaron en cuanto a delimitar su papel frente a si mismas y frente a las familias. También las docentes se mostraron con pocos recursos para trabajar con la diversidad de las demandas familiares y es posible pensar que se beneficiarían de espacios de reflexión y desarrollo de la sensibilidad para poder discriminar tales demandas. Así, se puede decir que se necesita abrir una discusión profunda sobre lo que significa formar a los docentes para el trabajo con las familias. 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Formación docente y cultura participativa del centro educativo: claves para favorecer la participación familia-escuela. Estudios sobre educación, Navarra, v.27, 153-168, 2014. URL: https://www.unav.edu/publicaciones/revistas/index.php/estudios-sobre-educacion/article/view/490/357RIVERA, Maritza; MILICIC, Neva. Alianza Familia-Escuela: percepciones, creencias, expectativas y aspiraciones de padres y profesores de enseñanza general básica. Psykhe, Santiago, v.15, n.1, 119-135, 2006. URL: http://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0718-22282006000100010SANTOS, Miguel; GODAS, Augustín; LORENZO, Mar. ¿Puede la implicación de los padres mejorar el estudio de sus hijos en la escuela? La evidencia de un programa pedagógico. Estudios sobre educación, Navarra, v.30, 9-30, 2016. URL: http://www.unav.edu/publicaciones/revistas/index.php/estudios-sobre-educacion/article/view/4800/4126SARAIVA, Lisiane A.; WAGNER, Adriana. A relação Família-Escola sob a ótica de professores e pais de crianças que frequentam o Ensino Fundamental. Ensaio: avaliação e políticas públicas em Educação, Rio de Janeiro, v.21, n.81, 739-772, 2013. URL: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-40362013000400006&lng=en&nrm=iso&tlng=pt SIMPLÍCIO, Sandra D.; ANDRADE, Márcia S. Compreendendo a questão da saúde dos professores da rede pública municipal de São Paulo. Psico, Porto Alegre, v.42, n.2, 159-167, 2011. URL: http://revistaseletronicas.pucrs.br/ojs/index.php/revistapsico/article/view/7566/6517 VÁZQUEZ HUERTAS, C.; LÓPEZ-LARROSA, S. Creencias sobre la relación familia-escuela. Cambios en el futuro profesorado tras recibir formación específica. Revista de Estudios e Investigación en Psicología y Educación, v.1, n.2, 111-121, 2014.VILA, Ignasi. Familia y escuela: dos contextos y un solo niño. En: ALFONSO, Carmen C. et al. (Eds.). La participación de los padres y madres en la escuela. 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This paper provides an overview of some trends among problem gamblers seeking help through the BreakEven/Gambler's Help problem gambling counselling services in Victoria, Australia, between July 1995 and June 2000. Data presented are drawn from details collected on clients at registration, assessment, and all other client contacts to form a Problem Gambling Services minimum data set (MDS). Analysis of the MDS shows a number of noteworthy trends towards continuity or change. A major element of continuity is the ability of the service to attract women, who constitute around 50% of the clients for the period. Major changes include the increasing trend towards presentation of clients at an earlier stage in their "career" as problem gamblers. Also identified is persistence or change in client characteristics, such as gender differences in gambling activity and problem type and level. In addition, a range of other factors are explored, such as level of debt and its associated characteristics, the characteristics of people committing crimes to finance their gambling, and the differences between people presenting for counselling and problem gamblers in the community.

AbstractThe current study aimed to identify personality traits, emotional states and adjustment variables in a sample of pathological gamblers as compared to a non-gambling control group taking gender differences into account. The sample for this study consisted of 206 subjects (103 pathological gamblers and 103 non-psychiatric subjects from the general population matched for age and gender). Pathological gamblers had a lower educational level and a family history of alcohol abuse higher than non-gamblers. In turn, female gamblers were affected by unemployment and a lower socioeconomic status more often than female non-gamblers. Pathological gamblers were more anxious and impulsive and suffered from a poorer self-esteem than non-gamblers. Likewise, pathological gamblers had a greater history of other Axis I psychiatric disorders and were more often affected by anxiety and depression symptoms and showed a more problematic adjustment to everyday life than non-gamblers. Alcohol abuse was not higher in pathological gamblers than in non-gamblers, but, when gender was taken into account, male gamblers were more affected by alcohol abuse than male non-gamblers. Importantly 68.6% of female gamblers versus 9.8% of control group women reported being victims of intimate partner violence. These findings can be used to specifically inform prevention and intervention efforts.

Research in gambling has only briefly examined age differences among problem gamblers, holding an anecdotal view that senior gamblers are more vulnerable to problem gambling. This study examines different generations of female gamblers, including their gambling habits and risk and protective factors. Approximately 450 female gamblers seeking treatment were surveyed and separated into five age groups for analysis. Results indicate that significant generational differences do not exist in areas such as gambling frequency or gambling debt; however, senior female pathological gamblers report starting to gamble at a significantly later age than their younger counterparts. Findings also suggest that senior women have a larger support network for their recovery, in contrast to common belief. Implications from this data may be useful to treatment providers in understanding and utilizing the assets more common to senior female pathological gamblers.

AbstractThe 20-item Gamblers’ Beliefs Questionnaire (GBQ) is used to identify cognitive distortions commonly had by gamblers. There is a great need for psychometrically validated instruments for both treatment and research purposes in the field of gambling addiction in Sweden. The purpose of this study was to validate a Swedish translation of the GBQ by assessing internal consistency, convergent validity, known-groups validity, the two-factor structure of the GBQ, and scaling success. The GBQ was translated into Swedish (GBQ-SE) and validated in a sample of 402 Swedish speaking women (47.9%) and men (52.1%) between 18–86 years, representing undergraduates, a working population, and people with current or historical gambling problems. The GBQ-SE showed excellent internal consistency and moderate relationships with instruments of problem gambling severity. We also showed that problem gamblers tend to endorse more gambling related distortions than non-problem gamblers by finding a significantly higher level of cognitive distortions in the problem gambler group. We were not able to confirm the two-factor structure in our sample. When assessing scaling success an overlap for eight of twenty of the items between the subscales was found. We conclude that the GBQ-SE is valid as a general instrument of gambling related cognitive distortions. It can be used to aid in treatment planning with gambling addicted clients, to evaluate treatment outcome, and for research purposes.

Very little is known about gender differences in psychoactive substance use among gamblers. In this study, 200 individuals seeking treatment for problem gambling were assessed with respect to lifetime and current use and abuse of licit and illicit substances. As a group, they were found to have experience with psychoactive substances exceeding that reported for the general population. There were no gender differences in patterns of illicit drugs; however, the women gamblers reported greater experience with psychiatric medications over the lifetime and during the treatment and follow-up periods.

This study surveys existing literature on Gamblers Anonymous (GA) and issues that help to contextualise our understanding of this mutual aid association. While GA has been the subject of investigation by social scientists, it is still understudied, with a notable shortage of research on issues facing women and ethnic minorities. A need exists for large-scale assessments of GA's effectiveness, more detailed accounts of GA beliefs and practices, increased knowledge of the ways in which GA attendance interacts with both formal treatment and attendance at other mutual aid organisations, and a better understanding of the profiles of gamblers best (and least) suited to GA, along with a clearer grasp of what GA was able to offer those gamblers that it seems to have helped. This assessment of the current state of knowledge underscores the embryonic state of our collective inquiry into the nature of GA, and the authors emphasise that significant advances have been made. Notably, important targets for study are being identified.

Although there continues to be interest in documenting the evidence base for problem gambling interventions, little has been published on service users' perspectives on services provided to them. To gain a greater understanding of this issue, group interviews were held with present and past users of two services in Victoria, Australia-the government-funded state-wide Gambler's Help program and the privately funded self-help Free Yourself Program. Service users articulated a range of views about factors leading to the propensity to gamble, causes of problem gambling, the action that they would take to protect problem gamblers, the effectiveness of self-exclusion from venues, the features of a good problem gambling counselling service, unhelpful service characteristics, and the issue of abstinence or control as desired endpoints of intervention.

The prevalence of problem gambling in the correctional system is about 10 times higher than in the general population, but programming for gambling problems in the correctional system is scarce. Examined barriers to treatment for problem gamblers in the correctional system, sex or gender differences, and options for program design. We conducted interviews with 16 experts who had worked with problem gamblers in the correctional system and analyzed the data in terms of themes. For barriers, the experts discussed a lack of awareness about problem gambling, as well as stigmatization and lockdowns. Experts described the content of current programs as equally applicable to both men and women, but that emotional components were more important for women. Finally, the experts had mixed views on whether programming should be integrated with other programs such as substance abuse. Programming implications for this population are discussed.

Past research has shown that treatment services for problem gambling are being underutilized in Ontario, especially by women. Our pilot study involves the development of a Tutorial Workbook (TW) designed specifically to address the special issues and treatment needs of women who gamble and develop consequent problems. Investigators tested the effectiveness of the intervention and reviewed comments from women gamblers on the contents and layout of the workbook. The TW study involved 12 modules and required progress update and feedback forms for each. A mixed method analysis was used to evaluate the intervention, with quantitative and qualitative feedbacks indicating that it was well received by participants. The majority reported that the program helped them modify gambling behaviours through increased understanding and awareness of their triggers. They reported feeling better about themselves, improved mood and anxiety levels, feeling less isolated, positive changes in their relationships and hope for the future. Their input provided suggestions for changes to the TW. The TW will serve women seeking self-help materials, including on-line or paper-based support. As such, it expands services to reach a sub-group of women who might not otherwise seek or accept treatment because of a variety of barriers.Dans des recherches faites précédemment, on a montré que les services de traitement de problèmes liés au jeu compulsif sont sous-utilisés en Ontario, surtout par les femmes. Notre étude pilote a porté sur la conception d’un cahier didactique conçu spécialement pour répondre aux problèmes particuliers et aux besoins de traitement des femmes qui s’adonnent au jeu et développent des problèmes connexes. Les chercheurs ont testé l’efficacité de l’intervention et analysé les commentaires faits par des joueuses pathologiques sur le contenu et la mise en page du cahier. L’étude sur le cahier didactique comprenait douze modules et des formulaires de bilan/retour des progrès à remplir obligatoirement pour chaque module. On a utilisé une méthodologie mixte pour évaluer l’intervention, avec commentaires quantitatifs et qualitatifs indiquant un accueil favorable par les participantes. La plupart ont indiqué que le programme les a aidées à modifier leurs comportements de jeu, car il leur a permis d’acquérir une meilleure compréhension de leurs déclencheurs et d’en prendre conscience. Les participantes ont déclaré se sentir mieux à propos d’elles-mêmes, avoir noté une amélioration de l’humeur et une baisse de l’anxiété, s’être senties moins isolées, avoir observé des changements positifs dans leurs relations et avoir regagné espoir pour l’avenir. Dans leurs commentaires, elles ont fourni des suggestions pour modifier le cahier de travail. Ce cahier sera utile aux femmes qui recherchent des documents d’initiative personnelle, en ligne ou sur papier. Comme tel, cet outil apporte donc un complément aux services déjà offerts afin d’atteindre un sous-groupe de femmes qui autrement pourraient ne pas chercher ou accepter un traitement en raison de diverses barrières.

AbstractAlthough in the last years several studies comparing male and female pathological gamblers have been published, most of them have been carried out using only samples of males. The aim of this study was to investigate gender differences in a sample of subjects diagnosed with pathological gambling (PG) attending three specialized outpatient units. Retrospective study was carried out of 96 patients (49% female and 51% male), comparing the main socio-demographic, clinical, and behavioral data. Most subjects (94%) met the criteria for pathological gambling. No significant differences between sexes were found in the severity of gambling behavior or the socio-demographic variables studied. Whereas slot machines were the main type of game for most subjects, a higher percentage of women were addicted to bingo (χ2(1, 4)= 5.19,p =.029 Cohen’sd= 0.48) and had more than one type of game as a secondary addiction χ2(1, 4)= 7.63,p =.006; Cohen’sd =0.59) . Women started gambling at a later age than men (t(94)= 2.95,p= .004; Cohen’sd =0.60), but developed a pattern of addiction faster (t(94)= 2.95,p= .004; Cohen’sd =–0.61) . Women also had higher comorbidity with other psychiatric disorders (χ2(1)= 7.28,p =.007; Cohen’sd =0.57), specifically with affective (χ2(1)= 11.31,p =.001; Cohen’sd =0.73) and personality disorders (χ2(1)= 4.71,p =.030; Cohen’sd =0.45). Our results indicate the existence of differences between women and men in the pattern of gambling behavior and in psychiatric comorbidity. These aspects should be considered in the design of treatment programs for pathological gamblers.

Feminist researchers have argued for a focus on ‘everyday gambling’ and domestic spaces as sites of women’s leisure. In this article, we analyse how culture, class and gender shape the consumer practices of migrant women from Pacific Islands countries (Cook Islands and Tonga) who play bingo in regional Australia. This intersectional approach examines the effects of bingo in the everyday lives of these women. We show how migrant women gamblers have a distinctive experience of ‘lifestyle’ that is located within a meaningful symbolic order that values both domestic responsibilities and community relations within extended families, even when distance from the homeland and economic precarity entail social and financial pressures. While much policy research focuses on gambling harms, including the impact of electronic gaming machines or online gambling, here we show how bingo is embedded in social relations that mitigate many of the ongoing financial problems and deeper existential anxieties for those in precarious economic circumstances.

This study’s aim was to identify characteristics with higher odds of distinguishing a group of pathological gamblers (PG) from (1) a group of gamblers without a gambling problem (NP) and 2) a sub-clinical group (SP). An additional aim was to investigate those characteristics as risk/protective factors along the continuum of problem-gambling severity. Sociodemographic (gender, age, marital status, and educational level), individual (psychopathological symptoms) and relational (family functioning, dyadic adjustment, and differentiation of self) variables were considered. The sample consisted of 331 participants: 162 NP, 117 SP and 52 PG. The main results indicate that the characteristics with higher odds of distinguishing among the groups were gender, educational level, age, differentiation of self, and psychopathological symptoms. The odds of being a PG were higher for men with a low educational level and less adaptive psycho-relational functioning. Conversely, the odds of being a NP were higher for women with a high educational level and more adaptive psycho-relational functioning. Gender and educational level stood out with respect to their relevance as risk/protective factors, and their role was found to be dynamic and interdependent with the severity of problem gambling and/or the investigated psycho-relational characteristics. The risk/protective value was more remarkable when gamblers already exhibited SP.L’objectif de cette étude était d'identifier les caractéristiques présentant une probabilité plus élevée de distinguer un groupe de joueurs pathologiques (PG) d'un groupe de joueurs sans problème de jeu (NP) et un groupe sous-clinique (SP). Un autre objectif consistait à étudier ces caractéristiques en tant que facteurs de risque / protection dans le continuum de la gravité du jeu problématique. Les variables sociodémographiques (sexe, âge, état matrimonial et niveau d'instruction), individuelles (symptômes psychopathologiques) et relationnelles (fonctionnement familial, ajustement dyadique et différenciation de self) ont été prises en considération. L'échantillon comprenait 331 participants: 162 NP, 117 SP et 52 PG. Les principaux résultats indiquent que les caractéristiques ayant une plus grande probabilité de distinction entre les groupes étaient le sexe, le niveau d'instruction, l'âge, la différenciation de self et les symptômes psychopathologiques. Les probabilités d'être un PG étaient plus élevées chez les hommes ayant un faible niveau d'instruction et moins adaptative au fonctionnement psycho-relationnel. À l'inverse, les probabilités d'être NP étaient plus élevées chez les femmes ayant un niveau d'instruction élevé et un fonctionnement psycho-relationnel plus adaptatif. Le sexe et le niveau de scolarité se distinguent par leur pertinence en tant que facteurs de risque / protection et leur rôle est jugé dynamique et interdépendant de la gravité du jeu problématique et / ou des caractéristiques psycho-relationnel étudiées. La valeur risque / protection était plus remarquable lorsque les joueurs présentaient déjà SP.

This study’s aim was to identify characteristics with higher odds of distinguishing a group of pathological gamblers (PG) from (1) a group of gamblers without a gambling problem (NP) and 2) a sub-clinical group (SP). An additional aim was to investigate those characteristics as risk/protective factors along the continuum of problem-gambling severity. Sociodemographic (gender, age, marital status, and educational level), individual (psychopathological symptoms) and relational (family functioning, dyadic adjustment, and differentiation of self) variables were considered. The sample consisted of 331 participants: 162 NP, 117 SP and 52 PG. The main results indicate that the characteristics with higher odds of distinguishing among the groups were gender, educational level, age, differentiation of self, and psychopathological symptoms. The odds of being a PG were higher for men with a low educational level and less adaptive psycho-relational functioning. Conversely, the odds of being a NP were higher for women with a high educational level and more adaptive psycho-relational functioning. Gender and educational level stood out with respect to their relevance as risk/protective factors, and their role was found to be dynamic and interdependent with the severity of problem gambling and/or the investigated psycho-relational characteristics. The risk/protective value was more remarkable when gamblers already exhibited SP.L’objectif de cette étude était d'identifier les caractéristiques présentant une probabilité plus élevée de distinguer un groupe de joueurs pathologiques (PG) d'un groupe de joueurs sans problème de jeu (NP) et un groupe sous-clinique (SP). Un autre objectif consistait à étudier ces caractéristiques en tant que facteurs de risque / protection dans le continuum de la gravité du jeu problématique. Les variables sociodémographiques (sexe, âge, état matrimonial et niveau d'instruction), individuelles (symptômes psychopathologiques) et relationnelles (fonctionnement familial, ajustement dyadique et différenciation de self) ont été prises en considération. L'échantillon comprenait 331 participants: 162 NP, 117 SP et 52 PG. Les principaux résultats indiquent que les caractéristiques ayant une plus grande probabilité de distinction entre les groupes étaient le sexe, le niveau d'instruction, l'âge, la différenciation de self et les symptômes psychopathologiques. Les probabilités d'être un PG étaient plus élevées chez les hommes ayant un faible niveau d'instruction et moins adaptative au fonctionnement psycho-relationnel. À l'inverse, les probabilités d'être NP étaient plus élevées chez les femmes ayant un niveau d'instruction élevé et un fonctionnement psycho-relationnel plus adaptatif. Le sexe et le niveau de scolarité se distinguent par leur pertinence en tant que facteurs de risque / protection et leur rôle est jugé dynamique et interdépendant de la gravité du jeu problématique et / ou des caractéristiques psycho-relationnel étudiées. La valeur risque / protection était plus remarquable lorsque les joueurs présentaient déjà SP.

Studies show that differences exist in how women and men gamble. However, publications devoted to senior gamblers usually describe them as a homogeneous group without distinguishing between senior men and women. The purpose of this qualitative research was to explore the experience of gambling by older women. The article presents how interest in gambling developed in a group of older women who gamble recreationally. In-depth interviews conducted with 26 non-addicted women have revealed that in retirement they most often return to this activity known for many years, and the initiation of gambling rarely occurs during this period of life. Retired women gamble more often and more regularly than do younger women, explained by them having fewer responsibilities and more free time, yet they are able to maintain control over their spending on the game. The results of this study suggest that gambling can be valid a form of recreation in retirement, but psychoeducation about threats and the use of responsible gambling strategies is important.RésuméLes études montrent qu’il y a des différences dans la façon dont les femmes et les hommes jouent. Cependant, les publications consacrées aux aînés les décrivent généralement comme un groupe homogène, sans faire la distinction entre les hommes et les femmes. La recherche qualitative avait pour but d’examiner l’expérience du jeu chez les femmes âgées. L’article décrit la façon dont l’intérêt pour le jeu naît dans un groupe de femmes âgées qui jouent par plaisir. Des entrevues approfondies menées auprès de 26 femmes non dépendantes ont révélé qu’à la retraite, elles reviennent le plus souvent à des activités qu’elles pratiquent depuis de nombreuses années, et commencent rarement à jouer durant cette période de leur vie. Les femmes retraitées jouent plus souvent et plus régulièrement que les femmes plus jeunes, ce qu’elles expliquent par le fait qu’elles ont moins de responsabilités et plus de temps libre, mais elles arrivent toutefois à contrôler leurs dépenses en jeu. Les résultats de cette étude montrent que le jeu peut être une forme de loisir à la retraite, mais que la psychoéducation portant sur les menaces et l’emploi de stratégies de jeu responsable sont importants.

AbstractYouth gambling is associated with a range of harms. This study aimed to examine, among Australian adolescents, the prevalence of gambling (ever, in the last month, at-risk and problem), the most frequent gambling types and modalities, and to explore the student characteristics associated with gambling in the last month and with at-risk or problem gambling. Students aged 12–17 years from Victoria and Queensland answered gambling questions as part of the Australian Secondary School Alcohol and Drug (ASSAD) Survey in 2017. The ASSAD also included a series of questions about smoking, alcohol and other drug use, and mental health. A total of 6377 students from 93 schools were included in analysis. The prevalence of ever gambling and gambling in the last month was 31% and 6% respectively. Of students who had gambled in the last month, 34% were classified as at-risk and 15% were classified as problem gamblers. The most frequent types of gambling in the last month were horse or dog race and sports betting. Students who gambled in the last month did so most frequently via a parent or guardian purchasing or playing for them, at home or at a friends’ house, and online or using an app. Regression analysis indicated that male gender, having money available to spend on self, alcohol consumption in the last seven days, the number of types of advertisements seen in the last month, and the number of peer or family members who gambled in the last month, were significantly associated with the likelihood of students gambling in the last month. Male gender, some age categories, and exposure to more types of gambling advertising were also significant predictors of being classified as an at-risk or problem gambler. This large study of youth gambling provides data on gambling behaviours and related variables from a large sample of Australian secondary school students. Student characteristics, including male gender and exposure to more types of gambling advertising, were associated with an increased likelihood of gambling in the last month and of being classified as an at-risk or problem gambler. Further implications of the study findings are discussed.

AbstractMobility is linked to negative HIV care continuum outcomes. We sought to understand factors associated with short and long term mobility among women in fishing communities in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. From 2018 through 2019 we conducted a cross-sectional survey of women aged 15 years and above, randomly selected from a census of six fishing villages, around Lake Victoria. Data collected included: demographics, risky sexual behaviour on the most recent trip, and travel behaviour in the previous 4 months. Mobility was recorded as any overnight trip outside the participant’s village. A two-level multinomial logistic regression model was used to determine the associated factors. A total of 901 participants were enrolled, of whom 645 (71.6%) reported travelling (53.4%; short and 18.2% long term trips). Five factors were associated with long term travel: age, travel purpose, frequency of travel, sexual behaviour while travelling, and destination. Trips made by women aged 46–75 years were less likely to be long term. Long term trips were more common if the trip was to visit, rather than to trade, and more common for women who reported one or two trips rather than three or more trips. Women who made long term trips were more likely to engage in unprotected sex while on a trip. Women who travelled to a regional town/district or another town/district were more likely to take long term trips. The factors associated with travel duration among women living in fishing communities could inform planning of future health care interventions in these communities.

AbstractPeople with gambling problems report more exposure and impact from gambling advertising, although less is known regarding the role of specific advertising types. Data on gamblers (n = 5830, 48.5% women, mean age = 44.27) was collected from a general population cross-sectional survey in Norway (32.7% response rate). We examined if problem gambling was associated with perceived advertising impact (on gambling involvement, awareness, and knowledge) or exposure (via internet, TV, retail outlet, newspaper, and direct advertising). We also investigated if advertising exposure was associated with advertising impact. ANOVAs revealed that problem gambling was associated with increased perceived advertising impact on gambling involvement (ω2 = 0.09, p < .001) and awareness of gambling (ω2 = 0.04, p < .001). Reported exposure to direct advertising increased linearly with problem gambling level (ω2 = 0.04, p < .001), whereas we found small/no differences in exposure to other types of advertising. Multiple regressions revealed that among advertising types, internet advertising was the strongest predictor of perceived advertising impact on gambling involvement (β = 0.1, p < .001). TV advertising was the strongest predictor of advertising impact on knowledge of gambling forms and operators (β = 0.28, p < .001) and awareness of gambling (β = .05, p < .05). Future studies should elucidate how different subtypes of internet advertising impact gambling involvement. Clinicians should assess clients’ experiences with direct advertising and devise interventions for coping. Researchers should be aware that internet and direct advertising allow for more tailored content compared to other advertising types.

This study explores how partners of persons with gambling problems experience the family’s everyday life, focusing on family relations and parenting. Problem gambling creates a serious impact on household finances, social life and health, emotional and relational issues. Between 6 and 10 persons are directly affected by a person’s gambling problems. Despite this, research exploring how daily life and relations in the family is affected is scarce. A qualitative method was used to acquire a deeper understanding of partners’ experiences of everyday life, relations and parenting. In-depth interviews were carried out with nine female partners of problem gamblers. All nine women had been responsible for minor children. A thematic analysis was used to systemize the participants’ experiences. The results determined how living with a partner with a gambling problem is a lonely project. Partners of problem gamblers take on a lot of responsibility for daily life activities, household finances and parenting but experience little support from their partner. A general lack of knowledge and recognition of gambling as a problem, increases the loneliness, shame and burden. Despite gambling having a tremendous impact on daily life and relations, families receive little support. Taking over responsibility and becoming the one in charge, can be understood as ways of reclaiming dignity and gaining power albeit within limits. This duality needs to be considered when providing support to families.RésuméCette étude explore la manière dont les partenaires de joueurs compulsifs vivent la vie de famille au quotidien, en mettant l’accent sur les relations familiales et la parentalité. Le jeu compulsif a de graves répercussions sur les finances du ménage, la vie sociale et la santé, sans compter les problèmes émotionnels et relationnels qu’il occasionne. Entre six et dix personnes sont directement affectées par les problèmes de jeu d’une personne. Malgré cela, les recherches sont rares sur les effets sur la vie quotidienne et les relations au sein de la famille. On a utilisé une méthodologie qualitative pour mieux comprendre les expériences des partenaires dans la vie quotidienne, les relations et la parentalité. Des entretiens approfondis ont été menés avec neuf partenaires féminins de joueurs compulsifs. Toutes avaient à charge des enfants mineurs. On a utilisé une analyse thématique pour systématiser les expériences des participants. Les résultats montrent à quel point vivre avec un partenaire ayant un problème de jeu oblige à assumer seul les responsabilités. Les partenaires de joueurs problématiques endossent beaucoup de responsabilités pour les activités quotidiennes, les finances du ménage et la parentalité, et elles obtiennent peu de soutien de leur partenaire. Un manque général de connaissances et le fait de ne pas reconnaître le jeu comme un problème augmente la solitude, la honte et le fardeau. Bien que le jeu ait un impact considérable sur la vie quotidienne et les relations, les familles reçoivent peu de soutien. Assumer les tâches familiales et en être responsable peut être vu comme un moyen de regagner de la dignité et d’avoir le pouvoir, même dans certaines limites. Le soutien offert aux familles doit tenir compte de cette dualité.

Cette étude vise à décrire l’influence du genre sur les différentes étapes amenant un joueur ayant des problèmes de jeu à prendre la décision de rechercher de l’aide. Le modèle de recherche d’aide de Goldsmith, Jackson et Hough (1988) a été utilisé pour conceptualiser les étapes de prise de décision menant à consulter des services d’aide pour un problème de jeu de hasard et d’argent. Au total, 83 participants, dont 45 femmes et 38 hommes adultes, y ont pris part. Les résultats indiquent que, comparativement aux hommes, les femmes sont plus nombreuses à habiter en couple, ont plus souvent de faibles revenus et subviennent moins fréquemment seules à leurs besoins, rapportent des conduites de jeu plus conséquentes, souffrent davantage de troubles anxieux au cours de leur vie et, enfin, consultent surtout des services non spécialisés. Au cours des 12 derniers mois, les femmes avaient consulté plus souvent les services médicaux de première ligne et avaient eu moins fréquemment recours aux services spécialisés que les hommes.The aim of this study was to describe the influence of gender on the various stages of the decision-making process that bring problem gamblers to seek help. The authors used the help-seeking model developed by Goldsmith, Jackson and Hough (1988) to conceptualize the different stages of the process that leads to consulting support services for a gambling problem. A total of 83 participants (45 females and 38 males) took part in the study. Results show that women are more likely to have a partner and to earn a lower income; they provide for their own needs less frequently than men; report more consistent gaming behaviours; are more prone to anxiety disorder during their lifetime; and consult primarily non-specialized services. In the previous 12 months, they had accessed front-line services more often and specialized services less frequently than men.

Indigenous peoples experience high rates of family violence (FV) yet are said to access support at lower rates than their non-Indigenous counterparts. There is an absence of Indigenous voices regarding their help-seeking behaviors for FV, particularly concerning men’s views. The aim of this research was to seek Indigenous perspectives on their help-seeking behaviors for FV. Individual, face-to-face semistructured interviews took place with 23 Indigenous Australians (14 women and 9 men) recruited from one large community in Victoria, Australia. Interviews were audiotaped and transcribed verbatim. Data were categorized and organized, and themes were identified using thematic analysis. Five main themes emerged from the data. “You’re Aboriginal, so that’s just how it is” describes the experiences with discrimination and judgment that create general barriers for Indigenous peoples to access services. The second theme “putting a big blanket over it” articulates the role that shame plays in deterring support-seeking for FV. “How do you trust somebody?” defines the fear in the hearts and minds of Indigenous participants who contemplate help-seeking. A further main theme of “someone that they could have a yarn with” explores what occurs when participants initially decide to seek support. Their thoughts on what participants want from interactions with formal services are explored in the final theme “a safe space.” Significant barriers to seeking support for FV exist for Indigenous peoples, including discrimination, shame, and fear. Service providers need to work on addressing these barriers through an increased understanding of Indigenous experiences and beliefs in an effort to encourage help-seeking behaviors. Interventions to assist kin in dealing with FV and for service providers to create safe spaces are urgent. More research informed by Indigenous voices is needed.

Research evidence suggests children experiencing adversity are at risk of language disparities in early childhood. This puts these children at risk of poor language outcomes, perpetuating disadvantage in later development and academic life. This study aimed to investigate associations between Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) attendance, hours of attendance and quality in a cohort of 2-year-old children experiencing adversity with their language outcomes at age five. Pregnant women experiencing adversity, based on women meeting two or more of 10 factors on a brief risk factor survey, were recruited from maternity hospitals in Victoria and Tasmania, Australia. At age 2 years, ECEC data was collected via survey, including ECEC attendance, amount of time spent and ECEC quality (using the Australian government’s national measure of quality, the National Quality Standard assessment) ( n = 161). At age 5 years, child language outcomes were measured using a standardised language assessment. This data was analysed using logistic regressions and the non-parametric Kruskal–Wallis test to identify associations. After adjusting for potential confounders, we found language scores at age five were higher, on average, for children who attended ECEC at age two compared to those who did not attend. However, hours of attendance and ECEC quality, was not found to be associated with language outcomes. Findings suggest ECEC attendance in the early developmental years (birth to age 3 years) may be a protective factor against social disadvantage factors and contribute to positive language development for children experiencing adversity. This information is important for the ECEC sector, policymakers and families to advocate, enable and ensure high-quality ECEC is accessible, particularly for children experiencing adversity.

Gambling participation among older people has grown over the years. Elders constitute a large and fast-growing population in Italy, but little empirical evidence describes gambling patterns among older Italian adults and the problem gambling (PG)’s psychosocial determinants, so a range of questions which are crucial to orient prevention strategies remain unanswered. The present study aims to investigate habits, representations, levels of engagement in gambling among Italian elders and the role of loneliness, social support and well-being in explaining their problem with gambling. A convenience sample of 165 participants (mean age: 66.93; SD = 5.73; women: 43.1%) was involved. Gambling activities, habits, representations and PG rates were examined. A group “at moderate risk/problem gambling” (scoring >7 on PGSI, n = 40) and a control group (scoring 0 on PGSI, n = 40) were selected from the whole sample, balanced on socio-demographic characteristics; a one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to compare the two groups on the target psychosocial variables. 11.5% of the sample was found to meet the PGSI criteria for PG; 26.7% for moderate risk; 11.5% for problem gambling; 50.3% were classified as no-problem gamblers. Scratch cards were the main form of gambling among all groups; the chance to make more money and to distract oneself from other problems were the main reasons to gamble. Finally, the group “at moderate risk/problem gambling,” compared to the control group, expressed higher loneliness, as well as lower perceived social support and well-being.RésuméLa pratique des jeux de hasard chez les personnes plus âgées augmente au fil des années. Les aînés représentent un segment important et à croissance rapide de la population en Italie, mais peu de données empiriques décrivent les habitudes de pratique de jeux de hasard des adultes italiens plus âgés et les déterminants psychosociaux du jeu compulsif. Tout un éventail de questions essentielles à l’orientation des stratégies de prévention reste sans réponse. La présente étude se penche sur les habitudes, les représentations et les niveaux de pratique de jeux de hasard chez les aînés italiens, ainsi que le rôle de la solitude, du soutien social et du bien-être pour expliquer leurs problèmes liés au jeu, à l’aide d’un échantillon de commodité de 165 participants (moyenne d’âge : 66,93; écart-type de la population = 5.73; femmes : 43,1 %). La pratique des jeux de hasard, les habitudes, les représentations et le jeu compulsif ont été examinés. Un groupe « à risque moyen/jeu compulsif » (pointage >7 sur l’indice de gravité de jeu compulsif (IGJC), n = 40) et un groupe témoin (pointage de 0 sur l’IGJC, n = 40) ont été choisis parmi l’ensemble de l’échantillon, équilibrés du point de vue des caractéristiques sociodémographiques; une analyse de variance à un critère de classification (ANOVA) a été utilisée pour comparer les deux groupes par rapport aux variables psychosociales cibles. On a constaté que 11,5 % de l’échantillon répondaient aux critères de jeu compulsif de l’IGJC; 26,7 % répondaient aux critères de risque modéré; 11,5 %, aux critères de jeu compulsif; et 50,3 % étaient classés comme des joueurs ne présentant pas de problème. Les cartes à gratter constituaient la forme principale de jeu de hasard dans tous les groupes; les principales raisons de jouer étaient la possibilité de faire plus d’argent et d’oublier d’autres problèmes. Enfin, par rapport au groupe témoin, le groupe « à risque moyen/jeu compulsif » a exprimé un plus grand sentiment de solitude et percevait un moins grand soutien social et un moins grand bien-être.

Background: Unsafe abortions are the third leading cause of maternal mortality in India, close to 8 women die from unsafe abortion each day.(1) MMR in India is 103/100,000 live births (2017-2019),unsafe abortion account for 8% of the MMR. Both MTP act of 1971 and MTP amendment act 2021,which expanded the scope of the act and provides impetus for safer abortions, are progressive and encouraging. Each year 4.7-13.2%of maternal death attributed due to unsafe abortions (2). Unsafe abortion accounts for 13% of maternal deaths worldwide of which 19% occurs in South East Asia (3, 4).Medical methods of abortion has become preferable method with availability of prostaglandin analogue misoprostol and antiprogesterone mifepristone. There are many studies for both drugs and each study claims its schedule to be superior and safer than others.(5,6,7) AIM:This study mainly aims to compare efficacy of Mifepristone and Misoprostol combination versus Misoprostol alone in procuring complete abortions in first trimester by comparing their Need for Manual /electric vacuum aspiration. OBJECTIVES: Ÿ To compare efficacy in relation to gestational period. Ÿ To compare the Success rate of combination drugs with misoprostol alone. Ÿ To compare Induction to abortion time intervals. Ÿ To evaluate the Safety. This is a prospective observational study conducted at Government Victoria hospital, Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology,Andhra Medical College,Visakhapatnam,and Andhra Pradesh Total no.of patients – 100 No.of women who were given Mifepristone & Misoprostol combination 50 No.of women received Misoprostol alone -50 Observations of this study 1.Maternal age was compared in both the groups.Majority of patients belongs to 21 to 25 years age group. 2.Majority are multigravida in both groups 3.Majority (64%) have opted for termination before 45days in mifepristone +misoprostol group,where as in misoprostol group 60% between 45-63 days 4.In both major indication for termination is unwanted pregnancy. 5. In mifepristone and misoprostol group 46 cases had complete abortion whereas 4 cases required electric vacuum aspiration 6.when comparing induction and abortion interval mifepristone and misoprostol group mean interval is 4.31 hours whereas misoprostol group is 16.18 hours and p value is <0.0001 showing induction abortion interval is less in mifepristone and misoprostol group 7.Unwanted symptoms were noted in both groups but significantly more with misoprostol only group but the p value was not significant. 8.There were no statistically significant major complications in both groups,none required blood transfusion 9. Although Mifepristone and Misoprostol combination is costly but more effective with higher rate of complete expulsion,should be preferred over Misoprostol alone where cost is not a restraining factor. CONCLUSION Based on findings from this study it can be concluded that 1. Mifepristone plus vaginal misoprostol combination group is associated with shorter induction abortion interval and 96% success rate when compared to misoprostol group alone. 2. Mifepristone plus vaginal misoprostol combination group is associated with complete abortion rate compared to misoprostol alone group.Vaginal misoprostol alone group is cost effective. 3. Routine use of Mifepristone-Misoprostol combination is an effective option for early MTP where cost is not a consideration and is ideal for home management. 4.Complication are less in Mifepristone-Misoprostol combination The only confounding factor is the cost involved which is about 20 times that of Misoprostol alone

In this paper we explore the rise of anti-gambling apps in the context of the massive expansion of gambling in new spheres of life (online and offline) and an acceleration in strategies of anticipatory and individualised management of harm caused by gambling. These apps, and the techniques and forms of labour they demand, are examples of and a mechanism through which a mode of governance premised on ‘self-care’ and ‘self-control’ is articulated and put into practice. To support this argument, we explore two government initiatives in the Australian context. Quit Pokies, a mobile app project between the Moreland City Council, North East Primary Care Partnership and the Victorian Local Governance Association, is an example of an emerging service paradigm of ‘self-care’ that uses online and mobile platforms with geo-location to deliver real time health and support interventions. A similar mobile app, Gambling Terminator, was launched by the NSW government in late 2012. Both apps work on the premise that interrupting a gaming session through a trigger, described by Quit Pokies’ creator as a “tap on the shoulder” provides gamblers the opportunity to take a reflexive stance and cut short their gambling practice in the course of play. We critically examine these apps as self-disciplining techniques of contemporary neo-liberalism directed towards anticipating and reducing the personal harm and social risk associated with gambling. We analyse the material and discursive elements, and new forms of user labour, through which this consumable media is framed and assembled. We argue that understanding the role of these apps, and mobile media more generally, in generating new techniques and technologies of the self, is important for identifying emerging modes of governance and their implications at a time when gambling is going through an immense period of cultural normalisation in online and offline environments. The Australian context is particularly germane for the way gambling permeates everyday spaces of sociality and leisure, and the potential of gambling interventions to interrupt and re-configure these spaces and institute a new kind of subject-state relation. Gambling in Australia Though a global phenomenon, the growth and expansion of gambling manifests distinctly in Australia because of its long cultural and historical attachment to games of chance. Australians are among the biggest betters and losers in the world (Ziolkowski), mainly on Electronic Gaming Machines (EGM) or pokies. As of 2013, according to The World Count of Gaming Machine (Ziolkowski), there were 198,150 EGMs in the country, of which 197,274 were slot machines, with the rest being electronic table games of roulette, blackjack and poker. There are 118 persons per machine in Australia. New South Wales is the jurisdiction with most EGMs (95,799), followed by Queensland (46,680) and Victoria (28,758) (Ziolkowski). Gambling is significant in Australian cultural history and average Australian households spend at least some money on different forms of gambling, from pokies to scratch cards, every year (Worthington et al.). In 1985, long-time gambling researcher Geoffrey Caldwell stated thatAustralians seem to take a pride in the belief that we are a nation of gamblers. Thus we do not appear to be ashamed of our gambling instincts, habits and practices. Gambling is regarded by most Australians as a normal, everyday practice in contrast to the view that gambling is a sinful activity which weakens the moral fibre of the individual and the community. (Caldwell 18) The omnipresence of gambling opportunities in most Australian states has been further facilitated by the availability of online and mobile gambling and gambling-like spaces. Social casino apps, for instance, are widely popular in Australia. The slots social casino app Slotomania was the most downloaded product in the iTunes store in 2012 (Metherell). In response to the high rate of different forms of gambling in Australia, a range of disparate interest groups have identified the expansion of gambling as a concerning trend. Health researchers have pointed out that online gamblers have a higher risk of experiencing problems with gambling (at 30%) compared to 15% in offline bettors (Hastings). The incidence of gambling problems is also disproportionately high in specific vulnerable demographics, including university students (Cervini), young adults prone to substance abuse problems (Hayatbakhsh et al.), migrants (Tanasornnarong et al.; Scull & Woolcock; Ohtsuka & Ohtsuka), pensioners (Hing & Breen), female players (Lee), Aboriginal communities (Young et al.; McMillen & Donnelly) and individuals experiencing homelessness (Holsworth et al.). While there is general recognition of the personal and public health impacts of gambling in Australia, there is a contradiction in the approach to gambling at a governance level. On one hand, its expansion is promoted and even encouraged by the federal and state governments, as gambling is an enormous source of revenue, as evidenced, for example, by the construction of the new Crown casino in Barangaroo in Sydney (Markham & Young). Campaigns trying to limit the use of poker machines, which are associated with concerns over problem gambling and addiction, are deemed by the gambling lobby as un-Australian. Paradoxically, efforts to restrict gambling or control gambling winnings have also been described as un-Australian, such as in the Australian Taxation Office’s campaign against MONA’s founder, David Walsh, whose immense art collection was acquired with the funds from a gambling scheme (Global Mail). On the other hand, people experiencing problems with gambling are often categorised as addicts and the ultimate blame (and responsibility) is attributed to the individual. In Australia, attitudes towards people who are arguably addicted to gambling are different than those towards individuals afflicted by alcohol or drug abuse (Jean). While “Australians tend to be sympathetic towards people with alcohol and other drug addictions who seek help,” unless it is seen as one of the more socially acceptable forms of occasional, controlled gambling (such as sports betting, gambling on the Melbourne Cup or celebrating ANZAC Day with Two-Up), gambling is framed as an individual “problem” and “moral failing” (Jean). The expansion of gambling is the backdrop to another development in health care and public health discourse, which have for some time now been devoted to the ideal of what Lupton has called the “digitally engaged patient” (Lupton). Technologies are central to the delivery of this model of health service provision that puts the patient at the centre of, and responsible for, their own health and medical care. Lupton has pointed out how this discourse, while appearing new, is in fact the latest version of the 1970s emphasis on the ‘patient as consumer’, an idea given an extra injection by the massive development and availability of digital and interactive web-based and mobile platforms, many of these directed towards the provision of health and health-related information and services. What this means for patients is that, rather than relying solely on professional medical expertise and care, the patient is encouraged to take on some of this medical/health work to conduct practices of ‘self-care’ (Lupton). The Discourse of ‘Self-Management’ and ‘Self-Care’ The model of ‘self-care’ and ‘self-management’ by ‘empowering’ digital technology has now become a dominant discourse within health and medicine, and is increasingly deployed across a range of related sectors such as welfare services. In recent research conducted on homelessness and mobile media, for example, government department staff involved in the reform of welfare services referred to ‘self-management’ as the new service paradigm that underpins their digital reform strategy. Echoing ideas and language similar to the “digitally engaged patient”, customers of Centrelink, Medicare and other ‘human services’ are being encouraged (through planned strategic initiatives aimed at shifting targeted customer groups online) to transact with government services digitally and manage their own personal profiles and health information. One departmental staff member described this in terms of an “opportunity cost”, the savings in time otherwise spent standing in long queues in service centres (Humphry). Rather than view these examples as isolated incidents taking place within or across sectors or disciplines, these are better understood as features of an emerging ‘discursive formation’ , a term Foucault used to describe the way in which particular institutions and/or the state establish a regime of truth, or an accepted social reality and which gives definition to a new historical episteme and subject: in this case that of the self-disciplined and “digitally engaged medical/health patient”. As Foucault explained, once this subject has become fully integrated into and across the social field, it is no longer easy to excavate, since it lies below the surface of articulation and is held together through everyday actions, habits and institutional routines and techniques that appear to be universal, necessary and/normal. The way in which this citizen subject becomes a universal model and norm, however, is not a straightforward or linear story and since we are in the midst of its rise, is not a story with a foretold conclusion. Nevertheless, across a range of different fields of governance: medicine; health and welfare, we can see signs of this emerging figure of the self-caring “digitally engaged patient” constituted from a range of different techniques and practices of self-governance. In Australia, this figure is at the centre of a concerted strategy of service digitisation involving a number of cross sector initiatives such as Australia’s National EHealth Strategy (2008), the National Digital Economy Strategy (2011) and the Australian Public Service Mobile Roadmap (2013). This figure of the self-caring “digitally engaged” patient, aligns well and is entirely compatible with neo-liberal formulations of the individual and the reduced role of the state as a provider of welfare and care. Berry refers to Foucault’s definition of neoliberalism as outlined in his lectures to the College de France as a “particular form of post-welfare state politics in which the state essentially outsources the responsibility of the ‘well-being' of the population” (65). In the case of gambling, the neoliberal defined state enables the wedding of two seemingly contradictory stances: promoting gambling as a major source of revenue and capitalisation on the one hand, and identifying and treating gambling addiction as an individual pursuit and potential risk on the other. Risk avoidance strategies are focused on particular groups of people who are targeted for self-treatment to avoid the harm of gambling addiction, which is similarly framed as individual rather than socially and systematically produced. What unites and makes possible this alignment of neoliberalism and the new “digitally engaged subject/patient” is first and foremost, the construction of a subject in a chronic state of ill health. This figure is positioned as terminal from the start. They are ‘sick’, a ‘patient’, an ‘addict’: in need of immediate and continuous treatment. Secondly, this neoliberal patient/addict is enabled (we could even go so far as to say ‘empowered’) by digital technology, especially smartphones and the apps available through these devices in the form of a myriad of applications for intervening and treating ones afflictions. These apps range fromself-tracking programs such as mood regulators through to social media interventions. Anti-Pokie Apps and the Neoliberal Gambler We now turn to two examples which illustrate this alignment between neoliberalism and the new “digitally engaged subject/patient” in relation to gambling. Anti-gambling apps function to both replace or ‘take the place’ of institutions and individuals actively involved in the treatment of problem gambling and re-engineer this service through the logics of ‘self-care’ and ‘self-management’. Here, we depart somewhat from Foucault’s model of disciplinary power summed up in the institution (with the prison exemplifying this disciplinary logic) and move towards Deleuze’s understanding of power as exerted by the State not through enclosures but through diffuse and rhizomatic information flows and technologies (Deleuze). At the same time, we retain Foucault’s attention to the role and agency of the user in this power-dynamic, identifiable in the technics of self-regulation and in his ideas on governmentality. We now turn to analyse these apps more closely, and explore the way in which these articulate and perform these disciplinary logics. The app Quit Pokies was a joint venture of the North East Primary Care Partnership, the Victorian Local Governance Association and the Moreland City Council, launched in early 2014. The idea of the rational, self-reflexive and agentic user is evident in the description of the app by app developer Susan Rennie who described it this way: What they need is for someone to tap them on the shoulder and tell them to get out of there… I thought the phone could be that tap on the shoulder. The “tap on the shoulder” feature uses geolocation and works by emitting a sound alert when the user enters a gaming venue. It also provides information about each user’s losses at that venue. This “tap on the shoulder” is both an alert and a reprimand from past gambling sessions. Through the Responsible Gambling Fund, the NSW government also launched an anti-pokie app in 2013, Gambling Terminator, including a similar feature. The app runs on Apple and Android smartphone platforms, and when a person is inside a gambling venue in New South Wales it: sends reminder messages that interrupt gaming-machine play and gives you a chance to re-think your choices. It also provides instant access to live phone and online counselling services which operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. (Google Play Store) Yet an approach that tries to prevent harm by anticipating the harm that will come from gambling at the point of entering a venue, also eliminates the chance of potential negotiations and encounters a user might have during a visit to the pub and how this experience will unfold. It reduces the “tap on the shoulder”, which may involve a far wider set of interactions and affects, to a software operation and it frames the pub or the club (which under some conditions functions as hubs for socialization and community building) as dangerous places that should be avoided. This has the potential to lead to further stigmatisation of gamblers, their isolation and their exclusion from everyday spaces. Moreland Mayor, Councillor Tapinos captures the implicit framing of self-care as a private act in his explanation of the app as a method for problem gamblers to avoid being stigmatised by, for example, publicly attending group meetings. Yet, curiously, the app has the potential to create a new kind of public stigmatisation through potentially drawing other peoples’ attention to users’ gambling play (as the alarm is triggered) generating embarrassment and humiliation at being “caught out” in an act framed as aberrant and literally, “alarming”. Both Quit Pokies and Gambling Terminator require their users to perform ‘acts’ of physical and affective labour aimed at behaviour change and developing the skills of self-control. After downloading Quit Pokies on the iPhone and launching the app, the user is presented an initial request: “Before you set up this app. please write a list of the pokies venues that you regularly use because the app will ask you to identify these venues so it can send you alerts if you spend time in these locations. It will also use your set up location to identify other venues you might use so we recommend that you set up the App in the location where you spend most time. Congratulation on choosing Quit Pokies.”Self-performed processes include installation, setting up, updating the app software, programming in gambling venues to be detected by the smartphone’s inbuilt GPS, monitoring and responding to the program’s alerts and engaging in alternate “legitimate” forms of leisure such as going to the movies or the library, having coffee with a friend or browsing Facebook. These self-performed labours can be understood as ‘technologies of the self’, a term used by Foucault to describe the way in which social members are obliged to regulate and police their ‘selves’ through a range of different techniques. While Foucault traces the origins of ‘technologies of the self’ to the Greco-Roman texts with their emphasis on “care of oneself” as one of the duties of citizenry, he notes the shift to “self-knowledge” under Christianity around the 8th century, where it became bound up in ideals of self-renunciation and truth. Quit Pokies and Gambling Terminator may signal a recuperation of the ideal of self-care, over confession and disclosure. These apps institute a set of bodily activities and obligations directed to the user’s health and wellbeing, aided through activities of self-examination such as charting your recovery through a Recovery Diary and implementing a number of suggested “Strategies for Change” such as “writing a list” and “learning about ways to manage your money better”. Writing is central to the acts of self-examination. As Jeremy Prangnell, gambling counsellor from Mission Australia for Wollongong and Shellharbour regions explained the app is “like an electronic diary, which is a really common tool for people who are trying to change their behaviour” (Thompson). The labours required by users are also implicated in the functionality and performance of the platform itself suggesting the way in which ‘technologies of the self’ simultaneously function as a form of platform work: user labour that supports and sustains the operation of digital systems and is central to the performance and continuation of digital capitalism in general (Humphry, Demanding Media). In addition to the acts of labour performed on the self and platform, bodies are themselves potentially mobilised (and put into new circuits of consumption and production), as a result of triggers to nudge users away from gambling venues, towards a range of other cultural practices in alternative social spaces considered to be more legitimate.Conclusion Whether or not these technological interventions are effective or successful is yet to be tested. Indeed, the lack of recent activity in the community forums and preponderance of issues reported on installation and use suggests otherwise, pointing to a need for more empirical research into these developments. Regardless, what we’ve tried to identify is the way in which apps such as these embody a new kind of subject-state relation that emphasises self-control of gambling harm and hastens the divestment of institutional and social responsibility at a time when gambling is going through an immense period of expansion in many respects backed by and sanctioned by the state. Patterns of smartphone take up in the mainstream population and the rise of the so called ‘mobile only population’ (ACMA) provide support for this new subject and service paradigm and are often cited as the rationale for digital service reform (APSMR). Media convergence feeds into these dynamics: service delivery becomes the new frontier for the merging of previously separate media distribution systems (Dwyer). Letters, customer service centres, face-to-face meetings and web sites, are combined and in some instances replaced, with online and mobile media platforms, accessible from multiple and mobile devices. These changes are not, however, simply the migration of services to a digital medium with little effective change to the service itself. Health and medical services are re-invented through their technological re-assemblage, bringing into play new meanings, practices and negotiations among the state, industry and neoliberal subjects (in the case of problem gambling apps, a new subjectivity, the ‘neoliberal addict’). These new assemblages are as much about bringing forth a new kind of subject and mode of governance, as they are a solution to problem gambling. This figure of the self-treating “gambler addict” can be seen to be a template for, and prototype of, a more generalised and universalised self-governing citizen: one that no longer needs or makes demands on the state but who can help themselves and manage their own harm. Paradoxically, there is the potential for new risks and harms to the very same users that accompanies this shift: their outright exclusion as a result of deprivation from basic and assumed digital access and literacy, the further stigmatisation of gamblers, the elimination of opportunities for proximal support and their exclusion from everyday spaces. References Albarrán-Torres, César. “Gambling-Machines and the Automation of Desire.” Platform: Journal of Media and Communication 5.1 (2013). Australian Communications and Media Authority. “Australians Cut the Cord.” Research Snapshots. Sydney: ACMA (2013) Berry, David. Critical Theory and the Digital. Broadway, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014 Berry, David. Stunlaw: A Critical Review of Politics, Arts and Technology. 2012. ‹http://stunlaw.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/code-foucault-and-neoliberal.html›. Caldwell, G. “Some Historical and Sociological Characteristics of Australian Gambling.” Gambling in Australia. Eds. G. Caldwell, B. Haig, M. Dickerson, and L. Sylan. Sydney: Croom Helm Australia, 1985. 18-27. Cervini, E. “High Stakes for Gambling Students.” The Age 8 Nov. 2013. ‹http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/high-stakes-for-gambling-students-20131108-2x5cl.html›. Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October (1992): 3-7. Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of the Self.” Eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988 Hastings, E. “Online Gamblers More at Risk of Addiction.” Herald Sun 13 Oct. 2013. ‹http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/online-gamblers-more-at-risk-of-addiction/story-fni0fiyv-1226739184629#!›.Hayatbakhsh, Mohammad R., et al. "Young Adults' Gambling and Its Association with Mental Health and Substance Use Problems." Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health 36.2 (2012): 160-166. Hing, Nerilee, and Helen Breen. "A Profile of Gaming Machine Players in Clubs in Sydney, Australia." Journal of Gambling Studies 18.2 (2002): 185-205. Holdsworth, Louise, Margaret Tiyce, and Nerilee Hing. "Exploring the Relationship between Problem Gambling and Homelessness: Becoming and Being Homeless." Gambling Research 23.2 (2012): 39. Humphry, Justine. “Demanding Media: Platform Work and the Shaping of Work and Play.” Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture, 10.2 (2013): 1-13. Humphry, Justine. “Homeless and Connected: Mobile Phones and the Internet in the Lives of Homeless Australians.” Australian Communications Consumer Action Network. Sep. 2014. ‹https://www.accan.org.au/grants/completed-grants/619-homeless-and-connected›.Lee, Timothy Jeonglyeol. "Distinctive Features of the Australian Gambling Industry and Problems Faced by Australian Women Gamblers." Tourism Analysis 14.6 (2009): 867-876. Lupton, D. “The Digitally Engaged Patient: Self-Monitoring and Self-Care in the Digital Health Era.” Social Theory & Health 11.3 (2013): 256-70. Markham, Francis, and Martin Young. “Packer’s Barangaroo Casino and the Inevitability of Pokies.” The Conversation 9 July 2013. ‹http://theconversation.com/packers-barangaroo-casino-and-the-inevitability-of-pokies-15892›. Markham, Francis, and Martin Young. “Who Wins from ‘Big Gambling’ in Australia?” The Conversation 6 Mar. 2014. ‹http://theconversation.com/who-wins-from-big-gambling-in-australia-22930›.McMillen, Jan, and Katie Donnelly. "Gambling in Australian Indigenous Communities: The State of Play." The Australian Journal of Social Issues 43.3 (2008): 397. Ohtsuka, Keis, and Thai Ohtsuka. “Vietnamese Australian Gamblers’ Views on Luck and Winning: Universal versus Culture-Specific Schemas.” Asian Journal of Gambling Issues and Public Health 1.1 (2010): 34-46. Scull, Sue, Geoffrey Woolcock. “Problem Gambling in Non-English Speaking Background Communities in Queensland, Australia: A Qualitative Exploration.” International Gambling Studies 5.1 (2005): 29-44. Tanasornnarong, Nattaporn, Alun Jackson, and Shane Thomas. “Gambling among Young Thai People in Melbourne, Australia: An Exploratory Study.” International Gambling Studies 4.2 (2004): 189-203. Thompson, Angela, “Live Gambling Odds Tipped for the Chop.” Illawarra Mercury 22 May 2013: 6. Metherell, Mark. “Virtual Pokie App a Hit - But ‘Not Gambling.’” Sydney Morning Herald 13 Jan. 2013. ‹http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/smartphone-apps/virtual-pokie-app-a-hit--but-not-gambling-20130112-2cmev.html#ixzz2QVlsCJs1›. Worthington, Andrew, et al. "Gambling Participation in Australia: Findings from the National Household Expenditure Survey." Review of Economics of the Household 5.2 (2007): 209-221. Young, Martin, et al. "The Changing Landscape of Indigenous Gambling in Northern Australia: Current Knowledge and Future Directions." International Gambling Studies 7.3 (2007): 327-343. Ziolkowski, S. “The World Count of Gaming Machines 2013.” Gaming Technologies Association, 2014. ‹http://www.gamingta.com/pdf/World_Count_2014.pdf›.

This article explores how fat women protesting challenges norms of womanhood, the place of women in society, and who has the power to have their say in public spaces. We use the term fat as a political reclamation; Fat Studies scholars and fat activists prefer the term fat, over the normative term “overweight” and the pathologising term “obese/obesity” (Lee and Pausé para 3). Who is and who isn’t fat, we suggest, is best left to self-determination, although it is generally accepted by fat activists that the term is most appropriately adopted by individuals who are unable to buy clothes in any store they choose. Using a tweet from conservative commentator Ann Coulter as a leaping-off point, we examine the narratives around women in the public sphere and explore how fat bodies might transgress further the norms set by society. The public representations of women in politics and protest are then are set in the context of ‘activist wisdom’ (Maddison and Scalmer) from two sides of the globe. Activist wisdom gives preference to the lived knowledge and experience of activists as tools to understand social movements. It seeks to draw theoretical implications from the practical actions of those on the ground. In centring the experiences of ourselves and other activists, we hope to expand existing understandings of body politics, gender, and political power in this piece. It is important in researching social movements to look both at the representations of protest and protestors in all forms of media as this is the ‘public face’ of movements, but also to examine the reflections of the individuals who collectively put their weight behind bringing social change.A few days after the 45th President of the United States was elected, people around the world spilled into the streets and participated in protests; precursors to the Women’s March which would take place the following January. Pictures of such marches were shared via social media, demonstrating the worldwide protest against the racism, misogyny, and overall oppressiveness, of the newly elected leader. Not everyone was supportive of these protests though; one such conservative commentator, Ann Coulter, shared this tweet: Image1: A tweet from Ann Coulter; the tweet contains a picture of a group of protestors, holding signs protesting Trump, white supremacy, and for the rights of immigrants. In front of the group, holding a megaphone is a woman. Below the picture, the text reads, “Without fat girls, there would be no protests”.Coulter continued on with two more tweets, sharing pictures of other girls protesting and suggesting that the protestors needed a diet programme. Kivan Bay (“Without Fat Girls”) suggested that perhaps Coulter was implying that skinny girls do not have time to protest because they are too busy doing skinny girl things, like buying jackets or trying on sweaters. Or perhaps Coulter was arguing that fat girls are too visible, too loud, and too big, to be taken seriously in their protests. These tweets provide a point of illustration for how fat women protesting challenge norms of womanhood, the place of women in society, and who has the power to have their say in public spaces While Coulter’s tweet was most likely intended as a hostile personal attack on political grounds, we find it useful in its foregrounding of gender, bodies and protest which we consider in this article, beginning with a review of fat girls’ role in social justice movements.Across the world, we can point to fat women who engage in activism related to body politics and more. Australian fat filmmaker and activist Kelli Jean Drinkwater makes documentaries, such as Aquaporko! and Nothing to Lose, that queer fat embodiment and confronts body norms. Newly elected Ontario MPP Jill Andrew has been fighting for equal rights for queer people and fat people in Canada for decades. Nigerian Latasha Ngwube founded About That Curvy Life, Africa’s leading body positive and empowerment site, and has organised plus-size fashion show events at Heineken Lagos Fashion and Design Week in Nigeria in 2016 and the Glitz Africa Fashion Week in Ghana in 2017. Fat women have been putting their bodies on the line for the rights of others to live, work, and love. American Heather Heyer was protesting the hate that white nationalists represent and the danger they posed to her friends, family, and neighbours when she died at a rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina in late 2017 (Caron). When Heyer was killed by one of those white nationalists, they declared that she was fat, and therefore her body size was lauded loudly as justification for her death (Bay, “How Nazis Use”; Spangler).Fat women protesting is not new. For example, the Fat Underground was a group of “radical fat feminist women”, who split off from the more conservative NAAFA (National Association to Aid Fat Americans) in the 1970s (Simic 18). The group educated the public about weight science, harassed weight-loss companies, and disrupted academic seminars on obesity. The Fat Underground made their first public appearance at a Women’s Equality Day in Los Angeles, taking over the stage at the public event to accuse the medical profession of murdering Cass Elliot, the lead singer of the folk music group, The Mamas and the Papas (Dean and Buss). In 1973, the Fat Underground produced the Fat Liberation Manifesto. This Manifesto began by declaring that they believed “that fat people are full entitled to human respect and recognition” (Freespirit and Aldebaran 341).Women have long been disavowed, or discouraged, from participating in the public sphere (Ginzberg; van Acker) or seen as “intruders or outsiders to the tough world of politics” (van Acker 118). The feminist slogan the personal is political was intended to shed light on the role that women needed to play in the public spheres of education, employment, and government (Caha 22). Across the world, the acceptance of women within the public sphere has been varied due to cultural, political, and religious, preferences and restrictions (Agenda Feminist Media Collective). Limited acceptance of women in the public sphere has historically been granted by those ‘anointed’ by a male family member or patron (Fountaine 47).Anti-feminists are quick to disavow women being in public spaces, preferring to assign them the role as helpmeet to male political elite. As Schlafly (in Rowland 30) notes: “A Positive Woman cannot defeat a man in a wrestling or boxing match, but she can motivate him, inspire him, encourage him, teach him, restrain him, reward him, and have power over him that he can never achieve over her with all his muscle.” This idea of women working behind the scenes has been very strong in New Zealand where the ‘sternly worded’ letter is favoured over street protest. An acceptable route for women’s activism was working within existing political institutions (Grey), with activity being ‘hidden’ inside government offices such as the Ministry of Women’s Affairs (Schuster, 23). But women’s movement organisations that engage in even the mildest form of disruptive protest are decried (Grey; van Acker).One way women have been accepted into public space is as the moral guardians or change agents of the entire political realm (Bliss; Ginzberg; van Acker; Ledwith). From the early suffrage movements both political actors and media representations highlighted women were more principled and conciliatory than men, and in many cases had a moral compass based on restraint. Cartoons showed women in the suffrage movement ‘sweeping up’ and ‘cleaning house’ (Sheppard 123). Groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union were celebrated for protesting against the demon drink and anti-pornography campaigners like Patricia Bartlett were seen as acceptable voices of moral reason (Moynihan). And as Cunnison and Stageman (in Ledwith 193) note, women bring a “culture of femininity to trade unions … an alternative culture, derived from the particularity of their lives as women and experiences of caring and subordination”. This role of moral guardian often derived from women as ‘mothers’, responsible for the physical and moral well-being of the nation.The body itself has been a sight of protest for women including fights for bodily autonomy in their medical decisions, reproductive justice, and to live lives free from physical and sexual abuse, have long been met with criticisms of being unladylike or inappropriate. Early examples decried in NZ include the women’s clothing movement which formed part of the suffrage movement. In the second half of the 20th century it was the freedom trash can protests that started the myth of ‘women burning their bras’ which defied acceptable feminine norms (Sawer and Grey). Recent examples of women protesting for body rights include #MeToo and Time’s Up. Both movements protest the lack of bodily autonomy women can assert when men believe they are entitled to women’s bodies for their entertainment, enjoyment, and pleasure. And both movements have received considerable backlash by those who suggest it is a witch hunt that might ensnare otherwise innocent men, or those who are worried that the real victims are white men who are being left behind (see Garber; Haussegger). Women who advocate for bodily autonomy, including access to contraception and abortion, are often held up as morally irresponsible. As Archdeacon Bullock (cited in Smyth 55) asserted, “A woman should pay for her fun.”Many individuals believe that the stigma and discrimination fat people face are the consequences they sow from their own behaviours (Crandall 892); that fat people are fat because they have made poor decisions, being too indulgent with food and too lazy to exercise (Crandall 883). Therefore, fat people, like women, should have to pay for their fun. Fat women find themselves at this intersection, and are often judged more harshly for their weight than fat men (Tiggemann and Rothblum). Examining Coulter’s tweet with this perspective in mind, it can easily be read as an attempt to put fat girl protestors back into their place. It can also be read as a warning. Don’t go making too much noise or you may be labelled as fat. Presenting troublesome women as fat has a long history within political art and depictions. Marianne (the symbol of the French Republic) was depicted as fat and ugly; she also reinforced an anti-suffragist position (Chenut 441). These images are effective because of our societal views on fatness (Kyrölä). Fatness is undesirable, unworthy of love and attention, and a representation of poor character, lack of willpower, and an absence of discipline (Murray 14; Pausé, “Rebel Heart” para 1).Fat women who protest transgress rules around body size, gender norms, and the appropriate place for women in society. Take as an example the experiences of one of the authors of this piece, Sandra Grey, who was thrust in to political limelight nationally with the Campaign for MMP (Grey and Fitzsimmons) and when elected as the President of the New Zealand Tertiary Education Union in 2011. Sandra is a trade union activist who breaches too many norms set for the “good woman protestor,” as well as the norms for being a “good fat woman”. She looms large on a stage – literally – and holds enough power in public protest to make a crowd of 7,000 people “jump to left”, chant, sing, and march. In response, some perceive Sandra less as a tactical and strategic leader of the union movement, and more as the “jolly fat woman” who entertains, MCs, and leads public events. Though even in this role, she has been criticised for being too loud, too much, too big.These criticisms are loudest when Sandra is alongside other fat female bodies. When posting on social media photos with fellow trade union members the comments often note the need of the group to “go on a diet”. The collective fatness also brings comments about “not wanting to fuck any of that group of fat cows”. There is something politically and socially dangerous about fat women en masse. This was behind the responses to Sandra’s first public appearance as the President of TEU when one of the male union members remarked “Clearly you have to be a fat dyke to run this union.” The four top elected and appointed positions in the TEU have been women for eight years now and both their fatness and perceived sexuality present as a threat in a once male-dominated space. Even when not numerically dominant, unions are public spaces dominated by a “masculine culture … underpinned by the undervaluation of ‘women’s worth’ and notions of womanhood ‘defined in domesticity’” (Cockburn in Kirton 273-4). Sandra’s experiences in public space show that the derision and methods of putting fat girls back in their place varies dependent on whether the challenge to power is posed by a single fat body with positional power and a group of fat bodies with collective power.Fat Girls Are the FutureOn the other side of the world, Tara Vilhjálmsdóttir is protesting to change the law in Iceland. Tara believes that fat people should be protected against discrimination in public and private settings. Using social media such as Facebook and Instagram, Tara takes her message, and her activism, to her thousands of followers (Keller, 434; Pausé, “Rebel Heart”). And through mainstream media, she pushes back on fatphobia rhetoric and applies pressure on the government to classify weight as a protected status under the law.After a lifetime of living “under the oppression of diet culture,” Tara began her activism in 2010 (Vilhjálmsdóttir). She had suffered real harm from diet culture, developing an eating disorder as a teen and being told through her treatment for it that her fears as a fat woman – that she had no future, that fat people experienced discrimination and stigma – were unfounded. But Tara’s lived experiences demonstrated fat stigma and discrimination were real.In 2012, she co-founded the Icelandic Association for Body Respect, which promotes body positivity and fights weight stigma in Iceland. The group uses a mixture of real life and online tools; organising petitions, running campaigns against the Icelandic version of The Biggest Loser, and campaigning for weight to be a protected class in the Icelandic constitution. The Association has increased the visibility of the dangers of diet culture and the harm of fat stigma. They laid the groundwork that led to changing the human rights policy for the city of Reykjavík; fat people cannot be discriminated against in employment settings within government jobs. As the city is one of the largest employers in the country, this was a large step forward for fat rights.Tara does receive her fair share of hate messages; she’s shared that she’s amazed at the lengths people will go to misunderstand what she is saying (Vilhjálmsdóttir). “This isn’t about hurt feelings; I’m not insulted [by fat stigma]. It’s about [fat stigma] affecting the livelihood of fat people and the structural discrimination they face” (Vilhjálmsdóttir). She collects the hateful comments she receives online through screenshots and shares them in an album on her page. She believes it is important to keep a repository to demonstrate to others that the hatred towards fat people is real. But the hate she receives only fuels her work more. As does the encouragement she receives from people, both in Iceland and abroad. And she is not alone; fat activists across the world are using Web 2.0 tools to change the conversation around fatness and demand civil rights for fat people (Pausé, “Rebel Heart”; Pausé, “Live to Tell").Using Web 2.0 tools as a way to protest and engage in activism is an example of oppositional technologics; a “political praxis of resistance being woven into low-tech, amateur, hybrid, alternative subcultural feminist networks” (Garrison 151). Fat activists use social media to engage in anti-assimilationist activism and build communities of practice online in ways that would not be possible in real life (Pausé, “Express Yourself” 1). This is especially useful for those whose protests sit at the intersections of oppressions (Keller 435; Pausé, “Rebel Heart” para 19). Online protests have the ability to travel the globe quickly, providing opportunities for connections between protests and spreading protests across the globe, such as SlutWalks in 2011-2012 (Schuster 19). And online spaces open up unlimited venues for women to participate more freely in protest than other forms (Harris 479; Schuster 16; Garrison 162).Whether online or offline, women are represented as dangerous in the political sphere when they act without male champions breaching norms of femininity, when their involvement challenges the role of woman as moral guardians, and when they make the body the site of protest. Women must ‘do politics’ politely, with utmost control, and of course caringly; that is they must play their ‘designated roles’. Whether or not you fit the gendered norms of political life affects how your protest is perceived through the media (van Acker). Coulter’s tweet loudly proclaimed that the fat ‘girls’ protesting the election of the 45th President of the United States were unworthy, out of control, and not worthy of attention (ironic, then, as her tweet caused considerable conversation about protest, fatness, and the reasons not to like the President-Elect). What the Coulter tweet demonstrates is that fat women are perceived as doubly-problematic in public space, both as fat and as women. They do not do politics in a way that is befitting womanhood – they are too visible and loud; they are not moral guardians of conservative values; and, their bodies challenge masculine power.ReferencesAgenda Feminist Media Collective. “Women in Society: Public Debate.” Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity 10 (1991): 31-44.Bay, Kivan. “How Nazis Use Fat to Excuse Violence.” Medium, 7 Feb. 2018. 1 May 2018 <https://medium.com/@kivabay/how-nazis-use-fat-to-excuse-violence-b7da7d18fea8>.———. “Without Fat Girls, There Would Be No Protests.” Bullshit.ist, 13 Nov. 2016. 16 May 2018 <https://bullshit.ist/without-fat-girls-there-would-be-no-protests-e66690de539a>.Bliss, Katherine Elaine. Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City. Penn State Press, 2010.Caha, Omer. 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In this article I discuss a story told by the South Australian Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal elder, Aunty Hilda Wilson (nee Varcoe), about the time when, at not quite sixteen, she was sent from the Point Pearce Aboriginal Station to work in the Adelaide Hills, some 500 kilometres away, as a housekeeper for “one of Adelaide’s leading doctors”. Her secondment was part of a widespread practice in early and mid-twentieth century Australia of placing young Aboriginal women “of marriageable age” from missions and government reserves into domestic service. Consciously deploying Indigenous storytelling practices as pedagogy, Hilda Wilson recounted this episode in a number of distinct ways during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Across these iterations, each building on the other, she exhibited a personal resilience in her subjectivity, embedded in Indigenous knowledge systems of relationality, kin and work, which informed her agency and determination in a challenging situation in which she was both caring for a white socially-privileged family of five, while simultaneously grappling with the injustices of a state system of segregated indentured labour. Kirmayer and colleagues propose that “notions of resilience emerging from developmental psychology and psychiatry in recent years address the distinctive cultures, geographic and social settings, and histories of adversity of indigenous peoples”. Resilience is understood here as an ability to actively engage with traumatic change, involving the capacity to absorb stress and to transform in order to cope with it (Luthar et al.). Further to this, in an Indigenous context, Marion Kickett has found the capacity for resilience to be supported by three key factors: family connections, culture and belonging as well as notions of identity and history. In exploring the layers of this autobiographical story, I employ this extended psychological notion of resilience in both a domestic ambit as well as the broader social context for Indigenous people surviving a system of external domination. Additionally I consider the resilience Aunty Hilda demonstrates at a pivotal interlude between girlhood and womanhood within the trajectory of her overall long and productive life, and within an intergenerational history of resistance and accommodation. What is especially important about her storytelling is its refusal to be contained by the imaginary of the settler nation and its generic Aboriginal-female subject. She refuses victimhood while at the same time illuminating the mechanisms of injustice, hinting also at possibilities for alternative and more equitable relationships of family and work across cultural divides. Considered through this prism, resilience is, I suggest, also a quality firmly connected to ideas of Aboriginal cultural-sovereignty and standpoint and to, what Victoria Grieves has identified as, the Aboriginal knowledge value of sharing (25, 28, 45). Storytelling as Pedagogy The story I discuss was verbally recounted in a manner that Westphalen describes as “a continuation of Dreaming Stories”, functioning to educate and connect people and country (13-14). As MacGill et al. note, “the critical and transformative aspects of decolonising pedagogies emerge from storytelling and involve the gift of narrative and the enactment of reciprocity that occurs between the listener and the storyteller.” Hilda told me that as a child she was taught not to ask questions when listening to the stories of an Elder, and her own children were raised in this manner. Hilda's oldest daughter described this as a process involving patience, intrigue and surprise (Elva Wanganeen). Narratives unfold through nuance and repetition in a complexity of layers that can generate multiple levels of meaning over time. Circularity and recursivity underlie this pedagogy through which mnemonic devices are built so that stories become re-membered and inscribed on the body of the listener. When a perceived level of knowledge-transference has occurred, a narrator may elect to elaborate further, adding another detail that will often transform the story’s social, cultural, moral or political context. Such carefully chosen additional detail, however, might re-contextualise all that has gone before. As well as being embodied, stories are also emplaced, and thus most appropriately told in the Country where events occurred. (Here I use the Aboriginal English term “Country” which encompasses home, clan estate, and the powerful complex of spiritual, animate and inanimate forces that bind people and place.) Hilda Wilson’s following account of her first job as a housekeeper for “one of Adelaide’s leading doctors”, Dr Frank Swann, provides an illustration of how she expertly uses traditional narrative forms of incrementally structured knowledge transmission within a cross-cultural setting to tell a story that expresses practices of resilience as resistance and transformation at its core. A “White Doctor” Story: The First Layer Aunty Hilda first told me this story when we were winding along the South Eastern Freeway through the Adelaide hills between Murray Bridge and Mount Barker, in 1997, on our way home to Adelaide from a trip to Camp Coorong, the Ngarrindjeri cultural education centre co-founded by her granddaughter. She was then 86 years old. Ahead of us, the profile of Mt Lofty rose out of the plains and into view. The highest peak in the Mount Lofty ranges, Yurrebilla, as it is known to Kaurna Aboriginal people, or Mt Lofty, has been an affluent enclave of white settlement for Adelaide’s moneyed elite since early colonial times. Being in place, or in view of place, provided the appropriate opportunity for her to tell me the story. It belongs to a group of stories that during our initial period of working together changed little over time until one day two years later she an added contextual detail which turned it inside out. Hilda described the doctor’s spacious hill-top residence, and her responsibilities of caring for Dr Swann’s invalid wife (“an hysteric who couldn't do anything for herself”), their twin teenage boys (who attended private college in the city) along with another son and younger daughter living at home (pers. com. Hilda Wilson). Recalling the exhilaration of looking down over the sparkling lights of Adelaide at night from this position of apparent “privilege” on the summit, she related this undeniably as a success story, justifiably taking great pride in her achievements as a teenager, capable of stepping into the place of the non-Indigenous doctor's wife in running the large and demanding household. Successfully undertaking a wide range of duties employed in the care of a family, including the disabled mother, she is an active participant crucial to the lives of all in the household, including to the work of the doctor and the twin boys in private education. Hilda recalled that Mrs Swann was unable to eat without her assistance. As the oldest daughter of a large family Hilda had previously assisted in caring for her younger siblings. Told in this way, her account collapses social distinctions, delineating a shared social and physical space, drawing its analytic frame from an Indigenous ethos of subjectivity, relationality, reciprocity and care. Moreover Hilda’s narrative of domestic service demonstrates an assertion of agency that resists colonial and patriarchal hegemony and inverts the master/mistress-servant relationship, one she firmly eschews in favour of the self-affirming role of the lady of the house. (It stands in contrast to the abuse found in other accounts for example Read, Tucker, Kartinyeri. Often the key difference was a continuity of family connections and ongoing family support.) Indeed the home transformed into a largely feminised and cross-culturalised space in which she had considerable agency and responsibility when the doctor was absent. Hilda told me this story several times in much the same way during our frequent encounters over the next two years. Each telling revealed further details that fleshed a perspective gained from what Patricia Hill Collins terms an “epistemic privilege” via her “outsider-within status” of working within a white household, lending an understanding of its social mechanisms (12-15). She also stressed the extent of her duty of care in upholding the family’s well-being, despite the work at times being too burdensome. The Second Version: Coming to Terms with Intersecting Oppressions Later, as our relationship developed and deepened, when I began to record her life-narrative as part of my doctoral work, she added an unexpected detail that altered its context completely: It was all right except I slept outside in a tin shed and it was very cold at night. Mount Lofty, by far the coldest part of Adelaide, frequently experiences winter maximum temperatures of two or three degrees and often light snowfalls. This skilful reframing draws on Indigenous storytelling pedagogy and is expressly used to invite reflexivity, opening questions that move the listener from the personal to the public realm in which domestic service and the hegemony of the home are pivotal in coming to terms with the overlapping historical oppressions of class, gender, race and nation. Suddenly we witness her subjectivity starkly shift from one self-defined and allied with an equal power relationship – or even of dependency reversal cast as “de-facto doctor's wife” – to one diminished by inequity and power imbalance in the outsider-defined role of “mistreated servant”. The latter was signalled by the dramatic addition of a single signifying detail as a decoding device to a deeper layer of meaning. In this parallel stratum of the story, Hilda purposefully brings into relief the politics in which “the private domain of women's housework intersected with the public domain of governmental social engineering policies” (Haskins 4). As Aileen Moreton-Robinson points out, what for White Australia was cheap labour and a civilising mission, for Indigenous women constituted stolen children and slavery. Protection and then assimilation were government policies under which Indigenous women grew up. (96) Hilda was sent away from her family to work in 1927 by the universally-feared Sister Pearl McKenzie, a nurse who too-zealously (Katinyeri, Ngarrindjeri Calling, 23) oversaw the Chief Protector’s policies of “training” Aboriginal children from the South Australian missions in white homes once they reached fourteen (Haebich, 316—20). Indeed many prominent Adelaide hills’ families benefited from Aboriginal labour under this arrangement. Hilda explained her struggle with the immense cultural dislocation that removal into domestic service entailed, a removal her grandfather William Rankine had travelled from Raukkan to Government House to protest against less than a decade earlier (The Register December 21, 1923). This additional layer of story also illuminates Hilda’s capacity for resilience and persistence in finding a way forward through the challenge of her circumstances (Luthar et al.), drawing on her family networks and sense of personhood (Kickett). Hilda related that her father visited her at Mount Lofty twice, though briefly, on his way to shearing jobs in the south-east of the state. “He said it was no good me living like this,” she stated. Through his active intervention, reinforcement was requested and another teenager from Point Pearce, Hilda’s future husband’s cousin, Annie Sansbury, soon arrived to share the workload. But, Hilda explained, the onerous expectations coupled with the cultural segregation of retiring to the tin shed quickly became too much for Annie, who stayed only three months, leaving Hilda coping again alone, until her father applied additional pressure for a more suitable placement to be found for his daughter. In her next position, working for the family of a racehorse trainer, Hilda contentedly shared the bedroom with the small boy for whom she cared, and not long after returned to Point Pearce where she married Robert Wilson and began a family of her own. Gendered Resilience across Cultural Divides Hilda explicitly speaks into these spaces to educate me, because all but a few white women involved have remained silent about their complicity with state sanctioned practices which exploited Indigenous labour and removed children from their families through the policies of protection and assimilation. For Indigenous women, speaking out was often fraught with the danger of a deeper removal from family and Country, even of disappearance. Victoria Haskins writes extensively of two cases in New South Wales where young Aboriginal women whose protests concerning their brutal treatment at the hands of white employers, resulted in their wrongful and prolonged committal to mental health and other institutions (147-52, 228-39). In the indentured service of Indigenous women it is possible to see oppression operating through Eurocentric ideologies of race, class and gender, in which Indigenous women were assumed to take on, through displacement, the more oppressed role of white women in pre-second world war non-Aboriginal Australian society. The troubling silent shadow-figure of the “doctor’s wife” indeed provides a haunting symbol of - and also a forceful rebellion against – the docile upper middle-class white femininity of the inter-war era. Susan Bordo has argued that that “the hysteric” is archetypal of a discourse of ‘pathology as embodied protest’ in which the body may […] be viewed as a surface on which conventional constructions of femininity are exposed starkly to view in extreme or hyperliteral form. (20) Mrs Swann’s vulnerability contrasts markedly with the strength Hilda expresses in coping with a large family, emanating from a history of equitable gender relations characteristic of Ngarrindjeri society (Bell). The intersection of race and gender, as Marcia Langton contends “continues to require deconstruction to allow us to decolonise our consciousness” (54). From Hilda’s brief description one grasps a relationship resonant with that between the protagonists in Tracy Moffat's Night Cries, (a response to the overt maternalism in the film Jedda) in which the white mother finds herself utterly reliant on her “adopted” Aboriginal daughter at the end of her life (46-7). Resilience and Survival The different versions of story Hilda deploys, provide a pedagogical basis to understanding the broader socio-political framework of her overall life narrative in which an ability to draw on the cultural continuity of the past to transform the future forms an underlying dynamic. This demonstrated capacity to meet the challenging conditions thrown up by the settler-colonial state has its foundations in the connectivity and cultural strength sustained generationally in her family. Resilience moves from being individually to socially determined, as in Kickett’s model. During the onslaught of dispossession, following South Australia’s 1836 colonial invasion, Ngarrindjeri were left near-starving and decimated from introduced diseases. Pullume (c1808-1888), the rupuli (elected leader of the Ngarrindjeri Tendi, or parliament), Hilda’s third generation great-grandfather, decisively steered his people through the traumatic changes, eventually negotiating a middle-path after the Point McLeay Mission was established on Ngarrindjeri country in 1859 (Jenkin, 59). Pullume’s granddaughter, the accomplished, independent-thinking Ellen Sumner (1842—1925), played an influential educative role during Hilda’s youth. Like other Ngarrindjeri women in her lineage, Ellen Sumner was skilled in putari practice (female doctor) and midwifery culture that extended to a duty of care concerning women and children (teaching her “what to do and what not to do”), which I suggest is something Hilda herself drew from when working with the Swann family. Hilda’s mother and aunties continued aspects of the putari tradition, attending births and giving instruction to women in the community (Bell, 171, Hughes Grandmother, 52-4). As mentioned earlier, when the South Australian government moved to introduce The Training of Children Act (SA) Hilda’s maternal grandfather William Rankine campaigned vigorously against this, taking a petition to the SA Governor in December 1923 (Haebich, 315-19). As with Aunty Hilda, William Rankine used storytelling as a method to draw public attention to the inequities of his times in an interview with The Register which drew on his life-narrative (Hughes, My Grandmother, 61). Hilda’s father Wilfred Varcoe, a Barngarrla-Wirrungu man, almost a thousand kilometres away from his Poonindie birthplace, resisted assimilation by actively pursuing traditional knowledge networks using his mobility as a highly sought after shearer to link up with related Elders in the shearing camps, (and as we saw to inspect the conditions his daughter was working under at Mt Lofty). The period Hilda spent as a servant to white families to be trained in white ways was in fact only a brief interlude in a long life in which family connections, culture and belonging (Kickett) served as the backbone of her resilience and resistance. On returning to the Point Pearce Mission, Hilda successfully raised a large family and activated a range of community initiatives that fostered well-being. In the 1960s she moved to Adelaide, initially as the sole provider of her family (her husband later followed), to give her younger children better educational opportunities. Working with Aunty Gladys Elphick OBE through the Council of Aboriginal Women, she played a foundational role in assisting other Aboriginal women establish their families in the city (Mattingly et al., 154, Fisher). In Adelaide, Aunty Hilda became an influential, much loved Elder, living in good health to the age of ninety-six years. The ability to survive changing circumstances, to extend care over and over to her children and Elders along with qualities of leadership, determination, agency and resilience have passed down through her family, several of whom have become successful in public life. These include her great-grandson and former AFL football player, Michael O’Loughlin, her great-nephew Adam Goodes and her-grand-daughter, the cultural weaver Aunty Ellen Trevorrow. Arguably, resilience contributes to physical as well as cultural longevity, through caring for the self and others. Conclusion This story demonstrates how sociocultural dimensions of resilience are contextualised in practices of everyday lives. We see this in the way that Aunty Hilda Wilson’s self-narrated story resolutely defies attempts to know, subjugate and categorise, operating instead in accord with distinctively Aboriginal expressions of gender and kinship relations that constitute an Aboriginal sovereignty. Her storytelling activates a revision of collective history in ways that valorise Indigenous identity (Kirmayer et al.). Her narrative of agency and personal achievement, one that has sustained her through life, interacts with the larger narrative of state-endorsed exploitation, diffusing its power and exposing it to wider moral scrutiny. Resilience in this context is inextricably entwined with practices of cultural survival and resistance developed in response to the introduction of government policies and the encroachment of settlers and their world. We see resilience too operating across Hilda Wilson’s family history, and throughout her long life. The agency and strategies displayed suggest alternative realities and imagine other, usually more equitable, possible worlds. References Bell, Diane. Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: A World That Is, Was and Will Be. Melbourne: Spinifex, 1998. 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This single and critical case study evaluated a faith-based natural family planning program's salient features using a framework on implementation fidelity. Multiple focus group discussions were conducted, with three groups of stakeholders (n=100), to gather qualitative data on their knowledge and experience of the program. Overall, the findings showed that the program primarily adhered to the essential elements of implementation fidelity, such as content, frequency, duration, and coverage prescribed by its designers. Three lessons were drawn to address some issues that have influenced the degree of fidelity in which the program was implemented. The first is the need to secure adequate and sustained human and financial resources. The second is the need to strengthen its partnership with government and non-government organizations that have provided them with much-needed assistance. Finally, there is also the need to provide extensive training, materials, and support to its service providers to preserve their morale and interest. Other faith-based organizations may hold this case as an indicator of how and why an NFP program works and the extent to which the need for family planning can be met adapted to their local conditions and needs. References Arbuckle, Gerald A. Refounding the Church: Dissent for Leadership. Quezon City: Claretian Publications. 1993. Arevalo, Marcos. "Expanding the Availability and improving the delivery of natural family planning services and fertility awareness education: providers' perspectives. Adv Contracept. Jun-Sep 1997; 13(2-3):275-81. Arévalo, Marcos, Victoria Jennings, and Irit Sinai. "Efficacy of a new method of family planning: the Standard Days Method." Contraception 65, no. 5 (2002): 333-338.Arévalo, Marcos, Irit Sinai, and Victoria Jennings. 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Introduction This article aims to explore some of the ideological discourses that reinforce marriage as a central social and cultural institution in US-American society. Andrew Cherlin argues that despite social secularisation, rising divorce rates and the emergence of other, alternative forms of love and living, marriage “remains the most highly valued form of family life in American culture, the most prestigious way to live your life” (9). Indeed, marriage in the US has become an ideological and political battlefield, with charged debates about who is entitled to this form of state-sanctioned relationship, with the government spending large sums of money to promote the value of marriage and the highest number of people projected to get married (nearly 90 per cent of all people) compared to other Western nations (Cherlin 4). I argue here that the idea of marriage as the ideal form for an intimate relationship permeates US-American culture to an extent that we can speak of a marital hegemony. This hegemony is fuelled by and reflected in the saturation of American popular culture with celebratory depictions of the white wedding as public performance and symbolic manifestation of the values associated with marriage. These depictions contribute to the discursive production of weddings as “one of the major events that signal readiness and prepare heterosexuals for membership in marriage as an organizing practice for the institution of marriage” (Ingraham 4). From the representation of weddings as cinematic climax in a huge number of films, to TV shows such as The Bachelor, Bridezillas and Race to the Altar, to the advertisement industry and the bridal magazines that construct the figure of the bride as an ideal that every girl and woman should aspire to, popular discourses promote the desirability of marriage in a wide range of media spheres. These representations, which I call bridal fictions, do not only shape and regulate the production of gendered, raced, classed and sexual identities in the media in fundamental ways. They also promote the idea that marriage is the only adequate framework for an intimate relationship and for the constitution of an acceptable gendered identity, meanwhile reproducing heterosexuality as norm and monogamy as societal duty. Thus I argue that we can understand contemporary bridal fictions as a symbolic legitimation of marital hegemony that perpetuates the idea that “lifelong marriage is a moral imperative” (Coontz 292). Marital Hegemony By drawing on Gramsci’s term and argument of cultural hegemony, I propose that public, political, religious and popular discourses work together in intersecting, overlapping, ideologically motivated and often even contradictory ways to produce what can be conceptualised as marital hegemony. Gramsci understands the relationship between state coercion and legitimation as crucial to an understanding of constituted consensus and co-operation. By legitimation Gramsci refers to processes through which social elites constitute their leadership through the universalizing of their own class-based self-interests. These self-interests are adopted by the greater majority of people, who apprehend them as natural or universal standards of value (common sense). This ‘hegemony’ neutralizes dissent, instilling the values, beliefs and cultural meanings into the generalized social structures. (Lewis 76-77)Marital hegemony also consists of those two mechanisms, coercion and legitimation. Coercion by the social elites, in this case by the state, is conducted through intervening in the private life of citizens in order to regulate and control their intimate relationships. Through the offering of financial benefits, medical insurance, tax cuts and various other privileges to married partners only (see Ingraham 175-76), the state withholds these benefits from all those that do not conform to this kind of state-sanctioned relationship. However, this must serve as the topic of another discussion, as this paper is more interested in the second aspect of hegemony, the symbolic legitimation. Symbolic legitimation works through the depiction of the white wedding as the occasion on which entering the institution of marriage is publicly celebrated and marital identity is socially validated. Bridal fictions work on a semiotic and symbolic level to display and perpetuate the idea of marriage as the most desirable and ultimately only legitimate form of intimate, heterosexual relationships. This is not to say that there is no resistance to this form of hegemony, as Foucault argues, eventually there is no “power without resistances” (142). However, as Engstrom contends, contemporary bridal fictions “reinforce and endorse the idea that romantic relationships should and must lead to marriage, which requires public display—the wedding” (3). Thus I argue that we can understand contemporary bridal fictions as one key symbolic factor in the production of marital hegemony. The ongoing centrality of marriage as an institution finds its reflection, as Otnes and Pleck argue, in the fact that the white wedding, in spite of all changes and processes of liberalisation in regard to gender, family and sexuality, “remains the most significant ritual in contemporary culture” (5). Accordingly, popular culture, reflective as well as constitutive of existing cultural paradigms, is saturated with what I have termed here bridal fictions. Bridal representations have been subject to rigorous academic investigation (c.f. Currie, Geller, Bambacas, Boden, Otnes and Pleck, Wallace and Howard). But, by using the term “bridal fictions”, I seek to underscore the fictional nature of these apparent “representations”, emphasising their role in producing pervasive utopias, rather than representing reality. This is not to say that bridal fictions are solely fictive. In fact, my argument here is that these bridal fictions do have discursive influence on contemporary wedding culture and practices. With my analysis of a bridal advertisement campaign later on in this paper, I aim to show exemplarily how bridal fictions work not only in perpetuating marriage, monogamy and heteronormativity as central organizing principles of intimate life. But moreover, how bridal fictions use this framework to promote certain kinds of white, heterosexual, upper-class identities that normatively inform our understanding of who is seen as entitled to this form of state-sanctioned relationship. Furthermore my aim is to highlight the role of postfeminist frames in sustaining marital hegemony. Second Wave feminism, seeing marriage as a form of “intimate colonization” (in Finlay and Clarke 416), has always been one of the few sources of critique in regard to this institution. In contrast, postfeminist accounts, now informing a significant amount of contemporary bridal fictions, evoke marriage as actively chosen, unproblematic and innately desired state of being for women. By constructing the liberated, self-determined figure of the postfeminist bride, contemporary bridal fictions naturalise and re-modernise marriage as framework for the constitution of modern feminine identity. An analysis of postfeminist bridal identities, as done in the following, is thus vital to my argument, because it highlights how postfeminist accounts deflect feminism’s critique of marriage as patriarchal, political and hegemonic institution and hence contribute to the perpetuation and production of marital hegemony. The Postfeminist Bride Postfeminism has emerged since the early 1990s as the dominant mode of constructing femininities in the media. Angela McRobbie understands postfeminism as “to refer to an active process by which feminist gains of the 1970s and 80s come to be undermined”, while simultaneously appearing to be “a well-informed and even well-intended response to feminism” (“Postfeminism” 255). Based on the assumption that women nowadays are no longer subjected to patriarchal power structures anymore, postfeminism actively takes feminism into account while, at the same time, “undoing” it (McRobbie “Postfeminism” 255). In contemporary postfeminist culture, feminism is “decisively aged and made to seem redundant”, which allows a conscious “dis-identification” and/or “forceful non-identity” with accounts of Second Wave feminism (McRobbie Aftermath 15). This demarcation from earlier forms of feminism is particularly evident with regard to marriage and wedding discourses. Second wave feminist critics such as Betty Friedan (1973) and Carole Pateman were critical of the influence of marriage on women’s psychological, financial and sexual freedom. This generation of feminists saw marriage as a manifestation of patriarchal power, which is based on women’s total emotional and erotic loyalty and subservience (Rich 1980), as well as on “men’s domination over women, and the right of men to enjoy equal sexual access to women” (Pateman 1988 2). In contrast, contemporary postfeminism enunciates now that “equality is achieved, in order to install a whole repertoire of new meanings which emphasise that it [feminism] is no longer needed, it is a spent force” (McRobbie “Postfeminism” 255). Instead of seeing marriage as institutionlised subjugation of women, the postfeminist generation of “educated women who have come of age in the 1990s feel that the women’s liberation movement has achieved its goals and that marriage is now an even playing field in which the two sexes operate as equal partners” (Geller 110). As McRobbie argues “feminism was anti-marriage and this can now to be shown to be great mistake” (Aftermath 20). Accordingly, postfeminist bridal fictions do not depict the bride as passive and waiting to be married, relying on conservative and patriarchal notions of hegemonic femininity, but as an active agent using the white wedding as occasion to act out choice, autonomy and power. Genz argues that a characteristic of postfemininities is that they re-negotiate femininity and feminism no longer as mutually exclusive and irreconcilable categories, but as constitutive of each other (Genz; Genz and Brabon). What I term the postfeminist bride embodies this shifted understanding of feminism and femininity. The postfeminist bride is a figure that is often celebrated in terms of individual freedom, professional success and self-determination, instead of resting on traditional notions of female domesticity and passivity. Rather than fulfilling clichés of the homemaker and traditional wife, the postfeminist bride is characterised by an emphasis on power, agency and pleasure. Characteristic of this figure, as with other postfemininities in popular culture, is a simultaneous appropriation and repudiation of feminist critique. Within postfeminist bridal culture, the performance of traditional femininity through the figure of the bride, or by identification with it, is framed in terms of individual choice, depicted as standing outside of the political and ideological struggles surrounding gender, equality, class, sexuality and race. In this way, as Engstrom argues, “bridal media’s popularity in the late 20th and early 21st centuries in the United States as indicative of a postfeminist cultural environment” (18). And although the contemporary white wedding still rests on patriarchal traditions that symbolise what the Second Wave called an “intimate colonization” (such as the bride’s vow of obedience; the giving away of the bride by one male chaperone, her father, to the next, the husband; her loss of name in marriage etc.), feminist awareness of the patriarchal dimensions of marriage and the ritual of the wedding is virtually absent from contemporary bridal culture. Instead, the patriarchal customs of the white wedding are now actively embraced by the women themselves in the name of tradition and choice. This reflects a prevailing characteristic of postfeminism, which is a trend towards the reclamation of conservative ideals of femininity, following the assumption that the goals of traditional feminist politics have been attained. This recuperation of traditional forms of femininity is one key characteristic of postfeminist bridal culture, as Engstrom argues: “bridal media collectively have become the epitomic example of women’s culture, a genre of popular culture that promotes, defends, and celebrates femininity” (21). Bridal fictions indeed produce traditional femininity by positioning the cultural, social and historical significance of the wedding as a necessary rite of passage for women and as the most important framework for the constitution of their (hetero)sexual, classed and gendered identities. Embodied in its ritual qualities, the white wedding symbolises the transition of women from single to belonging, from girlhood to womanhood and implicitly from childlessness to motherhood. However, instead of seeing this form of hegemonic femininity as a product of unequal, patriarchal power relations as Second Wave did, postfeminism celebrates traditional femininity in modernised versions. Embracing conservative feminine roles (e.g. that of the bride/wife) is now a matter of personal choice, individuality and freedom, characterised by awareness, knowingness and sometimes even irony (McRobbie “Postfeminism”). Nevertheless, the wedding is not only positioned as the pinnacle of a monogamous, heterosexual relationship, but also as the climax of a (female) life-story (“the happiest day of the life”). Combining feminist informed notions of power and choice, the postfeminist wedding is constructed as an event which supposedly enables women to act out those notions, while serving as a framework for gendered identity formation and self-realisation within the boundaries of an officialised and institutionalised relationship. “Modern” Brides I would like to exemplarily illustrate how postfeminism informs contemporary bridal fictions by analysing an advertising campaign of the US bridal magazine Modern Bride that paradigmatically and emblematically shows how postfeminist frames are used to construct the ‘modern’ bride. These advertisements feature American celebrities Guiliana Rancic (“host of E! News”), Daisy Fuentes (“host of Ultimate Style”) and Layla Ali, (“TV host and world champion”) stating why they qualify as a “modern bride”. Instead of drawing on notions of passive femininity, these advertisements have a distinct emphasis on power and agency. All advertisements include the women’s profession and other accomplishments. Rancic claims that she is a modern bride because: “I chased my career instead of guys.” These advertisements emphasise choice and empowerment, the key features of postfeminism, as Angela McRobbie (“Postfeminism”) and Rosalind Gill argue. Femininity, feminism and professionalism here are not framed as mutually exclusive, but are reconciled in the identity of the “modern” bride. Marriage and the white wedding are clearly bracketed in a liberal framework of individual choice, underpinned by a grammar of self-determination and individualism. Layla Ali states that she is a modern bride: “Because I refuse to let anything stand in the way of my happiness.” This not only communicates the message that happiness is intrinsically linked to marriage, but clearly resembles the figure that Sharon Boden terms the “super bride”, a role which allows women to be in control of every aspect of their wedding and “the heroic creator of her big day” while being part of a fairy-tale narrative in which they are the centre of attention (74). Agency and power are clearly visible in all of these ads. These brides are not passive victims of the male gaze, instead they are themselves gazing. In Rancic’s advertisement this is particularly evident, as she is looking directly at the viewer, where her husband, looking into another direction, remains rather face- and gazeless. This is in accord with bridal fictions in general, where husbands are often invisible, serving as bystanders or absent others, reinforcing the ideal that this is the special day of the bride and no one else. Furthermore, all of these advertisements remain within the limited visual repertoire that is common within bridal culture: young to middle-aged, heterosexual, able-bodied, conventionally attractive women. The featuring of the non-white bride Layla Ali is a rare occasion in contemporary bridal fictions. And although this can be seen as a welcomed exception, this advertisement remains eventually within the hegemonic and racial boundaries of contemporary bridal fictions. As Ingraham argues, ultimately “the white wedding in American culture is primarily a ritual by, for, and about the white middle to upper classes. Truly, the white wedding” (33). Furthermore, these advertisements illustrate another key feature of bridal culture, the “privileging of white middle- to upper-class heterosexual marriage over all other forms” (Ingraham 164). Semiotically, the discussed advertisements reflect the understanding of the white wedding as occasion to perform a certain classed identity: the luscious white dresses, the tuxedos, the jewellery and make up, etc. are all signifiers for a particular social standing. This is also emphasised by the mentioning of the prestigious jobs these brides hold, which presents a postfeminist twist on the otherwise common depictions of brides as practising hypergamy, meaning the marrying of a spouse of higher socio-economic status. But significantly, upward social mobility is usually presented as only acceptable for women, reinforcing the image of the husband as the provider. Another key feature of postfeminism, the centrality of heterosexual romance, becomes evident through Daisy Fuentes’ statement: “I’m a modern bride, because I believe that old-school values enhance a modern romance.” Having been liberated from the shackles of second wave feminism, which dismissed romance as “dope for dupes” (Greer in Pearce and Stacey 50), the postfeminist bride unapologetically embraces romance as central part of her life and relationship. Romance is here equated with traditionalism and “old school” values, thus reinforcing sexual exclusiveness, traditional gender roles and marriage as re-modernised, romantic norms. Angela McRobbie describes this “double entanglement” as a key feature of postfeminism that is comprised of “the co-existence of neo-conservative values in relation to gender, sexuality and family life […] with processes of liberalisation in regard to choice and diversity in domestic, sexual and kinship relations” (“Postfeminism” 255–56). These advertisements illustrate quite palpably that the postfeminist bride is a complex figure. It is simultaneously progressive and conservative, fulfilling ideals of conservative femininity while actively negotiating in the complex field of personal choice, individualism and social conventions; it oscillates between power and passivity, tradition and modern womanhood, between feminism and femininity. It is precisely this contradictory nature of the postfeminist bride that makes the figure so appealing, as it allows women to participate in the fantasy world of bridal utopias while still providing possibilities to construct themselves as active and powerful agents. Conclusion While we can generally welcome the reconfiguration of brides as powerful and self-determined, we have to remain critical of the postfeminist assumption of women as “autonomous agents no longer constrained by any inequalities or power imbalances whatsoever” (Gill 153). Where marriage is assumed to be an “even playing field” as Geller argues (110), feminism is no longer needed and traditional marital femininity can be, once again, performed without guilt. In these ways postfeminism deflects feminist criticism with regard to the political dimensions of marital femininity and thus contributes to the production of marital hegemony. But why is marital hegemony per se problematic? Firstly, by presenting marital identity as essential for the construction of gendered identity, bridal fictions leave little room for (female) self-definition outside of the single/married binary. As Ingraham argues, not only “are these categories presented as significant indices of social identity, they are offered as the only options, implying that the organization of identity in relation to marriage is universal and in no need of explanation” (17). Hence, by positioning marriage and singledom as opposite poles on the axis of proper femininity, bridal fictions stigmatise single women as selfish, narcissistic, hedonistic, immature and unable to attract a suitable husband (Taylor 20, 40). Secondly, within bridal fictions “weddings, marriage, romance, and heterosexuality become naturalized to the point where we consent to the belief that marriage is necessary to achieve a sense of well-being, belonging, passion, morality and love” (Ingraham 120). By presenting the white wedding as a publicly endorsed and visible entry to marriage, bridal fictions produce in fundamental ways normative notions about who is ‘fit’ for marriage and therefore capable of the associated cultural and social values of maturity, responsibility, ‘family values’ and so on. This is particularly critical, as postfeminist identities “are structured by, stark and continuing inequalities and exclusions that relate to ‘race’ and ethnicity, class, age, sexuality and disability as well as gender” (Gill 149). These postfeminist exclusions are very evident in contemporary bridal fictions that feature almost exclusively young to middle-aged, white, able-bodied couples with upper to middle class identities that conform to the heteronormative matrix, both physically and socially. By depicting weddings almost exclusively in this kind of raced, classed and gendered framework, bridal fictions associate the above mentioned values, that are seen as markers for responsible adulthood and citizenship, with those who comply with these norms. In these ways bridal fictions stigmatise those who are not able or do not want to get married, and, moreover, produce a visual regime that determines who is seen as entitled to this kind of socially validated identity. The fact that bridal fictions indeed play a major role in producing marital hegemony is further reflected in the increasing presence of same-sex white weddings in popular culture. These representations, despite their message of equality for everyone, usually replicate rather than re-negotiate the heteronormative terms of bridal culture. This can be regarded as evidence of bridal fiction’s scope and reach in naturalising marriage not only as the most ideal form of a heterosexual relationship, but increasingly as the ideal for any kind of intimate relationship. References Bambacas, Christyana. “Thinking about White Weddings.” Journal of Australian Studies 26.72 (2002): 191–200.The Bachelor, ABC, 2002–present. Boden, Sharon. Consumerism, Romance and the Wedding Experience. Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Bridezillas, We TV, 2004–present. Cherlin, Andrew. The-Marriage-Go-Round. The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today. New York: Vintage, 2010. Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage. A History. New York: Penguin, 2005. Currie, Dawn. “‘Here Comes the Bride’: The Making of a ‘Modern Traditional’ Wedding in Western Culture.” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 24.3 (1993): 403–21. Engstrom, Erika. The Bride Factory. Mass Portrayals of Women and Weddings. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. Fairchild Bridal Study (2005) 27 May 2012. ‹http://www.sellthebride.com/documents/americanweddingsurvey.pdf›. Finlay, Sara-Jane, and Victoria Clarke. “‘A Marriage of Inconvenience?’ Feminist Perspectives on Marriage.” Feminism & Psychology 13.4 (2003): 415–20. Foucault, M. (1980) “Body/Power and Truth/Power” in Gordon, C. (ed.) Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge, Harvester, U.K. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1973. Geller, Jaqlyn. Here Comes the Bride. Women, Weddings, and the Marriage Mystique. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001. Genz, Stéphanie. Postfemininities in Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave, 2009. Genz, Stéphanie, and Benjamin Brabon. Postfeminsm. Cultural Texts and Theories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Gill, Rosalind. “Postfeminist Media Culture. Elements of a Sensibility.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 10.2 (2007): 147–66. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971. Howard, Vicki. Brides, Inc. American Weddings and the Business of Tradition. Philadelphia: U of Pen Press, 2006. Ingraham, Chrys. White Weddings. Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Discourse. New York: Routledge, 1999. Lewis, Jeff. Cultural Studies. London: Sage, 2008. McRobbie, Angela. “Post-Feminism and Popular Culture.” Feminist Media Studies 4.3 (2004): 255– 64. McRobbie, A. (2009). The Aftermath of Feminism. Gender, Culture and Social Change. London: Sage. Modern Bride, Condé Nast. Otnes, Cele, and Elizabeth Pleck. Cinderella Dreams. The Allure of the Lavish Wedding. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988. Pearce, Lynn, and Jackie Stacey. Romance Revisited. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995. Race to the Altar, NBC, 2003. Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs Summer.5 (1980): 631–60. Taylor, Anthea. Single Women in Popular Culture. The Limits of Postfeminism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Wallace, Carol. All Dressed in White. The Irresistible Rise of the American Wedding. London: Penguin Books, 2004. Advertisements Analysed Guiliana Rancic. 29 Sept. 2012 ‹http://slackerchic.blogspot.de/2008/06/im-modern-bride-because-my-witness-was.html›. Daisy Fuentes. 29 Sept. 2012 ‹http://slackerchic.blogspot.de/2008/06/im-modern-bride-because-my-witness-was.html›. Layla Ali. 29 Sept. 2012 ‹http://slackerchic.blogspot.de/2008/06/im-modern-bride-because-my-witness-was.html›.

Introduction: Bubbles and Sport The ephemeral materiality of bubbles – beautiful, spectacular, and distracting but ultimately fragile – when applied to protect or conserve in the interests of sport-media profit, creates conditions that exacerbate existing inequalities in sport and society. Bubbles are usually something to watch, admire, and chase after in their brief yet shiny lives. There is supposed to be, technically, nothing inside them other than one or more gasses, and yet we constantly refer to people and objects being inside bubbles. The metaphor of the bubble has been used to describe the life of celebrities, politicians in purpose-built capital cities like Canberra, and even leftist, environmentally activist urban dwellers. The metaphorical and material qualities of bubbles are aligned—they cannot be easily captured and are liable to change at any time. In this article we address the metaphorical sporting bubble, which is often evoked in describing life in professional sport. This is a vernacular term used to capture and condemn the conditions of life of elite sportspeople (usually men), most commonly after there has been a sport-related scandal, especially of a sexual nature (Rowe). It is frequently paired with connotatively loaded adjectives like pampered and indulged. The sporting bubble is rarely interrogated in academic literature, the concept largely being left to the media and moral entrepreneurs. It is represented as involving a highly privileged but also pressurised life for those who live inside it. A sporting bubble is a world constructed for its most prized inhabitants that enables them to be protected from insurgents and to set the terms of their encounters with others, especially sport fans and disciplinary agents of the state. The Covid-19 pandemic both reinforced and reconfigured the operational concept of the bubble, re-arranging tensions between safety (protecting athletes) and fragility (short careers, risks of injury, etc.) for those within, while safeguarding those without from bubble contagion. Privilege and Precarity Bubble-induced social isolation, critics argue, encourages a loss of perspective among those under its protection, an entitled disconnection from the usual rules and responsibilities of everyday life. For this reason, the denizens of the sporting bubble are seen as being at risk to themselves and, more troublingly, to those allowed temporarily to penetrate it, especially young women who are first exploited by and then ejected from it (Benedict). There are many well-documented cases of professional male athletes “behaving badly” and trying to rely on institutional status and various versions of the sporting bubble for shelter (Flood and Dyson; Reel and Crouch; Wade). In the age of mobile and social media, it is increasingly difficult to keep misbehaviour in-house, resulting in a slew of media stories about, for example, drunkenness and sexual misconduct, such as when then-Sydney Roosters co-captain Mitchell Pearce was suspended and fined in 2016 after being filmed trying to force an unwanted kiss on a woman and then simulating a lewd act with her dog while drunk. There is contestation between those who condemn such behaviour as aberrant and those who regard it as the conventional expression of youthful masculinity as part of the familiar “boys will be boys” dictum. The latter naturalise an inequitable gender order, frequently treating sportsmen as victims of predatory women, and ignoring asymmetries of power between men and women, especially in homosocial environments (Toffoletti). For those in the sporting bubble (predominantly elite sportsmen and highly paid executives, also mostly men, with an array of service staff of both sexes moving in and out of it), life is reflected for those being protected via an array of screens (small screens in homes and indoor places of entertainment, and even smaller screens on theirs and others’ phones, as well as huge screens at sport events). These male sport stars are paid handsomely to use their skill and strength to perform for the sporting codes, their every facial expression and bodily action watched by the media and relayed to audiences. This is often a precarious existence, the usually brief career of an athlete worker being dependent on health, luck, age, successful competition with rivals, networks, and club and coach preferences. There is a large, aspirational reserve army of athletes vying to play at the elite level, despite risks of injury and invasive, life-changing medical interventions. Responsibility for avoiding performance and image enhancing drugs (PIEDs) also weighs heavily on their shoulders (Connor). Professional sportspeople, in their more reflective moments, know that their time in the limelight will soon be up, meaning that getting a ticket to the sporting bubble, even for a short time, can make all the difference to their post-sport lives and those of their families. The most vulnerable of the small minority of participants in sport who make a good, short-term living from it are those for whom, in the absence of quality education and prior social status, it is their sole likely means of upward social mobility (Spaaij). Elite sport performers are surrounded by minders, doctors, fitness instructors, therapists, coaches, advisors and other service personnel, all supporting athletes to stay focussed on and maximise performance quality to satisfy co-present crowds, broadcasters, sponsors, sports bodies and mass media audiences. The shield offered by the sporting bubble supports the teleological win-at-all-costs mentality of professional sport. The stakes are high, with athlete and executive salaries, sponsorships and broadcasting deals entangled in a complex web of investments in keeping the “talent” pivotal to the “attention economy” (Davenport and Beck)—the players that provide the content for sale—in top form. Yet, the bubble cannot be entirely secured and poor behaviour or performance can have devastating effects, including permanent injury or disability, mental illness and loss of reputation (Rowe, “Scandals and Sport”). Given this fragile materiality of the sporting bubble, it is striking that, in response to the sudden shutdown following the economic and health crisis caused by the 2020 global pandemic, the leaders of professional sport decided to create more of them and seek to seal the metaphorical and material space with unprecedented efficiency. The outcome was a multi-sided tale of mobility, confinement, capital, labour, and the gendering of sport and society. The Covid-19 Gilded Cage Sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman and John Urry have analysed the socio-politics of mobilities, whereby some people in the world, such as tourists, can traverse the globe at their leisure, while others remain fixed in geographical space because they lack the means to be mobile or, in contrast, are involuntarily displaced by war, so-called “ethnic cleansing”, famine, poverty or environmental degradation. The Covid-19 global pandemic re-framed these matters of mobilities (Rowe, “Subjecting Pandemic Sport”), with conventional moving around—between houses, businesses, cities, regions and countries—suddenly subjected to the imperative to be static and, in perniciously unreflective technocratic discourse, “socially distanced” (when what was actually meant was to be “physically distanced”). The late-twentieth century analysis of the “risk society” by Ulrich Beck, in which the mysterious consequences of humans’ predation on their environment are visited upon them with terrifying force, was dramatically realised with the coming of Covid-19. In another iteration of the metaphor, it burst the bubble of twenty-first century global sport. What we today call sport was formed through the process of sportisation (Maguire), whereby hyper-local, folk physical play was reconfigured as multi-spatial industrialised sport in modernity, becoming increasingly reliant on individual athletes and teams travelling across the landscape and well over the horizon. Co-present crowds were, in turn, overshadowed in the sport economy when sport events were taken to much larger, dispersed audiences via the media, especially in broadcast mode (Nicholson, Kerr, and Sherwood). This lucrative mediation of professional sport, though, came with an unforgiving obligation to generate an uninterrupted supply of spectacular live sport content. The pandemic closed down most sports events and those that did take place lacked the crucial participation of the co-present crowd to provide the requisite event atmosphere demanded by those viewers accustomed to a sense of occasion. Instead, they received a strange spectacle of sport performers operating in empty “cathedrals”, often with a “faked” crowd presence. The mediated sport spectacle under the pandemic involved cardboard cut-out and sex doll spectators, Zoom images of fans on large screens, and sampled sounds of the crowd recycled from sport video games. Confected co-presence produced simulacra of the “real” as Baudrillardian visions came to life. The sporting bubble had become even more remote. For elite sportspeople routinely isolated from the “common people”, the live sport encounter offered some sensory experience of the social – the sounds, sights and even smells of the crowd. Now the sporting bubble closed in on an already insulated and insular existence. It exposed the irony of the bubble as a sign of both privileged mobility and incarcerated athlete work, both refuge and prison. Its logic of contagion also turned a structure intended to protect those inside from those outside into, as already observed, a mechanism to manage the threat of insiders to outsiders. In Australia, as in many other countries, the populace was enjoined by governments and health authorities to help prevent the spread of Covid-19 through isolation and immobility. There were various exceptions, principally those classified as essential workers, a heterogeneous cohort ranging from supermarket shelf stackers to pharmacists. People in the cultural, leisure and sports industries, including musicians, actors, and athletes, were not counted among this crucial labour force. Indeed, the performing arts (including dance, theatre and music) were put on ice with quite devastating effects on the livelihoods and wellbeing of those involved. So, with all major sports shut down (the exception being horse racing, which received the benefit both of government subsidies and expanding online gambling revenue), sport organisations began to represent themselves as essential services that could help sustain collective mental and even spiritual wellbeing. This case was made most aggressively by Australian Rugby League Commission Chairman, Peter V’landys, in contending that “an Australia without rugby league is not Australia”. In similar vein, prominent sport and media figure Phil Gould insisted, when describing rugby league fans in Western Sydney’s Penrith, “they’re lost, because the football’s not on … . It holds their families together. People don’t understand that … . Their life begins in the second week of March, and it ends in October”. Despite misgivings about public safety and equality before the pandemic regime, sporting bubbles were allowed to form, re-form and circulate. The indefinite shutdown of the National Rugby League (NRL) on 23 March 2020 was followed after negotiation between multiple entities by its reopening on 28 May 2020. The competition included a team from another nation-state (the Warriors from Aotearoa/New Zealand) in creating an international sporting bubble on the Central Coast of New South Wales, separating them from their families and friends across the Tasman Sea. Appeals to the mental health of fans and the importance of the NRL to myths of “Australianness” notwithstanding, the league had not prudently maintained a financial reserve and so could not afford to shut down for long. Significant gambling revenue for leagues like the NRL and Australian Football League (AFL) also influenced the push to return to sport business as usual. Sport contests were needed in order to exploit the gambling opportunities – especially online and mobile – stimulated by home “confinement”. During the coronavirus lockdowns, Australians’ weekly spending on gambling went up by 142 per cent, and the NRL earned significantly more than usual from gambling revenue—potentially $10 million above forecasts for 2020. Despite the clear financial imperative at play, including heavy reliance on gambling, sporting bubble-making involved special licence. The state of Queensland, which had pursued a hard-line approach by closing its borders for most of those wishing to cross them for biographical landmark events like family funerals and even for medical treatment in border communities, became “the nation's sporting hub”. Queensland became the home of most teams of the men’s AFL (notably the women’s AFLW season having been cancelled) following a large Covid-19 second wave in Melbourne. The women’s National Netball League was based exclusively in Queensland. This state, which for the first time hosted the AFL Grand Final, deployed sport as a tool in both national sports tourism marketing and internal pre-election politics, sponsoring a documentary, The Sporting Bubble 2020, via its Tourism and Events arm. While Queensland became the larger bubble incorporating many other sporting bubbles, both the AFL and the NRL had versions of the “fly in, fly out” labour rhythms conventionally associated with the mining industry in remote and regional areas. In this instance, though, the bubble experience did not involve long stays in miners’ camps or even the one-night hotel stopovers familiar to the popular music and sport industries. Here, the bubble moved, usually by plane, to fulfil the requirements of a live sport “gig”, whereupon it was immediately returned to its more solid bubble hub or to domestic self-isolation. In the space created between disciplined expectation and deplored non-compliance, the sporting bubble inevitably became the scrutinised object and subject of scandal. Sporting Bubble Scandals While people with a very low risk of spreading Covid-19 (coming from areas with no active cases) were denied entry to Queensland for even the most serious of reasons (for example, the death of a child), images of AFL players and their families socialising and enjoying swimming at the Royal Pines Resort sporting bubble crossed our screens. Yet, despite their (players’, officials’ and families’) relative privilege and freedom of movement under the AFL Covid-Safe Plan, some players and others inside the bubble were involved in “scandals”. Most notable was the case of a drunken brawl outside a Gold Coast strip club which led to two Richmond players being “banished”, suspended for 10 matches, and the club fined $100,000. But it was not only players who breached Covid-19 bubble protocols: Collingwood coaches Nathan Buckley and Brenton Sanderson paid the $50,000 fine imposed on the club for playing tennis in Perth outside their bubble, while Richmond was fined $45,000 after Brooke Cotchin, wife of team captain Trent, posted an image to Instagram of a Gold Coast day spa that she had visited outside the “hub” (the institutionally preferred term for bubble). She was subsequently distressed after being trolled. Also of concern was the lack of physical distancing, and the range of people allowed into the sporting bubble, including babysitters, grandparents, and swimming coaches (for children). There were other cases of players being caught leaving the bubble to attend parties and sharing videos of their “antics” on social media. Biosecurity breaches of bubbles by players occurred relatively frequently, with stern words from both the AFL and NRL leaders (and their clubs) and fines accumulating in the thousands of dollars. Some people were also caught sneaking into bubbles, with Lekahni Pearce, the girlfriend of Swans player Elijah Taylor, stating that it was easy in Perth, “no security, I didn’t see a security guard” (in Barron, Stevens, and Zaczek) (a month later, outside the bubble, they had broken up and he pled guilty to unlawfully assaulting her; Ramsey). Flouting the rules, despite stern threats from government, did not lead to any bubble being popped. The sport-media machine powering sporting bubbles continued to run, the attendant emotional or health risks accepted in the name of national cultural therapy, while sponsorship, advertising and gambling revenue continued to accumulate mostly for the benefit of men. Gendering Sporting Bubbles Designed as biosecurity structures to maintain the supply of media-sport content, keep players and other vital cogs of the machine running smoothly, and to exclude Covid-19, sporting bubbles were, in their most advanced form, exclusive luxury camps that illuminated the elevated socio-cultural status of sportsmen. The ongoing inequalities between men’s and women’s sport in Australia and around the world were clearly in evidence, as well as the politics of gender whereby women are obliged to “care” and men are enabled to be “careless” – or at least to manage carefully their “duty of care”. In Australia, the only sport for women that continued during the height of the Covid-19 lockdown was netball, which operated in a bubble that was one of sacrifice rather than privilege. With minimum salaries of only $30,000 – significantly less than the lowest-paid “rookies” in the AFL – and some being mothers of small children and/or with professional jobs juggled alongside their netball careers, these elite sportswomen wanted to continue to play despite the personal inconvenience or cost (Pavlidis). Not one breach of the netballers out of the bubble was reported, indicating that they took their responsibilities with appropriate seriousness and, perhaps, were subjected to less scrutiny than the sportsmen accustomed to attracting front-page headlines. National Netball League (also known after its Queensland-based naming rights sponsor as Suncorp Super Netball) players could be regarded as fortunate to have the opportunity to be in a bubble and to participate in their competition. The NRL Women’s (NRLW) Premiership season was also completed, but only involved four teams subject to fly in, fly out and bubble arrangements, and being played in so-called curtain-raiser games for the NRL. As noted earlier, the AFLW season was truncated, despite all the prior training and sacrifice required of its players. Similarly, because of their resource advantages, the UK men’s and boy’s top six tiers of association football were allowed to continue during lockdown, compared to only two for women and girls. In the United States, inequalities between men’s and women’s sports were clearly demonstrated by the conditions afforded to those elite sportswomen inside the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) sport bubble in the IMG Academy in Florida. Players shared photos of rodent traps in their rooms, insect traps under their mattresses, inedible food and blocked plumbing in their bubble accommodation. These conditions were a far cry from the luxury usually afforded elite sportsmen, including in Florida’s Walt Disney World for the men’s NBA, and is just one of the many instances of how gendered inequality was both reproduced and exacerbated by Covid-19. Bursting the Bubble As we have seen, governments and corporate leaders in sport were able to create material and metaphorical bubbles during the Covid-19 lockdown in order to transmit stadium sport contests into home spaces. The rationale was the importance of sport to national identity, belonging and the routines and rhythms of life. But for whom? Many women, who still carry the major responsibilities of “care”, found that Covid-19 intensified the affective relations and gendered inequities of “home” as a leisure site (Fullagar and Pavlidis). Rates of domestic violence surged, and many women experienced significant anxiety and depression related to the stress of home confinement and home schooling. During the pandemic, women were also more likely to experience the stress and trauma of being first responders, witnessing virus-related sickness and death as the majority of nurses and care workers. They also bore the brunt of much of the economic and employment loss during this time. Also, as noted above, livelihoods in the arts and cultural sector did not receive the benefits of the “bubble”, despite having a comparable claim to sport in contributing significantly to societal wellbeing. This sector’s workforce is substantially female, although men dominate its senior roles. Despite these inequalities, after the late March to May hiatus, many elite male sportsmen – and some sportswomen - operated in a bubble. Moving in and out of them was not easy. Life inside could be mentally stressful (especially in long stays of up to 150 days in sports like cricket), and tabloid and social media troll punishment awaited those who were caught going “over the fence”. But, life in the sporting bubble was generally preferable to the daily realities of those afflicted by the trauma arising from forced home confinement, and for whom watching moving sports images was scant compensation for compulsory immobility. The ethical foundation of the sparkly, ephemeral fantasy of the sporting bubble is questionable when it is placed in the service of a voracious “media sports cultural complex” (Rowe, Global Media Sport) that consumes sport labour power and rolls back progress in gender relations as a default response to a global pandemic. Covid-19 dramatically highlighted social inequalities in many areas of life, including medical care, work, and sport. For the small minority of people involved in sport who are elite professionals, the only thing worse than being in a sporting bubble during the pandemic was not being in one, as being outside precluded their participation. Being inside the bubble was a privilege, albeit a dubious one. But, as in wider society, not all sporting bubbles are created equal. Some are more opulent than others, and the experiences of the supporting and the supported can be very different. The surface of the sporting bubble may be impermanent, but when its interior is opened up to scrutiny, it reveals some very durable structures of inequality. Bubbles are made to burst. They are, by nature, temporary, translucent structures created as spectacles. As a form of luminosity, bubbles “allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle or shimmer” (Deleuze, 52). In echoing Deleuze, Angela McRobbie (54) argues that luminosity “softens and disguises the regulative dynamics of neoliberal society”. The sporting bubble was designed to discharge that function for those millions rendered immobile by home confinement legislation in Australia and around the world, who were having to deal with the associated trauma, risk and disadvantage. 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IntroductionJohn Berger provides a compelling analysis in Ways of Seeing on how we’ve been socialized through centuries of art to see women as objects and men as subjects. This way of seeing men and women is more than aesthetic choices but in fact shapes our ideologies of gender. As Berger asserts: “The art of the past no longer exists as it once did… In its place there is a language of images. What matters now is who uses that language for what purpose” (33).What happens when there are no historical images that represent your identity? How do others learn to see you? How do you learn to represent yourself? This article addresses the challenges that bisexuals face in constructing and contending with media representations of non-normative sexualities. As Berger suggests: “A people or class which is cut off from its own past is far less free to choose and to act as a people or class than one that has been able to situate itself in history” (33). This article seeks to apply Berger’s core concepts in Ways of Seeing studying representations of bisexuality in mainstream media. How bisexuality is represented, and therefore observed, shapes what can ultimately be culturally understood and recognized.This article explores how bisexuals use digital media to construct self-representations and brand a bisexual identity. Bisexual representations are particularly relevant to study as they are often rendered invisible by the cultural hegemony of monosexuality. Cultural norms ideologically shape the intelligibility of representation; bisexuality is often misinterpreted when read within the dominant binaries of heterosexuality and homosexuality in Western European culture. This work addresses how users adapt visual, textual, and hyperlinked information in online spaces to create representations that can be culturally recognized. Users want to be seen as bisexuals. The research for this article examined online social spaces created by and for bisexuals between 2013-2015, as well as mainstream media addressing bisexuality or bisexual characters. The social spaces studied included national and regional websites for bisexual organizations, blogs dedicated to bisexual issues and topics, and public bisexual groups on Facebook and Tumblr. Participant observation and semiotic analysis was employed to analyze how bisexual representation was discussed and performed. Learning to See Bisexuality Bisexuality is often constructed within the domain of medical and psychological classification systems as a sexual identity situated between one polarity or the other: between desiring men or desiring women as sexual partners or between being gay or being straight in sexual orientation, as most widely put forth by Alfred Kinsey in the 1950s (Kinsey et al., 1948; e.g., Blumstein, 1977; Diamond, 1993; Weinberg, 1995). This popularly held conception has a particular history that serves to reinforce the normative categories of heterosexuality and monosexuality.This history does not reflect bisexual’s accounts of their own experiences of what it means to be bisexual. Bisexuals in the spaces I study express their sexuality as fluid both in terms of gender (objects of desire do not have to identify as only male or female) as well as in terms of the lifespan (desire based on sex or gender does not have remain consistent throughout one’s life). As one participant remarked: “I think of bisexual as a different orientation from both homosexuals (who orient exclusively towards same-sex romance/sexuality) and heterosexuals (who orient exclusively toward opposite-sex romance/sexuality). Bisexuals seem to think about the world in a different way: a world of ‘AND’ rather than a world of ‘OR’.” Or as another participant noted: “I saw video a couple of months ago that described ‘bi’ as being attracted to ‘same and different sexed people.’ I considered my internal debate settled at that point. Yes, it is binary, but only in the broadest sense.”This data from my research is congruent with data from much larger studies that examined longitudinal psycho-social development of bisexual identities (Klein, 1978; Barker, 2007; Diamond, 2008). Individuals’ narratives of a more “fluid” identity suggest an emphasis at the individual level less about fluctuating between “two” possible types of sexual partners than about a dynamic, complex desire within a coherent self. Nevertheless, popular constructions of bisexuality in media continue to emphasize it within hegemonic monosexual ideologies.Heterosexual relationships are overwhelmingly the most dominant relationship type portrayed in media, and the second most portrayed relationship is homosexuality, or a serial monogamy towards only one gender. This pairing is not only conveying the dominant hegemonic norms of heterosexuality (and most often paired with serial monogamy as well), but it is equally and powerfully reproducing the hegemonic ideal of monosexuality. Monosexuality is the romantic or sexual attraction to members of one sex or gender group only. A monosexual person may identify as either heterosexual or homosexual, the key element being that their sexual or romantic attraction remains consistently directed towards one sex or gender group. In this way, we have all been socialized since childhood to value not only monogamy but monosexuality as well. However, current research on sexuality suggests that self-identified bisexuals are the largest group among non-heterosexuals. In 2011, Dr. Gary Gates, Research Director of the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law, analyzed data collected from nine national health surveys from the USA, United Kindgdom, Canada, Australia and Norway to provide the most comprehensive statistics available to date on how many people self-identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. While the population percentage of LGBT people varied by country, the ratio of lesbian, gay and bisexuals among LGBT people remained consistent, with self-identified bisexuals accounting for 40-60% of all LGBT populations regardless of country. This data is significant for challenging the popular assumption that bisexuals are a small minority among non-heterosexuals; indeed, this data indicates that non-monosexuals represent half of all non-heterosexuals. Yet we have learned to recognize monosexuality as dominant, normal and naturalized, even within LGBT representations. Conversely, we struggle to even recognize relationships that fall outside of this hegemonic norm. In essence, we lack ways of seeing bisexuals, pansexuals, omnisexuals, asexuals, and all queer-identified individuals who do not conform to monosexuality. We quite literally have not learned to see them, or—worse yet—learned how to not see them.Bisexual representations are particularly relevant to study as they are often rendered invisible in cultures that practice monogamy paired with hegemonic monosexuality. Members of bisexual spaces desire to achieve recognition but struggle to overcome bisexual erasure in their daily lives.Misrepresention: The Triad in Popular MediaWhen bisexuality is portrayed in media it is most commonly portrayed in a disingenuous manner where the bisexual is portrayed as being torn between potential lovers, on a pathway from straight to gay, or as a serial liar and cheater who cannot remain monogamous due to overwhelming attractions. Representations of bisexuals in media are infrequent, but those that are available too often follow these inaccurate stereotypes. By far the most common convention for representing bisexuality in visual media is the use of the triad: three people convey the (mis)representation of bisexuality as a sexuality in the “middle” of heterosexuality and homosexuality. For the purpose of this article, data analysis will be limited to print magazines for the sake of length and clarity.The 2014 New York Times Magazine article “The Scientific Quest to Prove Bisexuality Exists” (Denizet-Lewis) addresses the controversial nature of bisexuality. The cover image depicts a close-up of a man’s face, separated into two halves: in one half, a woman is nuzzled up to the man’s cheek, and the other half a man is nuzzled up to his ear. Presumably the man is bisexual and therefore split into two parts: his heterosexual self and his homosexual self. This visual depiction of bisexuality reifies the notion that bisexuals are torn between two polar desires and experience equal and concurrent attraction to more than one partner simultaneously. Furthermore, the triad represented in this way suggests that the essential bisexual is having simultaneous liaisons with heterosexual and homosexual partners.Within the convention of the triad there is also a sub-genre closely connected with hypersexualization and the male gaze. In these cases, the triad is commonly presented in varying states of undress and/or in a bed. An article in The Guardian from 11 April 2014 with the headline: “Make up your mind! The science behind bisexuality” (Browne) includes an image with three attractive young people in bed together. A man is sitting up between two sleeping women and smoking a cigarette – the cigarette connotes post-coital sexual activity, as does the smirk on his face. This may have been a suitable image if the article had been about having a threesome, but the headline—and the article—are attempting to explain the science behind bisexuality. Furthermore, while the image is intended to illustrate an article on bisexuality, the image is fundamentally misleading. The women in the image are asleep and to the side and the man is awake and in the middle. He is the central figure – it is a picture of him. So who is the bisexual in the image? What is the image attempting to do? It seems that the goal is to titillate, to excite, and to satisfy a particularly heterosexual fantasy rather than to discuss bisexuality. This hypersexualization once again references the mistaken idea (or heterosexual male fantasy) that bisexuality is only expressed through simultaneous sex acts.Many of these examples are salacious but they occur with surprising regularity in the mainstream media. On 17 February 2016, the American Association of Retired Persons posted an article to the front page of their website titled “Am I Discovering I'm Bisexual?” (Schwartz, 2016). In the accompanying image at the top of the article, we see three people sitting on a park bench – two men on either side of a woman. The image is taken from behind the bench so we see their backs and ostensibly they do not see us, the viewer. The man on the left is kissing the woman in the center while also holding hands behind the back of the bench with the man sitting on her other side. The man on the right is looking away from the couple kissing, suggesting he is not directly included in their intimate activity. Furthermore, the two men are holding hands behind the bench, which could also be code for behind the woman’s back, suggesting infidelity to the dyad and depicting some form of duplicity. This triad reinforces the trope of the bisexual as promiscuous and untrustworthy.Images such as these are common and range from the more inoffensive to the salacious. The resulting implications are that bisexuals are torn between their internal hetero and homo desires, require simultaneous partners, and are untrustworthy partners. Notably, in all these images it is never clear exactly which individuals are bisexual. Are all three members of the triad bisexual? While this is a possible read, the dominant discourse leads us to believe that one of person in the triad is the bisexual while the others adhere to more dominant sexualities.Participants in my research were acutely aware of these media representations and expressed frequent negative reactions to the implications of the triad. Each article contained numerous online comments expressing frustration with the use of “threesomes.” As one commentator stated: “Without a threesome, we’re invisible. It’s messed up. I always imagine a t-shirt with 3 couples stick figure like: girl + girl, girl + boy, and boy + boy. and it says “6 bisexuals.” What is made clear in many user comments is that the mainstream social scripts used to portray bisexuality are clearly at odds with the ways in which bisexuals choose to describe or portray themselves. Seeing through CapitalismOne of the significant conclusions of this research was the ways in which the misrepresentation of bisexuality results in many individuals feeling underrepresented or made invisible within mainstream media. The most salient themes to emerge from this research is participants’ affective struggle with feeling "invisible.” The frequency of discourse specific to invisibility is significant, as well as its expressed negatively associated experiences and feelings. The public sharing of those reactions among individuals, and the ensuing discourse that emerges from those interactions, include imagining what visibility “looks” like (its semiotic markers and what would make those markers “successful” for visibility), and the articulation of “solutions” to counter perceived invisibility. Notably, participants often express the desire for visibility in terms of commodification. As one participant posted, “their [sic] is no style for bi, there is no voice tone, unless I'm wearing my shirt, how is anyone to know?” Another participant explicated, “I wish there was a look. I wish I could get up every day and put on the clothes and jewelry that identified me to the world when I stepped out of my apartment. I wish I was as visible on the street as I am on facebook.” This longing for a culturally recognizable bisexual identity is articulated as a desire for a market commodification of “bisexual.” But a commodified identity may be a misguided desire. As Berger warns: “Publicity is not merely an assembly of competing messages: it is a language in itself which is always being used to make the same general purpose… It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more” (131). Consumerism—and its bedfellow—marketing, aim to sell the fantasy of a future self whereby the consumer transforms themselves through material objects, not transforming the culture to accept them. Berger further elicits that marketing essentially convinces us that we are not whole the way we are and sells us the idea of a wholeness achieved through consumerism (134). Following Berger’s argument, this desire for a commodified identity, while genuine, may fundamentally undermine the autonomy bisexuals currently have insomuch as without a corporate brand, bisexual representations are more culturally malleable and therefore potentially more inclusive to the real diversity of bisexual identified people.However, Berger also rightly noted that “publicity is the culture of the consumer society. It propagates through images that society’s belief in itself” (139). Without any publicity, bisexuals are not wrong to feel invisible in a consumer culture. And yet “publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of significant political choice” (149). A commodified identity will not likely usher in meaningful political change in a culture where bisexuals experience worse mental health and discrimination outcomes than lesbian and gay people (LGBT Advisory Committee, 2011). Bisexuals Online: New Ways of SeeingThe Internet, which was touted early as a space of great potential for anonymity and exploration where visibility can be masked, here becomes the place where bisexuals try to make the perceived invisible ‘visible.’ Digital technologies and spaces provide particularly useful environments for participants of online bisexual spaces to negotiate issues of invisibility as participants construct visible identities through daily posts, threads, videos, and discourse in which bisexuality is discursively and visually imagined, produced, articulated, defended, and desired. But most importantly these digital technologies provide bisexuals with opportunities to counter misrepresentations in mainstream media. In the frequent example of intimate partners in the physical world rendering a bisexual’s identity invisible, participants of these online communities grapple with the seeming paradox of one’s offline self as the avatar and one’s online self as more fully integrated, represented, and recognized. One participant expressed this experience, remarking:I feel I'm more out online that offline. That's because, in the offline world there's the whole ''social assumptions'' issue. My co-workers, friends, etc, know I have a boyfriend, wich [sic] equals ''straight'' for most ppl out there. So, I'll out myself when the occasion comes (talking abt smn I used to date, the LGBT youth group I used to belong to, or usually just abt some girl I find attractive) and usually ppl are not surprised. Whereas online, my pic at Facebook (and Orkut) is a Bisexual Pride icon. I follow Bi groups on Twitter. I'm a member of bi groups. So, online it's spelled out, while offline ppl usually think me having a bf means I'm straight.The I Am Visible (IAV) campaign is just one example of an organized response to the perceived erasure of bisexuals in mainstream culture. Launched in January 2011 by Adrienne McCue (nee Williams), the executive director of the Bi Social Network, a non-profit organization aimed at bringing awareness to representations of bisexuality in media. The campaign was hosted on bisocialnetwork.com, with the goal to “stop biphobia and bi-erasure in our community, media, news, and entertainment,” Prior to going live, IAV implemented a six-month lead-up advertising campaign across multiple online bisexual forums, making it the most publicized new venture during the period of my study. IAV hosted user-generated videos and posters that followed the vernacular of coming out and provided emotional support for listeners who may be struggling with their identity in a world largely hostile to bisexuality. Perceived invisibility was the central theme of IAV, which was the most salient theme for every bisexual group I studied online.Perhaps the most notable video and still image series to come out of IAV were those including Emmy nominated Scottish actor Alan Cumming. Cumming, a long-time Broadway thespian and acclaimed film actor, openly identifies as bisexual and has criticized ‘gaystream’ outlets on more than one occasion for intentionally mislabeling him as ‘gay.’ As such, Alan Cumming is one of the most prominently celebrated bisexual celebrities during the time of my study. While there are numerous famous out gays and lesbians in the media industry who have lent their celebrity status to endorse LGBT political messages—such as Ellen DeGeneres, Elton John, and Neil Patrick Harris, to name a few—there have been notably fewer celebrities supporting bisexual specific causes. Therefore, Cummings involvement with IAV was significant for many bisexuals. His star status was perceived as contributing legitimacy to bisexuality and increasing cultural visibility for bisexuals.These campaigns to become more visible are based in the need to counteract the false media narrative, which is, in a sense, to educate the wider society as to what bisexuality is not. The campaigns are an attempt to repair the false messages which have been “learnt” and replace them with more accurate representations. The Internet provides bisexual activists with a tool with which they can work to correct the skewed media image of themselves. Additionally, the Internet has also become a place where bisexuals can more easily represent themselves through a wide variety of semiotic markers in ways which would be difficult or unacceptable offline. In these ways, the Internet has become a key device in bisexual activism and while it is important not to uncritically praise the technology it plays an important role in enabling correct representation. ReferencesBarker, Meg. 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