Journal articles on the topic 'Women – Legal status, laws, etc. – Social aspects'

This research aims to explain the marriage of minors and to know the point of view of Islamic law and Yemeni law on this marriage, as well as to know its causes and effects. This objective was achieved through an introduction, four chapters and a conclusion. The introduction included the importance of the research, the reasons for its selection, its problem, objectives, methodology, questions, hypotheses, previous studies and research, and its divisions. The first topic included: the nature of marriage, its legitimacy and its pillars in Islamic law.. The second topic contained: the concept of marriage of minors and the reasons for its emergence in contemporary societies. The third topic came: it included the legitimate and legal vision of the marriage of minors. The fourth topic included: the effects of marriage of minors. The conclusion included: the most important findings and recommendations. The researcher followed the descriptive approach based on induction, analysis and deduction. The research came out with the most important results and recommendations as follows: 1- Studying and analyzing the causes, motives and risks of underage marriage will limit the growth of the phenomenon by spreading awareness among the members of society. 2- Educating society about the dangers, negatives, and problems of underage marriage and its effects, and activating dialogue on this matter helps limit its increasing growth and contributes to combating the ignorance that surrounds some groups of society, which pushes them to hasten to marry off their daughters. 3- Early marriage is considered one of the social problems that the Yemeni society suffers from, and the Yemeni girl suffers from it, especially in the countryside. 4- The phenomenon of early marriage in Yemen was combined with many factors, including economic, social and cultural factors. 5- There are many effects that result from early marriage, including psychological, health, social and economic effects. 6- The presence of shortcomings in the Yemeni law regarding the marriage of minors, in Article No. (15) of its recent amendments in the Personal Status Law, which did not explicitly specify the age of marriage, and there is no explicit text specifying the penalty for those who violate the text of the law. 7- The prevalence of early divorce among young girls, due to several reasons, including, but not limited to, her lack of knowledge of marital rights, the lack of complementarity between the two marriages, or the lack of compatibility between them. 8- The high mortality rate of young mothers, due to their exposure to many risks of pregnancy and childbirth at an early age, including severe bleeding, acute anemia, etc. The researcher recommended several recommendations, the most important of which are: 1- Determining the age of marriage at (18) years, and urging the Yemeni legislator to amend Article (15) of the Personal Status Law No. (20) of 1992 AD and its amendments in Law No. (27) of 1998 AD so that it explicitly stipulates that the age of marriage be set at no less than (18) years. A solar system, specifying a penalty for those who violate it, and harmonizing other laws related to the personal status law with regard to the age of marriage for young girls. 2- Developing a media policy aimed at creating awareness among members of society, through visual, print and audio media, and social media, in order to clarify the harms of early marriage, and the risks, disadvantages, and problems of underage marriage and its future effects, and to provide an educational role through various relevant official and unofficial agencies and institutions such as the Ministry Education, media, human rights, the National Committee for Women, the Supreme Council for Motherhood and Childhood, civil society organizations and others. 3- Spreading legal awareness in society of the dangers and effects of child marriage. 4- Combined joint efforts (official and popular) to seek to achieve a safe age of marriage of eighteen years, in order to achieve the complete elimination of child marriage. 5- Urging researchers and those interested in the field of the family to prepare qualitative studies and in-depth specialized research on child marriage as a social phenomenon that includes all its different aspects in terms of its size, causes of its spread, damages and multiple effects.

Most people today associate social justice with the equality of all citizens before the law, a decent wage, a high level of social security for people with disabilities, equal access to health care, education, culture, and etc. We analyze value aspects of social justice and define the importance and role of values in human life. The substantive relationship between the concepts of value and well-being is studied. Important aspects of social justice such as: social, legal and political are discussed separately. The demand for social justice in modern Georgian society is analyzed. An assessment of the role of social justice in the development of society is given. Analyzing the value aspects of social justice, we would like to point out that social justice is the category and working tool by which we evaluate various social and political phenomena, adopted laws, results of ongoing reforms, socio-economic status of Georgia, social groups and classes, distribution of public good and etc.

Archaeological sites as part of cultural heritage satisfy a broad range of interests of different stakeholders. Along with satisfying cultural, social, scientific, etc., interests, their role is no less important in strategic socio-economic development.Unlocking asocio-economic potential of archaeological sites requires clear vision of how to conserve and protect each particular site, how and by what means to maintain and manage the object as well as what to do with it next. It is widely acknowledged that archaeological sites, in particular those having the status of archaeological monuments, play a socially important role, but their maintenance and development often require significant investment. While the laws make owners of archaeological sites, both private and public, solely responsible for conservation, restoration and maintenance of cultural monuments in their property, there should be appropriate mechanisms that mitigate the financial and legal burden and support owners along the way.Based on the review of legal regulation, scientific literature, information of the authorities and mass media, multiple expert interviews, consultations with professional archaeologists, and using an integrated socio-economic and legal approach to the researched issue, the article provides theoretical and practical insight into the actualities of archaeological heritage development potential in Latvia (making international comparisons) and possible solutions thereto.

This study aims at illustrating the weakness of women protection against violence in various levels in Indonesia and Cairo. Both countries share common failure in protecting women due to the incapability poor performance of police and local governments. In addition, cultural values and religious understanding have played a part in narrowing the concern to the protection. Basically, Indonesia has already set some legal instruments to protect women against any violence through the gender-based laws and policies. In practice, however, such laws and policies have faced several complexities in regards to the nature of institution, security role and social values among society. Violence against women is generally regarded as moral and norm violations instead of criminal acts. In some respects, the weakness of law enforcement indicates the ineffectiveness of the existing laws and policies. Similarly, Egypt also suffers from the backwardness of women protection against violence. In fact, legal reform for women protection in this country was made in 2014 through special constitution. Such constitution is the first law set to promote the status and role of women in both private and public affairs. In addition, it also aims at ensuring equal rights and obligations in women protection which is free from discrimination and empowering as well as caring for women and girls victims at various stages of case handling system. Referring to the data and actual documents collected during the research, this study has found a result stating women protection has faced various aspects of social and political interests. To that end, it necessary to strengthen the role of civil society in controlling the government and making people aware of gender equality in particular and human rights in general.

Relevant to any attempt for amelioration of woman’s conditions was the history of Muslim people in general and that of Muslims in the Indo-Pak Subcontinent in particular. This paper highlights Muslim women’s struggle for their rights movements in British India. Their continuous struggle altered educational and political institutions, allowing them to emerge from seclusion and participate more actively in the nation's public life. It is said that when women in the developed countries were agitating against their own male regarding their rights, a similar struggle had begun in the subcontinent where men started encouraging participation of women in education and politics, appreciated, and sometimes patronized it. The imperialists in India reversed the economic and social milieu. By strengthening system, British fortified the position of the feudal and tribal lords which not only contributed towards solidifying the struggle for Muslim Women’s Rights in the British India but also resulted in lowering the status of women. The British, on the other hand, did not believe it was necessary to extend their politics into all aspects of life. As a result, local laws continued to apply in family and personal matters like as marriage, guardianship, and inheritance, and the status quo between men and women was maintained. After a prolonged protests and struggle for women’s rights, the central legislature undertook legislation on issues relating to Muslim women such as child marriage, property rights, widow remarriage, divorce, etc. Muslim women had to resisted on the laws imposed by imperialists as most of it were the violation of their fundamental rights, and that they were mostly successful i.e., law of inheritance 1937. The paper shows that women's struggles for educational and political freedom had a significant impact in the British India Particularly in 1940s during Pakistan Movement. Everyone is aware of the social changes/developments that occurred at that time. However, few people acknowledge that women had a key role in bringing about these developments. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that women have achieved tremendous progress and have paved the way for more reforms in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In my postgraduate formation during the last years of the 80’s, we had close to thirty hospital beds in a pavilion called “sépticas” (1). In Colombia, where abortion was completely penalized, the pavilion was mostly filled with women with insecure, complicated abortions. The focus we received was technical: management of intensive care; performance of hysterectomies, colostomies, bowel resection, etc. In those times, some nurses were nuns and limited themselves to interrogating the patients to get them to “confess” what they had done to themselves in order to abort. It always disturbed me that the women who left alive, left without any advice or contraceptive method. Having asked a professor of mine, he responded with disdain: “This is a third level hospital, those things are done by nurses of the first level”. Seeing so much pain and death, I decided to talk to patients, and I began to understand their decision. I still remember so many deaths with sadness, but one case in particular pains me: it was a woman close to being fifty who arrived with a uterine perforation in a state of advanced sepsis. Despite the surgery and the intensive care, she passed away. I had talked to her, and she told me she was a widow, had two adult kids and had aborted because of “embarrassment towards them” because they were going to find out that she had an active sexual life. A few days after her passing, the pathology professor called me, surprised, to tell me that the uterus we had sent for pathological examination showed no pregnancy. She was a woman in a perimenopausal state with a pregnancy exam that gave a false positive due to the high levels of FSH/LH typical of her age. SHE WAS NOT PREGNANT!!! She didn’t have menstruation because she was premenopausal and a false positive led her to an unsafe abortion. Of course, the injuries caused in the attempted abortion caused the fatal conclusion, but the real underlying cause was the social taboo in respect to sexuality. I had to watch many adolescents and young women leave the hospital alive, but without a uterus, sometime without ovaries and with colostomies, to be looked down on by a society that blamed them for deciding to not be mothers. I had to see situation of women that arrived with their intestines protruding from their vaginas because of unsafe abortions. I saw women, who in their despair, self-inflicted injuries attempting to abort with elements such as stick, branches, onion wedges, alum bars and clothing hooks among others. Among so many deaths, it was hard not having at least one woman per day in the morgue due to an unsafe abortion. During those time, healthcare was not handled from the biopsychosocial, but only from the technical (2); nonetheless, in the academic evaluations that were performed, when asked about the definition of health, we had to recite the text from the International Organization of Health that included these three aspects. How contradictory! To give response to the health need of women and guarantee their right when I was already a professor, I began an obstetric contraceptive service in that third level hospital. There was resistance from the directors, but fortunately I was able to acquire international donations for the institution, which facilitated its acceptance. I decided to undertake a teaching career with the hope of being able to sensitize health professionals towards an integral focus of health and illness. When the International Conference of Population and Development (ICPD) was held in Cairo in 1994, I had already spent various years in teaching, and when I read their Action Program, I found a name for what I was working on: Sexual and Reproductive Rights. I began to incorporate the tools given by this document into my professional and teaching life. I was able to sensitize people at my countries Health Ministry, and we worked together moving it to an approach of human rights in areas of sexual and reproductive health (SRH). This new viewpoint, in addition to being integral, sought to give answers to old problems like maternal mortality, adolescent pregnancy, low contraceptive prevalence, unplanned or unwanted pregnancy or violence against women. With other sensitized people, we began with these SRH issues to permeate the Colombian Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology, some universities, and university hospitals. We are still fighting in a country that despite many difficulties has improved its indicators of SRH. With the experience of having labored in all sphere of these topics, we manage to create, with a handful of colleagues and friend at the Universidad El Bosque, a Master’s Program in Sexual and Reproductive Health, open to all professions, in which we broke several paradigms. A program was initiated in which the qualitative and quantitative investigation had the same weight, and some alumni of the program are now in positions of leadership in governmental and international institutions, replicating integral models. In the Latin American Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecology (FLASOG, English acronym) and in the International Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecology (FIGO), I was able to apply my experience for many years in the SRH committees of these association to benefit women and girls in the regional and global environments. When I think of who has inspired me in these fights, I should highlight the great feminist who have taught me and been with me in so many fights. I cannot mention them all, but I have admired the story of the life of Margaret Sanger with her persistence and visionary outlook. She fought throughout her whole life to help the women of the 20th century to be able to obtain the right to decide when and whether or not they wanted to have children (3). Of current feminist, I have had the privilege of sharing experiences with Carmen Barroso, Giselle Carino, Debora Diniz and Alejandra Meglioli, leaders of the International Planned Parenthood Federation – Western Hemisphere Region (IPPF-RHO). From my country, I want to mention my countrywoman Florence Thomas, psychologist, columnist, writer and Colombo-French feminist. She is one of the most influential and important voices in the movement for women rights in Colombia and the region. She arrived from France in the 1960’s, in the years of counterculture, the Beatles, hippies, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre, a time in which capitalism and consumer culture began to be criticized (4). It was then when they began to talk about the female body, female sexuality and when the contraceptive pill arrived like a total revolution for women. Upon its arrival in 1967, she experimented a shock because she had just assisted in a revolution and only found a country of mothers, not women (5). That was the only destiny for a woman, to be quiet and submissive. Then she realized that this could not continue, speaking of “revolutionary vanguards” in such a patriarchal environment. In 1986 with the North American and European feminism waves and with her academic team, they created the group “Mujer y Sociedad de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia”, incubator of great initiatives and achievements for the country (6). She has led great changes with her courage, the strength of her arguments, and a simultaneously passionate and agreeable discourse. Among her multiple books, I highlight “Conversaciones con Violeta” (7), motivated by the disdain towards feminism of some young women. She writes it as a dialogue with an imaginary daughter in which, in an intimate manner, she reconstructs the history of women throughout the centuries and gives new light of the fundamental role of feminism in the life of modern women. Another book that shows her bravery is “Había que decirlo” (8), in which she narrates the experience of her own abortion at age twenty-two in sixty’s France. My work experience in the IPPF-RHO has allowed me to meet leaders of all ages in diverse countries of the region, who with great mysticism and dedication, voluntarily, work to achieve a more equal and just society. I have been particularly impressed by the appropriation of the concept of sexual and reproductive rights by young people, and this has given me great hope for the future of the planet. We continue to have an incomplete agenda of the action plan of the ICPD of Cairo but seeing how the youth bravely confront the challenges motivates me to continue ahead and give my years of experience in an intergenerational work. In their policies and programs, the IPPF-RHO evidences great commitment for the rights and the SRH of adolescent, that are consistent with what the organization promotes, for example, 20% of the places for decision making are in hands of the young. Member organizations, that base their labor on volunteers, are true incubators of youth that will make that unassailable and necessary change of generations. In contrast to what many of us experienced, working in this complicated agenda of sexual and reproductive health without theoretical bases, today we see committed people with a solid formation to replace us. In the college of medicine at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and the College of Nursing at the Universidad El Bosque, the new generations are more motivated and empowered, with great desire to change the strict underlying structures. Our great worry is the onslaught of the ultra-right, a lot of times better organized than us who do support rights, that supports anti-rights group and are truly pro-life (9). Faced with this scenario, we should organize ourselves better, giving battle to guarantee the rights of women in the local, regional, and global level, aggregating the efforts of all pro-right organizations. We are now committed to the Objectives of Sustainable Development (10), understood as those that satisfy the necessities of the current generation without jeopardizing the capacity of future generations to satisfy their own necessities. This new agenda is based on: - The unfinished work of the Millennium Development Goals - Pending commitments (international environmental conventions) - The emergent topics of the three dimensions of sustainable development: social, economic, and environmental. We now have 17 objectives of sustainable development and 169 goals (11). These goals mention “universal access to reproductive health” many times. In objective 3 of this list is included guaranteeing, before the year 2030, “universal access to sexual and reproductive health services, including those of family planning, information, and education.” Likewise, objective 5, “obtain gender equality and empower all women and girls”, establishes the goal of “assuring the universal access to sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights in conformity with the action program of the International Conference on Population and Development, the Action Platform of Beijing”. It cannot be forgotten that the term universal access to sexual and reproductive health includes universal access to abortion and contraception. Currently, 830 women die every day through preventable maternal causes; of these deaths, 99% occur in developing countries, more than half in fragile environments and in humanitarian contexts (12). 216 million women cannot access modern contraception methods and the majority live in the nine poorest countries in the world and in a cultural environment proper to the decades of the seventies (13). This number only includes women from 15 to 49 years in any marital state, that is to say, the number that takes all women into account is much greater. Achieving the proposed objectives would entail preventing 67 million unwanted pregnancies and reducing maternal deaths by two thirds. We currently have a high, unsatisfied demand for modern contraceptives, with extremely low use of reversible, long term methods (intrauterine devices and subdermal implants) which are the most effect ones with best adherence (14). There is not a single objective among the 17 Objectives of Sustainable Development where contraception does not have a prominent role: from the first one that refers to ending poverty, going through the fifth one about gender equality, the tenth of inequality reduction among countries and within the same country, until the sixteenth related with peace and justice. If we want to change the world, we should procure universal access to contraception without myths or barriers. We have the moral obligation of achieving the irradiation of extreme poverty and advancing the construction of more equal, just, and happy societies. In emergency contraception (EC), we are very far from reaching expectations. If in reversible, long-term methods we have low prevalence, in EC the situation gets worse. Not all faculties in the region look at this topic, and where it is looked at, there is no homogeneity in content, not even within the same country. There are still myths about their real action mechanisms. There are countries, like Honduras, where it is prohibited and there is no specific medicine, the same case as in Haiti. Where it is available, access is dismal, particularly among girls, adolescents, youth, migrants, afro-descendent, and indigenous. The multiple barriers for the effective use of emergency contraceptives must be knocked down, and to work toward that we have to destroy myths and erroneous perceptions, taboos and cultural norms; achieve changes in laws and restrictive rules within countries, achieve access without barriers to the EC; work in union with other sectors; train health personnel and the community. It is necessary to transform the attitude of health personal to a service above personal opinion. Reflecting on what has occurred after the ICPD in Cairo, their Action Program changed how we look at the dynamics of population from an emphasis on demographics to a focus on the people and human rights. The governments agreed that, in this new focus, success was the empowerment of women and the possibility of choice through expanded access to education, health, services, and employment among others. Nonetheless, there have been unequal advances and inequality persists in our region, all the goals were not met, the sexual and reproductive goals continue beyond the reach of many women (15). There is a long road ahead until women and girls of the world can claim their rights and liberty of deciding. Globally, maternal deaths have been reduced, there is more qualified assistance of births, more contraception prevalence, integral sexuality education, and access to SRH services for adolescents are now recognized rights with great advances, and additionally there have been concrete gains in terms of more favorable legal frameworks, particularly in our region; nonetheless, although it’s true that the access condition have improved, the restrictive laws of the region expose the most vulnerable women to insecure abortions. There are great challenges for governments to recognize SRH and the DSR as integral parts of health systems, there is an ample agenda against women. In that sense, access to SRH is threatened and oppressed, it requires multi-sector mobilization and litigation strategies, investigation and support for the support of women’s rights as a multi-sector agenda. Looking forward, we must make an effort to work more with youth to advance not only the Action Program of the ICPD, but also all social movements. They are one of the most vulnerable groups, and the biggest catalyzers for change. The young population still faces many challenges, especially women and girls; young girls are in particularly high risk due to lack of friendly and confidential services related with sexual and reproductive health, gender violence, and lack of access to services. In addition, access to abortion must be improved; it is the responsibility of states to guarantee the quality and security of this access. In our region there still exist countries with completely restrictive frameworks. New technologies facilitate self-care (16), which will allow expansion of universal access, but governments cannot detach themselves from their responsibility. Self-care is expanding in the world and can be strategic for reaching the most vulnerable populations. There are new challenges for the same problems, that require a re-interpretation of the measures necessary to guaranty the DSR of all people, in particular women, girls, and in general, marginalized and vulnerable populations. It is necessary to take into account migrations, climate change, the impact of digital media, the resurgence of hate discourse, oppression, violence, xenophobia, homo/transphobia, and other emergent problems, as SRH should be seen within a framework of justice, not isolated. We should demand accountability of the 179 governments that participate in the ICPD 25 years ago and the 193 countries that signed the Sustainable Development Objectives. They should reaffirm their commitments and expand their agenda to topics not considered at that time. Our region has given the world an example with the Agreement of Montevideo, that becomes a blueprint for achieving the action plan of the CIPD and we should not allow retreat. This agreement puts people at the center, especially women, and includes the topic of abortion, inviting the state to consider the possibility of legalizing it, which opens the doors for all governments of the world to recognize that women have the right to choose on maternity. This agreement is much more inclusive: Considering that the gaps in health continue to abound in the region and the average statistics hide the high levels of maternal mortality, of sexually transmitted diseases, of infection by HIV/AIDS, and the unsatisfied demand for contraception in the population that lives in poverty and rural areas, among indigenous communities, and afro-descendants and groups in conditions of vulnerability like women, adolescents and incapacitated people, it is agreed: 33- To promote, protect, and guarantee the health and the sexual and reproductive rights that contribute to the complete fulfillment of people and social justice in a society free of any form of discrimination and violence. 37- Guarantee universal access to quality sexual and reproductive health services, taking into consideration the specific needs of men and women, adolescents and young, LGBT people, older people and people with incapacity, paying particular attention to people in a condition of vulnerability and people who live in rural and remote zone, promoting citizen participation in the completing of these commitments. 42- To guarantee, in cases in which abortion is legal or decriminalized in the national legislation, the existence of safe and quality abortion for non-desired or non-accepted pregnancies and instigate the other States to consider the possibility of modifying public laws, norms, strategies, and public policy on the voluntary interruption of pregnancy to save the life and health of pregnant adolescent women, improving their quality of life and decreasing the number of abortions (17).

AbstrakStatus sosial dalam tinjauan hukum islam dan positif ini menjadi suatu permasalahan utama. Pengaruh perkawinan ditinjau dari hukum islam dan strata sosial pada Masyarakat Sulawesi Selatan Kecamatan Soppeng Riaja Kabupaten Barru dan dampak positif dan negatif terhadap adanya strata sosial yang berbeda pada Masyarakat Sulawesi Selatan Kecamatan Soppeng Riaja Kabupaten Barru menjadi topik utama. Peneliti kemudian menggunakan metode deskriptif kualitatif, menginterpretasikan dan mendeskripsikan info, sikap dan pandangan yang terjadi dalam suatu masyarakat, kontradiksi antara dua kejadian, hubungan antara individu dan variabel yang muncul dari perbedaan fakta yang ada dengan fakta yang ada serta pengaruhnya terhadap kondisi. Pendekatan induktif, dengan teknik pengumpulan information yaitu studi lapangan, wawancara, selain itu penulis juga melakukan studi literatur dengan menelaah buku, literatur dan peraturan perundang-undangan. Menganalisis dokumen hukum yaitu penulis menggali, menganalisis dan menemukan segala peraturan perundang-undangan yang mengatur semua aspek asas hukum Islam dan hukum perkawinan. Status Sosial Masyarakat Kecamatan Soppeng Riaja Kabupaten Barru dalam ditinjau dari hukum islam dan hukum positif bahwa status sosial perempuan sangat menentukan tinggi dan rendahnya uang panai’, meliputi Keturunan Bangsawan, Tingkat Pendidikan, Pekerjaan Status Ekonomi perempuan dan Kondisi Fisik. Adapun dampak hukum jika pihak laki-laki tidak mampu menyanggupi jumlah uang panai’ yang telah ditargetkan, maka secara otomatis perkawinan akan batal dan pada umumnya implikasi yang muncul adalah pihak laki-laki dan perempuan mendapat cibiran atau hinaan di kalangan masyarakat setempat, dan biasanya hubungan antar kedua keluarga bisa renggang. Selain itu banyak laki-laki yang enggan menikah karena banyaknya tuntutan yang harus disiapkan oleh pihak laki- laki demi sebuah perkawinan. Tidak sedikit perempuan yang tidak kawin dan menjadi perawan tua.Kata kunci: Hukum Islam, Hukum Positif, Strata Sosial.AbstractSocial status in this positive and Islamic legal journal is a major issue. The effect of marriage in terms of Islamic law and social strata in the community of South Sulawesi, the district of Soppeng Riaja, the regency of Barru and the positive and negative impacts on the existence of different social strata in the community of South Sulawesi, Soppeng Riaja District, Barru Regency is the main subject. The researchers then use descriptive qualitative methods, interpret and describe the information, attitudes and viewpoints that occur in a society, the contradictions between two events, the relationships between individuals and the variables that result from differences between facts. existing and existing facts and their effects on conditions. Inductive approach, with information gathering techniques, namely field studies, interviews, in addition to the fact that the author also conducts literature studies by examining books, literature and statutory regulations. By analyzing legal documents, the author searches, analyzes and finds all the laws and regulations that govern all aspects of Islamic law and marriage law. Social status of the Soppeng Riaja sub-district, Barru Regency in terms of Islamic law and positive law according to which the social status of women determines the top and bottom of Panai money ”. Social status includes royal ancestry, educational level, professional economic status of women, and physical condition. doi 'panai' was considered siri 'or the self-esteem of a woman and her family. As for the legal impact if the male party is not able to pay the targeted amount of Panai money, the marriage will automatically be annulled and, in general, this implies that both men and women receive contempt or insults. in the local community, and generally relations between the two families can be tenuous. In addition, many men are reluctant to get married due to the many demands that men have to prepare for a marriage. Not a few women who don't get married and become single.Keywords: Islamic Law, Positive Law, Social Strata.

The relevance of the study is determined by the fact that the legislator and the law enforcement officer allow deviations from the social and legal foundations at all stages of the formation and application of the criminal law. Therefore, the subject of research is, on the one hand, incorrectly formulated norms of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, draft amendments to them, unjustified application of the law. On the other hand, there are theoretical and normative constructions existing for a given historical period, designed to prevent the emergence of such norms and their application. These include the theory of substantiation of criminal law, including its most developed part - the theory of criminalization of acts, regulations on the examination of laws and their application. In this regard, the purpose of the study is to identify the causes of failure, failure of these structures and to determine the way to solve the problem. The study was carried out using such general logical methods of cognition as systemic, comparative-legal; analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction. Analyzed: 4 laws and bills (No. 5, 8, 9, 18), 7 decisions of the Constitutional Court of the RF over the past 5 years (No. 1-4, 15, 17), which offer a different constitutional interpretation of the unjustified norms of the Criminal Code of the RF; materials of judicial practice on the norms incorrectly fixed in the Criminal Code or applied by the courts, carried out by the author and other researchers (No. 6, 12, 13, 14); monitoring data of the expertise of the law officially conducted in Russia and its application for compliance-inconsistency with the social and legal foundations of the criminal law (52). It has been carried out the analysis and synthesis of the authors' views on the components of the concept, the criteria for the criminalization of acts, the substantiation of the law, named in 18 studies (No. 19-21, 26-29, 31-41, 52 (monographs, dissertations, journal articles) its use in applied research, as well as 13 studies devoted to a broader substantiation of the law than criminalization (22-25, 30, 44-51). Sociological, philosophical and other studies have been analyzed (No. 7, 11, 42, 43). The system analysis made it possible to draw both intermediate and final conclusions obtained as a result of the study. As a result of the study, it was revealed that: 1. Criminalization is the most important stage in the process of substantiating a law, but it does not cover all the factors that must be taken into account for its substantiation. This is within the scope of the theory of the justification of the criminal law. 2. But neither the theory of criminalization of acts, nor the theory of justification are not fully developed as integral theories. 3. In this state, they are not fully used by researchers, legislators, law enforcement officials or experts. Therefore, the first block of the theory of justification - the criminalization of acts and all others (consolidation of the signs of an act in the main composition, qualified, norm, etc.) require systematization of existing knowledge, further research of social and legal factors of justification of the law in various aspects and generalization of their results. Such a study is within the capabilities of a large federal research center that unites the potential of researchers from different regions of Russia and other countries. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

The legal aspects of formation and development if integral competence of local council deputies are analyzed in the article.There has been defined the concept of "integral competence of local council deputies such as knowledge, skills, capacities, and sometimes - other important qualities, ways and methods of their implementation into the activities of the local council deputies which are necessary for the successful and responsible fulfillment of their tasks and responsibilities. It has been determined that the profile of integral (pro-active, business-like) competence of local council deputies in Ukraine includes law-making, administrative and jurisdictional (organizational, executive, administrative, coordinative), control and supervisory, informational and analytical; economic (budgetary and planning, etc.), value-oriented (moral and ethical), social and psychological with communicative and consulting competences. The profile is designed mainly for the creative type of activity. The necessity to develop knowledge, skills and capacities of local council deputies to solve urgent problems of local self-government related to decentralization reform has been substantiated.It has been proved that the local council deputy must be highly professional in his/her field, capable to control changes, develop leadership skills, take risks, meet challenges of today. It has been emphasized necessary to provide continuous professional training to local council deputies for their mobility, prompt and effective response to the challenges of society in the context of development the paradigm shift within the state administration and local self-government.It is concluded that ensuring the effective activity of a local council deputy depends directly on his level of integral competence increasing through the vocational training. Leadership is an important component of integral competence. Leadership features include open-mindness and responsibility for self-actualization. The legal bases of formation and development of integral competence of the local councils deputies. There has been investigated defined by the Constitution of Ukraine, laws of Ukraine "On local self-government in Ukraine", "On the status of the local councils deputies " - concerning the content of the profile of integrative competence of local councils deputies in Ukraine, based on the distinguishing of empowerment and competences of the local self-government body; legislation defining the strategy and main directions of the further development of life-long adult education in Ukraine by means of formal, non-formal and informal education, namely: the National Doctrine of Education Development, the National Strategy for Education Development in Ukraine until 2021, the National Qualifications Framework, the laws of Ukraine “On Professional Development of Employees”, “On Employment of the Population”, “On Higher Education”, “On Education”. It is proved that the existing system of vocational training, based on European standards of education development, plays a key role in the process of the integral competence formation for the local councils deputies, and insurance of their continuous professional training. The have been analyzed the legal foundations of the vocational training system for the local councils deputies, which are defined by the Concept of reforming the system of vocational training for civil servants, heads of local state administrations, their senior deputies and deputies, local self-government officials and of local councils deputies under the date of December 1, 2017 No. 974-p , the plan of actiors for its implementation, as well as the corresponding Regulations on the vocational training system.

Forced marriage is a form of marriage that takes place without the consent of the parties, or is done under coercion by one of the parties to the contract. The difference revolves around between compulsory marriage and regular marriage, as the latter depends on the agreement and consent of the parties to the contract, and with the consent of the parents of both parties. As for forced marriage, it obligates one or both parties to the contract to accept, even if it is necessary to use psychological pressure or physical violence. In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the rate of forced marriage, which has reached more than 20 percent, according to statistics from personal status courts, while the percentage of victims of these marriages is more than 40 percent of women, indicating that most divorce cases are among young people who were forced to marry before reaching the legal age. The phenomenon was very small during the nineties, but it increased significantly after the US occupation of Iraq in 2003. There are legal treatments for the phenomenon, through declarations, the agreements that Iraq joined or ratified, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Covenant on Civil, Political and Social Rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Violence and Discrimination against Women, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, all of which contain texts stating not to be forced into marriage. Forced for whatever reason. The problem lies in the failure to criminalize the perpetrators of forced marriage by the penal laws and legislations. The Iraqi Penal Code of 1969 did not include any criminalization of it, but the Personal Status Law No. 188 of 1959 mentioned the penalty of imprisonment for the person who is forced to marry if he is the relative of the victim of the first degree, and imprisonment for a period Not more than 10 years, if otherwise. One of the most common types of forced marriage is reciprocal, or by presenting a woman as a substitute for the dowry, whether it is a sister or a daughter, and there is another type of marriage, which is a blood allowance, that is to offer a woman as compensation for the harm that befell the other clan in the event that one of her clan members kills One of the members of that clan, and there is a gift marriage, and such marriages had receded. There is kidnapping marriage, which is widespread in one of the sects and is criminalized by the Penal Code with life imprisonment for its perpetrator. In addition to the problem of marriage outside the courts with the approval of a cleric, and this matter is not related to individual cases, but in tens of thousands of cases throughout the country. About 9,800 cases of marriage outside the courts were recorded in Baghdad alone during 2017, according to Judicial Council numbers, while about 59,000 were registered. A situation throughout Iraq, with the exception of the Kurdistan region, a large part of which is the marriage of minors (under the legal age) whose families want to impose a fait accompli on the courts. From all the foregoing, it becomes clear how important the research topic is, as it affects the human rights and freedoms of girls and women and negatively affects the family and society, and thus the security and community peace. The research aims to include detailed texts in the Personal Status Law that include all forms of forced marriage and its material, moral and psychological aspects and all parties and persons in the forced marriage process or the reason for its occurrence and the various cases of its occurrence, as well as addressing legislative contradictions and mitigating or exempting excuses stipulated in the Penal Code, which allow For the perpetrators with impunity. And that the forms of the crime of forced marriage are included with its provisions in the penal code and not in the personal status law, and heavy penalties are imposed on the perpetrators, and that the degree of relationship of the perpetrator to the victim is a reason for the severity of the punishment and not to reduce it, so that the closer the degree, the more severe the punishment

Pekerja rumahan belum banyak dikenal dan keberadaannya tidak terlihat sebagai kelompok masyarakat produktif, bahkan data statistik tidak mengkategorikan perempuan pekerja rumahan sebagai golongan pekerja, tetapi sebagai ibu rumah tangga. Informalisasi pekerja rumahan berdampak pada kondisi kerja yang tidak menguntungkan, upah rendah, tidak ada kontrak kerja, tidak ada jaminnan sosial, jam kerja panjang, rentan atas resiko kecelakaan kerja, dsb. Tulisan ini dimaksud dapat menjawab persoalan hukum atas perlindungan pekerja rumahan, menggunakan data sekunder, dengan pendekatan perundang- undangan namun tetap diisi kajian sosiologi dan antropologi. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan kaburnya status hubungan kerja pekerja rumahan menyebabkan hilangnya sejumlah hak pekerja, dan keadaan ini merupakan dampak dari fleksibilitas hubungan kerja. Pemerintah tidak bisa menghilangkan tanggungjawab pengawasan dan perlindungan meskipun sektor informal belum tercakup sebanyak sektor formal dalam UU Ketenagakerjaan Homeworkers have not been widely known and their existence is not seen as a productive community group, even the statistical data do not categorize women homeworkers as workers, but as housewives. Informalization of homeworkers has an impact on unfavorable working conditions, low wages, no employment contracts, no social security, long working hours, vulnerability to the risk of workplace accidents, etc. This paper was intended to be able to answer legal issues regarding the protection of homeworkers, using secondary data, with a legal approach but still filled with sociology and anthropology studies. The results of the study indicated that the blurring of the status of work relations of homeworkers caused the loss of a number of workers' rights, and this situation was an impact of the flexibility of work relations. The government could not eliminate the oversight and protection responsibilities even though the informal sector had not been covered as much as the formal sector in the Major Labour Laws.

Background. In the XX-XXI centuries politics is becoming an increasingly professional field of activity, to which more and more women are joining. Insufficient representation of the latter in state bodies gives grounds for doubts about the democracy of the state system, which determined the relevance of the study. Analysis of recent research and publications. Various aspects of the position of woman in Ukrainian politics have been studied by T. Martseniuk, Ya. Radysh, V. Smachylo, and G. Yurovska, but today we are required to carry out a comprehensive legal analysis of the formation of a gender equality society in Ukraine. The aim of the article is to study national legislation on the issue of gender equality in the political sphere, taking into account international standards; analysis of mechanisms for increasing the number of women in politics based on the generalization of the experience of developed democracies. Materials and methods, that were used - dialectical, comparative analysis, systemic, formal and legal scientific methods and principles. Results. An important aspect of the struggle of women for their political rights was that the latest constitutions of the states enshrined the principle of equality of citizens, including in the electoral process, regardless of gender, race and political views. Analysis of the political experience of social democracies has shown that the participation of women deputies in the work of parliaments and other representative institutions is extremely important and effective for society as a whole, because they focus on health care, upbringing, education, social protection of population, etc. In Ukraine, equality between woman and man has been established de jure, but gender stereotypes regarding the distribution of roles continue to dominate society and consciousness. The most successful international practices include the creation of a parliament on the basis of gender equality through the application of: positive actions for the implementation of gender quotas; creation of state institutions to monitor the observance of equal rights for women and men; implementation of gender expertise of bills. Conclusion. Our study has improved the thesis that in Ukraine there is an objective need to change the patriarchal type of political culture. In this regard, we have proposed measures that can increase the status of Ukrainian woman in politics: to further monitor national legislation; introduce national mechanisms to ensure the representation of women in government; create the necessary economic conditions for the implementation of women's political activity. Keywords: gender equality, democracy, parliamentarism, women’s political rights.

Formulation of the problem. The regulatory and legal principles of the competence of state authorities and local self-government in Ukraine formation have been studied. The contents of the Ukraine key laws regarding local self-government bodies and modern concepts of their activities are disclosed. It was found that there is no unified conceptual vision of the local self-government bodies status, competencies, and responsibilities in Ukraine. It has been established that the legal framework for the functioning and development of local self-government bodies in Ukraine is formed from regulatory acts of different levels. Analysis of recent research and publications. Research on this issue can be divided into two directions. First of all, these are the works of specialists in constitutional and municipal law who investigated the issue of the essence and nature of local self-go- vernment (professors M. O. Baimuratov, O. V. Batanov, B. V. Kalynovskyi, P. M. Lyub- chenko, N. V. Mishina and etc.). Secondly, these are the works of representatives of administrative and legal science who analyze the problems of administrative regulation of local self-government in Ukraine, here it is worth mentioning the monograph of Y. V. Zhuravlya, A. A. Manjuli, I. I. Lytvynova, T. O. Karbina. Formulation of the article goals. The purpose of the specified scientific research is to analyze the state of regulatory and legal support for optimizing the competences of local self-government bodies. It is noted that the regulatory and legal support for the activities of local self- government bodies needs improvement, in particular by finding effective and rational means of managerial influence on their functioning. These include the improvement of the competent regulatory and legal framework for the activities of local self-government entities, which will contribute to the satisfaction of the economic, political, and social people needs, and the creation for their harmonious development conditions. Сonclusions. That the dynamic development of local self-government can only be ensured by the organization and activity of local self-government entities and their regulation by improving the relevant competent legal framework. Further development of local self-government in Ukraine should depend on finding sufficiently effective means of influencing national law on its functioning. At the legislative level, a new model of local self-government has been formed in Ukraine, which provides for the decentralization of state administration and the optimization of the competence of central authorities at the regional level. However, the practical implementation of the specified legislative provisions should ensure the deprivation of the central bodies of the state executive power of functions that do not belong to them, by maximally delegating them from the center to the regions and from the state to the private sector. We see the prospects for further research on the topic in the coverage of a number of derivative aspects of the mentioned topic, first of all, a detailed analysis of international legal acts, an outline of the prospects for optimizing the powers of local self-government bodies.

The dynamic present places high demands on the personal development of modern youth. Modern socioeconomic processes in our society make high demands on the personal and professional qualities of specialists in such important areas of practice as management, scientific, pedagogical, legal, medical, psychological, etc. In the conditions of development and updating of pedagogical education the problem of formation of the teacher’s personality becomes especially actual. One way to solve this problem is to return national education to humanistic sources. Since the teacher is the most important figure in the education system, it is the humanistic orientation in the structure of the teacher’s personality that makes it possible to develop subject-subject relations between the participants in the educational process. The problem of subject-subject interaction is especially relevant in the system of higher education, which is the first step in the professionalization of the personality of a young person — the student. As practice shows, today’s freshmen in the vast majority of eighteen years are young men and women who have changed their social status and living conditions. It is proved that the transition to adulthood is very complex and controversial. Conflicts of personal formation are not easy, full of contradictions, search for meanings, motivated choice of profession and mastery of professional competencies. Mastering the teaching profession is determined by the student’s motivation, his psychological readiness for teaching, a conscious attempt to self-realize in the profession. To socially significant motives of pedagogical activity scientists refer: responsibility for education of children; enthusiasm and satisfaction from interaction with children; awareness of the high mission of the teacher. It should be noted that socially valuable motives for pedagogical activity are clearly expressed in the educational and professional process and cover students’ mastery of pedagogical, socio-cultural and research activities. With such motivation, the process of training a future teacher becomes the most effective and, most likely, that after gaining a professional qualification, they will implement the acquired competencies in the field of education.

Along with the times, especially in the era of the development of information and communication technology. The development of information technology is very sophisticated, fast and easy so that it becomes a lifestyle for people around the world, including Indonesia. The public is free to express their opinions, either through oral, written, print or electronic media (online). Often the delivery of opinions or opinions freely is misused by some people to express their opinions in an uncultured and unethical manner which will bring legal consequences for the perpetrators, one of which is expressing displeasure or making hate speech. Hate speech is an act of communication carried out by an individual or group in the form of provocation, incitement, or insult to another individual or group in terms of various aspects such as race, skin color, gender, disability, sexual orientation, nationality, religion. , and others. This hate speech crime can be carried out through various media, including in campaign speeches, social media networks, public presentations (demonstrations), religious lectures and other electronic media. This study aims to see how the differences in the tendency to do hate speech between men and women. The method used in this study is a qualitative descriptive method. This method is used to see and describe the tendency to do hate speech between men and women. This research was conducted on 4 teenagers (2 boys and 2 girls; average age 19 years; student status) through in-depth interviews. The data were analyzed using an interactive model consisting of three steps including data reduction, data presentation and drawing conclusions. The results of the study indicate that there are differences in the forms of hate speech between men and women, where differences in women's hate speech are more provocation to everyone against people who are given hate speech than hate speech committed by men. Therefore, as good Indonesian citizens and upholding unity, in expressing opinions and criticisms, we should use wise and kind sentences, so that our opinions can be accepted and do not cause misunderstandings to other social media users. When using social media services to express opinions and criticisms, we should use wise and kind sentences, so that our opinions can be accepted and do not cause misunderstandings to other social media users. It is better in laws and regulations relating to insults and hate speech, both on social media and in public, a further article is made that explains the intent of hate speech itself, such as dirty sentences, animal names and speech without valid data. If it is used, it will be subject to the ITE article regarding hate speech itself. Counselors/BK teachers also have an important role to shape student behavior in schools so as not to do hate speech. Not only that, the creativity of a Counselor/BK teacher is also required so that all ways can be taken to avoid students being involved with hate speech behavior by providing information services and providing group guidance services. For students who have been involved with hate speech actions, coaching can be done through individual counseling, group counseling and group guidance.

Contemporary society is concerned about successful functioning of its members and their effective participation in social interrelations therefore the adaptation of children living in foster homes is perceived as a relevant social issue. In the context of developing democratic ideas increasing attention is being paid towards the problem of adaptive behavior and its development in children without parental care. It is influenced by important social, political, value and legal changes having occurred in the last several decades in Lithuania in a context of which the attitude towards children without parental care, their social status, foster care and development is also changing. While adopting more laws and resolutions on the issues of child’s foster care, development and healthcare there appear more possibilities to solve a lot of relevant questions in child foster care and training institutions. In the context of democracy increasing attention is paid towards social integration of children living in foster institutions, their involvement and participation into social life. The goals and objectives of Lithuanian educational system reflect the intention to prepare a person for life, who is able to analyze reality individually or with other people, also adequately deal with the problems, plan the future and successfully adapt to the constantly changing, dynamic society. These objectives allow to discover a variety of aspects of the organization of educational activities in foster homes. The problematic issue arises while preparing foster home pupils for independent living: Are the educational system and conditions at foster homes sufficient and adequate in process of preparation for independent life? The article actualizes the educational significance of preparing teenagers for independent life. Interviews with foster home staff evaluate the current situation of foster homes, disclose the education system, work achievements (strengths), discuss the developmental problems and identify deficiencies of preparation for independent living in foster homes. The aim – to assess the preparation of foster home pupils for independent living within the context of foster homes, revealing the positive and improvable aspects of the foster home educator’s point of view. Analyzing the features of foster home preparation for independent living in care institutions, the study involved 17 foster home staff, based on their opinion about their personal work experiences and points of view. In order to understand home educational activities, to review the pupils’ preparation for independent living opportunities, educational reality, to find out and identify problems, provide opportunities for improving the situation, the interview method was used. Instant analysis revealed that home care workers initiated a variety of activities: encourage children to solve problems, analyze situations and make decisions. It is also practiced by demonstration of adult example, analyzing the situation and promoting the search for solutions. Workshops are organized, situations and educational environment is created in which the pupils are encouraged to act independently, provide practical training skills that enable learners to try themselves in different activities (household work, cooking, etc.). However, according to the assessment of the current situation in foster homes, it is clear that there are not optimal functions performed by the formation of practical skills and preparing for independent living of children without parental care. Interviews revealed that foster homes lack „real practices“ when most children are able to buy food, count the money, pay for services, cook, and independence is developed mostly by the potential circumstances. Comments on the survey suggest that the lack of practical activities, funding and real-world examples in foster homes prevent realization of the set goals, implement ideas for youngsters to prepare for independent living, to acquire domestic skills and do not create conditions for independent personal development (learning). Discussing the opportunities for improvement of foster home preparation for independent living, almost unanimously expressed material financial base and the improvement of household demand. Foster home staff believes that the conditions under which pupils can cook themselves face with the real everyday life, keep their own budgets, learn, acquire new knowledge or skills may be one of the most successful assumptions for training (learning) to live independently when they came out foster homes.

Статья посвящена исследованию практики двоеженства в традиционной модели семейной организации Осетии. Исследование охватывает период c середины XVIII по XIX в. Анализ специфики внедрения в семейное пространство новаций российского права позволяет представить процесс перехода от традиционных норм обычно-правовой культуры осетин и формирование нового правового сознания. В данном исследовании предложен структурно-функциональный анализ института вторых жен (номылус) в осетинском социуме. Целью исследования является анализ семейно-брачного права осетин, отдельные аспекты которого раскрывают социальное происхождение женщин-номылус, их положение в семье, наследственные права. Впервые объектом исследования становится институт двоеженства, а также последствия, которые имели место после административных мер по борьбе с двоеженством. При этом процесс искоренения института номылус проанализирован на примере нескольких кейсов из семейной практики. Рассматривается деятельность российской администрации, которая в условиях реализации положений крестьянской реформы 1861 г. признавала конкубинат незаконным и освобождала жен-номылус и их детей как представителей несвободного сословия, признавая их вольноотпущенными. Раскрываются особенности бракосочетаний и бракоразводного процесса со второй женой (номылус). Определяются конкретные факторы дифференциации статуса жены-номылус и главной жены, в числе которых хозяйственные, имущественные и т.д. Исследована экономическая сторона заключения конкубината. Результаты работы имеют значение для понимания трансформационных процессов, затронувших все сферы осетинского социума в XIX в. и отразившихся в том числе в способах и формах регламентации брачно-семейных отношений. The article is devoted to the study of the practice of bigamy in the traditional model of family organization in Ossetia. The study covers the period from the middle of the 18th to the 19th century. An analysis of the specifics of the introduction of Russian law innovations into the family space allows us to imagine the process of transition from the traditional norms of the customary legal culture of Ossetians and the formation of a new legal consciousness. This study proposes a structural and functional analysis of the institution of second wives (nomylus) in the Ossetian society. The aim of the study is to analyze the family and marriage law of Ossetians, some aspects of which reveal the social origin of nomylus women, their position in the family, and inheritance rights. For the first time, the institution of bigamy becomes the object of research, as well as the consequences that took place after administrative measures against bigamy. At the same time, the process of eradicating the institution of nomylus is analyzed on the example of several cases from family practice. The activities of the Russian administration is considered, which, in the context of the implementation of the provisions of the peasant reform of 1861, recognized concubinage as illegal and freed wives-nomylus and their children as representatives of the not free estate, recognizing them as freedmen. The features of marriages and divorce proceedings with a second wife (nomylus) are revealed. The specific factors of differentiation of the status of the nomylus wife and the main wife are determined, including economic, property, etc. The economic side of the conclusion of concubinage is studied. The results of the work are important for understanding the transformational processes that affected all spheres of Ossetian society in the 19th century and reflected, among other things, in the ways and forms of regulation of marriage and family relations.

The article presents the results of the analysis of the Frankish criminal law main provisions in the Early Middle Ages, namely, the aspects of the application of punishments for the main types of crimes. This analysis was based on the norms of two sources: the Salic Law, which is deservedly considered to be one of the most important barbarian laws, and the Ripuarian Law, which is less studied in domestic historiography, which consolidated the customary law of the Ripuarian Franks. The aim of the study was a comparative analysis of the Salic and Ripuarian laws, aimed at identifying both common characteristics of criminal law for both documents, and features that reflect various aspects of the Salic and Ripuarian Franks social and economic development. In the course of the conducted research, the qualification of the main criminal offenses according to the Ripuarian and Salic Laws was determined, the characteristic features of the criminal legislation fixed by both sources were identified (class status, the predominance of material penalties, etc.). Based on the comparison of the norms of both Laws, the author also concludes that the historical value of the Ripuarian Law is higher than it is commonly believed: while repeating the norms of the Salic Law in some parts, neverthelessб it does not duplicate it, but complements and expands the characteristics of a legal institutions number.

The world has become a global village and distance is no more the challenge. The direct impact of this positive change can be seen in interaction of various citizens of different countries belonging to diverse social, cultural and religious background. But cross border movements, inter-country migration and cross border marriages creates a new challenge like inter parental child abduction. In case of cross border broken marriages, there arise various issues like infringement of spouse’s parental rights, parallel conflicting legal disputes in different countries, non participation of various countries to Hague convention for welfare of children, isolation of child in foreign abodes due to connection with Indian soil, etc. Inter parental child abduction is neither considered as an offence, nor it is covered under any statutory laws of India. Like 94 nations, India is not a signatory to The Hague Convention on Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, 1980, a multi lateral treaty developed by Hague Conference on Private International Law. Due to its non signatory status the judges of foreign countries do not trust Indian courts and do not permit the parent to take child to India, fearing its non-return. In absence of any international legal instrument, the litigating parents will have to bear unnecessary expenses of visa, travel, litigation, etc and unfortunate child will become a trophy to be won in the clashes of egos of litigating parents.

The article attempts to find individualistic ideas in philosophy of Montesquieu and Voltaire, who continued to discourse on legal themes specific particularly to the Enlightenment: the theme of natural condition, social contract, rationalism, morality, human’s place in the world and God in a human. Revealing, first of all, the most topical issues of this time, the thinkers in their philosophy deal with the matters that are utterly individualistic. It is about: the idea of equality, freedom, natural rights (rights to life and ownership), human nature, etc. It is determined that Montesquieu and Voltaire, like other thinkers of the Enlightenment, revealed the essence of individualistic tendencies through rationalism, because human is a rational person who makes decisions, fights his desires supported by reason. The mind, as a source of law, allows man to develop on the basis of science, learnt by him patterns. It is defined that Montesquieu also discoursed on the individualist attributes; in particular, he pays attention to the problem of equality and freedom: 1) as thinker emphasizes, all were equal in natural state but afterwards this equality could be ensured only by the laws, which have to be just; 2) freedom in his philosophy is considered in two aspects: political and personal. For individualist issues important are revealing the personal aspect of freedom, which firstly was in safety of citizen. Providing this freedom is just laws and proper organization of statehood. It is studied that basic individualist principles of Voltaire are: 1) humanity, which lies in declaring the natural right of every person to life and to meet basic needs; 2) freedom manifests in that people become autonomous entities and are no longer formally dependent on one another; freedom lies in depending only on the laws; 3) people are equal and free to each other individuals, and equality is understood by him in just political and legal sense: acquiring equal citizenship status by all people, alike dependence of all citizens on the law and their equal protection by law; 4) ownership — freedom of labor, which is the right of every person «to sell his work to those who pay the highest price for it, as labor is the property of those who have no other ownerships.»

"Self-Reliance" is an 1841 essay written by American transcendentalist philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. It contains the most thorough statement of one of Emerson's recurrent themes: the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his own instincts and ideas. . The debate surrounding the self reliance will be meaningless if issues related to women in a large country like India will not only be inappropriate but sometimes even misleading. Women specific and women related legislations have been enacted to safeguard the rights and interest of women, besides protecting against discrimination, violence, and atrocities and also to prevent socially undesirable practices. Despite the constitutional mandate of equal legal status for the girl child, the same is yet to be realized. The de jure laws have not been translated into de facto situation for various reasons such as illiteracy, social practices, prejudices, cultural norms based on patriarchal values, poor representation of women in policy-making, poverty, regional disparity in development, lack of access and opportunity to information and resources etc. According to the Uttar Pradesh Govt. sources, female life expectancy is less than 55 years and the under-five mortality rate is as high as 141 per thousand. Australia was the first country to develop a gender-sensitive budget, with the Federal government publishing in 1984 the first comprehensive audit of a government budget for its impact on women and girls. Empowerment of women is essentially the process of upliftment of economic, social and political status of women, the traditionally underprivileged ones, in the society. It involves the building up of a society wherein in women can breathe without the fear of oppression, exploitation, apprehension, discrimination and the general feeling of persecution which goes with being a woman in a traditionally male dominated structure. One major therapy prescribed by woman empowerment advocates is empowering women through legislation for ensuring participation in political decision making. Such an approach provides the women with a constitutional platform to stand up to men, to raise their voice on issues concerning women oppression, subjugation and related issues and thus in effect, providing them with an identity in an orthodox male dominated socio-political set up, in addition to providing a much needed forum to seek redressal of problems directly affecting them: the true essence of empowerment. The present paper attempts to look into the dynamism of the process whereby women empowerment is achieved (?) through legislation or women participation in the Panchayati Raj Institution. KEYWORDS: Self Reliance, Gender Bugdeting, Women empowerment, Panchayati Raj Institutions.

Abstract Background In Mexico, 47.7% of newborns are breastfed within the first hour of life and 28.6% are exclusively breastfed until 6 months of age, which does not meet the WHO definition of successful breastfeeding. Attitudes are expressed through beliefs, emotions and intentions wich represent a link between attitude and behavior, that is, a strong predictor of behavior. Objetive: to determine the factors associated with the intention of breastfeeding in womeńs next pregnancy. Methods A cross-sectional, prospective, observational and comparative study was carried out. Women between 18 and 35 years old, residents from Veracruz in Mexico, were between July and December 2020. Virtual surveys were applied through social networks, using a non-probabilistic sampling, evaluating knowledge about breastfeeding through the application of the ‘Breastfeeding knowledge questionnaire' (Cronbach's Alpha 0.722) and social characteristics were also recorded. Results 1241 participants were included, with a mean age of 22.1 (± 3.5) years. The prevalence of the intention to exclusively breastfeed was 41.2%; the factors that registered a positive association for the intention to grant exclusive breastfeeding were the age between 18 and 25 years (OR 2.0 95%IC 1.4-2.9), high knowledge (OR 2.0 IC95%1.3-2.9), being single (OR 3.7, CI95% 2.4-5.6), studyng high school (OR 1.3, 95%CI 1.05-1.7), being students (OR 2.2, 95%CI 1.7-2.8), have medical service through social security (OR 1.4, 95%CI 1.1-1.7), know what is a breastfeeding room (OR 1.9 95%CI 1.5-2.4), as well as know different points of the law in support of lactation had OR values higher than 1, with p values <0.05 in all cases. Conclusions Age, knowledge about breastfeeding, marital status, scholarship, occupation, having medical attention for social security, not having children, knowing the legal aspects about breastfeeding in Mexico and knowing the concept of breastfeeding room are associated with the intention to exclusively breastfeed. Key messages Women who receive medical care in the public health system increase their intention to exclusively breastfeed in their next pregnancy. High knowledge about breastfeeding, the laws that support it, being young, single, and knowing what abreastfeeding room is all favor the intentions of giving exclusive breastfeeding.

Introduction Since at least the work of van Gennep in the early 1900s, anthropologists have recognised that borders and thresholds are crucial in understanding human behavior and culture. But particularly in the past few decades, the study of borders has moved from the margins of social inquiry to the centre. At the same time, fashion (Entwistle), including clothing and skin (Bille), have emerged as crucial to understanding the human condition. In this article, we draw on and expand this literature on borders and fashion to demonstrate that the way Indonesians fashion and display their body reflects larger changes in attitudes about morality and gender. And in this, borders and thresholds are crucial. In order to make this argument, we consider three case studies from Indonesia. First, we discuss the requirement that policewomen submit to a virginity test, which takes the form of a hymen inspection. Then, we look at the successful campaign by policewomen to be able to wear the Islamic veil. Finally, we consider reports of Makassar policewomen who attempt to turn young people into exemplary citizens and traffic 'ambassadors' by using downtown crosswalks as a catwalk. In each of these three cases, fashioned borders and thresholds play prominent roles in determining the expression of morality, particularly in relation to gender roles. Fashion, Thresholds, and Borders There was once a time when social scientists tended to view clothes and other forms of adornment as "frivolous" or trivial (Entwistle 14; 18). Over the past few decades, however, fashion has emerged as a serious study within the social sciences. Writers have, for example, demonstrated how fashion is closely tied up with identity and capitalism (King and Winarnita). And although fashion used to be envisaged as emerging from London, New York, Paris, Milan, and other Western locations, scholars are increasingly recognising the importance of Asia in fashion studies. Whether the haute couture and cosplay in Tokyo or 'traditional' weaving of materials in Indonesia, studying fashion and clothes provides crucial insight into the cultures and societies of Asia (King and Winarnita). To contribute to this burgeoning area of research in Asian fashion, we draw on the anthropological classics, in particular, the concept of threshold. Every time we walk through a doorway, gate, or cross a line, we cross a threshold. But what classic anthropology shows us is that crossing certain thresholds changes our social status. This changing particularly occurs in the context of ritual. For example, walking onto a stage, a person becomes a performer or actor. Traditionally a groom carries his bride through the door, symbolising the transition to husband and wife (Douglas 115). In this article, we apply this idea that crossing thresholds is associated with transitioning social statuses (Douglas; Turner; van Gennep). To do this, we first establish a connection between national and personal borders. We argue that skin and clothes have a cultural function in addition to their practical functions. Typically, skin is imagined as a kind of social border and clothes provide a buffer zone. But to make this case, we first need to elaborate how we understand national borders. In the traditional kingdoms of Southeast Asia, borders were largely imperceptible or non-existent. Power was thought to radiate out from the ruler, through the capital, and into the surrounding areas. As it emanated from this 'exemplary centre', power was thought to weaken (Geertz 222-229). Rather than an area of land, a kingdom was thought to be a group of people (Tambiah 516). In this context, borders were irrelevant. But as in other parts of the world, in the era of nations, the situation has entirely changed in modern Indonesia. In a simple sense, our current global legal system is created out of international borders. These borders are, first and foremost, imagined lines that separate the area belonging to one nation-state from another. Borders are for the most part simply drawn on maps, explained by reference to latitude, longitude, and other features of the landscape. But, obviously, borders exist outside the imagination and on maps. They have significance in international law, in separating one jurisdiction from another. Usually, national borders can only be legally crossed with appropriate documentation and legal status. In extreme cases, crossing another nation's border can be a cause for war; but the difficulty in determining borders in practice means both sides may debate over whether a border was actually crossed. Where this possibility exists, sometimes the imagined lines are marked on the actual earth by fences, walls, etc. To protect borders, buffer zones are sometimes created. The most famous buffer zone is the Demilitarized Zone or DMZ, which runs along North Korea's border with South Korea. As no peace treaty has been signed between these two nations, they are technically still at war. Hostility is intense, but armed conflict has, for the most part, ceased. The buffer helps both sides maintain this cessation by enabling them to distinguish between an unintentional infringement and a genuine invasion. All this practical significance of borders and buffer zones is obvious. But borders become even more fascinating when we look beyond their 'practical' significance. Borders have ritual as well as practical importance. Like the flag, the nation's borders have meaning. They also have moral implications. Borders have become an issue of almost fanatical or zealous significance. The 2015 footage of a female Hungarian reporter physically attacking asylum seekers who crossed the border into her nation indicates that she was not just upset with their legal status; presumably she does not physically attack people breaking other laws (BBC News). Similarly the border vigilantes, volunteers who 'protect' the southern borders of the USA against what they see as drug cartels, apparently take no action against white-collar criminals in the cities of the USA. For the Hungarian reporter and the border vigilantes, the border is a threshold to be protected at all costs and those who cross it without proper documentation and process are more than just law breakers; they are moral transgressors, possibly even equivalent to filth. So much for border crossing. What about the borders themselves? As mentioned, fences, walls, and other markers are built to make the imagined line tangible. But some borders go well beyond that. Borders are also adorned or fashioned. For instance, the border between North and South Korea serves as a site where national sovereignty and legitimacy are emphasised, defended, and contested. It is at this buffer zone that these two nations look at each other and showcase to the other what is ideally contained within their own respective national borders. But it is not just national states which have buffer zones and borders with deep significance in the modern period; our own clothes and skin possess a similar moral significance. Why are clothes so important? Of course, like national borders, clothes have practical and functional use. Clothes keep us warm, dry, and protected from the sun and other elements. In addition to this practical use, clothes are heavily imbued with significance. Clothes are a way to fashion the body. They define our various identities including gender, class, etc. Clothes also signify morality and modesty (Leach 152). But where does this morality regarding clothing come from? Clothing is a site where state, religious, and familial control is played out. Just like the DMZ, our bodies are aestheticised with adornments, accoutrements, and decorations, and they are imbued with strong symbolic significance in attempts to reveal what constitutes the enclosed. Just like the DMZ, our clothing or lack thereof is considered constitutive of the nation. Because clothes play a role akin to geo-political borders, clothes are our DMZ; they mark us as good citizens. Whether we wear gang colours or a cross on our necklace, they can show us as belonging to something powerful, protective, and worth belonging to. They also show others that they do not belong. In relation to this, perhaps it is necessary to mention one cultural aspect of clothing. This is the importance, in the modern Indonesian nation, of appearing rapih. Rapih typically means clean, tidy, and well-groomed. The ripped and dirty jeans, old T-shirts, unshaven, unkempt hair, which has, at times, been mainstream fashion in other parts of the world, is typically viewed negatively in Indonesia, where wearing 'appropriate' clothing has been tied up with the nationalist project. For instance, as a primary school student in Indonesia, Winarnita was taught Pendidikan Moral Pancasila (Pancasila Moral Education). Named after the Pancasila, the guiding principles of the Indonesian nation, this class is also known as "PMP". It provided instruction in how to be a good national citizen. Crucially, this included deportment. The importance of being well dressed and rapih was stressed. In sum, like national borders, clothes are much more than their practical significance and practical use. This analysis can be extended by looking at skin. The practical significance of skin cannot be overstated; it is crucial to survival. But that does not preclude the possibility that humans—being the prolifically creative and meaning-making animals that we are—can make skin meaningful. Everyday racism, for instance, is primarily enabled by people making skin colour meaningful. And although skin is not optional, we fashion it into borders that define who we are, such as through tattoos, by piercing, accessorising, and through various forms of body modification (from body building to genital modification). Thresholds are also important in understanding skin. In a modern Indonesian context, when a penis crosses a woman's hymen her ritual status changes; she is no longer a virgin maiden (gadis) or virgin (perawan). If we apply the analogy of borders to the hymen, we could think of it as a checkpoint or border crossing. At a national border crossing, only people with correct credentials (for instance, passport holders with visas) can legally cross and only at certain times (not on public holidays or only from 9-5). At a hymen, only people with the correct status, namely one's husband, can morally cross. The checkpoint is a crucial reminder of the nation state and citizen scheme. The hymen is a crucial reminder of heteronormative standards. Crucial to understanding Indonesian notions of skin is the idea of aurat (Bennett 2007; Parker 2008). This term refers to parts of the body that should be covered. Or it could be said that aurat refers to 'intimate parts' of the body, if we understand that different parts of the body are considered intimate in Indonesian cultures. Indonesians tend to describe the aurat as those body parts that arouse feelings of sexual attraction or embarrassment in others. The concept tends to have Arabic and Islamic associations in Indonesia. Accordingly, for many Muslims, it means that women, once they appear sexually mature, should cover their hair, neck, and cleavage, and other areas that might arouse sexual attraction. These need to be covered when they leave their house, when they are viewed by people outside of the immediate nuclear family (muhrim). For men, it means they should be covered from their stomach to their knees. However, different Islamic scholars and preachers give different interpretations about what the aurat includes, with some opining that the entire female body with the exception of hands and face needs to be covered. That said, the general disposition or habitus of using clothes to cover is also found among non-Muslims in Indonesia. Accordingly, Catholics, Protestants, and Hindus also tend to cover their legs and cleavage, and so on, more than would commonly be found in Western countries. Having outlined the literature and cultural context, we now turn to our case studies. The Veil and Indonesian Policewomen Our first case study focusses on Indonesian police. Aside from a practical significance in law enforcement, police also have symbolic importance. There is an ideal that police should set and enforce standards for exemplary behaviour. Despite this, the Indonesia police have an image problem, being seen as highly corrupt (Davies, Stone, & Buttle). This is where policewomen fit in. The female constabulary are thought to be capable of morally improving the police force and the nation. Additionally, Indonesian policewomen are believed to be needed in situations of family violence, for instance, and to bring a sensitive and humane approach. The moral significance of Indonesia's policewomen shows clearly through issues of their clothing, in particular, the veil. In 2005, it became illegal for Indonesian policewomen to wear the veil on duty. Various reasons were given for this ban. These included that police should present a secular image, showcasing a modern and progressive nation. But this was one border contest where policewomen were able to successfully fight back; in 2013, they won the right to wear the veil on duty. The arguments espoused by both sides during this debate were reflective of geo-political border disputes, and protagonists deployed words such as "sovereignty", "human rights", and "religious autonomy". But in the end it was the policewomen's narrative that best convinced the government that they had a right to wear the veil on duty. Possibly this is because by 2013 many politicians and policymakers wanted to present Indonesia as a pious nation and having policewomen able to express their religion – and the veil being imbued with sentiments of honesty and dedication – fitted in with this larger national image. In contrast, policewomen have been unsuccessful in efforts to ban so called virginity testing (discussed below). Indonesian Policewomen Need to Be Attractive But veils are not the only bodily border that can be packed around language used to describe a DMZ. Policewomen's physical appearance, and specifically facial appearance and make-up, are discussed in similar terms. As such another border that policewomen must present in a particular (i.e. beautiful) way is their appearance. As part of the selection process, women police candidates must be judged by a mostly male panel as being pretty. They have to be a certain height and weight, and bust measurements are taken. The image of the policewoman is tall, slim, and beautiful, with a veil or with regulation cut and coiffed hair. Recognising the 'importance' of beauty for policewomen, they are given a monthly allowance precisely to buy make-up. Such is the status of policewomen that entry is highly competitive. And those who make the cut accrue many benefits. One of these benefits can be celebrity status, and it is not unusual for some policewomen to have over 100,000 Instagram followers. This celebrity status has led one police official to publicly state that women should not join the police force thinking it is a shortcut to celebrity status (Davies). So just like a nation trying to present its best self, Indonesia is imagined in the image of its policewomen. Policewomen feel pride in being selected for this position even when feeling vexed about these barriers to getting selected (Davies). Another barrier to selection is discussed in the next case study. Virginity Testing of Policewomen Our second case study relates to the necessity that female police recruits be virgins. Since 1965, policewomen recruits have been required to undergo internal examinations to ensure that their hymen is supposedly intact. Glossed as 'virginity' tests this procedure involves a two-finger examination by a health professional. Protests against the practice have been voiced by Human Rights Watch and others (Human Rights Watch). Pledges have also been made that the practice will be removed. But to date the procedure is still performed, although there are currently moves to have it banned within the armed forces. Hymens are more of a skin border than a clothing border such as that formed by uniforms or veils, but they operate in similar ways. The ‘feelable’ hymen marks an unmarried woman as moral. New women police recruits must be unmarried and therefore virgins. Actually, the hymen is not a taut skin border, but rather a loose connection of overlapping tissue and in this sense a hymen is not something one can lose. But the hymen is used as a proxy to determine a woman’s value. Hymen border control gives one a moral edge. A hymen supposedly measures a woman’s ability to protect herself, like any fortified geo-political border. Protecting one’s own borders gives the suggestion that one is able to protect others. A policewoman who can protect her bodily borders can protect those of others. Outsiders may wonder what being attractive, modest, but not too modest has to do with police work. And some (but by no means all) Indonesian policewomen wondered the same thing too. Indeed, some policewomen Davies interviewed in the 2010s were against this practice, but many staunchly supported it. They had successfully passed this rite of passage and therefore felt a common bond with other new recruits who had also gone through this procedure. Typically rites of passage, and especially the accompanying humiliation and abuse, engender a strong sense of solidarity among those who have passed through them. The virginity test seems to have operated in a similar way. Policewomen and the 'Citayam' Street Fashion Our third case study is an analysis of a short and otherwise unremarkable TV news report about policewomen parading across a crosswalk in a remote regional city. To understand why, we need to turn to "Citayam Fashion Week", a youth social movement which has developed around a road crossing in downtown Jakarta. Social movements like this are difficult to pin down, but it seems that a central aspect has been young fashionistas using a zebra crossing on a busy Jakarta street as an impromptu catwalk to strut across, be seen, and photographed. These youths are referred to in one article as "Jakarta's budget fashionistas" (Saraswati). The movement is understood in social media and traditional media sources as expressing 'street fashion'. Social media has been central to this movement. The youths have posted photos and videos of themselves crossing the road on social media. Some of these young fashionistas posted interviews with each other on TikTok. Some of the interviews went viral in June 2022 (Saraswati). So where does the name "Citayam Fashion Week" come from? Citayam is an outer area of Jakarta, which is a long way from from the wealthy central district where the young fashionistas congregate. But "Citayam" does not mean that the youths are all thought to come from that area. Instead the idea is that they could be from any poorer outer areas around the capital and have bussed or trained into town. The crosswalk they strut across is near the transport hub next to a central train station. The English-language "Fashion Week" is a tongue-in-cheek label mocking the haute couture fashion weeks around the world – events which, due to a wealth and class gap, are closed off to these teens. Strutting on the crosswalk is not limited to a single 'week' but it is an ongoing activity. The movement has spread to other parts of Indonesia, with youth parading across cross walks in other urban centres. Citayam Fashion Week became one of the major Indonesian public issues of 2022. Reaction was mixed. Some pointed to the unique street style and attitude, act, and language of the young fashionistas, some of whom became minor celebrities. The "Citayam Fashion Week" idea was also picked up by mainstream media, attracting celebrities, models, content creators, politicians and other people in the public eye. Some government voices also welcomed the social movement as promoting tourism and the creative industry. Others voiced disapproval at the youth. Their clothes were disparaged as 'tacky', reflecting deep divides in class and income in modern Jakarta. Some officials noted that they are a nuisance because they create traffic jams and loitering. Criticism also had a moral angle, in particular with commentators focused on male teens wearing feminine attire (Saraswati). Social scientists such as Oki Rahadianto (Souisa & Salim) and Saraswati see this as an expression of youth agency. These authors particularly highlight the class origins of the Citayam fashionistas being mostly from poorer outer suburbs. Their fashion displays are seen to be a way of reclaiming space for the youth in the urban landscape. Furthermore, the youths are expressing their own and unique version of youth culture. We can use the idea of threshold to provide unique insight into this phenomenon in the simple sense that the crosswalk connects one side of the road to the other. But the youth use it for something far more significant than this simple practical purpose. What is perceived to be happening is that some of the youth, who after all are in the process of transitioning from childhood to adulthood, use the crosswalk to publicly express their transition to non-normative gender and sexual identities; indeed, some of them have also transitioned to become mini celebrities in the process. Images of 'Citayam' portray young males adorned in makeup and clothes that are not identifiably masculine. They appear to be crossing gender boundaries. Other images show the distinct street fashion of these youth of exposed skin through crop tops (short tops) that show the belly, clothes with cut-out sections on various parts of the body, and ripped jeans. In a way, these youth are transgressing the taboo against exposing too much skin in public. One video is particularly interesting in light of the approach we are taking in this article as it comes from Makassar, the capital of one of Indonesia's outlying regions. "The Citayam Fashion Week phenomenon spreads to Makassar; young people become traffic (lalu lintas) ambassadors" (Kompas TV) is a news report about policewomen getting involved with young people using a crosswalk to parade their fashion. At first glance the Citayam Fashion Week portrayed in Makassar, a small city in an outlying province, is tiny compared to the scale of the movement in Jakarta. The news report shows half a dozen young males in feminine clothing and makeup. Aside from several cars in the background, there is no observable traffic that the process seems to interrupt. The news report portrays several Indonesian policewomen, all veiled, assisting and accompanying the young fashionistas. The reporter explains that the policewomen go 'hand in hand' (menggandeng) with the fashionistas. The police attempt to harness the creative energy of the youth and turn them into traffic ambassadors (duta lalu lintas). Perhaps it is going too far to state, but the term for traffic here, lalu lintas ("lalu" means to pass by or pass through, and "lintas" means "to cross"), implies that the police are assisting them in crossing thresholds. In any case, from the perspective we have adopted in this chapter, Citayam Fashion Week can be analysed in terms of thresholds as a literal road crossing turned into a place where youth can cross over gender norms and class barriers. The policewomen, with their soft, feminine abilities, attempt to transform them into exemplary citizens. Discussion: Morality, Skin, and Borders In this article, we have actually passed over two apparent contradictions in Indonesian society. In the early 2000s, Indonesian policewomen recruits were required to prove their modesty by passing a virginity test in which their hymen was inspected. Yet, at the same time they needed to be attractive. And, moreover, they were not allowed to wear the Muslim veil. They had to be modest and protect themselves from male lust but also good-looking and visible to others. The other contradiction relates to a single crosswalk or zebra crossing in downtown Jakarta, Indonesia's capital city, in 2022. Instead of using this zebra crossing simply as a place to cross the road, some youths turned it to their own ends as an impromptu 'catwalk' and posted images of their fashion on Instagram. A kind of social movement has emerged whereby Indonesian youth are fashioning their identity that contravenes gender expectations. In an inconsequential news report on the Citayam Fashion Week in Makassar, policewomen were portrayed as co-opting and redirecting the movement into an instructional opportunity in orderly road crossing. The youths could thereby transformed into good citizens. Although the two phenomena – attractive modest police virgins and a crosswalk that became a catwalk – might seem distinct, underlying the paradoxes are similar issues which can be teased out by analysing them in terms of morality, gender, and clothing in relation to borders, buffer zones, and thresholds. Veils, hymens, clothes, make-up are all politically positioned as borders worth fighting for, as necessary borders. While some border disputes can be won (such as policewomen winning the right to veil on duty, or disrupting traffic by parading one's gender-bending fashion), others are either not challenged or unsuccessfully challenged (such as ending virginity tests). These borders of moral encounter enable and provoke various responses: the ban on veiling for Indonesian policewomen was something to challenge as it undermined women’s moral position and stopped their expression of piety – things their nation wanted them to be able to do. But fighting to stop virginity testing was not permissible because even suggesting a contestation implies immorality. Only the immoral could want to get rid of virginity tests. The Citayam Fashion Week presented potentially immoral youths who corrupt national values, but with the help of policewomen, literally and figuratively holding their hand, they could be transformed into worthwhile citizens. National values were at stake in clothing and skin. Conclusion Borders and buffer zone are crucial to a nation's image of itself; whether in the geographical shape of one's country, or in clothes and skin. Douglas suggests that the human experience of boundaries can symbolise society. If she is correct, Indonesian nationalist ideas about clothing, skin, and even hymens shape how Indonesians understand their own nation. Through the three case studies we argued firstly for the importance of analysing the fashioning of the body not only as a form of border maintenance, but as truly at the centre of understanding national morality in Indonesia. Secondly, the national border may also be a way to remake the individual. People see themselves in the 'shape' of their country. As Bille stated "like skin, borders are a protective integument as well as a surface of inscription. Like the body, the nation is skin deep" (71). Thresholds are just as they imply. Passing through a threshold, we cross over one side of the border. We can potentially occupy an in-between status in, for instance, demilitarised zones. Or we can continue on to the other side. To go over a threshold such as becoming a policewoman, a teenager, a fashionista, and a mini celebrity, a good citizen can be constituted through re-fashioning the body. Fashioning one's body can be done through adorning skin with makeup or clothes, covering or revealing the skin, including particular parts of the body deemed sacred, such as the aurat, or by maintaining a special type of skin such as the hymen. The skin that is re-fashioned thus becomes a site of border contention that we argue define not only personal but national identity. Acknowledgment This article was first presented by Sharyn Graham Davies as a plenary address on 24 November 2021 as part of the Women in Asia conference. References BBC News. "Hungarian Camerawoman Who Kicked Refugees Charged." 8 Sep. 2016. 3 Oct 2022 <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37304489>. Bennett, Linda Rae. "Zina and the Enigma of Sex Education for Indonesian Muslim Youth." Sex Education 7.4 (2007): 371- 386. Bille, Franck. "Skinworlds: Borders, Haptics, Topologies." Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 36.1 (2017): 60-77. Davies, Sharyn Graham. "Skins of Morality: Bio-borders, Ephemeral Citizenship and Policing Women in Indonesia." Asian Studies Review 42.1 (2018): 69-88. Davies, Sharyn Graham, Louise M. Stone, and John Buttle. "Covering Cops: Critical Reporting of Indonesian Police Corruption." Pacific Journalism Review 22 (2016): 185-201. Douglas, Mary. "External Boundaries." In Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Taboo and Pollution. London: Routlege, 2002. 115-129. Entwistle, Joanne. "Preface to the Second Edition." In The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Social Theory. New York: Polity Press, 2015. 2-26. Geertz, Clifford. "Ideology as a Cultural System." In The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. 193-233. Human Rights Watch. "Indonesia: No End to Abusive ‘Virginity Tests’; Military, Police Claim Discriminatory Practice Is for ‘Morality Reasons." 22 Nov. 2017. 3 Oct. 2022 <https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/11/22/indonesia-no-end-abusive-virginity-tests>. King, Emerald L., and Monika Winarnita. "Fashion: Editorial." M/C Journal 25.4 (2022). Kompas TV. "Fenomena 'Citayam Fashion Week' Menular ke Makassar, Muda-mudi Ini Dijadikan Duta Lalu Lintas.” 29 July 2022 <https://www.kompas.tv/article/314063/fenomena-citayam-fashion-week-menular-ke-makassar-muda-mudi-ini-dijadikan-duta-lalu-lintas>. Leach, E.R. "Magical Hair." The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 88.2 (1958): 147-164. Parker, Lyn. "To Cover the Aurat: Veiling, Sexual Morality and Agency among the Muslim Minangkabau, Indonesia." Intersections 16 (2008). <http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue16/parker.htm>. Saraswati, Asri. Citayam Fashion Week: The Class Divide and the City. 2 Aug. 2022. 3 Oct. 2002 <https://indonesiaatmelbourne.unimelb.edu.au/citayam-fashion-week-class-divide-and-the-city/>. Souisa, Hellena, and Natasya Salim. "At Citayam Fashion Week, Jakarta's Budget Fashionistas Get Their Turn on the Catwalk." ABC News 7 Aug. 2022. 3 Oct 2022. <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-08-07/citayam-fashion-week-indonesia-underprivileged/101291202>. Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. "The Galactic Polity: The Structure of Traditional Kingdoms in Southeast Asia." The Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 293 (1977): 69-97. Turner, Victore W. "Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage." In William Armand Lessa and Evon Zartman Vogt (eds.), Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach. London: Harper Collins, 1979 [1964]. 234-243. Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge 2004.

The Problem setting. Due to the rapid development of digital technologies, the issue of status settlement and the use of artificial intelligence technologies is especially relevant. This fact indicates the need and importance of finding answers to the question and aims to intensify and unite the efforts of the scientific community to address relevant issues. One of the areas of scientific research is the doctrinal development of new phenomena and processes that have arisen and are taking place in the state and legal sphere under the influence of digitalization of economics, management and law. The tasks of scientific research are to comprehend the impact of the digitization process on the state and legal sphere of society; law as such; assessment of the transformations that are taking place and identification of trends in their dynamics; forecasting the state of these phenomena in the future; formulation of fundamental and applied problems of legal science in terms of doctrinal development of the laws of development and functioning of law, state and legal sphere of society in the conditions of digital reality, determination of approaches to their solution. Recent research and publications analysis. An analysis of recent research and publications shows that scientific research on this issue is carried out mainly within the economic, political, computer, legal sciences, although the problems and prospects of digitization of law require a deep and thorough philosophical, including philosophical and legal understanding. The rapid development of new technologies, in particular artificial intelligence technologies, the Internet of Things, cloud technologies, etc., is contributing to changes in current legislation. Today, advanced economies are already pondering the question of regulating the status and use of AI technologies. While these are only the first bold steps, in the future, all of these can affect global changes in the legal system - perhaps full-fledged comprehensive institutions of law, even the branches of law. Paper objectiv. The purpose of this article is a philosophical and legal understanding of the impact of digitalization on the state and legal sphere of society and law as such. Paper main body. One of the practical aspects of digitalization is the manifestation of the state’s ability to provide various services. If necessary, citizens receive certificates, records, statements, responses to electronic inquiries, electronic payments. Other practical aspects, provided that these technologies are used wisely, can improve welfare in education, public safety, and health. In addition, digital imaging can also help address common global issues, such as climate change and greater access to health care and mobility. At the same time, according to many researchers, along with the benefits of digital technologies, including artificial intelligence, new types of ethical issues are being raised, namely compliance with legal ethics standards by artificial intelligence systems and justice, the most important of which are respect for human rights and democratic values. , as well as the danger of transferring prejudices from the analog to the digital world. Researchers have linked the legal challenges of using artificial intelligence technologies in legal practice to a number of issues. In particular, with such as: ensuring data confidentiality; access to confidential law enforcement information; lack of regulatory framework for the use of artificial intelligence systems in legal practice; protection of intellectual property; risk assessment of the use of artificial intelligence systems by a lawyer when working with a client; other potential problems of lawyer’s liability; dangers of unauthorized access and modification of artificial intelligence systems by attackers; damage to artificial intelligence systems by malicious virus programs; violation of the terms of providing advice from artificial intelligence systems in case of technical problems, etc. Therefore, the development of systems that transparently use artificial intelligence and are responsible for their results is critical. Artificial intelligence systems must function properly and safely. According to experts, the unresolved in Ukraine of many political and legal issues related to the rapid development of the information and communication sphere with the advent of digital technologies has become dangerous. It is obvious that the transformations in society associated with these processes require new approaches to the development of national policies for the digitalization of society, which should be based on international agreements. Due to these transformations, there is a need to develop strategic documents that will regulate this area. These documents should be flexible and designed to take into account the maximum amount of data, as well as ensure the free development of innovative technologies and prevent possible risks. Issues of development of the digital economy and society of Ukraine do not fully meet today’s conditions, not enough account is taken of the transformations that have emerged and are currently taking place both in law and in the field of legal regulation under the influence of digitalization. Digital technologies are able to change the image of law, to influence its regulatory potential and efficiency, to open the way or to block its action in new dimensions of social reality. Traditional rather than digital vision of law, legal technologies and certain types of legal activity by legislators is a consequence of the lack of relevant scientific developments that will identify and explain the impact of the digitization process on the law and the legal sphere of society. The practical need for this kind of research is now greater than ever. In order to satisfy it, scientists should intensify work in this direction. Conclusions of the research. The new digital reality puts forward new requirements for legal science and legal practice, including the development of effective tools and models of legal regulation of various spheres of public life. In modern conditions, law becomes not only a means, a tool that provides digitalization of the economy, government and other segments of social life, but also the object of digitalization. With the development of digital technologies, the contradiction between the need for quality both in terms of form and content of regulations, as well as the ability to meet it in a short time. The task of the state is both to provide favorable conditions conducive to digitalization and to create opportunities for their implementation.

As the single most successful social-networking Website to date, Facebook has caused a shift in both practice and perception of online socialisation, and its relationship to the offline world. While not the first online social networking service, Facebook’s user base dwarfs its nearest competitors. Mark Zuckerberg’s creation boasts more than 750 million users (Facebook). The currently ailing MySpace claimed a ceiling of 100 million users in 2006 (Cashmore). Further, the accuracy of this number has been contested due to a high proportion of fake or inactive accounts. Facebook by contrast, claims 50% of its user base logs in at least once a day (Facebook). The popular and mainstream uptake of Facebook has shifted social use of the Internet from various and fragmented niche groups towards a common hub or portal around which much everyday Internet use is centred. The implications are many, but this paper will focus on the progress what Mimi Marinucci terms the “Facebook effect” (70) and the evolution of lists as a filtering mechanism representing one’s social zones within Facebook. This is in part inspired by the launch of Google’s new social networking service Google+ which includes “circles” as a fundamental design feature for sorting contacts. Circles are an acknowledgement of the shortcomings of a single, unified friends list that defines the Facebook experience. These lists and circles are both manifestations of the same essential concept: our social lives are, in fact, divided into various zones not defined by an online/offline dichotomy, by fantasy role-play, deviant sexual practices, or other marginal or minority interests. What the lists and circles demonstrate is that even very common, mainstream people occupy different roles in everyday life, and that to be effective social tools, social networking sites must grant users control over their various identities and over who knows what about them. Even so, the very nature of computer-based social tools lead to problematic definitions of identities and relationships using discreet terms, in contrast to more fluid, performative constructions of an individual and their relations to others. Building the Monolith In 1995, Sherry Turkle wrote that “the Internet has become a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and reconstructions of self that characterize postmodern life” (180). Turkle describes the various deliberate acts of personnae creation possible online in contrast to earlier constraints placed upon the “cycling through different identities” (179). In the past, Turkle argues, “lifelong involvement with families and communities kept such cycling through under fairly stringent control” (180). In effect, Turkle was documenting the proliferation of identity games early adopters of Internet technologies played through various means. Much of what Turkle focused on were MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) and MOOs (MUD Object Oriented), explicit play-spaces that encouraged identity-play of various kinds. Her contemporary Howard Rheingold focused on what may be described as the more “true to life” communities of the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) (1–38). In particular, Rheingold explored a community established around the shared experience of parenting, especially of young children. While that community was not explicitly built on the notion of role-play, the parental identity was an important quality of community members. Unlike contemporary social media networks, these early communities were built on discreet platforms. MUDs, MOOs, Bulletin Board Systems, UseNet Groups and other early Internet communication platforms were generally hosted independently of one another, and even had to be dialled into via modem separately in some cases (such as the WELL). The Internet was a truly disparate entity in 1995. The discreetness of each community supported the cordoning off of individual roles or identities between them. Thus, an individual could quite easily be “Pete” a member of the parental WELL group and “Gorak the Destroyer,” a role-player on a fantasy MUD without the two roles ever being associated with each other. As Turkle points out, even within each MUD ample opportunity existed to play multiple characters (183–192). With only a screen name and associated description to identify an individual within the MUD environment, nothing technical existed to connect one player’s multiple identities, even within the same community. As the Internet has matured, however, the tendency has been shifting towards monolithic hubs, a notion of collecting all of “the Internet” together. From a purely technical and operational perspective, this has led to the emergence of the ISP (Internet service provider). Users can make a connection to one point, and then be connected to everything “on the Net” instead of individually dialling into servers and services one at a time as was the case in the early 1980s with companies such as Prodigy, the Source, CompuServe, and America On-Line (AOL). The early information service providers were largely walled gardens. A CompuServe user could only access information on the CompuServe network. Eventually the Internet became the network of choice and services migrated to it. Standards such as HTTP for Web page delivery and SMTP for email became established and dominate the Internet today. Technically, this has made the Internet much easier to use. The services that have developed on this more rationalised and unified platform have also tended toward monolithic, centralised architectures, despite the Internet’s apparent fundamental lack of a hierarchy. As the Internet replaced the closed networks, the wider Web of HTTP pages, forums, mailing lists and other forms of Internet communication and community thrived. Perhaps they required slightly more technological savvy than the carefully designed experience of walled-garden ISPs such as AOL, but these fora and IRC (Internet Relay Chat) rooms still provided the discreet environments within which to role-play. An individual could hold dozens of login names to as many different communities. These various niches could be simply hobby sites and forums where a user would deploy their identity as model train enthusiast, musician, or pet owner. They could also be explicitly about role-play, continuing the tradition of MUDs and MOOs into the new millennium. Pseudo- and polynymity were still very much part of the Internet experience. Even into the early parts of the so-called Web 2.0 explosion of more interactive Websites which allowed for easier dialog between site owner and viewer, a given identity would be very much tied to a single site, blog or even individual comments. There was no “single sign on” to link my thread from a music forum to the comments I made on a videogame blog to my aquarium photos at an image gallery site. Today, Facebook and Google, among others, seek to change all that. The Facebook Effect Working from a psychological background Turkle explored the multiplicity of online identities as a valuable learning, even therapeutic, experience. She assessed the experiences of individuals who were coming to terms with aspects of their own personalities, from simple shyness to exploring their sexuality. In “You Can’t Front on Facebook,” Mimi Marinucci summarizes an analysis of online behaviour by another psychologist, John Suler (67–70). Suler observed an “online disinhibition effect” characterised by users’ tendency to express themselves more openly online than offline (321). Awareness of this effect was drawn (no pun intended) into popular culture by cartoonist Mike Krahulik’s protagonist John Gabriel. Although Krahulik’s summation is straight to the point, Suler offers a more considered explanation. There are six general reasons for the online disinhibition effect: being anonymous, being invisible, the communications being out of sync, the strange sensation that a virtual interlocutor is all in the mind of the user, the general sense that the online world simply is not real and the minimisation of status and authority (321–325). Of the six, the notion of anonymity is most problematic, as briefly explored above in the case of AOL. The role of pseudonymity has been explored in more detail in Ruch, and will be considered with regard to Facebook and Google+ below. The Facebook effect, Marinucci argues, mitigates all six of these issues. Though Marinucci explains the mitigation of each factor individually, her final conclusion is the most compelling reason: “Facebook often facilitates what is best described as an integration of identities, and this integration of identities in turn functions as something of an inhibiting factor” (73). Ruch identifies this phenomenon as the “aggregation of identities” (219). Similarly, Brady Robards observes that “social network sites such as MySpace and Facebook collapse the entire array of social relationships into just one category, that of ‘Friend’” (20). Unlike earlier community sites, Ruch notes “Facebook rejects both the mythical anonymity of the Internet, but also the actual pseudo- or polynonymous potential of the technologies” (219). Essentially, Facebook works to bring the offline social world online, along with all the conventional baggage that accompanies the individual’s real-world social life. Facebook, and now Google+, present a hard, dichotomous approach to online identity: anonymous and authentic. Their socially networked individual is the “real” one, using a person’s given name, and bringing all (or as many as the sites can capture) their contacts from the offline world into the online one, regardless of context. The Facebook experience is one of “friending” everyone one has any social contact with into one homogeneous group. Not only is Facebook avoiding the multiple online identities that interested Turkle, but it is disregarding any multiplicity of identity anywhere, including any online/offline split. David Kirkpatrick reports Mark Zuckerberg’s rejection of this construction of identity is explained by his belief that “You have one identity … having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity” (199). Arguably, Zuckerberg’s calls for accountability through identity continue a perennial concern for anonymity online fuelled by “on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog” style moral panics. Over two decades ago Lindsy Van Gelder recounted the now infamous case of “Joan and Alex” (533) and Julian Dibbell recounted “a rape in cyberspace” (11). More recent anxieties concern the hacking escapades of Anonymous and LulzSec. Zuckerberg’s approach has been criticised by Christopher Poole, the founder of 4Chan—a bastion of Internet anonymity. During his keynote presentation at South by SouthWest 2011 Poole argued that Zuckerberg “equates anonymity with a lack of authenticity, almost a cowardice.” Yet in spite of these objections, Facebook has mainstream appeal. From a social constructivist perspective, this approach to identity would be satisfying the (perceived?) need for a mainstream, context-free, general social space online to cater for the hundreds of millions of people who now use the Internet. There is no specific, pre-defined reason to join Facebook in the way there is a particular reason to join a heavy metal music message board. Facebook is catering to the need to bring “real” social life online generally, with “real” in this case meaning “offline and pre-existing.” Very real risks of missing “real life” social events (engagements, new babies, party invitations etc) that were shared primarily via Facebook became salient to large groups of individuals not consciously concerned with some particular facet of identity performance. The commercial imperatives towards monolithic Internet and identity are obvious. Given that both Facebook and Google+ are in the business of facilitating the sale of advertising, their core business value is the demographic information they can sell to various companies for target advertising. Knowing a user’s individual identity and tastes is extremely important to those in the business of selling consumers what they currently want as well as predicting their future desires. The problem with this is the dawning realisation that even for the average person, role-playing is part of everyday life. We simply aren’t the same person in all contexts. None of the roles we play need to be particularly scandalous for this to be true, but we have different comfort zones with people that are fuelled by context. Suler proposes and Marinucci confirms that inhibition may be just as much part of our authentic self as the uninhibited expression experienced in more anonymous circumstances. Further, different contexts will inform what we inhibit and what we express. It is not as though there is a simple binary between two different groups and two different personal characteristics to oscillate between. The inhibited personnae one occupies at one’s grandmother’s home is a different inhibited self one plays at a job interview or in a heated discussion with faculty members at a university. One is politeness, the second professionalism, the third scholarly—yet they all restrain the individual in different ways. The Importance of Control over Circles Google+ is Google’s latest foray into the social networking arena. Its previous ventures Orkut and Google Buzz did not fare well, both were variously marred by legal issues concerning privacy, security, SPAM and hate groups. Buzz in particular fell afoul of associating Google accounts with users” real life identities, and (as noted earlier), all the baggage that comes with it. “One user blogged about how Buzz automatically added her abusive ex-boyfriend as a follower and exposed her communications with a current partner to him. Other bloggers commented that repressive governments in countries such as China or Iran could use Buzz to expose dissidents” (Novak). Google+ takes a different approach to its predecessors and its main rival, Facebook. Facebook allows for the organisation of “friends” into lists. Individuals can span more than one list. This is an exercise analogous to what Erving Goffman refers to as “audience segregation” (139). According to the site’s own statistics the average Facebook user has 130 friends, we anticipate it would be time-consuming to organise one’s friends according to real life social contexts. Yet without such organisation, Facebook overlooks the social structures and concomitant behaviours inherent in everyday life. Even broad groups offer little assistance. For example, an academic’s “Work People” list may include the Head of Department as well as numerous other lecturers with whom a workspace is shared. There are things one might share with immediate colleagues that should not be shared with the Head of Department. As Goffman states, “when audience segregation fails and an outsider happens upon a performance that was not meant for him, difficult problems in impression management arise” (139). By homogenising “friends” and social contexts users are either inhibited or run the risk of some future awkward encounters. Google+ utilises “circles” as its method for organising contacts. The graphical user interface is intuitive, facilitated by an easy drag and drop function. Use of “circles” already exists in the vocabulary used to describe our social structures. “List” by contrast reduces the subject matter to simple data. The utility of Facebook’s friends lists is hindered by usability issues—an unintuitive and convoluted process that was added to Facebook well after its launch, perhaps a reaction to privacy concerns rather than a genuine attempt to emulate social organisation. For a cogent breakdown of these technical and design problems see Augusto Sellhorn. Organising friends into lists is a function offered by Facebook, but Google+ takes a different approach: organising friends in circles is a central feature; the whole experience is centred around attempting to mirror the social relations of real life. Google’s promotional video explains the centrality of emulating “real life relationships” (Google). Effectively, Facebook and Google+ have adopted two different systemic approaches to dealing with the same issue. Facebook places the burden of organising a homogeneous mass of “friends” into lists on the user as an afterthought of connecting with another user. In contrast, Google+ builds organisation into the act of connecting. Whilst Google+’s approach is more intuitive and designed to facilitate social networking that more accurately reflects how real life social relationships are structured, it suffers from forcing direct correlation between an account and the account holder. That is, use of Google+ mandates bringing online the offline. Google+ operates a real names policy and on the weekend of 23 July 2011 suspended a number of accounts for violation of Google’s Community Standards. A suspension notice posted by Violet Blue reads: “After reviewing your profile, we determined the name you provided violates our Community Standards.” Open Source technologist Kirrily Robert polled 119 Google+ users about their experiences with the real names policy. The results posted to her on blog reveal that users desire pseudonymity, many for reasons of privacy and/or safety rather than the lack of integrity thought by Zuckerberg. boyd argues that Google’s real names policy is an abuse of power and poses danger to those users employing “nicks” for reasons including being a government employment or the victim of stalking, rape or domestic abuse. A comprehensive list of those at risk has been posted to the Geek Feminism Wiki (ironically, the Wiki utilises “Connect”, Facebook’s attempt at a single sign on solution for the Web that connects users’ movements with their Facebook profile). Facebook has a culture of real names stemming from its early adopters drawn from trusted communities, and this culture became a norm for that service (boyd). But as boyd also points out, “[r]eal names are by no means universal on Facebook.” Google+ demands real names, a demand justified by rhetoric of designing a social networking system that is more like real life. “Real”, in this case, is represented by one’s given name—irrespective of the authenticity of one’s pseudonym or the complications and dangers of using one’s given name. Conclusion There is a multiplicity of issues concerning social networks and identities, privacy and safety. This paper has outlined the challenges involved in moving real life to the online environment and the contests in trying to designate zones of social context. Where some earlier research into the social Internet has had a positive (even utopian) feel, the contemporary Internet is increasingly influenced by powerful and competing corporations. As a result, the experience of the Internet is not necessarily as flexible as Turkle or Rheingold might have envisioned. Rather than conducting identity experimentation or exercising multiple personnae, we are increasingly obligated to perform identity as it is defined by the monolithic service providers such as Facebook and Google+. This is not purely an indictment of Facebook or Google’s corporate drive, though they are obviously implicated, but has as much to do with the new social practice of “being online.” So, while there are myriad benefits to participating in this new social context, as Poole noted, the “cost of failure is really high when you’re contributing as yourself.” Areas for further exploration include the implications of Facebook positioning itself as a general-purpose user authentication tool whereby users can log into a wide array of Websites using their Facebook credentials. If Google were to take a similar action the implications would be even more convoluted, given the range of other services Google offers, from GMail to the Google Checkout payment service. While the monolithic centralisation of these services will have obvious benefits, there will be many more subtle problems which must be addressed. References Blue, Violet. “Google Plus Deleting Accounts en Masse: No Clear Answers.” zdnet.com (2011). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/google-plus-deleting-accounts-en-masse-no-clear-answers/56›. boyd, danah. “Real Names Policies Are an Abuse of Power.” zephoria.org (2011). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/08/04/real-names.html›. Cashmore, Pete. “MySpace Hits 100 Million Accounts.” mashable.com (2006). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://mashable.com/2006/08/09/myspace-hits-100-million-accounts›. Dibble, Julian. My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1998. Facebook. “Fact Sheet.” Facebook (2011). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistic›. Geek Feminism Wiki. “Who Is Harmed by a Real Names Policy?” 2011. 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Real_Names%22_policy› Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1959. Google. “The Google+ Project: Explore Circles.” Youtube.com (2011). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocPeAdpe_A8›. Kirkpatrick, David. The Facebook Effect. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. Marinucci, Mimi. “You Can’t Front on Facebook.” Facebook and Philosophy. Ed. Dylan Wittkower. Chicago & La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 2010. 65–74. Novak, Peter. “Privacy Commissioner Reviewing Google Buzz.” CBC News: Technology and Science (2010). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2010/02/16/google-buzz-privacy.html›. Poole, Christopher. Keynote presentation. South by SouthWest. Texas, Austin, 2011. Robards, Brady. “Negotiating Identity and Integrity on Social Network Sites for Educators.” International Journal for Educational Integrity 6.2 (2010): 19–23. Robert, Kirrily. “Preliminary Results of My Survey of Suspended Google Accounts.” 2011. 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://infotrope.net/2011/07/25/preliminary-results-of-my-survey-of-suspended-google-accounts/›. Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. Ruch, Adam. “The Decline of Pseudonymity.” Posthumanity. Eds. Adam Ruch and Ewan Kirkland. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary.net Press, 2010: 211–220. Sellhorn, Augusto. “Facebook Friend Lists Suck When Compared to Google+ Circles.” sellmic.com (2011). 10 Aug. 2011 ‹http://sellmic.com/blog/2011/07/01/facebook-friend-lists-suck-when-compared-to-googleplus-circles›. Suler, John. “The Online Disinhibition Effect.” CyberPsychology and Behavior 7 (2004): 321–326. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Van Gelder, Lindsy. “The Strange Case of the Electronic Lover.” Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices Ed. Rob Kling. New York: Academic Press, 1996: 533–46.

Problem setting. One of the most important tasks of modern science of public management and administration is the further improvement of management technologies, management decisions in banking in particular and the increase of their efficiency and effectiveness. Accordingly, the scientific interest is not only in the study and the analysis of banking legislation of certain countries, but in the adaptation of national legislation to the directives of the European Union. The urgency of improving the mechanism of state regulation of the market for the provision of services for the collection of funds and transportation of currency valuables in the banking system of Ukraine is undeniable, the implementation of which should include the mandatory establishment of real requirements and measures of responsibility of managers of both individual financial institutions and regulatory bodies. Recent research and publications analysis. The organization of central banks of the world, their legal status, main functions, comparative aspects, regulatory activities in the field of the organization of cash circulation and cash collection were studied in the works of L. Voronova, D. Hetmantsev, V. Krotyuk, S. Yehorychev, M. Starynsky, P. Melnyk, S. Laptev, I. Zaverukha. Legal problems of legalization of firearms circulation in Ukraine were studied by А. Kolosok, P. Mitrukhov, P. Fries, S. Shumilenko and others. The works of V. Baranyak, V. Меzhyvy, М. Pinchuk, T. Pryhodko, V. Rybachuk, В. Tychyi, etc. are devoted to the study of legal problems of illegal handling of weapons. However, these works do not reflect the peculiarities of the use of firearms in subdivisions of collection of funds. Native and foreign scholars generally have not paid due attention to the study and the analysis of the existing model of cash circulation in Ukraine, its advantages, risks and disadvantages as well as the effective functioning of the market of collection of funds and transportation of currency valuables in the banking system of Ukraine. Highlighting previously unsettled parts of the general problem. The purpose of this article is to analyze the innovative foreign experience of state regulation of the market of collection of funds and transportation of currency valuables in the banking system of Ukraine (hereinafter – collection of funds) and to justify the need for its implementation in Ukraine. Another important problem in collection activities is the lack of legislative regulation of firearms trafficking as there is no law on weapons in Ukraine, there are only regulations of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, which greatly complicates its regulation by the state according to P. Fries. Paper main body. The market of collection of funds and transportation of currency valuables (hereinafter – the market of collection) is one of the most closed segments of the banking system of any country as a whole. The most popular way to pay for services and goods during the last few years, according to annual surveys conducted by the Swiss central bank, is cash. The important factor is that even with the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, the demand for cash and cash flow has increased significantly. The National Bank of Ukraine carries out regulatory activities in accordance with the requirements of the Law of Ukraine “On Principles of State Regulatory Policy in the Field of Economic Activity”. Collection of funds has never been a particularly profitable activity, for the subdivisions of collection of any country along with the staff and transportation costs, that is why to ensure the proper security of cash transportation is a very costly item of the estimate. In this regard, there is an urgent need for the adoption of the Law of Ukraine “On collection of funds and transportation of currency valuables” and “On firearms”, which would define the basic foundations, principles, forms of activities in the field of collection services, rights, duties and responsibilities of all participants in the collection market, in order to increase their reliability, safety and efficiency. In the countries of the European Union (EU), services for the collection and transportation of currency valuables are provided by public and private enterprises. In many EU countries there is no legal definition of the concept ‘collection’. In most cases, collection falls under the general legislation on the basics of security, except for Austria and Germany, which regulate such activities through professional organizations, insurance and collective agreements. Today, five foreign global CIT companies account for almost 60% of the global CIT market for cash collection and cash handling services. They are: – Brinks (USA) – 23%; – G4S (England) – 15%; – Loomis (Sweden) – 12%; – Prosegur (Spain) – 7%; – Garda (Canada) – 4%; – GSLS – 0.01%; – Other regional independent companies – 39%. In six EU countries (Denmark, Ireland, Greece, Sweden, Great Britain and the Netherlands) the presence of firearms during collection of funds is prohibited. In Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg and Spain, the presence of a weapon in the performance of professional collection duties is mandatory. Safe collection of funds largely depends on the fast, without delays, safe travel by road. Ukraine needs to reform its transport system to gain access to the European Union’s rail, road, river and air transport markets and to financial resources for building safe infrastructure of high quality. Conclusions of the research and prospects for further studies. Unfortunately, there are no well-known world CIT collection companies in the Ukrainian market of collection services and therefore Ukrainian banks and legal entities have to deal with local CIT companies, the authorized capital of which in some cases may be significantly less than the amount of the collected cash. In accordance with the mentioned above, for the effective functioning of the Ukrainian market of collection of funds and a balanced regulatory policy of the state, we suggest making appropriate changes and additions to the Laws of Ukraine on “Banks and Banking”, “National Bank of Ukraine”. To initiate the development and adoption of the Laws of Ukraine “On Collection and Transportation of Currency Valuables” and “On Firearms” which will ensure equal competitive conditions in the collection market for all its participants, reliable labor protection, social guarantees and rights of employees of collection divisions.

In its preamble, The Western Australian Charter of Multiculturalism (WA) commits the state to becoming: “A society in which respect for mutual difference is accompanied by equality of opportunity within a framework of democratic citizenship”. One of the principles of multiculturalism, as enunciated in the Charter, is “equality of opportunity for all members of society to achieve their full potential in a free and democratic society where every individual is equal before and under the law”. An important element of this principle is the “equality of opportunity … to achieve … full potential”. The implication here is that those who start from a position of disadvantage when it comes to achieving that potential deserve more than ‘equal’ treatment. Implicitly, equality can be achieved only through the recognition of and response to differential needs and according to the likelihood of achieving full potential. This is encapsulated in Kymlicka’s argument that neutrality is “hopelessly inadequate once we look at the diversity of cultural membership which exists in contemporary liberal democracies” (903). Yet such a potential commitment to differential support might seem unequal to some, where equality is constructed as the same or equal treatment regardless of differing circumstances. Until the past half-century or more, this problematic has been a hotly-contested element of the struggle for Civil Rights for African-Americans in the United States, especially as these rights related to educational opportunity during the years of racial segregation. For some, providing resources to achieve equal outcomes (rather than be committed to equal inputs) may appear to undermine the very ethos of liberal democracy. In Australia, this perspective has been the central argument of Pauline Hanson and her supporters who denounce programs designed as measures to achieve equality for specific disadvantaged groups; including Indigenous Australians and humanitarian refugees. Nevertheless, equality for all on all grounds of legally-accepted difference: gender, race, age, family status, sexual orientation, political conviction, to name a few; is often held as the hallmark of progressive liberal societies such as Australia. In the matter of religious freedoms the situation seems much less complex. All that is required for religious equality, it seems, is to define religion as a private matter – carried out, as it were, between consenting parties away from the public sphere. This necessitates, effectively, the separation of state and religion. This separation of religious belief from the apparatus of the state is referred to as ‘secularism’ and it tends to be regarded as a cornerstone of a liberal democracy, given the general assumption that secularism is a necessary precursor to equal treatment of and respect for different religious beliefs, and the association of secularism with the Western project of the Enlightenment when liberty, equality and science replaced religion and superstition. By this token, western nations committed to equality are also committed to being liberal, democratic and secular in nature; and it is a matter of state indifference as to which religious faith a citizen embraces – Wiccan, Christian, Judaism, etc – if any. Historically, and arguably more so in the past decade, the terms ‘democratic’, ‘secular’, ‘liberal’ and ‘equal’ have all been used to inscribe characteristics of the collective ‘West’. Individuals and states whom the West ascribe as ‘other’ are therefore either or all of: not democratic; not liberal; or not secular – and failing any one of these characteristics (for any country other than Britain, with its parliamentary-established Church of England, headed by the Queen as Supreme Governor) means that that country certainly does not espouse equality. The West and the ‘Other’ in Popular Discourse The constructed polarisation between the free, secular and democratic West that values equality; and the oppressive ‘other’ that perpetuates theocracies, religious discrimination and – at the ultimate – human rights abuses, is a common theme in much of the West’s media and popular discourse on Islam. The same themes are also applied in some measure to Muslims in Australia, in particular to constructions of the rights of Muslim women in Australia. Typically, Muslim women’s dress is deemed by some secular Australians to be a symbol of religious subjugation, rather than of free choice. Arguably, this polemic has come to the fore since the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001. However, as Aly and Walker note, the comparisons between the West and the ‘other’ are historically constructed and inherited (Said) and have tended latterly to focus western attention on the role and status of Muslim women as evidence of the West’s progression comparative to its antithesis, Eastern oppression. An examination of studies of the United States media coverage of the September 11 attacks, and the ensuing ‘war on terror’, reveals some common media constructions around good versus evil. There is no equal status between these. Good must necessarily triumph. In the media coverage, the evil ‘other’ is Islamic terrorism, personified by Osama bin Laden. Part of the justification for the war on terror is a perception that the West, as a force for good in this world, must battle evil and protect freedom and democracy (Erjavec and Volcic): to do otherwise is to allow the terror of the ‘other’ to seep into western lives. The war on terror becomes the defence of the west, and hence the defence of equality and freedom. A commitment to equality entails a defeat of all things constructed as denying the rights of people to be equal. Hutcheson, Domke, Billeaudeaux and Garland analysed the range of discourses evident in Time and Newsweek magazines in the five weeks following September 11 and found that journalists replicated themes of national identity present in the communication strategies of US leaders and elites. The political and media response to the threat of the evil ‘other’ is to create a monolithic appeal to liberal values which are constructed as being a monopoly of the ‘free’ West. A brief look at just a few instances of public communication by US political leaders confirms Hutcheson et al.’s contention that the official construction of the 2001 attacks invoked discourses of good and evil reminiscent of the Cold War. In reference to the actions of the four teams of plane hijackers, US president George W Bush opened his Address to the Nation on the evening of September 11: “Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts” (“Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation”). After enjoining Americans to recite Psalm 23 in prayer for the victims and their families, President Bush ended his address with a clear message of national unity and a further reference to the battle between good and evil: “This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day. Yet, we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world” (“Statement by the President in His Address to the Nation”). In his address to the joint houses of Congress shortly after September 11, President Bush implicated not just the United States in this fight against evil, but the entire international community stating: “This is the world’s fight. This is civilisation’s fight” (cited by Brown 295). Addressing the California Business Association a month later, in October 2001, Bush reiterated the notion of the United States as the leading nation in the moral fight against evil, and identified this as a possible reason for the attack: “This great state is known for its diversity – people of all races, all religions, and all nationalities. They’ve come here to live a better life, to find freedom, to live in peace and security, with tolerance and with justice. When the terrorists attacked America, this is what they attacked”. While the US media framed the events of September 11 as an attack on the values of democracy and liberalism as these are embodied in US democratic traditions, work by scholars analysing the Australian media’s representation of the attacks suggested that this perspective was echoed and internationalised for an Australian audience. Green asserts that global media coverage of the attacks positioned the global audience, including Australians, as ‘American’. The localisation of the discourses of patriotism and national identity for Australian audiences has mainly been attributed to the media’s use of the good versus evil frame that constructed the West as good, virtuous and moral and invited Australian audiences to subscribe to this argument as members of a shared Western democratic identity (Osuri and Banerjee). Further, where the ‘we’ are defenders of justice, equality and the rule of law; the opposing ‘others’ are necessarily barbaric. Secularism and the Muslim Diaspora Secularism is a historically laden term that has been harnessed to symbolise the emancipation of social life from the forced imposition of religious doctrine. The struggle between the essentially voluntary and private demands of religion, and the enjoyment of a public social life distinct from religious obligations, is historically entrenched in the cultural identities of many modern Western societies (Dallmayr). The concept of religious freedom in the West has evolved into a principle based on the bifurcation of life into the objective public sphere and the subjective private sphere within which individuals are free to practice their religion of choice (Yousif), or no religion at all. Secularism, then, is contingent on the maintenance of a separation between the public (religion-free) and the private or non- public (which may include religion). The debate regarding the feasibility or lack thereof of maintaining this separation has been a matter of concern for democratic theorists for some time, and has been made somewhat more complicated with the growing presence of religious diasporas in liberal democratic states (Charney). In fact, secularism is often cited as a precondition for the existence of religious pluralism. By removing religion from the public domain of the state, religious freedom, in so far as it constitutes the ability of an individual to freely choose which religion, if any, to practice, is deemed to be ensured. However, as Yousif notes, the Western conception of religious freedom is based on a narrow notion of religion as a personal matter, possibly a private emotional response to the idea of God, separate from the rational aspects of life which reside in the public domain. Arguably, religion is conceived of as recognising (or creating) a supernatural dimension to life that involves faith and belief, and the suspension of rational thought. This Western notion of religion as separate from the state, dividing the private from the public sphere, is constructed as a necessary basis for the liberal democratic commitment to secularism, and the notional equality of all religions, or none. Rawls questioned how people with conflicting political views and ideologies can freely endorse a common political regime in secular nations. The answer, he posits, lies in the conception of justice as a mechanism to regulate society independently of plural (and often opposing) religious or political conceptions. Thus, secularism can be constructed as an indicator of pluralism and justice; and political reason becomes the “common currency of debate in a pluralist society” (Charney 7). A corollary of this is that religious minorities must learn to use the language of political reason to represent and articulate their views and opinions in the public context, especially when talking with non-religious others. This imposes a need for religious minorities to support their views and opinions with political reason that appeals to the community at large as citizens, and not just to members of the minority religion concerned. The common ground becomes one of secularism, in which all speakers are deemed to be indifferent as to the (private) claims of religion upon believers. Minority religious groups, such as fundamentalist Mormons, invoke secular language of moral tolerance and civil rights to be acknowledged by the state, and to carry out their door-to-door ‘information’ evangelisation/campaigns. Right wing fundamentalist Christian groups and Catholics opposed to abortion couch their views in terms of an extension of the secular right to life, and in terms of the human rights and civil liberties of the yet-to-be-born. In doing this, these religious groups express an acceptance of the plurality of the liberal state and engage in debates in the public sphere through the language of political values and political principles of the liberal democratic state. The same principles do not apply within their own associations and communities where the language of the private religious realm prevails, and indeed is expected. This embracing of a political rhetoric for discussions of religion in the public sphere presents a dilemma for the Muslim diaspora in liberal democratic states. For many Muslims, religion is a complete way of life, incapable of compartmentalisation. The narrow Western concept of religious expression as a private matter is somewhat alien to Muslims who are either unable or unwilling to separate their religious needs from their needs as citizens of the nation state. Problems become apparent when religious needs challenge what seems to be publicly acceptable, and conflicts occur between what the state perceives to be matters of rational state interest and what Muslims perceive to be matters of religious identity. Muslim women’s groups in Western Australia for example have for some years discussed the desirability of a Sharia divorce court which would enable Muslims to obtain divorces according to Islamic law. It should be noted here that not all Muslims agree with the need for such a court and many – probably a majority – are satisfied with the existing processes that allow Muslim men and women to obtain a divorce through the Australian family court. For some Muslims however, this secular process does not satisfy their religious needs and it is perceived as having an adverse impact on their ability to adhere to their faith. A similar situation pertains to divorced Catholics who, according to a strict interpretation of their doctrine, are unable to take the Eucharist if they form a subsequent relationship (even if married according to the state), unless their prior marriage has been annulled by the Catholic Church or their previous partner has died. Whereas divorce is considered by the state as a public and legal concern, for some Muslims and others it is undeniably a religious matter. The suggestion by the Anglican Communion’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, that the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law regarding marital disputes or financial matters is ultimately unavoidable, sparked controversy in Britain and in Australia. Attempts by some Australian Muslim scholars to elaborate on Dr Williams’s suggestions, such as an article by Anisa Buckley in The Herald Sun (Buckley), drew responses that, typically, called for Muslims to ‘go home’. A common theme in these responses is that proponents of Sharia law (and Islam in general) do not share a commitment to the Australian values of freedom and equality. The following excerpts from the online pages of Herald Sun Readers’ Comments (Herald Sun) demonstrate this perception: “These people come to Australia for freedoms they have never experienced before and to escape repression which is generally brought about by such ‘laws’ as Sharia! How very dare they even think that this would be an option. Go home if you want such a regime. Such an insult to want to come over to this country on our very goodwill and our humanity and want to change our systems and ways. Simply, No!” Posted 1:58am February 12, 2008 “Under our English derived common law statutes, the law is supposed to protect an individual’s rights to life, liberty and property. That is the basis of democracy in Australia and most other western nations. Sharia law does not adequately share these philosophies and principles, thus it is incompatible with our system of law.” Posted 12:55am February 11, 2008 “Incorporating religious laws in the secular legal system is just plain wrong. No fundamentalist religion (Islam in particular) is compatible with a liberal-democracy.” Posted 2:23pm February 10, 2008 “It should not be allowed in Australia the Muslims come her for a better life and we give them that opportunity but they still believe in covering them selfs why do they even come to Australia for when they don’t follow owe [our] rules but if we went to there [their] country we have to cover owe selfs [sic]” Posted 11:28am February 10, 2008 Conflicts similar to this one – over any overt or non-private religious practice in Australia – may also be observed in public debates concerning the wearing of traditional Islamic dress; the slaughter of animals for consumption; Islamic burial rites, and other religious practices which cannot be confined to the private realm. Such conflicts highlight the inability of the rational liberal approach to solve all controversies arising from religious traditions that enjoin a broader world view than merely private spirituality. In order to adhere to the liberal reduction of religion to the private sphere, Muslims in the West must negotiate some religious practices that are constructed as being at odds with the rational state and practice a form of Islam that is consistent with secularism. At the extreme, this Western-acceptable form is what the Australian government has termed ‘moderate Islam’. The implication here is that, for the state, ‘non-moderate Islam’ – Islam that pervades the public realm – is just a descriptor away from ‘extreme’. The divide between Christianity and Islam has been historically played out in European Christendom as a refusal to recognise Islam as a world religion, preferring instead to classify it according to race or ethnicity: a Moorish tendency, perhaps. The secular state prefers to engage with Muslims as an ethnic, linguistic or cultural group or groups (Yousif). Thus, in order to engage with the state as political citizens, Muslims must find ways to present their needs that meet the expectations of the state – ways that do not use their religious identity as a frame of reference. They can do this by utilizing the language of political reason in the public domain or by framing their needs, views and opinions exclusively in terms of their ethnic or cultural identity with no reference to their shared faith. Neither option is ideal, or indeed even viable. This is partly because many Muslims find it difficult if not impossible to separate their religious needs from their needs as political citizens; and also because the prevailing perception of Muslims in the media and public arena is constructed on the basis of an understanding of Islam as a religion that conflicts with the values of liberal democracy. In the media and public arena, little consideration is given to the vast differences that exist among Muslims in Australia, not only in terms of ethnicity and culture, but also in terms of practice and doctrine (Shia or Sunni). The dominant construction of Muslims in the Australian popular media is of religious purists committed to annihilating liberal, secular governments and replacing them with anti-modernist theocratic regimes (Brasted). It becomes a talking point for some, for example, to realise that there are international campaigns to recognise Gay Muslims’ rights within their faith (ABC) (in the same way that there are campaigns to recognise Gay Christians as full members of their churches and denominations and equally able to hold high office, as followers of the Anglican Communion will appreciate). Secularism, Preference and Equality Modood asserts that the extent to which a minority religious community can fully participate in the public and political life of the secular nation state is contingent on the extent to which religion is the primary marker of identity. “It may well be the case therefore that if a faith is the primary identity of any community then that community cannot fully identify with and participate in a polity to the extent that it privileges a rival faith. Or privileges secularism” (60). Modood is not saying here that Islam has to be privileged in order for Muslims to participate fully in the polity; but that no other religion, nor secularism, should be so privileged. None should be first, or last, among equals. For such a situation to occur, Islam would have to be equally acceptable both with other religions and with secularism. Following a 2006 address by the former treasurer (and self-avowed Christian) Peter Costello to the Sydney Institute, in which Costello suggested that people who feel a dual claim from both Islamic law and Australian law should be stripped of their citizenship (Costello), the former Prime Minister, John Howard, affirmed what he considers to be Australia’s primary identity when he stated that ‘Australia’s core set of values flowed from its Anglo Saxon identity’ and that any one who did not embrace those values should not be allowed into the country (Humphries). The (then) Prime Minister’s statement is an unequivocal assertion of the privileged position of the Anglo Saxon tradition in Australia, a tradition with which many Muslims and others in Australia find it difficult to identify. Conclusion Religious identity is increasingly becoming the identity of choice for Muslims in Australia, partly because it is perceived that their faith is under attack and that it needs defending (Aly). They construct the defence of their faith as a choice and an obligation; but also as a right that they have under Australian law as equal citizens in a secular state (Aly and Green). Australian Muslims who have no difficulty in reconciling their core Australianness with their deep faith take it as a responsibility to live their lives in ways that model the reconciliation of each identity – civil and religious – with the other. In this respect, the political call to Australian Muslims to embrace a ‘moderate Islam’, where this is seen as an Islam without a public or political dimension, is constructed as treating their faith as less than equal. Religious identity is generally deemed to have no place in the liberal democratic model, particularly where that religion is constructed to be at odds with the principles and values of liberal democracy, namely tolerance and adherence to the rule of law. Indeed, it is as if the national commitment to secularism rules as out-of-bounds any identity that is grounded in religion, giving precedence instead to accepting and negotiating cultural and ethnic differences. Religion becomes a taboo topic in these terms, an affront against secularism and the values of the Enlightenment that include liberty and equality. In these circumstances, it is not the case that all religions are equally ignored in a secular framework. What is the case is that the secular framework has been constructed as a way of ‘privatising’ one religion, Christianity; leaving others – including Islam – as having nowhere to go. Islam thus becomes constructed as less than equal since it appears that, unlike Christians, Muslims are not willing to play the secular game. In fact, Muslims are puzzling over how they can play the secular game, and why they should play the secular game, given that – as is the case with Christians – they see no contradiction in performing ‘good Muslim’ and ‘good Australian’, if given an equal chance to embrace both. Acknowledgements This paper is based on the findings of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project, 2005-7, involving 10 focus groups and 60 in-depth interviews. The authors wish to acknowledge the participation and contributions of WA community members. 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Problem setting. The status of the state and private partnership in Ukraine and the prospects of its development under conditions of the healthcare reform were examined. The cooperation of the state and private sector becomes increasingly important in a social sense, however the existing practice does not demonstrate the efficiency of the fulfillment of the assigned tasks. The conducted analysis allowed to determine the risks and problems of the implementation of the state and private partnership in the sphere of healthcare under current conditions in Ukraine. It was substantiated that the fulfillment of the concept of the state and private partnership in the healthcare system of Ukraine is one of the key issues of the state policy. Recent research and publications analysis. The involvement of a private partner in the field of healthcare is highly common in many countries of the world. The effectiveness of such cooperation is confirmed and described in a number of various studies. At the same time, authors’ publications fail to mention the aspects of involving the private sector in the activities of municipal and state healthcare facilities, including under conditions of healthcare reform in Ukraine. Highlighting previously unsettled parts of the general problem. At the modern stage of reforming of the healthcare system which is an integral part of socioeconomic transformations in Ukraine, the problem of the state regulation of investment support for the development of healthcare sector is becoming ever more important. The main goal of the reform is to build such a model of the healthcare system which would ensure equal and fair access of all members of society to necessary medical services, their high quality and cost-effectiveness while maintaining socially expected volume of state guarantees. The purpose of this article is to reveal the prospects of the state and private partnership under conditions of implementation of the healthcare reform. Paper main body. Ministry of Economic Development and Trade of Ukraine continues to play a key role in the institutional support of the state and private partnership in Ukraine. According to the regulatory document (Decree on the Ministry) it is entrusted with various functions related to the implementation of the state policy in this sector, and namely: monitoring the efficiency of the central, regional and municipal authorities in the field of the state and private partnership; verification of the fulfilment of the signed contracts on the state and private partnership; preparation and provision of information on the results of the state and private partnership to the public; monitoring and evaluation of various types of risks (and namely, general risk) of state partners within the framework of the contracts on the state and private partnership; accounting of contracts on the state and private partnership; organizing and conducting training in order to form and implement the contracts on the state and private partnership; monitoring of compliance with the requirements of current laws on the state and private partnership with respect to existing and new contracts. As of today, the development of the concept of the state and private partnership in the field of healthcare of Ukraine, unfortunately, is not a matter of priority of the state policy and modern budgeting system creates high financial risks for the state and private partnership which are related to short-term (yearly) budget cycles of planning and their annual approval procedures which are sometimes unnecessarily prolonged. Joint activities, distribution of products etc. may be forms of implementation of the projects of the state and private partnership and they may be financed from the funds of the state and local budgets, financial resources of the private partner, loaned funds and other sources which are not prohibited by laws. In this case, the legislation foresees the provision of support to projects of the state and private partnership through state guarantees, provision of funds from state and local budgets and other sources within the framework of the state-wide and local programmes. There are also preconditions for organizing high-tech centres for treating various types of diseases while using financial instruments of investors and staff capacity of the state healthcare facilities. However, presently there are certain doubts on the side of potential private partners regarding the possibility of implementation of long-term mutually beneficial cooperation. It resulted in the absence of transparency and clarity in the normative and legal regulation of the state and private partnership in Ukraine. Therefore, state and private partnership must ensure: The use of the mechanism for planning and funding projects of the state and private partnership because it contributes significantly to the interest of private domestic and foreign investors in participating in the state and private partnership. Normative and legal regulation of implementation of projects of the state and private partnership. Successful introduction of infrastructure projects of the state and private partnership into the activities of healthcare facilities. Construction of high-tech centres for treatment of various types of diseases. Increasing the accessibility of health services for the population and supporting the development of the private sector. Conclusions of the research and prospects for further studies. The majority of projects were implemented in order to reduce the expenses incurred by state and municipal healthcare facilities and neither to increase the quality of provision of health services nor to optimize the expenditure for upgrading material and technical equipment. As a result, the efficiency of such state and private cooperation is one-sided and, as a rule, it has a positive impact solely on the private partner or a short-term result for a healthcare facility where such cooperation is implemented. In this case, the primary task laid as part of implementation of the state policy within the framework of healthcare reform, and namely improving the quality and accessibility of health services for the population of Ukraine, remains uncompleted on the side of the state and municipal healthcare facilities. However, there is a positive experience of involvement of private business in the process of introduction of infrastructure projects of the state and private partnership into the activities of healthcare facilities; confirmation of the relevance of the development for practical introduction of infrastructural projects of the state and private partners into the activities of facilities of the system of emergency medical care of Ukraine. Introduction of the mentioned infrastructural forms of the state and private partnership into the activities of emergency medical care facilities in Ukraine may be an effective instrument for reducing the share of the non-market sector in the field of healthcare while simultaneously increasing the efficiency of the state management. The involvement of the private sector helps to resolve several issues at once: Involvement of personnel oriented towards the provision of services which will contribute significantly to the competitive ability of the state and municipal facilities. Management which reacts quickly to changes on the market of health services which is somewhat restricted under conditions of budgetary legislation on the side of the state and municipal healthcare facilities and is sufficiently important for constantly adapting the needs of the population to the modern global requirements. Raising funds from partners for upgrading material and technical equipment, on the one hand, may significantly reduce financial losses with the involvement of the most up-to-date technologies or give the facilities an opportunity to receive modern services and equipment with the use of the funds of private partners. Reducing financial burden of expenses on local authorities and the state budget of Ukraine in general while keeping a healthcare facility in a satisfactory condition and corresponding level of provision of health services. Improvement of socioeconomic standard of living on account of an increase in accessibility of healthcare to the population of Ukraine in accordance with global requirements. All of this will finally result in a change of the situation in the healthcare sector, will help to build trust in the domestic medicine and increase the health of the nation in the overall perspective. Further research prospects in this direction should include the study of successful foreign experience for strengthening the state and private partnership and determining the feasibility of implementation of the best foreign practices under current conditions in Ukraine on account of development, adaptation and introduction of changes into the legal framework.

Babies and toddlers are amassing huge followings on social media, achieving microcelebrity status, and raking in five figure sums. In East Asia, many of these lucrative “micro­-microcelebrities” rise to fame by inheriting exposure and proximate microcelebrification from their social media Influencer mothers. Through self-branding techniques, Influencer mothers’ portrayals of their young’ children’s lives “as lived” are the canvas on which (baby) products and services are marketed to readers as “advertorials”. In turning to investigate this budding phenomenon, I draw on ethnographic case studies in Singapore to outline the career trajectory of these young children (under 4yo) including their social media presence, branding strategies, and engagement with their followers. The chapter closes with a brief discussion on some ethical considerations of such young children’s labour in the social media age.Influencer MothersTheresa Senft first coined the term “microcelebrity” in her work Camgirls as a burgeoning online trend, wherein people attempt to gain popularity by employing digital media technologies, such as videos, blogs, and social media. She describes microcelebrities as “non-actors as performers” whose narratives take place “without overt manipulation”, and who are “more ‘real’ than television personalities with ‘perfect hair, perfect friends and perfect lives’” (Senft 16), foregrounding their active response to their communities in the ways that maintain open channels of feedback on social media to engage with their following.Influencers – a vernacular industry term albeit inspired by Katz & Lazarsfeld’s notion of “personal influence” that predates Internet culture – are one type of microcelebrity; they are everyday, ordinary Internet users who accumulate a relatively large following on blogs and social media through the textual and visual narration of their personal lives and lifestyles, engage with their following in “digital” and “physical” spaces, and monetize their following by integrating “advertorials” into their blog or social media posts and making physical appearances at events. A pastiche of “advertisement” and “editorial”, advertorials in the Influencer industry are highly personalized, opinion-laden promotions of products/services that Influencers personally experience and endorse for a fee. Influencers in Singapore often brand themselves as having “relatability”, or the ability to persuade their followers to identify with them (Abidin). They do so by make consciously visible the backstage (Goffman) of the usually “inaccessible”, “personal”, and “private” aspects of mundane, everyday life to curate personae that feel “authentic” to fans (Marwick 114), and more accessible than traditional celebrity (Senft 16).Historically, the Influencer industry in Singapore can be traced back to the early beginnings of the “blogshop” industry from the mid-2000s and the “commercial blogging” industry. Influencers are predominantly young women, and market products and services from diverse industries, although the most popular have been fashion, beauty, F&B, travel, and electronics. Most prominent Influencers are contracted to management agencies who broker deals in exchange for commission and assist in the production of their vlogs. Since then, the industry has grown, matured, and expanded so rapidly that Influencers developed emergent models of advertorials, with the earliest cohorts moving into different life stages and monetizing several other aspects of their personal lives such as the “micro-microcelebrity” of their young children. What this paper provides is an important analysis of the genesis and normative practices of micro-microcelebrity commerce in Singapore from its earliest years, and future research trajectories in this field.Micro-Microcelebrity and Proximate MicrocelebrificationI define micro-microcelebrities as the children of Influencers who have themselves become proximate microcelebrities, having derived exposure and fame from their prominent Influencer mothers, usually through a more prolific, deliberate, and commercial form of what Blum-Ross defines as “sharenting”: the act of parents sharing images and stores about their children in digital spaces such as social networking sites and blogs. Marwick (116-117), drawing from Rojek’s work on types of celebrity – distinguishes between two types of microcelebrity: “ascribed microcelebrity” where the online personality is made recognizable through the “production of celebrity media” such as paparazzi shots and user-produced online memes, or “achieved microcelebrity” where users engage in “self-presentation strateg[ies]”, such as fostering the illusion of intimacy with fans, maintaining a persona, and selective disclosure about oneself.Micro-microcelebrities lie somewhere between the two: In a process I term “proximate microcelebrification”, micro-microcelebrities themselves inherit celebrity through the preemptive and continuous exposure from their Influencer mothers, many beginning even during the pre-birth pregnancy stages in the form of ultrasound scans, as a form of “achieved microcelebrity”. Influencer mothers whose “presentational strategies” (cf. Marshall, “Promotion” 45) are successful enough (as will be addressed later) gain traction among followers, who in turn further popularize the micro-microcelebrity by setting up fan accounts, tribute sites, and gossip forums through which fame is heightened in a feedback loop as a model of “ascribed microcelebrity”.Here, however, I refrain from conceptualizing these young stars as “micro-Influencers” for unlike Influencers, these children do not yet curate their self-presentation to command the attention of followers, but instead are used, framed, and appropriated by their mothers for advertorials. In other words, Influencer mothers “curate [micro-microcelebrities’] identities into being” (Leaver, “Birth”). Following this, many aspects of their micro-microcelebrities become rapidly commodified and commercialized, with advertisers clamoring to endorse anything from maternity hospital stays to nappy cream.Although children of mommybloggers have the prospect to become micro-microcelebrities, both groups are conceptually distinct. Friedman (200-201) argues that among mommybloggers arose a tension between those who adopt “the raw authenticity of nonmonetized blogging”, documenting the “unglamorous minutiae” of their daily lives and a “more authentic view of motherhood” and those who use mommyblogs “primarily as a source of extra income rather than as a site for memoir”, focusing on “parent-centered products” (cf. Mom Bloggers Club).In contrast, micro-microcelebrities and their digital presence are deliberately commercial, framed and staged by Influencer mothers in order to maximize their advertorial potential, and are often postured to market even non-baby/parenting products such as fast food and vehicles (see later). Because of the overt commerce, it is unclear if micro-microcelebrity displays constitute “intimate surveillance”, an “almost always well-intentioned surveillance of young people by parents” (Leaver, “Born” 4). Furthermore, children are generally peripheral to mommybloggers whose own parenting narratives take precedence as a way to connect with fellow mothers, while micro-microcelebrities are the primary feature whose everyday lives and digital presence enrapture followers.MethodologyThe analysis presented is informed by my original fieldwork with 125 Influencers and related actors among whom I conducted a mixture of physical and digital personal interviews, participant observation, web archaeology, and archival research between December 2011 and October 2014. However, the material presented here is based on my digital participant observation of publicly accessible and intentionally-public digital presence of the first four highly successful micro-microcelebrities in Singapore: “Baby Dash” (b.2013) is the son of Influencer xiaxue, “#HeYurou” (b.2011) is the niece of Influencer bongqiuqiu, “#BabyElroyE” (b.2014) is the son of Influencer ohsofickle, and “@MereGoRound” (b.2015) is the daughter of Influencer bongqiuqiu.The microcelebrity/social media handles of these children take different forms, following the platform on which their parent/aunt has exposed them on the most. Baby Dash appears in all of xiaxue’s digital platforms under a variety of over 30 indexical, ironic, or humourous hashtags (Leaver, “Birth”) including “#pointylipped”, #pineappledash”, and “#面包脸” (trans. “bread face”); “#HeYurou” appears on bongqiuqiu’s Instagram and Twitter; “#BabyElroyE” appears on ohsofickle’s Instagram and blog, and is the central figure of his mother’s new YouTube channel; and “@MereGoRound” appears on all of bongqiuqiu’s digital platforms but also has her own Instagram account and dedicated YouTube channel. The images reproduced here are screenshot from Influencer mothers’ highly public social media: xiaxue, bongqiuqiu, and ohsofickle boast 593k, 277k, and 124k followers on Instagram and 263k, 41k, and 17k followers on Twitter respectively at the time of writing.Anticipation and Digital EstatesIn an exclusive front-pager (Figure 1) on the day of his induced birth, it was announced that Baby Dash had already received up to SGD25,000 worth of endorsement deals brokered by his Influencer mother, xiaxue. As the first micro-microcelebrity in his cohort (his mother was among the pioneer Influencers), Baby Dash’s Caesarean section was even filmed and posted on xiaxue’s YouTube channel in three parts (Figure 2). xiaxue had announced her pregnancy on her blog while in her second trimester, following which she consistently posted mirror selfies of her baby bump.Figure 1 & 2, screenshot April 2013 from ‹instagram.com/xiaxue›In her successful attempt at generating anticipation, the “bump” itself seemed to garner its own following on Twitter and Instagram, with many followers discussing how the Influencer dressed “it”, and how “it” was evolving over the weeks. One follower even compiled a collage of xiaxue’s “bump” chronologically and gifted it to the Influencer as an art image via Twitter on the day she delivered Baby Dash (Figure 3 & 4). Followers also frequently speculated and bantered about how her baby would look, and mused about how much they were going to adore him. Figure 3 & 4, screenshot March 2013 from ‹twitter.com/xiaxue› While Lupton (42) has conceptualized the sharing of images that precede birth as a “rite of passage”, Influencer mothers who publish sonograms deliberately do so in order to claim digital estates for their to-be micro-microcelebrities in the form of “reserved” social media handles, blog URLs, and unique hashtags for self-branding. For instance, at the 3-month mark of her pregnancy, Influencer bongqiuqiu debuted her baby’s dedicated hashtag, “#MereGoRound” in a birth announcement on her on Instagram account. Shortly after, she started an Instagram account, “@MereGoRound”, for her baby, who amassed over 5.5k followers prior to her birth. Figure 5 & 6, screenshot March 2015 from instagram.com/meregoround and instagram.com/bongqiuqiuThe debut picture features a heavily pregnant belly shot of bongqiuqiu (Figure 5), creating much anticipation for the arrival of a new micro-microcelebrity: in the six months leading up to her birth, various family, friends, and fans shared Instagram images of their gifts and welcome party for @MereGoRound, and followers shared congratulations and fan art on the dedicated Instagram hashtag. During this time, bongqiuqiu also frequently updated followers on her pregnancy progress, not without advertising her (presumably sponsored) gynecologist and hospital stay in her pregnancy diaries (Figure 6) – like Baby Dash, even as a foetus @MereGoRound was accumulating advertorials. Presently at six months old, @MereGoRound boasts almost 40k followers on Instagram on which embedded in the narrative of her growth are sponsored products and services from various advertisers.Non-Baby-Related AdvertorialsPrior to her pregnancy, Influencer bongqiuqiu hopped onto the micro-microcelebrity bandwagon in the wake of Baby Dash’s birth, by using her niece “#HeYurou” in her advertorials. Many Influencers attempt to naturalize their advertorials by composing their post as if recounting a family event. With reference to a child, parent, or partner, they may muse or quip about a product being used or an experience being shared in a bid to mask the distinction between their personal and commercial material. bongqiuqiu frequently posted personal, non-sponsored images engaging in daily mundane activities under the dedicated hashtag “#HeYurou”.However, this was occasionally interspersed with pictures of her niece holding on to various products including storybooks (Figure 8) and shopping bags (Figure 9). At first glance, this might have seemed like any mundane daily update the Influencer often posts. However, a close inspection reveals the caption bearing sponsor hashtags, tags, and campaign information. For instance, one Instagram post shows #HeYurou casually holding on to and staring at a burger in KFC wrapping (Figure 7), but when read in tandem with bongqiuqiu’s other KFC-related posts published over a span of a few months, it becomes clear that #HeYurou was in fact advertising for KFC. Figure 7, 8, 9, screenshot December 2014 from ‹instagram.com/bongqiuqiu›Elsewhere, Baby Dash was incorporated into xiaxue’s car sponsorship with over 20 large decals of one of his viral photos – dubbed “pineapple Dash” among followers – plastered all over her vehicle (Figure 10). Followers who spot the car in public are encouraged to photograph and upload the image using its dedicated hashtag, “#xiaxuecar” as part of the Influencer’s car sponsorship – an engagement scarcely related to her young child. Since then, xiaxue has speculated producing offshoots of “pineapple Dash” products including smartphone casings. Figure 10, screenshot December 2014 from ‹instagram.com/xiaxue›Follower EngagementSponsors regularly organize fan meet-and-greets headlined by micro-microcelebrities in order to attract potential customers. Photo opportunities and the chance to see Baby Dash “in the flesh” frequently front press and promotional material of marketing campaigns. Elsewhere on social media, several Baby Dash fan and tribute accounts have also emerged on Instagram, reposting images and related media of the micro-microcelebrity with overt adoration, no doubt encouraged by xiaxue, who began crowdsourcing captions for Baby Dash’s photos.Influencer ohsofickle postures #BabyElroyE’s follower engagement in a more subtle way. In her YouTube channel that debut in the month of her baby’s birth, ohsofickle produces video diaries of being a young, single, mother who is raising a child (Figure 11). In each episode, #BabyElroyE is the main feature whose daily activities are documented, and while there is some advertising embedded, ohsofickle’s approach on YouTube is much less overt than others as it features much more non-monetized personal content (Figure 12). Her blog serves as a backchannel to her vlogs, in which she recounts her struggles with motherhood and explicitly solicits the advice of mothers. However, owing to her young age (she became an Influencer at 17 and gave birth at 24), many of her followers are teenagers and young women who respond to her solicitations by gushing over #BabyElroyE’s images on Instagram. Figure 11 & 12, screenshot September 2015 from ‹instagram.com/ohsofickle›PrivacyAs noted by Holloway et al. (23), children like micro-microcelebrities will be among the first cohorts to inherit “digital profiles” of their “whole lifetime” as a “work in progress”, from parents who habitually underestimate or discount the privacy and long term effects of publicizing information about their children at the time of posting. This matters in a climate where social media platforms can amend privacy policies without user consent (23), and is even more pressing for micro-microcelebrities whose followers store, republish, and recirculate information in fan networks, resulting in digital footprints with persistence, replicability, scalability, searchability (boyd), and extended longevity in public circulation which can be attributed back to the children indefinitely (Leaver, “Ends”).Despite minimum age restrictions and recent concerns with “digital kidnapping” where users steal images of other young children to be re-posted as their own (Whigham), some social media platforms rarely police the proliferation of accounts set up by parents on behalf of their underage children prominently displaying their legal names and life histories, citing differing jurisdictions in various countries (Facebook; Instagram), while others claim to disable accounts if users report an “incorrect birth date” (cf. Google for YouTube). In Singapore, the Media Development Authority (MDA) which governs all print and digital media has no firm regulations for this but suggests that the age of consent is 16 judging by their recommendation to parents with children aged below 16 to subscribe to Internet filtering services (Media Development Authority, “Regulatory” 1). Moreover, current initiatives have been focused on how parents can impart digital literacy to their children (Media Development Authority, “Empowered”; Media Literacy Council) as opposed to educating parents about the digital footprints they may be unwittingly leaving about their children.The digital lives of micro-microcelebrities pose new layers of concern given their publicness and deliberate publicity, specifically hinged on making visible the usually inaccessible, private aspects of everyday life (Marshall, “Persona” 5).Scholars note that celebrities are individuals for whom speculation of their private lives takes precedence over their actual public role or career (Geraghty 100-101; Turner 8). However, the personae of Influencers and their young children are shaped by ambiguously blurring the boundaries of privacy and publicness in order to bait followers’ attention, such that privacy and publicness are defined by being broadcast, circulated, and publicized (Warner 414). In other words, the publicness of micro-microcelebrities is premised on the extent of the intentional publicity rather than simply being in the public domain (Marwick 223-231, emphasis mine).Among Influencers privacy concerns have aroused awareness but not action – Baby Dash’s Influencer mother admitted in a national radio interview that he has received a death threat via Instagram but feels that her child is unlikely to be actually attacked (Channel News Asia) – because privacy is a commodity that is manipulated and performed to advance their micro-microcelebrities’ careers. As pioneer micro-microcelebrities are all under 2-years-old at present, future research warrants investigating “child-centred definitions” (Third et al.) of the transition in which they come of age, grow an awareness of their digital presence, respond to their Influencer mothers’ actions, and potentially take over their accounts.Young LabourThe Ministry of Manpower (MOM) in Singapore, which regulates the employment of children and young persons, states that children under the age of 13 may not legally work in non-industrial or industrial settings (Ministry of Manpower). However, the same document later ambiguously states underaged children who do work can only do so under strict work limits (Ministry of Manpower). Elsewhere (Chan), it is noted that national labour statistics have thus far only focused on those above the age of 15, thus neglecting a true reflection of underaged labour in Singapore. This is despite the prominence of micro-microcelebrities who are put in front of (video) cameras to build social media content. Additionally, the work of micro-microcelebrities on digital platforms has not yet been formally recognized as labour, and is not regulated by any authority including Influencer management firms, clients, the MDA, and the MOM. Brief snippets from my ethnographic fieldwork with Influencer management agencies in Singapore similarly reveal that micro-microcelebrities’ labour engagements and control of their earnings are entirely at their parents’ discretion.As models and actors, micro-microcelebrities are one form of entertainment workers who if between the ages of 15 days and 18 years in the state of California are required to obtain an Entertainment Work Permit to be gainfully employed, adhering to strict work, schooling, and rest hour quotas (Department of Industrial Relations). Furthermore, the Californian Coogan Law affirms that earnings by these minors are their own property and not their parents’, although they are not old enough to legally control their finances and rely on the state to govern their earnings with a legal guardian (Screen Actors Guild). However, this similarly excludes underaged children and micro-microcelebrities engaged in creative digital ecologies. Future research should look into safeguards and instruments among young child entertainers, especially for micro-micrcocelebrities’ among whom commercial work and personal documentation is not always distinct, and are in fact deliberately intertwined in order to better engage with followers for relatabilityGrowing Up BrandedIn the wake of moral panics over excessive surveillance technologies, children’s safety on the Internet, and data retention concerns, micro-microcelebrities and their Influencer mothers stand out for their deliberately personal and overtly commercial approach towards self-documenting, self-presenting, and self-publicizing from the moment of conception. 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This paper argues that illegitimacy is a concept that relates to almost all of the fundamental ways in which Western society has traditionally organised itself. Sex, family and marriage, and the power of the church and state, are all implicated in the various ways in which society reproduces itself from generation to generation. All employ the concepts of legitimacy and illegitimacy to define what is and what is not permissible. Further, the creation of the illegitimate can occur in more or less legitimate ways; for example, through acts of consent, on the one hand; and force, on the other. This paper uses the study of an English Renaissance text, Shakespeare’s Henry V, to argue that these concepts remain potent ones, regularly invoked as a means of identifying and denouncing perceived threats to the good ordering of the social fabric. In western societies, many of which may be constructed as post-marriage, illegitimate is often applied as a descriptor to unlicensed migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. In countries subject to war and conflict, rape as a war crime is increasingly used by armies to create fractures within the subject community and to undermine the paternity of a cohort of children. In societies where extramarital sex is prohibited, or where rape has been used as a weapon of war, the bastard acts as physical evidence that an unsanctioned act has been committed and the laws of society broken, a “failure in social control” (Laslett, Oosterveen and Smith, 5). This paper explores these themes, using past conceptions of the illegitimate and bastardy as an explanatory concept for problematic aspects of legitimacy in contemporary culture.Bastardy was a particularly important issue in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe when an individual’s genealogy was a major determining factor of social status, property and identity (MacFarlane). Further, illegitimacy was not necessarily an aspect of a person’s birth. It could become a status into which they were thrust through the use of divorce, for example, as when Henry VIII illegitimised his daughter Mary after annulling his marriage to Mary’s mother, Catherine of Aragon. Alison Findlay’s study of illegitimacy in Renaissance literature lists over 70 portrayals of illegitimacy, or characters threatened with illegitimacy, between 1588 and 1652 (253–257). In addition to illegitimacy at an individual level however, discussions around what constitutes the “illegitimate” figure in terms of its relationship with the family and the wider community, are also applicable to broader concerns over national identity. In work such as Stages of History, Phyllis Rackin dissected images of masculine community present in Shakespeare’s history plays to expose underlying tensions over gender, power and identity. As the study of Henry V indicates in the following discussion, illegitimacy was also a metaphor brought to bear on issues of national as well as personal identity in the early modern era. The image of the nation as a “family” to denote unity and security, both then and now, is rendered complex and problematic by introducing the “illegitimate” into that nation-family image. The rhetoric used in the recent debate over the Scottish independence referendum, and in Australia’s ongoing controversy over “illegitimate” migration, both indicate that the concept of a “national bastard”, an amorphous figure that resists precise definition, remains a potent rhetorical force. Before turning to the detail of Henry V, it is useful to review the use of “illegitimate” in the early modern context. Lacking an established position within a family, a bastard was in danger of being marginalised and deprived of any but the most basic social identity. If acknowledged by a family, the bastard might become a drain on that family’s economic resources, drawing money away from legitimate children and resented accordingly. Such resentment may be reciprocated. In his essay “On Envy” the scientist, author, lawyer and eventually Lord Chancellor of England Francis Bacon explained the destructive impulse of bastardy as follows: “Deformed persons, and eunuchs, and old men, and bastards, are envious. For he that cannot possibly mend his own case will do what he can to impair another’s.” Thus, bastardy becomes a plot device which can be used to explain and to rationalise evil. In early modern English literature, as today, bastardy as a defect of birth is only one meaning for the word. What does “in everything illegitimate” (quoting Shakespeare’s character Thersites in Troilus and Cressida [V.viii.8]) mean for our understanding of both our own society and that of the late sixteenth century? Bastardy is an important ideologeme, in that it is a “unit of meaning through which the ‘social space’ constructs the ideological values of its signs” (Schleiner, 195). In other words, bastardy has an ideological significance that stretches far beyond a question of parental marital status, extending to become a metaphor for national as well as personal loss of identity. Anti-Catholic polemicists of the early sixteenth century accused priests of begetting a generation of bastards that would overthrow English society (Fish, 7). The historian Polydore Vergil was accused of suborning and bastardising English history by plagiarism and book destruction: “making himself father to other men’s works” (Hay, 159). Why is illegitimacy so important and so universal a metaphor? The term “bastard” in its sense of mixture or mongrel has been applied to language, to weaponry, to almost anything that is a distorted but recognisable version of something else. As such, the concept of bastardy lends itself readily to the rhetorical figure of metaphor which, as the sixteenth century writer George Puttenham puts it, is “a kind of wresting of a single word from his owne right signification, to another not so natural, but yet of some affinitie or coueniencie with it” (Puttenham, 178). Later on in The Art of English Poesie, Puttenham uses the word “bastard” to describe something that can best be recognised as being an imperfect version of something else: “This figure [oval] taketh his name of an egge […] and is as it were a bastard or imperfect rounde declining toward a longitude.” (101). “Bastard” as a descriptive term in this context has meaning because it connects the subject of discussion with its original. Michael Neill takes an anthropological approach to the question of why the bastard in early modern drama is almost invariably depicted as monstrous or evil. In “In everything illegitimate: Imagining the Bastard in Renaissance Drama,” Neill argues that bastards are “filthy”, using the term as it is construed by Mary Douglas in her work Purity and Danger. Douglas argues that dirt is defined by being where it should not be, it is “matter in the wrong place, belonging to ‘a residual category, rejected from our normal scheme of classifications,’ a source of fundamental pollution” (134). In this argument the figure of the bastard aligns strongly with the concept of the Other (Said). Arguably, however, the anthropologist Edmund Leach provides a more useful model to understand the associations of hybridity, monstrosity and bastardy. In “Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse”, Leach asserts that our perceptions of the world around us are largely based on binary distinctions; that an object is one thing, and is not another. If an object combines attributes of itself with those of another, the interlapping area will be suppressed so that there may be no hesitation in discerning between them. This repressed area, the area which is neither one thing nor another but “liminal” (40), becomes the object of fear and of fascination: – taboo. It is this liminality that creates anxiety surrounding bastards, as they occupy the repressed, “taboo” area between family and outsiders. In that it is born out of wedlock, the bastard child has no place within the family structure; yet as the child of a family member it cannot be completely relegated to the external world. Michael Neill rightly points out the extent to which the topos of illegitimacy is associated with the disintegration of boundaries and a consequent loss of coherence and identity, arguing that the bastard is “a by-product of the attempt to define and preserve a certain kind of social order” (147). The concept of the liminal figure, however, recognises that while a by-product can be identified and eliminated, a bastard can neither be contained nor excluded. Consequently, the bastard challenges the established order; to be illegitimate, it must retain its connection with the legitimate figure from which it diverges. Thus the illegitimate stands as a permanent threat to the legitimate, a reminder of what the legitimate can become. Bastardy is used by Shakespeare to indicate the fear of loss of national as well as personal identity. Although noted for its triumphalist construction of a hero-king, Henry V is also shot through with uncertainties and fears, fears which are frequently expressed using illegitimacy as a metaphor. Notwithstanding its battle scenes and militarism, it is the lawyers, genealogists and historians who initiate and drive forward the narrative in Henry V (McAlindon, 435). The reward of the battle for Henry is not so much the crown of France as the assurance of his own legitimacy as monarch. The lengthy and legalistic recital of genealogies with which the Archbishop of Canterbury proves to general English satisfaction that their English king Henry holds a better lineal right to the French throne than its current occupant may not be quite as “clear as is the summer sun” (Henry V 1.2.83), but Henry’s question about whether he may “with right and conscience” make his claim to the French throne elicits a succinct response. The churchmen tell Henry that, in order to demonstrate that he is truly the descendant of his royal forefathers, Henry will need to validate that claim. In other words, the legitimacy of Henry’s identity, based on his connection with the past, is predicated on his current behaviour:Gracious lord,Stand for your own; unwind your bloody flag;Look back into your mighty ancestors:Go, my dread lord, to your great-grandsire’s tomb,From whom you claim; invoke his warlike spirit…Awake remembrance of these valiant dead,And with your puissant arm renew their feats:You are their heir, you sit upon their throne,The blood and courage that renowned themRuns in your veins….Your brother kings and monarchs of the earthDo all expect that you should rouse yourselfAs did the former lions of your blood. (Henry V 1.2.122 – 124)These exhortations to Henry are one instance of the importance of genealogy and its immediate connection to personal and national identity. The subject recurs throughout the play as French and English characters both invoke a discourse of legitimacy and illegitimacy to articulate fears of invasion, defeat, and loss of personal and national identity. One particular example of this is the brief scene in which the French royalty allow themselves to contemplate the prospect of defeat at the hands of the English:Fr. King. ‘Tis certain, he hath pass’d the river Somme.Constable. And if he be not fought withal, my lord,Let us not live in France; let us quit all,And give our vineyards to a barbarous people.Dauphin. O Dieu vivant! shall a few sprays of us,The emptying of our fathers’ luxury,Our scions, put in wild and savage stock,Spirt up so suddenly into the clouds,And overlook their grafters?Bourbon. Normans, but bastard Normans, Norman bastards!...Dauphin. By faith and honour,Our madams mock at us, and plainly sayOur mettle is bred out; and they will giveTheir bodies to the lust of English youthTo new-store France with bastard warriors. (Henry V 3.5.1 – 31).Rape and sexual violence pervade the language of Henry V. France itself is constructed as a sexually vulnerable female with “womby vaultages” and a “mistress-court” (2.4.131, 140). In one of his most famous speeches Henry graphically describes the rape and slaughter that accompanies military defeat (3.3). Reading Henry V solely in terms of its association of military conquest with sexual violence, however, runs the risk of overlooking the image of bastards themselves as both the threat and the outcome of national defeat. The lines quoted above exemplify the extent to which illegitimacy was a vital metaphor within early modern discourses of national as well as personal identity. Although the lines are divided between various speakers – the French King, Constable (representing the law), Dauphin (the Crown Prince) and Bourbon (representing the aristocracy) – the images develop smoothly and consistently to express English dominance and French subordination, articulated through images of illegitimacy.The dialogue begins with the most immediate consequence of invasion and of illegitimacy: the loss of property. Legitimacy, illegitimacy and property were so closely associated that a case of bastardy brought to the ecclesiastical court that did not include a civil law suit about land was referred to as a case of “bastardy speciall”, and the association between illegitimacy and property is present in this speech (Cowell, 14). The use of the word “vine” is simultaneously a metonym for France and a metaphor for the family, as in the “family tree”, conflating the themes of family identity and national identity that are both threatened by the virile English forces.As the dialogue develops, the rhetoric becomes more elaborate. The vines which for the Constable (from a legal perspective) represented both France and French families become instead an attempt to depict the English as being of a subordinate breed. The Dauphin’s brief narrative of the English origins refers to the illegitimate William the Conqueror, bastard son of the Duke of Normandy and by designating the English as being descendants of a bastard Frenchman the Dauphin attempts to depict the English nation as originating from a superabundance of French virility; wild offshoots from a true stock. Yet “grafting” one plant to another can create a stronger plant, which is what has happened here. The Dauphin’s metaphors, designed to construct the English as an unruly and illegitimate offshoot of French society, a product of the overflowing French virility, evolve instead into an emblem of a younger, stronger branch which has overtaken its enfeebled origins.In creating this scene, Shakespeare constructs the Frenchmen as being unable to contain the English figuratively, still less literally. The attempts to reduce the English threat by imagining them as “a few sprays”, a product of casual sexual excess, collapses into Bourbon’s incoherent ejaculation: “Normans, but bastard Normans, Norman bastards!” and the Norman bastard dominates the conclusion of the scene. Instead of containing and marginalising the bastard, the metaphoric language creates and acknowledges a threat which cannot be marginalised. The “emptying of luxury” has engendered an uncontrollable illegitimate who will destroy the French nation beyond any hope of recovery, overrunning France with bastards.The scene is fascinating for its use of illegitimacy as a means of articulating fears not only for the past and present but also for the future. The Dauphin’s vision is one of irreversible national and familial disintegration, irreversible because, unlike rape, the French women’s imagined rejection of their French families and embrace of the English conquerors implies a total abandonment of family origins and the willing creation of a new, illegitimate dynasty. Immediately prior to this scene the audience has seen the Dauphin’s fear in action: the French princess Katherine is shown learning to speak English as part of her preparation for giving her body to a “bastard Norman”, a prospect which she anticipates with a frisson of pleasure and humour, as well as fear. This scene, between Katherine and her women, evokes a range of powerful anxieties which appear repeatedly in the drama and texts of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: anxieties over personal and national identity, over female chastity and masculine authority, and over continuity between generations. Peter Laslett in The World We Have Lost – Further Explored points out that “the engendering of children on a scale which might threaten the social structure was never, or almost never, a present possibility” (154) at this stage of European history. This being granted, the Dauphin’s depiction of such a “wave” of illegitimates, while it might have no roots in reality, functioned as a powerful image of disorder. Illegitimacy as a threat and as a strategy is not limited to the renaissance, although a study of renaissance texts offers a useful guidebook to the use of illegitimacy as a means of polarising and excluding. Although as previously discussed, for many Western countries, the marital status of one’s parents is probably the least meaningful definition associated with the word “illegitimate”, the concept of the nation as a family remains current in modern political discourse, and illegitimate continues to be a powerful metaphor. During the recent independence referendum in Scotland, David Cameron besought the Scottish people not to “break up the national family”; at the same time, the Scottish Nationalists have been constructed as “ungrateful bastards” for wishing to turn their backs on the national family. As Klocker and Dunne, and later O’Brien and Rowe, have demonstrated, the emotive use of words such as “illegitimate” and “illegal” in Australian political rhetoric concerning migration is of long standing. Given current tensions, it might be timely to call for a further and more detailed study of the way in which the term “illegitimate” continues to be used by politicians and the media to define, demonise and exclude certain types of would-be Australian immigrants from the collective Australian “national family”. Suggestions that persons suspected of engaging with terrorist organisations overseas should be stripped of their Australian passports imply the creation of national bastards in an attempt to distance the Australian community from such threats. But the strategy can never be completely successful. Constructing figures as bastard or the illegitimate remains a method by which the legitimate seeks to define itself, but it also means that the bastard or illegitimate can never be wholly separated or cast out. In one form or another, the bastard is here to stay.ReferencesBeardon, Elizabeth. “Sidney's ‘Mongrell Tragicomedy’ and Anglo-Spanish Exchange in the New Arcadia.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10 (2010): 29 - 51.Davis, Kingsley. “Illegitimacy and the Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 45 (1939).John Cowell. The Interpreter. Cambridge: John Legate, 1607.Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. 1980. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.Findlay, Alison. Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009.Hay, Denys. Polydore Vergil: Renaissance Historian and Man of Letters. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952.Laslett, Peter. The World We Have Lost - Further Explored. London: Methuen, 1983.Laslett, P., K. Oosterveen, and R. M. Smith, eds. Bastardy and Its Comparative History. London: Edward Arnold, 1980.Leach, Edmund. “Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse.” E. H. Lennenberg, ed. New Directives in the Study of Language. MIT Press, 1964. 23-63. MacFarlane, Alan. The Origins of English Individualism: The Family Property and Social Transition Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978.Mclaren, Ann. “Monogamy, Polygamy and the True State: James I’s Rhetoric of Empire.” History of Political Thought 24 (2004): 446 – 480.McAlindon, T. “Testing the New Historicism: “Invisible Bullets” Reconsidered.” Studies in Philology 92 (1995):411 – 438.Neill, Michael. Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics and Society in English Renaissance Drama. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.Pocock, J.G.A. Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on English Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. Ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936.Reekie, Gail. Measuring Immorality: Social Inquiry and the Problem of Illegitimacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Rowe, Elizabeth, and Erin O’Brien. “Constructions of Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Australian Political Discourse”. In Kelly Richards and Juan Marcellus Tauri, eds., Crime Justice and Social Democracy: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, 2013.Schleiner, Louise. Tudor and Stuart Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.Shakespeare, William. Henry V in The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. S. Greenblatt, W. Cohen, J.E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York and London: Norton, 2008.

Intellectual property. It's a strange term, indicating from its structure that the questionable notion of property has been appended to something that, in a tangible sense, doesn't even exist. Difficult to grasp, like water, or air, yet at the same time so desirable to own... In Anglo-American law, property is defined, as the eighteenth-century jurist Sir William Blackstone put it, as "that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe" (Terry & Guigni 207). For most physical things, the 'right' of exclusion seems simple enough to understand, and to control. Yet even there, when the boundaries blur, especially over space and time, the results of such 'rights' become less and less manageable, as indicated by the classic 'tragedy of the commons' (Hardin). And once we move outside of the physical realm, and into the world of ideas, or of feelings or the spirit, the notion of an exclusive 'right' of ownership steadily makes less and less sense. It's an issue that's come to the fore with the rise of the Open Source movement, creating software that can be freely shared and used by anyone. There are many arguments about exactly is meant by 'free', though there's often an emphasis on freedom of ideas rather than price: "think of 'free' as in 'free speech', not as in 'free beer'" is how one group describes it (Free Software Foundation). Unlike proprietary software such as Microsoft Windows, the source-code from which the programs are compiled is available is available for anyone to view, amend, extend. As yet, few programmers are paid to do so; certainly no-one is excluded from doing so. The results from this apparently anarchic and altruistic model would be startling for anyone coming from a conventional economics background: for example, Sourceforge, the main Open Source repository, currently hosts almost 60,000 projects, with almost ten times that number of active contributors (Sourceforge). Some of these projects are huge: for example, the Linux kernel is well over a million lines of code, whilst the Gnome user-interface is already almost twice that size. Open Source programs such as the 'LAMP' quadrivirate of the GNU/Linux operating-system, Apache web-server, MySQL database and PHP, Perl or Python scripting languages provide most of the software infrastructure for the Internet (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, Python). And the Internet returns the favour, by providing a space in which collaboration can happen quickly and for the most part transparently, without much regard for status or location. Yet central though the Internet may be to this new wave of shared 'public good', the core innovations of Open Source are more social than technological. Of these, probably the most important are a specific kind of collaboration, and an unusual twist on copyright law. Eric Raymond's classic essay 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' is one of the best descriptions of the social processes behind Open Source (Raymond). "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch", says Raymond: see a need, tackle it, share the initial results, ask for help. Larry Wall, the initiator of Perl, "wanted to create something that was so useful that it would be taken up by many people" (Moody 133), and consciously promoted it in much the same way as a missionary (Moody 131). Open access to communications and a culture of shared learning provides the space to "release early, release often" and invite collaboration. Some projects, such as Apache and PHP, are run as a kind of distributed collective, but many are somewhat hierarchical, with a well-known lead-figure at the centre: Linus Torvalds for Linux, Larry Wall for Perl, Guido van Rossum for Python, Miguel de Icaza for Gnome. Yet the style rarely seems hierarchical in practice: the lead-figure's role is that of coordinator and final arbiter of quality, far removed from the militaristic 'command and control' so common in business environments. What makes it work is that anyone can join in, identify a bug, submit a patch, volunteer to design some desirable function or feature, and gain personal satisfaction and social respect for doing so. Programmers’ motivations vary enormously, of course: some share their work as a kind of libertarian statement, whilst others are more driven by a sense of obligation to others in the software-development community, or in the wider world. Yet for many, perhaps most, it's the personal satisfaction that's most important: as Linus Torvalds comments, "most of the good programmers do [Open Source] programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program" (Torvalds & Ghosh). In that sense it more closely resembles a kind of art-form rather than a conventional business proposition. Realistically, many of the smaller Open Source projects are little more than student exercises, with limited real-world usefulness. But for larger, more relevant projects this borderless, inclusive collaboration usually results in code of very high quality and reliability – "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" is another of Raymond's aphorisms – in stark contrast to the notorious security holes and general fragility of proprietary products from Redmond and elsewhere. And it leverages different people's skills to create an extraordinary degree of 'win/win', as Linus Torvalds points out: "imagine ten people putting in one hour each every day on the project. They put in one hour of work, but because they share the end results they get nine hours of 'other peoples work' for free. It sounds unfair: get nine hours of work for doing one hour. But it obviously is not" (Torvalds & Ghosh). It's this kind of return-on-investment that's making many businesses more than willing to embrace the 'insanity' of paying programmers to give away their time on Open Source projects (Pavlicek). The hard part, for many businesses, is that it demands a very different approach to business relationships. "Forget business as usual", writes Russell Pavlicek; "forget about demanding your own way; forget fluffy, empty management speeches; forget about fudging facts; forget about marketing that alienates the community; forget about pushing hype rather than real value; forget about taking more than you give" (Pavlicek 131-7). When everything is open, and everyone is in effect a volunteer, none of those time-dishonoured tactics works well. But the real catch is the legal framework under which Open Source is developed and distributed. Conventionally, placing work in the public domain – the intellectual-property equivalent of the commons – means that anyone can apply even the minutest of changes and then declare it exclusively as their own. Walt Disney famously did exactly this with many classics, such as the Grimms' fairy-tales or Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book. The Free Software Foundation's 'GNU Public License' – used for most Open Source software – avoids this by copyrighting the work, permitting freedom to view, amend and extend the code for any purpose, but requiring that any new version permit the same freedoms (GNU/FSF). This inclusive approach – nicknamed 'copyleft' in contrast to conventional copyright – turns the usual exclusive model of intellectual property on its head. Its viral, self-propagating nature uses the law to challenge the law of property: everything it touches is – in principle – freed from exclusive private ownership. Larry Lessig and the Creative Commons legal team have extended this somewhat further, with machine-readable licenses that permit a finer granularity of choice in defining what uses of a work – a musical performance, a book or a Weblog, for example – are open or withheld (Creative Commons). But the central theme is that copyleft, together with the open nature of the Internet, "moves everything that touches it toward the public domain" (Norlin). Which is not a happy thought for those whose business models depend on exclusion and control of access to intellectual property – such as Hollywood, the media and the biotechnology industry – nor, for that matter, for those who'd prefer to keep their secrets secret (AWOLBush). Part of the problem, for such people, is a mistaken notion of what the Internet really is. It's not a pipe or a medium, like cable TV; it's more like a space or a place, a 'world of ends' (Searls & Weinberger). Not so much infrastructure, to be bought and sold, but necessarily shared, it's more 'innerstructure', a kind of artificial force of nature: "like the Earth's fertile surface, it derives much of its fertility from the life it supports" (Searls). Its key characteristics, argues Doc Searls, are that "No-one owns it; Everyone can use it; Anyone can improve it". And these characteristics of the Internet ultimately arise not from the hardware – routers, cables, servers and the like – or even the software, but ultimately from an agreement – the Internet Protocol – and an idea – that network connections can and should be self-routing, beyond direct control. Yet perhaps the most important idea that arises from this is that one of the most basic foundation-stones of Western society – the model of property as an exclusive 'right', a "sole and despotic dominion" – simply doesn't work. This is especially true for supposed 'intellectual property', such as copyrights, trade-marks, patents, genome sequences, scientific theories: after all, from where do those ideas and patterns ultimately arise? Who owns that? In legal terms, there's no definable root for a trail of provenance, no means to identify all involved intermediaries, and hence no ultimate anchor for any kind of property claim. Many other types of intellectual property, such as domain-names, phrases, words, radio-frequencies, colours, sounds - the word 'Yes', the phrase 'The Real Thing', Ferrari red, the sound of a Harley-Davidson – can only be described as arbitrary expropriations from the public domain. In many senses, then, the whole legal edifice of intellectual property is little more than "all smoke and mirrors", held together by lawyers' bluff – hardly a stable foundation for the much-vaunted 'information economy'! Whilst it's not quite true that "nobody owns it", in practice the only viable ownership for any kind of intellectual property would seem to be that of a declaration of responsibility, of stewardship – such as a project-leader's responsibility for an Open Source project – rather than an arbitrary and ultimately indefensible assertion of exclusive 'right'. So a simple question about intellectual property – is it copyright or copyleft? should source-code be proprietary or 'free'? – goes deeper and deeper into the 'innerstructure' of society itself. Miguel Icaza describes this well: "as the years pass and you're working in this framework, you start to reevaluate in many areas your relationships with your friends and your family. The same ideas about free software and sharing and caring about other people start to permeate other aspects of your life" (Moody 323). Perhaps it's time to look more carefully to look more carefully not just at intellectual property, but at the 'rights' and responsibilities associated with all kinds of property, to reach a more equitable and sustainable means to manage the tangible and intangible resources of this world we share. Works Cited Blackstone, Sir William. "Commentaries on the Laws of England." Book 2, 1765, 2, quoted in Andrew Terry and Des Guigni, Business, Society and the Law. Marrickville, Australia: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1994. Hardin, Garrett. "The Tragedy of the Commons." Science 162 (1968): 1243-8. 10 Mar. 2003 <http://www.constitution.org/cmt/tragcomm.htm>. “The Free Software Definition.” Free Software Foundation. 10 Mar. 2003 <http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-sw.php>. Sourceforge. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://sourceforge.net/>. Linux. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.linux.org/>. GNOME. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.gnome.org/>. Apache. The Apache Software Foundation. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.apache.org/>. MySQL. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.mysql.com/>. PHP. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.php.net/>. Perl. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.perl.org/>. Python. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.python.org/>. Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. 11 Aug. 1998. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.openresources.com/documents/cathedral-bazaar>. (Note: original location at http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ is no longer accessible.) Moody, Glyn. Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution. London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2001. Torvalds, Linus, and Rishab Aiyer Ghosh. "Interview with Linus Torvalds". First Monday 3.3 (1998). 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_3/torvalds/index.php>. Pavlicek, Russell C. Embracing Insanity: Open Source Software Development. Indianapolis: Sams Publishing, 2000. "Licenses – GNU Project." GNU/Free Software Foundation. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.fsf.org/licenses/licenses.html#TOCWhatIsCopyleft>. Lessig, Lawrence (Larry). Home page. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig>. Creative Commons. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://creativecommons.org/>. Norlin, Eric. Weblog. 23 Feb. 2003. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.unchartedshores.com/blogger/archive/2003_02_23_ar... ...chive3.html#90388497>. “G W Bush Went AWOL.” AWOLBush.com. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://www.awolbush.com/>. Searls, Doc, and David Weinberger. World Of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else. 9 Mar. 2003 <http://worldofends.com/>. Searls, Doc. "Is Linux Infrastructure? Or Is it Deeper than That?" Linux Journal 14 May 2002. 10 Mar. 2003 <http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6074>. ---. "Setting Fire to Hollywood’s Plans for the Net: The GeekPAC Story". Linux Journal 29 Apr. 2002. 10 Mar. 2003 <http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6033>. Links http://creativecommons.org/ http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig http://sourceforge.net/ http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ http://worldofends.com/ http://www.apache.org/ http://www.awolbush.com/ http://www.constitution.org/cmt/tragcomm.htm http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_3/torvalds/index.html http://www.fsf.org/licenses/licenses.html\lTOCWhatIsCopyleft http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-sw.html http://www.gnome.org/ http://www.linux.org/ http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6033 http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6074 http://www.mysql.com/ http://www.openresources.com/documents/cathedral-bazaar http://www.perl.org/ http://www.php.net/ http://www.python.org/ http://www.unchartedshores.com/blogger/archive/2003_02_23_archive3.html\l90388497 Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Graves, Tom. "Something Happened on the Way to the ©" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/03-somethinghappened.php>. APA Style Graves, T. (2003, Apr 23). Something Happened on the Way to the ©. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/03-somethinghappened.php>

Introduction The term monster might have its roots in the Latin word monere (to warn), but it has since evolved to have various symbolic meanings, from a terrifying mythical creature to a person of extreme cruelty. No matter the flexibility in use, the term is mostly meant to be derogatory (Asma). As Gilmore puts it, monsters “embody all that is dangerous and horrible in the human imagination” (1). However, it may be argued that monsters sometimes perform the much-needed work of defining and policing our norms (Mittman and Hensel). Since their archetype is predisposed to transgressing boundaries of human integrity (Gilmore), they help establish deviation between human and in-human. Their cognition and action are considered ‘other’ (Kearney) and a means with which people can understand what is right and wrong, and what is divergent from appropriate ways of being. The term monster need not even refer to the werewolves, ogres, vampires, zombies and the like that strike fear in audiences through their ‘immoral, heinous or unjust’ appearance or behaviours. Rather, the term monster can be, and has been, readily applied as a metaphor to describe the unthinkable, unethical, and brutal actions of human beings (Beville 5). Inadvertently, “through their bodies, words, and deeds, monsters show us ourselves” (Mittman and Hensel 2), or what we consider monstrous about ourselves. Therefore, humans acting in ways that deviate from societal norms and standards can be viewed as monstrous. This is evident in the representations of public relations practitioners in media offerings. In the practice of public relations, ethical standards are advocated as the norm, and deviating from them considered unprofessional (Fawkes), and as we contend: monstrous. However, the practice has long suffered a negative stereotypical perception of being deceptive, and with public relations roles receiving less screen time than shows and films about lawyers, accountants, teachers and the like, these few derogatory depictions can distort how audiences view the occupation (Johnston). Depictions of professions (lawyers, cops, journalists, etc.) tend to be cliché, but our contention is that fewer depictions of public relations practitioners on screen further limit the possibility for diverse depictions. The media can have a socialising impact and can influence audiences to view the content they consume as a reflection of the real world around them (Chandler). Television, in particular, with its capacity to prompt heuristic processing in audiences (Shurm), has messages that can be easily decoded by people of various literacies as they become immersed in the viewing experiences (Gerbner and Gross). These messages gain potency because, despite being set in fictional worlds, they can be understood as reflective of the world and audiences’ experiences of it (Gerbner and Gross). Tsetsura, Bentley, and Newcomb add that popular stories recounted in the media have authoritative power and can offer patterns of meaning that shape individual perceptions. Admittedly, as Stuart Hall suggests, media offerings can be encoded with ideologies and representations that are considered appropriate according to the dominant elite, but these may not necessarily be decoded as preferred meanings. In other words, those exposed to stories of monstrous public relations practitioners can agree with such a position, oppose this viewpoint, or remain neutral, but this is dependent on individual experiences. Without other frames of reference, it could be that viewers of negative portrayals of public relations accept the encoded representation that inevitably does a disservice to the profession. When the representations of the field of public relations suggest, inaccurately, that the industry is dominated by men (Johnston), and women practitioners are shown as slick dressers who control and care little about ethics (Dennison), the distortions can adversely impact on the identities of public relations practitioners and on how they are collectively viewed (Tsetsura et al.). Public relations practitioners view this portrayal as the ‘other’ and tend to distance the ideal self from it, continuing to be stuck in the dichotomy of saints and sinners (Fawkes). Our observation of television offerings such as Scandal, Flack, Call My Agent!, Absolutely Fabulous, Sex and the City, You’re the Worst, and Emily in Paris reveals how television programmes continue to perpetuate the negative stereotypes about public relations practice, where practitioners are anything but ethical—therefore monstrous. The characters, mostly well-groomed women, are shown as debased, liars and cheaters who will subvert ethical standards for personal and professional gain. Portrayals of Public Relations Practitioners in Television and Media According to Miller, the eight archetypical traits identified in media representations of public relations practitioners are: ditzy, obsequious, cynical, manipulative, money-minded, isolated, accomplished, or unfulfilled. In later research, Yoon and Black found that television representations of public relations tended to suggest that people in these roles were heartless, manipulative bullies, while Lambert and White contend that the depiction of the profession has improved to be more positive, but nonetheless continues to do a disservice to the practice by presenting female workers, especially, as “shallow but loveable” (18). We too find that public relations practitioners continue to be portrayed as morally ambiguous characters who are willing to break ethical codes of conduct to suit the needs of their clients. We discuss three themes prevalent as popular tropes in television programmes that characterise public relations practitioners as monstrous. To Be or Not to Be a Slick and Skilful Liar? Most television programmes present public relations practitioners as slick and skilful liars, who are shown as well-groomed and authoritative, convinced that they are lying only to protect their clients. In fact, in most cases the characters are shown to not only believe but also advocate to their juniors that ‘a little bit of lying’ is almost necessary to maintain client relationships and ensure campaign success. For example, in the British drama Flack, the main character of Robyn (played by Anna Paquin) is heard advising her prodigy “just assume we are lying to everyone”. The programmes also feature characters who are in dilemma about the monstrous expectations from their roles, struggling to accept that that they engage in deception as part of their jobs. However, most of them are presented as somewhat of an ugly duckling or the modest character in the programme, who is not always rational or in an explicit position of power. For example, Emily from Emily in Paris (played by Lily Collins), while working as a social media manager, regularly questions the approaches taken by the firm she works for. Her boss Sylvie Grateux (played by Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu), who embodies the status quo, is constantly disapproving of Emily’s lack of sophisticated self-presentation, among other aspects. In the episode ‘Faux Amis’, Sylvie quips “it’s not you personally. It’s everything you stand for. You’re the enemy of luxury because luxury is defined by sophistication and taste, not emilyinparis”. Similarly, in the first episode of Call My Agent!, Samuel Kerr (played by Alain Rimoux), the head of a film publicity firm, solves the conundrum faced by his anxious junior Gabriel (played by Grégory Montel) by suggesting that he lie to his client about the real reason why she lost the film. When a modestly dressed Gabriel questions how he can lie to someone he cares for, Samuel, towering over him in an impeccable suit and a confident demeanour, advises “who said anything about lying? Don’t lie. Simply don’t tell her the truth”. However, the subtext here is that the lie is to protect the client from unnecessary hurt and in doing so nurtures the client relationship. So, it lets the audience decide the morality of lying here. It may be argued that moral ambiguity may not necessarily be monstrous. Such grey characters are often crafted because they allow audiences to relate more readily to themselves by encouraging what Hawkins refers to as mental play. Audiences are less interested in the black and white of morality and veer towards shows such as Call My Agent! where storylines hone in on the need to do bad for the greater good. In these ways, public relations practitioners still transgress moral standards but are less likely to be considered monstrous because the impact and effect on others is utilitarian in nature. It is also interesting to note that in these programmes physical appearance is made to play a crucial role in showcasing the power and prestige of the senior public relations practitioner. This focus on attire can tend to further perpetuate unfavourable stereotypes about public relations practitioners being high income earners (Grandien) who are styled with branded apparel but lacking in substance and morals (Fröhlich and Peters). Promiscuous Women The urge to attract audiences to a female character can also lead to developing and cementing unfavourable stereotypes of public relations practitioners as uninhibited women who live on blurred lines between personal and professional. These characters are not portrayed as inherently bad, but instead are found to indulge in lives of excess. In her definition of the monstrous, Arumugam suggests that excess and insatiable appetites direct the monster’s behaviour, and Kearney outlines that this uncontainable excess is what signals the difference between humans and others. Such excess is readily identifiable in the character of Patsy Stone (played by Joanna Lumley) in Absolutely Fabulous. She is an alcoholic, regularly uses recreational drugs, is highly promiscuous, and chain-smokes throughout the series. She is depicted as prone to acting deceptively to maintain her vices. In Flack, Robyn is shown as regularly snorting cocaine and having sex with her clients. Those reviewing the show highlight how it will attract those interested in “its dark, acidic sense of humour” (Greene) while others condemn it because it emphasises the “depraved publicist” trope (Knibbs) and call it “one of the worst TV shows ever made” even though it is trying to highlight concerns raised in the MeToo movement about how men need to respect women (McGurk). Female characters such as Robyn, with her willingness to question why a client has not tried to sleep with her, appear to undermine the empowerment of the movement rather than support it, and continue to maintain the archetypes that those working in the field of public relations abhor. Similarly, Samantha Jones (played by Kim Cattrell) of Sex and the City is portrayed as sexually liberated, and in one episode another character describes Samantha’s vagina as “the hottest spot in town: it’s always open”. In many ways Samantha’s sexual behaviour reflects a post-feminist narrative of empowerment, agency, and choice, but it could also be read as a product of being a public relations practitioner frequenting parties and bars as she rubs shoulders with clients, celebrities, and high-profile businesspeople. To this end, Patsy, Samantha, and Robyn glamourise public relations and paint it as simply an extension of their liberated and promiscuous selves, with little care for any expectation of professionalism or work ethic. This is also in stark contrast to the reality, where women often tend to occupy technical roles that see much of their time spent in doing the hard yards of publicity and promotion (Krugler). Making Others Err Public relations practitioners are not just shown as being morally ambiguous themselves, but often quite adept at making others do deceitful acts on their behalf, thus nonchalantly oppressing others to get their way. For example, although lauded for elevating an African-American woman to the lead role despite the show maintaining misrepresentations of race (Lambert), the main character of Olivia Pope (played by Kerry Washington) in the television programme Scandal regularly subverts the law for her clients despite considering herself one of the “good guys” and wearing a “white hat”. Over the course of seven seasons, Olivia Pope is found to rig elections, plant listening devices in political figures’ offices, bribe, threaten, and conduct an affair with the President. In some cases, she calls on the services of her colleague Huck to literally, and figuratively, get rid of the barriers in the way of protecting her clients. For example, in season one’s episode Crash and Burn she asks Huck to torture a suspect for information about a dead client. Her willingness to request such actions of her friend and colleague, regardless of perceived good motivations, reinforces Mittman’s categorisation that monsters are identified by their effect and impact on others. Here, the impact includes the torturing of a suspect and the revisiting of psychological trauma by Huck’s character. Huck struggles to overcome his past as a killer and spends much of the show trying to curb his monstrous tendencies which are often brought on by PR woman Olivia’s requests. Although she is sometimes striving for justice, Olivia’s desire for results can lead her to act monstrously, which inadvertently contributes to the racist and sexist ideologies that have long been associated with monsters and perceptions of the Other. Across time and space, certain ethnic groups, such as those of African descent, have been associated with the demonic (Cohen). Similarly, all that is feminine often needs to be discarded as the monster to conform to the patriarchal order of society (Creed). Therefore, Olivia Pope’s monstrous behaviour not only does a disservice to representations of public relations practitioners, but also inadvertently perpetuates negative and inaccurate stereotypes about women of African American descent. Striving to be Ethical The majority of public relations practitioners are encouraged, and in some cases expected, to conform to ethical guidelines to practice and gain respect, admiration, and in-group status. In New Zealand, those who opt to become members of the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand (PRINZ) are required to abide by the association’s code of ethics. The code stipulates that members are bound to act in ways that serve public interests by ensuring they are honest, disclose conflict of interests, follow the law, act with professionalism, ensure openness and privacy are maintained, and uphold values of loyalty, fairness, and independence (PRINZ). Similarly, the Global Alliance of Public Relations and Communication Management that binds practitioners together identifies nine guiding principles that are to be adhered to to be recognised as acting ethically. These include obeying laws, working in the public’s interest, ensuring freedom of speech and assembly, acting with integrity, and upholding privacy in sensitive matters (to name a few). These governing principles are designed to maintain ethical practice in the field. Of course, the trouble is that not all who claim to practice public relations become members of the local or global governing bodies. This implies that professional associations like PRINZ are not able to enforce ethics across the board. In New Zealand alone, public relations consultants have had to offer financial reparations for acting in defamatory ways online (Fisher), or have been alleged to have bribed an assault victim to prevent the person giving evidence in a court case (Hurley). Some academics have accused the industry of being engaged in organised lying (Peacock), but these are not common, nor are these moral transgressors accepted into ethical bodies that afford practitioners authenticity and legitimacy. In most cases, public relations practitioners view their role as acting as the moral conscience of the organisations they support (Schauster, Neill, Ferrucci, and Tandoc). Furthermore, they rated better than the average adult when it came to solving ethical dilemmas through moral reasoning (Schuaster et al.). Additionally, training of practitioners through guidance of mentors has continued to contribute to the improved ethical ratings of public relations. What these findings suggest is that the monsters of public relations portrayed on our television screens are exaggerations that are not reflective of most of the practice. Women of Substance, But Not Necessarily Power Exploring the role of women in public relations, Topic, Cunha, Reigstad, Jele-Sanchez, and Moreno found that female practitioners were subordinated to their male counterparts but were found to be more inclined to practice two-way communication, offer balanced perspectives, opt to negotiate, and build relationships through cooperation. The competitiveness, independence, and status identified in popular media portrayals were found to be exhibited more by male practitioners, despite there being more women in the public relations industry than men. As Fitch argues, popular culture continues to suggest that men dominate public relations, and their preferred characteristics end up being those elements that permeate the media messages, regardless of instances where the lead character is a woman or the fact that feminist values of “loyalty, ethics, morality, [and] fairness” are advocated by female practitioners in real life (Vardeman-Winter and Place 333). Additionally, even though public relations is a feminised field, female practitioners struggle to break the glass ceiling, with male practitioners dominating executive positions and out-earning women (Pompper). Interestingly, in public relations, power is not just limited due to gender but also area of practice. In her ethnographic study of the New Zealand practice, Sissons found that practitioners who worked in consultancies were relatively powerless vis-à-vis their clients, and often this asymmetry negatively affected the practitioner’s decision-making. This implies that in stark contrast to the immoral, glamourous, and authoritative depiction of public relations women in television programmes, in reality they are mired by the struggles of a gendered occupation. Accordingly, they are not in fact in a position to have monstrous power over and impact on others. Therefore, one of the only elements the shows seem to capture and emphasise is that public relations is an occupation that specialises in image management; but what these shows contribute to is an ideology that women are expected to look and carry themselves in particular ways, ultimately constructing aesthetic standards that can diminish women’s power and self-esteem. Conclusion Miller’s archetypes may be over twenty years old, but the trend towards obsequious, manipulative, and cynical television characters remains. Although there have been identifiable shifts to loveable, yet shallow, public relations practitioners, such as Alexis Rose on Schitt’s Creek, the appeal of monstrous public relations practitioners remains. As Cohen puts it, monsters reveal to audiences “what a member of that society can become when those same dictates are rejected, when the authority of leaders or customs disintegrates and the subordination of individual to hierarchy is lost” (68). In other words, audiences enjoy watching the stories of metaphorical monsters because they exhibit the behaviours that are expected to be repressed in human beings; they depict what happens when the social norms of society are disturbed (Levina and Bui). At the very least, these media representations can act, much as monster narratives do, as a cautionary tale on how not to think and act to remain accepted as part of the in-group rather than being perceived as the Other. As Mittman and Hensel argue, society can learn much from monsters because monsters exist within human beings. According to Cohen, they offer meaning about the world and can teach audiences so they can learn, in this case, how to be better. Although the representations of public relations in television can offer insights into roles that are usually most effective when they are invisible (Chorazy and Harrington), the continued negative stereotypes of public relations practitioners can adversely impact on the industry if people are unaware of the practices of the occupation, because lacking a reference point limits audiences’ opportunities to critically evaluate the media representations. This will certainly harm the occupation by perpetuating existing negative stereotypes of charming and immoral practitioners, and perhaps add to its struggles with gendered identity and professional legitimacy. References Absolutely Fabulous. Created by Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French. 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Each community’s title deed carries the indelible blood stains of our ancestors. (Watson, "Howard’s End" 2)IntroductionAccording to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term coalition comes from the Latin coalescere or ‘coalesce’, meaning “come or bring together to form one mass or whole”. Coalesce refers to the unity affirmed as something grows: co – “together”, alesce – “to grow up”. While coalition is commonly associated with formalised alliances and political strategy in the name of self-interest and common goals, this paper will draw as well on the broader etymological understanding of coalition as “growing together” in order to discuss the Australian government’s recent changes to land rights legislation, the 2007 Emergency Intervention into the Northern Territory, and its decision to use Indigenous land in the Northern Territory as a dumping ground for nuclear waste. What unites these distinct cases is the role of the Australian nation-state in asserting its sovereign right to decide, something Giorgio Agamben notes is the primary indicator of sovereign right and power (Agamben). As Fiona McAllan has argued in relation to the Northern Territory Intervention: “Various forces that had been coalescing and captivating the moral, imaginary centre were now contributing to a spectacular enactment of a sovereign rescue mission” (par. 18). Different visions of “growing together”, and different coalitional strategies, are played out in public debate and policy formation. This paper will argue that each of these cases represents an alliance between successive, oppositional governments - and the nourishment of neoliberal imperatives - over and against the interests of some of the Indigenous communities, especially with relation to land rights. A critical stance is taken in relation to the alterations to land rights laws over the past five years and with the Northern Territory Emergency Intervention, hereinafter referred to as the Intervention, firstly by the Howard Liberal Coalition Government and later continued, in what Anthony Lambert has usefully termed a “postcoalitional” fashion, by the Rudd Labor Government. By this, Lambert refers to the manner in which dominant relations of power continue despite the apparent collapse of old political coalitions and even in the face of seemingly progressive symbolic and material change. It is not the intention of this paper to locate Indigenous people in opposition to models of economic development aligned with neoliberalism. There are examples of productive relations between Indigenous communities and mining companies, in which Indigenous people retain control over decision-making and utilise Land Council’s to negotiate effectively. Major mining company Rio Tinto, for example, initiated an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Policy platform in the mid-1990s (Rio Tinto). Moreover, there are diverse perspectives within the Indigenous community regarding social and economic reform governed by neoliberal agendas as well as government initiatives such as the Intervention, motivated by a concern for the abuse of children, as outlined in The Little Children Are Sacred Report (Wild & Anderson; hereinafter Little Children). Indeed, there is no agreement on whether or not the Intervention had anything to do with land rights. On the one hand, Noel Pearson has strongly opposed this assertion: “I've got as much objections as anybody to the ideological prejudices of the Howard Government in relation to land, but this question is not about a 'land grab'. The Anderson Wild Report tells us about the scale of Aboriginal children's neglect and abuse" (ABC). Marcia Langton has agreed with this stating that “There's a cynical view afoot that the emergency intervention was a political ploy - a Trojan Horse - to sneak through land grabs and some gratuitous black head-kicking disguised as concern for children. These conspiracy theories abound, and they are mostly ridiculous” (Langton). Patrick Dodson on the other hand, has argued that yes, of course, the children remain the highest priority, but that this “is undermined by the Government's heavy-handed authoritarian intervention and its ideological and deceptive land reform agenda” (Dodson). WhitenessOne way to frame this issue is to look at it through the lens of critical race and whiteness theory. Is it possible that the interests of whiteness are at play in the coalitions of corporate/private enterprise and political interests in the Northern Territory, in the coupling of social conservatism and economic rationalism? Using this framework allows us to identify the partial interests at play and the implications of this for discussions in Australia around sovereignty and self-determination, as well as providing a discursive framework through which to understand how these coalitional interests represent a specific understanding of progress, growth and development. Whiteness theory takes an empirically informed stance in order to critique the operation of unequal power relations and discriminatory practices imbued in racialised structures. Whiteness and critical race theory take the twin interests of racial privileging and racial discrimination and discuss their historical and on-going relevance for law, philosophy, representation, media, politics and policy. Foregrounding contemporary analysis in whiteness studies is the central role of race in the development of the Australian nation, most evident in the dispossession and destruction of Indigenous lands, cultures and lives, which occurred initially prior to Federation, as well as following. Cheryl Harris’s landmark paper “Whiteness as Property” argues, in the context of the US, that “the origins of property rights ... are rooted in racial domination” and that the “interaction between conceptions of race and property ... played a critical role in establishing and maintaining racial and economic subordination” (Harris 1716).Reiterating the logic of racial inferiority and the assumption of a lack of rationality and civility, Indigenous people were named in the Australian Constitution as “flora and fauna” – which was not overturned until a national referendum in 1967. This, coupled with the logic of terra nullius represents the racist foundational logic of Australian statehood. As is well known, terra nullius declared that the land belonged to no-one, denying Indigenous people property rights over land. Whiteness, Moreton-Robinson contends, “is constitutive of the epistemology of the West; it is an invisible regime of power that secures hegemony through discourse and has material effects in everyday life” (Whiteness 75).In addition to analysing racial power structures, critical race theory has presented studies into the link between race, whiteness and neoliberalism. Roberts and Mahtami argue that it is not just that neoliberalism has racialised effects, rather that neoliberalism and its underlying philosophy is “fundamentally raced and produces racialized bodies” (248; also see Goldberg Threat). The effect of the free market on state sovereignty has been hotly debated too. Aihwa Ong contends that neoliberalism produces particular relationships between the state and non-state corporations, as well as determining the role of individuals within the body-politic. Ong specifies:Market-driven logic induces the co-ordination of political policies with the corporate interests, so that developmental discussions favour the fragmentation of the national space into various contiguous zones, and promote the differential regulation of the populations who can be connected to or disconnected from global circuits of capital. (Ong, Neoliberalism 77)So how is whiteness relevant to a discussion of land reform, and to the changes to land rights passed along with Intervention legislation in 2007? Irene Watson cites the former Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough, who opposed the progressive individual with what he termed the “failed collective.” Watson asserts that in the debates around land leasing and the Intervention, “Aboriginal law and traditional roles and responsibilities for caring and belonging to country are transformed into the cause for community violence” (Sovereign Spaces 34). The effects of this, I will argue, are twofold and move beyond a moral or social agenda in the strictest sense of the terms: firstly to promote, and make more accessible, the possibility of private and government coalitions in relation to Indigenous lands, and secondly, to reinforce the sovereignty of the state, recognised in the capacity to make decisions. It is here that the explicit reiteration of what Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls “white possession” is clearly evidenced (The Possessive Logic). Sovereign Interventions In the Northern Territory 50% of land is owned by Indigenous people under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976 (ALRA) (NT). This law gives Indigenous people control, mediated via land councils, over their lands. It is the contention of this paper that the rights enabled through this law have been eroded in recent times in the coalescing interests of government and private enterprise via, broadly, land rights reform measures. In August 2007 the government passed a number of laws that overturned aspects of the Racial Discrimination Act 197 5(RDA), including the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Bill 2007 and the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Amendment (Township Leasing) Bill 2007. Ostensibly these laws were a response to evidence of alarming levels of child abuse in remote Indigenous communities, which has been compiled in the special report Little Children, co-chaired by Rex Wild QC and Patricia Anderson. This report argued that urgent but culturally appropriate strategies were required in order to assist the local communities in tackling the issues. The recommendations of the report did not include military intervention, and instead prioritised the need to support and work in dialogue with local Indigenous people and organisations who were already attempting, with extremely limited resources, to challenge the problem. Specifically it stated that:The thrust of our recommendations, which are designed to advise the NT government on how it can help support communities to effectively prevent and tackle child sexual abuse, is for there to be consultation with, and ownership by the local communities, of these solutions. (Wild & Anderson 23) Instead, the Federal Coalition government, with support from the opposition Labor Party, initiated a large scale intervention, which included the deployment of the military, to install order and assist medical personnel to carry out compulsory health checks on minors. The intervention affected 73 communities with populations of over 200 Aboriginal men, women and children (Altman, Neo-Paternalism 8). The reality of high levels of domestic and sexual abuse in Indigenous communities requires urgent and diligent attention, but it is not the space of this paper to unpack the media spectacle or the politically determined response to these serious issues, or the considered and careful reports such as the one cited above. While the report specifies the need for local solutions and local control of the process and decision-making, the Federal Liberal Coalition government’s intervention, and the current Labor government’s faithfulness to these, has been centralised and external, imposed upon communities. Rebecca Stringer argues that the Trojan horse thesis indicates what is at stake in this Intervention, while also pinpointing its main weakness. That is, the counter-intuitive links its architects make between addressing child sexual abuse and re-litigating Indigenous land tenure and governance arrangements in a manner that undermines Aboriginal sovereignty and further opens Aboriginal lands to private interests among the mining, nuclear power, tourism, property development and labour brokerage industries. (par. 8)Alongside welfare quarantining for all Indigenous people, was a decision by parliament to overturn the “permit system”, a legal protocol provided by the ALRA and in place so as to enable Indigenous peoples the right to refuse and grant entry to strangers wanting to access their lands. To place this in a broader context of land rights reform, the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 2006, created the possibility of 99 year individual leases, at the expense of communal ownership. The legislation operates as a way of individualising the land arrangements in remote Indigenous communities by opening communal land up as private plots able to be bought by Aboriginal people or any other interested party. Indeed, according to Leon Terrill, land reform in Australia over the past 10 years reflects an attempt to return control of decision-making to government bureaucracy, even as governments have downplayed this aspect. Terrill argues that Township Leasing (enabled via the 2006 legislation), takes “wholesale decision-making about land use” away from Traditional Owners and instead places it in the hands of a government entity called the Executive Director of Township Leasing (3). With the passage of legislation around the Intervention, five year leases were created to enable the Commonwealth “administrative control” over the communities affected (Terrill 3). Finally, under the current changes it is unlikely that more than a small percentage of Aboriginal people will be able to access individual land leasing. Moreover, the argument has been presented that these reforms reflect a broader project aimed at replacing communal land ownership arrangements. This agenda has been justified at a rhetorical level via the demonization of communal land ownership arrangements. Helen Hughes and Jenness Warin, researchers at the rightwing think-tank, the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), released a report entitled A New Deal for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in Remote Communities, in which they argue that there is a direct casual link between communal ownership and economic underdevelopment: “Communal ownership of land, royalties and other resources is the principle cause of the lack of economic development in remote areas” (in Norberry & Gardiner-Garden 8). In 2005, then Prime Minister, John Howard, publicly introduced the government’s ambition to alter the structure of Indigenous land arrangements, couching his agenda in the language of “equal opportunity”. I believe there’s a case for reviewing the whole issue of Aboriginal land title in the sense of looking more towards private recognition …, I’m talking about giving them the same opportunities as the rest of their fellow Australians. (Watson, "Howard’s End" 1)Scholars of critical race theory have argued that the language of equality, usually tied to liberalism (though not always) masks racial inequality and even results in “camouflaged racism” (Davis 61). David Theo Goldberg notes that, “the racial status-quo - racial exclusions and privileges favouring for the most part middle - and upper class whites - is maintained by formalising equality through states of legal and administrative science” (Racial State 222). While Howard and his coalition of supporters have associated communal title with disadvantage and called for the equality to be found in individual leases (Dodson), Altman has argued that there is no logical link between forms of communal land ownership and incidences of sexual abuse, and indeed, the government’s use of sexual abuse disingenuously disguises it’s imperative to alter the land ownership arrangements: “Given the proposed changes to the ALRA are in no way associated with child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities […] there is therefore no pressing urgency to pass the amendments.” (Altman National Emergency, 3) In the case of the Intervention, land rights reforms have affected the continued dispossession of Indigenous people in the interests of “commercial development” (Altman Neo-Paternalism 8). In light of this it can be argued that what is occurring conforms to what Aileen Moreton-Robinson has highlighted as the “possessive logic of patriarchal white sovereignty” (Possessive Logic). White sovereignty, under the banner of benevolent paternalism overturns the authority it has conceded to local Indigenous communities. This is realised via township leases, five year leases, housing leases and other measures, stripping them of the right to refuse the government and private enterprise entry into their lands (effectively the right of control and decision-making), and opening them up to, as Stringer argues, a range of commercial and government interests. Future Concerns and Concluding NotesThe etymological root of coalition is coalesce, inferring the broad ambition to “grow together”. In the issues outlined above, growing together is dominated by neoliberal interests, or what Stringer has termed “assimilatory neoliberation”. The issue extends beyond a social and economic assimilationism project and into a political and legal “land grab”, because, as Ong notes, the neoliberal agenda aligns itself with the nation-state. This coalitional arrangement of neoliberal and governmental interests reiterates “white possession” (Moreton-Robinson, The Possessive Logic). This is evidenced in the position of the current Labor government decision to uphold the nomination of Muckaty as a radioactive waste repository site in Australia (Stokes). In 2007, the Northern Land Council (NLC) nominated Muckaty Station to be the site for waste disposal. This decision cannot be read outside the context of Maralinga, in the South Australian desert, a site where experiments involving nuclear technology were conducted in the 1960s. As John Keane recounts, the Australian government permitted the British government to conduct tests, dispossessing the local Aboriginal group, the Tjarutja, and employing a single patrol officer “the job of monitoring the movements of the Aborigines and quarantining them in settlements” (Keane). Situated within this historical colonial context, in 2006, under a John Howard led Liberal Coalition, the government passed the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Act (CRWMA), a law which effectively overrode the rulings of the Northern Territory government in relation decisions regarding nuclear waste disposal, as well as overriding the rights of traditional Aboriginal owners and the validity of sacred sites. The Australian Labor government has sought to alter the CRWMA in order to reinstate the importance of following due process in the nomination process of land. However, it left the proposed site of Muckaty as confirmed, and the new bill, titled National Radioactive Waste Management retains many of the same characteristics of the Howard government legislation. In 2010, 57 traditional owners from Muckaty and surrounding areas signed a petition stating their opposition to the disposal site (the case is currently in the Federal Court). At a time when nuclear power has come back onto the radar as a possible solution to the energy crisis and climate change, questions concerning the investments of government and its loyalties should be asked. As Malcolm Knox has written “the nuclear industry has become evangelical about the dangers of global warming” (Knox). While nuclear is a “cleaner” energy than coal, until better methods are designed for processing its waste, larger amounts of it will be produced, requiring lands that can hold it for the desired timeframes. For Australia, this demands attention to the politics and ethics of waste disposal. Such an issue is already being played out, before nuclear has even been signed off as a solution to climate change, with the need to find a disposal site to accommodate already existing uranium exported to Europe and destined to return as waste to Australia in 2014. The decision to go ahead with Muckaty against the wishes of the voices of local Indigenous people may open the way for the co-opting of a discourse of environmentalism by political and business groups to promote the development and expansion of nuclear power as an alternative to coal and oil for energy production; dumping waste on Indigenous lands becomes part of the solution to climate change. During the 2010 Australian election, Greens Leader Bob Brown played upon the word coalition to suggest that the Liberal National Party were in COALition with the mining industry over the proposed Mining Tax – the Liberal Coalition opposed any mining tax (Brown). Here Brown highlights the alliance of political agendas and business or corporate interests quite succinctly. Like Brown’s COALition, will government (of either major party) form a coalition with the nuclear power stakeholders?This paper has attempted to bring to light what Dodson has identified as “an alliance of established conservative forces...with more recent and strident ideological thinking associated with free market economics and notions of individual responsibility” and the implications of this alliance for land rights (Dodson). It is important to ask critical questions about the vision of “growing together” being promoted via the coalition of conservative, neoliberal, private and government interests.Acknowledgements Many thanks to the reviewers of this article for their useful suggestions. 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Dégueulasse is French slang for “disgusting,” derived in 1867 from the French verb dégueuler, to vomit. Despite its vulgar status, it is frequently used by almost every French speaker, including foreigners and students. It is also a term that has often been employed to describe the 1973 cult film, La Grande bouffe [Blow Out], by Marco Ferreri, which recounts in grotesque detail the gastronomic suicide of four male protagonists. This R-rated French-Italian production was booed, and the director spat on, at the 26th Cannes Film Festival—the Jury President, Ingrid Bergman, said it was the most “sordid” film she’d ever seen, and is even reported to have vomited after watching it (Télérama). Ferreri nevertheless walked away with the Prix FIPRESCI, awarded by the Federation of International Critics, and it is apparently the largest grossing release in the history of Paris with more than 700,000 entries in Paris and almost 3 million in France overall. Scandal sells, and this was especially seemingly so 1970s, when this film was avidly consumed as part of an unholy trinity alongside Bernardo Bertolucci’s Le Dernier Tango à Paris [Last Tango in Paris] (1972) and Jean Eustache’s La Maman et la putain [The Mother and the Whore] (1973). Fast forward forty years, though, and at the very moment when La Grande bouffe was being commemorated with a special screening on the 2013 Cannes Film Festival programme, a handful of University of Melbourne French students in a subject called “Matters of Taste” were boycotting the film as an unacceptable assault to their sensibilities. Over the decade that I have been showing the film to undergraduate students, this has never happened before. In this article, I want to examine critically the questions of taste that underpin this particular predicament. Analysing firstly the intradiegetic portrayal of taste in the film, through both gustatory and aesthetic signifiers, then the choice of the film as a key element in a University subject corpus, I will finally question the (dis)taste displayed by certain students, contextualising it as part of an ongoing socio-cultural commentary on food, sex, life, and death. Framed by a brief foray into Bourdieusian theories of taste, I will attempt to draw some conclusions on the continual renegotiation of gustatory and aesthetic tastes in relation to La Grande bouffe, and thereby deepen understanding of why it has become the incarnation of dégueulasse today. Theories of Taste In the 1970s, the parameters of “good” and “bad” taste imploded in the West, following political challenges to the power of the bourgeoisie that also undermined their status as the contemporary arbiters of taste. This revolution of manners was particularly shattering in France, fuelled by the initial success of the May 68 student, worker, and women’s rights movements (Ross). The democratization of taste served to legitimize desires different from those previously dictated by bourgeois norms, enabling greater diversity in representing taste across a broad spectrum. It was reflected in the cultural products of the 1970s, including cinema, which had already broken with tradition during the New Wave in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and became a vector for political ideologies as well as radical aesthetic choices (Smith). Commonly regarded as “the decade that taste forgot,” the 1970s were also a time for re-assessing the sociology of taste, with the magisterial publication of Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979, English trans. 1984). As Bourdieu refuted Kant’s differentiation between the legitimate aesthetic, so defined by its “disinterestedness,” and the common aesthetic, derived from sensory pleasures and ordinary meanings, he also attempted to abolish the opposition between the “taste of reflection” (pure pleasure) and the “taste of sense” (facile pleasure) (Bourdieu 7). In so doing, he laid the foundations of a new paradigm for understanding the apparently incommensurable choices that are not the innate expression of our unique personalities, but rather the product of our class, education, family experiences—our habitus. Where Bourdieu’s theories align most closely with the relationship between taste and revulsion is in the realm of aesthetic disposition and its desire to differentiate: “good” taste is almost always predicated on the distaste of the tastes of others. Tastes (i.e. manifested preferences) are the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference. It is no accident that, when they have to be justified, they are asserted purely negatively, by the refusal of other tastes. In matters of taste, more than anywhere else, all determination is negation; and tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance (“sick-making”) of the tastes of others. “De gustibus non est disputandum”: not because “tous les goûts sont dans la nature,” but because each taste feels itself to be natural—and so it almost is, being a habitus—which amounts to rejecting others as unnatural and therefore vicious. Aesthetic intolerance can be terribly violent. Aversion to different life-styles is perhaps one of the strongest barriers between the classes (Bourdieu). Although today’s “Gen Y” Melbourne University students are a long way from 1970s French working class/bourgeois culture clashes, these observations on taste as the corollary of distaste are still salient tools of interpretation of their attitudes towards La Grande bouffe. And, just as Bourdieu effectively deconstructed Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and the 18th “century of taste” notions of universality and morality in aesthetics (Dickie, Gadamer, Allison) in his groundbreaking study of distinction, his own theories have in turn been subject to revision in an age of omnivorous consumption and eclectic globalisation, with various cultural practices further destabilising the hierarchies that formerly monopolized legitimate taste (Sciences Humaines, etc). Bourdieu’s theories are still, however, useful for analysing La Grande bouffe given the contemporaneous production of these texts, as they provide a frame for understanding (dis)taste both within the filmic narrative and in the wider context of its reception. Taste and Distaste in La Grande bouffe To go to the cinema is like to eat or shit, it’s a physiological act, it’s urban guerrilla […] Enough with feelings, I want to make a physiological film (Celluloid Liberation Front). Marco Ferreri’s statements about his motivations for La Grande bouffe coincide here with Bourdieu’s explanation of taste: clearly the director wished to depart from psychological cinema favoured by contemporary critics and audiences and demonstrated his distaste for their preference. There were, however, psychological impulses underpinning his subject matter, as according to film academic Maurizio Viano, Ferrari had a self-destructive, compulsive relation to food, having been forced to spend a few weeks in a Swiss clinic specialising in eating disorders in 1972–1973 (Viano). Food issues abound in his biography. In an interview with Tullio Masoni, the director declared: “I was fat as a child”; his composer Phillipe Sarde recalls the grand Italian-style dinners that he would organise in Paris during the film; and, two of the film’s stars, Marcello Mastroianni and Ugo Tognazzi, actually credit the conception of La Grande bouffe to a Rabelaisian feast prepared by Tognazzi, during which Ferreri exclaimed “hey guys, we are killing ourselves!” (Viano 197–8). Evidently, there were psychological factors behind this film, but it was nevertheless the physiological aspects that Ferreri chose to foreground in his creation. The resulting film does indeed privilege the physiological, as the protagonists fornicate, fart, vomit, defecate, and—of course—eat, to wild excess. The opening scenes do not betray such sordid sequences; the four bourgeois men are introduced one by one so as to establish their class credentials as well as display their different tastes. We first encounter Ugo (Tognazzi), an Italian chef of humble peasant origins, as he leaves his elegant restaurant “Le Biscuit à soupe” and his bourgeois French wife, to take his knives and recipes away with him for the weekend. Then Michel (Piccoli), a TV host who has pre-taped his shows, gives his apartment keys to his 1970s-styled baba-cool daughter as he bids her farewell, and packs up his cleaning products and rubber gloves to take with him. Marcello (Mastroianni) emerges from a cockpit in his aviator sunglasses and smart pilot’s uniform, ordering his sexy airhostesses to carry his cheese and wine for him as he takes a last longing look around his plane. Finally, the judge and owner of the property where the action will unfold, Philippe (Noiret), is awoken by an elderly woman, Nicole, who feeds him tea and brioche, pestering him for details of his whereabouts for the weekend, until he demonstrates his free will and authority, joking about his serious life, and lying to her about attending a legal conference in London. Having given over power of attorney to Nicole, he hints at the finality of his departure, but is trying to wrest back his independence as his nanny exhorts him not to go off with whores. She would rather continue to “sacrifice herself for him” and “keep it in the family,” as she discreetly pleasures him in this scene. Scholars have identified each protagonist as an ideological signifier. For some, they represent power—Philippe is justice—and three products of that ideology: Michel is spectacle, Ugo is food, and Marcello is adventure (Celluloid Liberation Front). For others, these characters are the perfect incarnations of the first four Freudian stages of sexual development: Philippe is Oedipal, Michel is indifferent, Ugo is oral, and Marcello is impotent (Tury & Peter); or even the four temperaments of Hippocratic humouralism: Philippe the phlegmatic, Michel the melancholic, Ugo the sanguine, and Marcello the choleric (Calvesi, Viano). I would like to offer another dimension to these categories, positing that it is each protagonist’s taste that prescribes his participation in this gastronomic suicide as well as the means by which he eventually dies. Before I develop this hypothesis, I will first describe the main thrust of the narrative. The four men arrive at the villa at 68 rue Boileau where they intend to end their days (although this is not yet revealed). All is prepared for the most sophisticated and decadent feasting imaginable, with a delivery of the best meats and poultry unfurling like a surrealist painting. Surrounded by elegant artworks and demonstrating their cultural capital by reciting Shakespeare, Brillat-Savarin, and other classics, the men embark on a race to their death, beginning with a competition to eat the most oysters while watching a vintage pornographic slideshow. There is a strong thread of masculine athletic engagement in this film, as has been studied in detail by James R. Keller in “Four Little Caligulas: La Grande bouffe, Consumption and Male Masochism,” and this is exacerbated by the arrival of a young but matronly schoolmistress Andréa (Ferréol) with her students who want to see the garden. She accepts the men’s invitation to stay on in the house to become another object of competitive desire, and fully embraces all the sexual and gustatory indulgence around her. Marcello goes further by inviting three prostitutes to join them and Ugo prepares a banquet fit for a funeral. The excessive eating makes Michel flatulent and Marcello impotent; when Marcello kicks the toilet in frustration, it explodes in the famous fecal fountain scene that apparently so disgusted his then partner Catherine Deneuve, that she did not speak to him for a week (Ebert). The prostitutes flee the revolting madness, but Andréa stays like an Angel of Death, helping the men meet their end and, in surviving, perhaps symbolically marking an end to the masculinist bourgeoisie they represent.To return to the role of taste in defining the rise and demise of the protagonists, let me begin with Marcello, as he is the first to die. Despite his bourgeois attitudes, he is a modern man, associated with machines and mobility, such as the planes and the beautiful Bugatti, which he strokes with greater sensuality than the women he hoists onto it. His taste is for the functioning mechanical body, fast and competitive, much like himself when he is gorging on oysters. But his own body betrays him when his “masculine mechanics” stop functioning, and it is the fact that the Bugatti has broken down that actually causes his death—he is found frozen in driver’s seat after trying to escape in the Bugatti during the night. Marcello’s taste for the mechanical leads therefore to his eventual demise. Michel is the next victim of his own taste, which privileges aesthetic beauty, elegance, the arts, and fashion, and euphemises the less attractive or impolite, the scatological, boorish side of life. His feminized attire—pink polo-neck and flowing caftan—cannot distract from what is happening in his body. The bourgeois manners that bind him to beauty mean that breaking wind traumatises him. His elegant gestures at the dance barre encourage rather than disguise his flatulence; his loud piano playing cannot cover the sound of his loud farts, much to the mirth of Philippe and Andréa. In a final effort to conceal his painful bowel obstruction, he slips outside to die in obscene and noisy agony, balanced in an improbably balletic pose on the balcony balustrade. His desire for elegance and euphemism heralds his death. Neither Marcello nor Michel go willingly to their ends. Their tastes are thwarted, and their deaths are disgusting to them. Their cadavers are placed in the freezer room as silent witnesses to the orgy that accelerates towards its fatal goal. Ugo’s taste is more earthy and inherently linked to the aims of the adventure. He is the one who states explicitly: “If you don’t eat, you won’t die.” He wants to cook for others and be appreciated for his talents, as well as eat and have sex, preferably at the same time. It is a combination of these desires that kills him as he force-feeds himself the monumental creation of pâté in the shape of the Cathedral of Saint-Peter that has been rejected as too dry by Philippe, and too rich by Andréa. The pride that makes him attempt to finish eating his masterpiece while Andréa masturbates him on the dining table leads to a heart-stopping finale for Ugo. As for Philippe, his taste is transgressive. In spite of his upstanding career as a judge, he lies and flouts convention in his unorthodox relationship with nanny Nicole. Andréa represents another maternal figure to whom he is attracted and, while he wishes to marry her, thereby conforming to bourgeois norms, he also has sex with her, and her promiscuous nature is clearly signalled. Given his status as a judge, he reasons that he can not bring Marcello’s frozen body inside because concealing a cadaver is a crime, yet he promotes collective suicide on his premises. Philippe’s final transgression of the rules combines diabetic disobedience with Oedipal complex—Andréa serves him a sugary pink jelly dessert in the form of a woman’s breasts, complete with cherries, which he consumes knowingly and mournfully, causing his death. Unlike Marcello and Michel, Ugo and Philippe choose their demise by indulging their tastes for ingestion and transgression. Following Ferreri’s motivations and this analysis of the four male protagonists, taste is clearly a cornerstone of La Grande bouffe’s conception and narrative structure. It is equally evident that these tastes are contrary to bourgeois norms, provoking distaste and even revulsion in spectators. The film’s reception at the time of its release and ever since have confirmed this tendency in both critical reviews and popular feedback as André Habib’s article on Salo and La Grande bouffe (2001) meticulously demonstrates. With such a violent reaction, one might wonder why La Grande bouffe is found on so many cinema studies curricula and is considered to be a must-see film (The Guardian). Corpus and Corporeality in Food Film Studies I chose La Grande bouffe as the first film in the “Matters of Taste” subject, alongside Luis Bunuel’s Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast, and Laurent Bénégui’s Au Petit Marguery, as all are considered classic films depicting French eating cultures. Certainly any French cinema student would know La Grande bouffe and most cinephiles around the world have seen it. It is essential background knowledge for students studying French eating cultures and features as a key reference in much scholarly research and popular culture on the subject. After explaining the canonical status of La Grande bouffe and thus validating its inclusion in the course, I warned students about the explicit nature of the film. We studied it for one week out of the 12 weeks of semester, focusing on questions of taste in the film and the socio-cultural representations of food. Although the almost ubiquitous response was: “C’est dégueulasse!,” there was no serious resistance until the final exam when a few students declared that they would boycott any questions on La Grande bouffe. I had not actually included any such questions in the exam. The student evaluations at the end of semester indicated that several students questioned the inclusion of this “disgusting pornography” in the corpus. There is undoubtedly less nudity, violence, gore, or sex in this film than in the Game of Thrones TV series. What, then, repulses these Gen Y students? Is it as Pasolini suggests, the neorealistic dialogue and décor that disturbs, given the ontologically challenging subject of suicide? (Viano). Or is it the fact that there is no reason given for the desire to end their lives, which privileges the physiological over the psychological? Is the scatological more confronting than the pornographic? Interestingly, “food porn” is now a widely accepted term to describe a glamourized and sometimes sexualized presentation of food, with Nigella Lawson as its star, and hundreds of blog sites reinforcing its popularity. Yet as Andrew Chan points out in his article “La Grande bouffe: Cooking Shows as Pornography,” this film is where it all began: “the genealogy reaches further back, as brilliantly visualized in Marco Ferreri’s 1973 film La Grande bouffe, in which four men eat, screw and fart themselves to death” (47). Is it the overt corporeality depicted in the film that shocks cerebral students into revulsion and rebellion? Conclusion In the guise of a conclusion, I suggest that my Gen Y students’ taste may reveal a Bourdieusian distaste for the taste of others, in a third degree reaction to the 1970s distaste for bourgeois taste. First degree: Ferreri and his entourage reject the psychological for the physiological in order to condemn bourgeois values, provoking scandal in the 1970s, but providing compelling cinema on a socio-political scale. Second degree: in spite of the outcry, high audience numbers demonstrate their taste for scandal, and La Grande bouffe becomes a must-see canonical film, encouraging my choice to include it in the “Matters of Taste” corpus. Third degree: my Gen Y students’ taste expresses a distaste for the academic norms that I have embraced in showing them the film, a distaste that may be more aesthetic than political. Oui, c’est dégueulasse, mais … Bibliography Allison, Henry E. Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2001. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1984. Calvesi, M. “Dipingere all moviola” (Painting at the Moviola). Corriere della Sera, 10 Oct. 1976. Reprint. “Arti figurative e il cinema” (Cinema and the Visual Arts). Avanguardia di massa. Ed. M. Calvesi. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978. 243–46. Celluloid Liberation Front. “Consumerist Ultimate Indigestion: La Grande Bouffe's Deadly Physiological Pleasures.” Bright Lights Film Journal 60 (2008). 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://brightlightsfilm.com/60/60lagrandebouffe.php#.Utd6gs1-es5›. Chan, Andrew. “La Grande bouffe: Cooking Shows as Pornography.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 3.4 (2003): 47–53. Dickie, George. The Century of Taste: The Philosophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Ebert, Roger, “La Grande bouffe.” 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/la-grande-bouffe-1973›. Ferreri, Marco. La Grande bouffe. Italy-France, 1973. Freedman, Paul H. Food: The History of Taste. U of California P, 2007. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Winsheimer and Donald C. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1999. Habib, André. “Remarques sur une ‘réception impossible’: Salo and La Grande bouffe.” Hors champ (cinéma), 4 Jan. 2001. 11 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/cinema/030101/salo-bouffe.html›. Keller, James R. “Four Little Caligulas: La Grande bouffe, Consumption and Male Masochism.” Food, Film and Culture: A Genre Study. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co, 2006: 49–59. Masoni, Tullio. Marco Ferreri. Gremese, 1998. Pasolini, P.P. “Le ambigue forme della ritualita narrativa.” Cinema Nuovo 231 (1974): 342–46. Ross, Kristin. May 68 and its Afterlives. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Smith, Alison. French Cinema in the 1970s: The Echoes of May. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005. Télérama: “La Grande bouffe: l’un des derniers grands scandales du Festival de Cannes. 19 May 2013. 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.telerama.fr/festival-de-cannes/2013/la-grande-bouffe-l-un-des-derniers-grands-scandales-du-festival-de-cannes,97615.php›. The Guardian: 1000 films to see before you die. 2007. 17 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/film/series/1000-films-to-see-before-you-die› Tury, F., and O. Peter. “Food, Life, and Death: The Film La Grande bouffe of Marco Ferreri in an Art Psychological Point of View.” European Psychiatry 22.1 (2007): S214. Viano, Maurizio. “La Grande Abbuffata/La Grande bouffe.” The Cinema of Italy. Ed. Giorgio Bertellini. London: Wallflower Press, 2004: 193–202.