Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "Comet (Schooner)"

AbstractMining the gene of histidine content in barley grain helps with the breeding of functional barley varieties. The study constructed a recombinant inbred lines (RILs) containing 193 families derived from the cross between Ziguangmangluoerling (ZGMLEL) (♀) and Schooner No.3 (♂). The histidine (HIS) content in the grain of the mapping population and its parents were determined by an automatic amino acid analyzer. The HIS content of ZGMLEL was 0.53 mg/g. The grain HIS content of Schooner No. 3 was 0.21 mg/g, and the grain HIS content of population ranged from 0.23 to 0.54. Genetic linkage maps, including those of seven chromosomes of barley, were constructed by using 180 pairs of simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers, with a total genetic distance of 2671.03 cM and average marker spacing of 14.84 cM. Quantitative trait locus (QTL) IciMappingV3.3 was used to analyze QTL of HIS content in barley grains, and three QTLs were detected. Mapping results showed that the three loci were located on chromosomes 2H, 4H, and 7H, respectively. The major QTL with a contribution rate of 10.11% was located on barley chromosome 4H (HVBAMMGB84-BMAG0808). The additive effect is positive (0.025). Thus, it comes from the high-value parent ZGMLEL. Another major QTL with a contribution rate of 13.75% was located on barley chromosome 7H (GBM1303-GMS056). The minor QTL with a contribution rate of 6.01% was located on chromosome 2H (Scssr03381-Scssr07759). The additive effects of 4H and 7H QTLs were negative (− 0.02 and − 0.033). So, they came from the male parent Schooner. The results provided a reference for further fine mapping, cloning, and transformation of HIS genes in barley grains.

Technology has been the bread and butter of learning not only among school going children, but also those of pre-schoolers. Its access and usage has become the perennial tool to generate learning. Hence, it comes with the effects of the learning process. This study attempts to investigate the concern of pre-schoolers’ parents regarding the access of Information Communication Technology (ICT) that takes place both in school and at home. This has also become the cause of concern for parents as their children are exposed to its access and usage, conveniently 24/7. To conduct this study, questionnaires were given and duly completed by 10 parents in a small school of eighteen pre-schoolers. These pre-schoolers ranged from the ages of 3 to 6 years old. At these ages, the children have ICT knowledge, at home ranging from leisure games, electronic toys, mobile phones, television, CD, and computers. They have well educated parents with concerns on child computer addiction, health matters and lack of social values. Discussions on the findings focus on the advantages and disadvantages of technology access and usage among the pre-schoolers. They also included the questions on methods of access control or preventive measures to ensure safe ICT use for these pre-schoolers. This study took a qualitative approach as it was suitable to access the respondents’ perception and opinion via questionnaires. The analysis of the study results indicated that ICT had positive impact on education. The concern and setback for parents were the health issues, dark webs, and lack or over socialising. More often it is lack of social mingling. Received: 27 June 2021 / Accepted: 9 August 2021 / Published: 5 September 2021

Mucopolysaccharidosis (MPS) is a rare and progressive disorder. It gradually causes the disappearance of the child’s learned skills. There are few scientificpapers concerning the rules of conduct with a child of preschool age with MPS, and therefore therapists’ work often comes down to searching for adequate methods of therapy in order to preserve the skills acquired by the pre-schooler as long as possible. The main research question was: “How does the treatment of a child with mucopolysaccharidosis at an Inclusive Preschool look like from the perspective of therapists?” Four therapists working with two boys suffering from MPS were surveyed in the study.

Over the first 5 years of life children become increasingly effective communicators and remarkably aware of the co-operative nature of communication. Much of the driving force for these developments comes from the scaffolding provided by caregivers and the child's motivation to engage in and repair communicative exchanges. This review charts the development of reference and presents examples from studies of infants' gestural and verbal development and pre-schoolers' comprehension and production of referring expressions.

This study was designed to pilot a survey to investigate nutrition knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs toward nutrition, exercise, and dietary habits of active adolescents. Participants included 117 middle school and 40 high school students. General and sport nutrition knowledge, dietary habits, and attitudes toward nutrition education were collected via three electronic surveys. Among middle schoolers, 79.5% of students stated feeling they could benefit from advice about nutrition compared to 92.5% of high school students. The topic scoring the highest in both populations was hydration; the lowest scoring topic category was protein and exercise. Knowledge about healthy eating reportedly comes from parents and coaches most frequently for both high school and middle school students. Less than 40% of students stated their diet meets their nutritional needs. Both middle school and high school students stated a desire to learn more about nutrition, but most nutrition information currently received comes from non-nutrition-related professionals. There is a need for validation of a nutrition knowledge and behavior instrument for United States adolescents, and room for improvement in general and sport nutrition knowledge in active adolescents in all topic areas.

The 17th century was the era of glorious for the development of intellectual history in Aceh, which is characterized by the presence of four well-known scholars, one of them is Abdurrauf Singkel. His work entitled Sullam al - Mustafidin contains views on theology that comes from the teachings of the ahl Sunnah wa al - Jamaah which also confirmed its existence as a Sunni schoolar. Abdurrauf’s theological views has also become important notion in the middle of debate between Hamzah Fansuri and Nuruddin Arraniri about wujudiyah in Aceh in the 17th century. Although al - Mustafidin Sullam text does not explicitly answer the question of wujudiyah in Aceh, but most likely this text was written to neutralize the chaos of religious (read: wujudiyah) and calls on Muslims to return to I’tiqad ahl sunnah wa al -Jamaah. Keywords: Aceh, Abdurrauf, texts, theology, wujudiyah, ahl sunnah wa al jamaah

Purpose This paper aims to investigate what factors influence women’s meaningful and equitable persistence in computing and technology fields. It draws on theories of learning and equity from the learning sciences to inform the understanding of women’s underrepresentation in computing as it investigates young women who showed an interest in computing in high school and followed-up with them in their college and careers. Design/methodology/approach The mixed-methods approach compares data from quantitative surveys and qualitative focus groups and interviews. The sample comes from database of 1,500 young women who expressed interest in computing by applying for an award for high schoolers. These women were surveyed in 2013 and then again in 2016, with 511 women identifying themselves as high schoolers in 2013 and then having graduated and pursued college or careers in the second survey. The authors also conducted qualitative interviews and focus groups with 90 women from the same sample. Findings The findings show that multiple factors influence women’s persistence in computing, but the best predictor of women’s persistence is access to early computing and programming opportunities. However, access and opportunities must be evaluated within broader social and contextual factors. Research limitations/implications The main limitation is that the authors measure women’s persistence in computing according to their chosen major or profession. This study does not measure the impact of computational thinking in women’s everyday lives. Practical implications Educators and policymakers should consider efforts to make Computer Science-for-All a reality. Originality/value Few longitudinal studies of a large sample of women exist that follow women interested in computing from high school into college and careers particularly from a critical educational equity perspective.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the role of promotion and service quality on consumer decisions in the marketplace. The method used for the literature study approach, the data source comes from journals obtained through a google schoolar search and reference books related to this article. The results of this literature review are 1) the role of promotion as an effort that can be made by companies to be known and have an impact on choosing the goods and services offered. The role of a good promotion can have a positive impact on consumer decisions in determining the purchase of goods/services. 2) Service quality has an effect on product purchasing decisions. The quality of services offered by the company will lead to consumer loyalty to use the products produced by the company and besides that consumers get a good impression of the market making it possible to make repurchase decisions.

Introduction: The risk factors for breast cancer consist of intrinsic, extrinsic and hormonal factors. Method: In the last ten years this meta-analysis taken literature based on full-text English journals published. This article aims to discuss the link between leptin levels and the incidence of breast cancer. The databases that we use in writing this article are Sage Pub, Pubmed and Google Schoolar. PICO (Patient, Index, Comparative, and Objective) analysis used in this study included patients with breast cancer, the index examined was the patient's leptin level, and comparisons were made on patients without breast cancer. Result: When it comes to breast cancer, the hormone leptin has been connected to a number of various phases and processes, including the progression of the disease itself.Conclusion: Most of the studies obtained showed that patients with breast cancer had higher levels of leptin with more severe disease grade, metastases, and ER(+). Keyword: Breast Cancer, Leptin, Obese, Menopaused

This article seeks to explain the role of the presence of various world-class educational institutions in Qatar which is a concrete step for Qatar in development, social and cultural by Qatar. Qatar believes that education is a major way and has a strong influence to increase Qatar's inclusiveness in the world so that it can maintain a good investment climate. This research is a conceptual paper where the data presented in this study comes from literature studies from Emerald, Science Direct, and Google Schoolar where 314 articles were found which were selected and narrowed down to find 18 articles that were most suitable from the title, abstract, to useful results. This paper also conducted simple SWOT analysis in order to mapping the strategy and provide a valid explanation in this study. From the results of the agreement in this paper, it can be found that as a socio-economic effort which is a long-term plan, education is not the only step that is achieved, but also utilizes mass media and various other aspects.

The article starts from the fact that one billion adults are illiterate world-wide, that more than 100 million children of school age are not schooled, and that the democratisation of the access to education is often only rhetorical. On the basis of available statistics it tackles successively three questions. First, who finances education and how much do they spend? Secondly, what resources or means are devoted to the education of an individual, and how can these data be evaluated. And finally, do the inequalities between individuals, social groups or nations tend to de- or increase with respect to education access. It will be shown that, for example, in developed countries like France, the social inequalities when it comes to education have widely diminished and can appear as relatively minor when compared to those affecting children from the poorest countries. At macro-economic level the ‘tendentious reduction of education systems' productivity is not valid. Schools are unequally efficient with the same means. The traditional distinction between developed and developing countries is changing, part of which is due an unequal development of developing nations. The least advanced have remained outside of the race, and the distance is increasing.

Objectives The purpose of this study is to investigate relationship between high school students’academic stress, academic self-efficacy and adaptation to school life, and, then verify the mediating effect of academic self-efficacy on the realtionship between academic stress and adaptation to school life. Methods In this regard, targeting 324 high-schoolers residing in J-province, we applied descriptive statistics techniques, correlation anaysis and verified the mediating effect within the variables. Results The reults of this study are as follows. First, academic stress of high school students showed significant negative correlation with adaptation to school life while revealing significant negative correlation with academic self-efficacy. In addition, adaptation to school life exposed statistically significant negative correlation with academic self-efficacy. Second, academic self-efficacy was verified to function as full mediation in the case that academic stress affected adaptation to school life. Namely, this could lead to the interpretation that acedmic stress would be helpful in adaptation to school life through academic self-efficacy. Conclusions This study comes up with the implication in that it investigated the importance of academic self-efficacy in the influence of academic stress and adaptaton to school life.

Family Planning (KB) is a program established by the National Population and Family Planning Agency (BKKBN) which aims to control the population in Indonesia. In implementing the family planning program, this is done by using contraceptives. The word contraception comes from the word "contra" which means to prevent and "conception" which means a meeting between a sperm cell and a mature egg cell which results in fertilization. According to Law No. 52 of 2009 regulates Population Development and Family Development. The manifestation of this program is the creation of regular pregnancies, determining the right age for giving birth, and maintaining one's reproductive rights (Ministry of Health RI, 2015). This population control is carried out in an effort to minimize population density and improve the quality of Human Resources (HR) in Indonesia. The research method used in this study is a literature review by analyzing journals about the factors that influence contraceptive devices from Google Schoolar between 2023. The results of the study using a literature review obtained that from the 8 journals analyzed it was found that many factors influenced the choice of device. contraception. The results of the research analyzed by the researcher, from eight (8) journals showed that in five (5) journals that husband's support was the main factor influencing the choice of contraceptives. While other factors that influence the choice of contraceptives are age, education, level of knowledge, parity, income, employment and support from health workers.

In response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) schools around the world have been closed to protect against the spread of coronavirus. In several countries, homeschooling has been introduced to replace classroom schooling. With a focus on individual differences, the present study examined 138 schoolers (age range = 6 to 21 years) regarding their self-control and boredom proneness. The results showed that both traits were important in predicting adherence to homeschooling. Schoolers with higher levels of self-control perceived homeschooling as less difficult, which in turn increased homeschooling adherence. In contrast, schoolers with higher levels of boredom proneness perceived homeschooling as more difficult, which in turn reduced homeschooling adherence. These results partially hold when it comes to studying in the classroom. However, boredom threatened adherence only in the homeschooling context. Our results indicate that boredom proneness is a critical construct to consider when educational systems switch to homeschooling during a pandemic.

Hutchins, Hazel. Cat Comes Too. Illus. Gosia Mosz. Toronto: Annick Press, 2013._____________ Dog Comes Too. Toronto: Annick Press, 2013.Nicely sized for children’s hands, these two little board books should delight both pre-schoolers and beginning readers. Their story lines are simple and humorous.In the first, a curious kitten follows a pair of human feet (the entire body is never revealed but seems feminine) up the stairs to the attic and, there, has a fine frolic amidst the storage. In the second, a puppy follows a heavy-booted pair of legs (gender unclear) on an outdoor hike that proves challenging, but not impossible, for the small canine striver.Gosia Mosz’s colorful line drawings give us, simultaneously, both the world view of each young pet and a sense of its indomitable personality. With very few words, and a vocabulary level well within the range of most three- to six-year-olds, Hazel Hutchins produces a delightful amount of word play, particularly in Dog Comes Too: “Too far Too hot Too tired, pup? Big rest Two friends To the top Together” (Dog…pp.15-19)(For the children who read this book, a formal lesson on homonyms may come years later, if at all; no matter. They will have internalized the concept, anyway.)In these works, Hutchins and Mosz demonstrate the features of good composition for the very young: simple plotlines; recognizable settings; text that is readily memorized, then read; illustrations that are wedded to the text; characters that are lovable; and a viewpoint not unlike their own--all this and witty wording, too. Brilliant.Highly Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Leslie AitkenLeslie Aitken’s long career in librarianship involved selection of children’s literature for school, public, special, and university collections. She is a former Curriculum Librarian at the University of Alberta.

It is well known that dogs are effective stress relievers. Specifically, certified therapy dogs and service dogs have been proven to reduce stress in the academic realm. With the reduction of stress comes an increase in test scores and academic performance. Scientific trails have shown that dog visitations have helped children in elementary school increase their literacy and reading rates. College students report that meet and greets with therapy dogs during finals weeks have left them feeling more confident about upcoming exams. Though, what is not commonly considered are students at the high school level and the influence of dogs, particularly one that they own. This study involved the collecting and analyzing of surveys to see whether or not high schoolers who owned dogs had higher academic success as compared to their peers who didn’t own dogs. The findings show that there is no such correlation between high schoolers who own dogs experiencing higher academic rates, however it did support the proven theory of dogs relieving stress.

The aims of this research are to know: (1) society education conditions dayak maanyan (2) its happening process social change culturize with mark sense education (3) education role tu cultural social change. Observational location to be done at warukin’s village tanta’s district tabalong’ regency. This research utilize qualitative method. Data collecting rech with interview, observation, documentation and it affiliate. Informan determination with purposive and snowball sampling. This research finds first education has experienced step-up or progress experiences changing built by earlychildhood education and middle school. Before children doesn’t want school now child willingness comes in college, well at earlychildhood, primary school and middle. Both of happening changed process is talk shop society no longer undivided rely from their forest result be connected with swasta sector and governance sector, life that modestly is now beginning gently amends go to middleweight life and cultural appreciation be taught on base rate education to keep up region culture to protage. Third play a part education at family as teaches and in dogma, get socialization with environmentally surrounding and more emphasizes to that child important education in future. Play a part education at schooled, as develops culture to read, write and gets computing and education material at studies by cognitive, afective and psycomotor. Play a part education at conjoined as deep partnership with side achooled as committee of school, following gets role in contribution lents fund, help and energy. Get starting point of this research finding, severally suggest one is proposed that is (1) increase society role in advance education (2) family role are expected get to help childs in formal education working out (3) for school, that aptly gets to utilize all kind help.Key word: changing social culture, Dayak Maanyan, education role

Puberty is the cornerstone of reproductive development. Therefore, the transition through puberty is a critical period of development that provides an important opportunity to build a healthy foundation for sexual and reproductive health.“Adolescence’’ comes from the Latin word meaning “to come to maturity”, a fitting description of this stage of life. The adolescent is maturing physically and emotionally, growing from childhood towards adulthood, and seeking to be grown up. It is a period of transition between childhood and adulthood. During this transition period dramatic physical, cognitive, psychosocial and psychosexual changes take place that are exciting and at the same time frightening Adolescence is a period where a vital physical and psychosexual changes takes place. In this regard, not only the pre-schooler, but also the older child that is the pre- adolescents between the age of 10 and 12 year should also receive adequate attention as a preparation for pubertal changes and menarche. Materials and Methods: A quantitative pre-experimental one group pre-test post-test design was used to assess the effectiveness of Structured Teaching Programme on knowledge regarding pubertal changes and its coping strategies among adolescent girls. The study conducted on 60 samples. Data was collected using structured knowledge questionnaire. Results: In the pre-test, the majority (72%) adolescent girls had inadequate knowledge regarding pubertal changes and its coping strategies. In the post test, the same group has gained adequate knowledge (97%). Thus the study findings indicate that the Structured Teaching Programme was effective in enhancing knowledge of adolescent girls regarding pubertal changes and its coping strategies. The variables with χ2 values for the variables age (χ2 =12.49), birth order (χ2 = 12.49), class of study (χ2=9.49), source of information (χ2 =12.49),type of family(χ2 =12.49),diet (χ2 =5.99), sleeping patterns (χ2=(9.49)are found to be significant at 0.05 level of significance with their mean pre- test knowledge scores. Conclusion: After the detailed analysis of the study findings showed that pre-test finding showed that, most of the adolescent girl had inadequate knowledge regarding pubertal changes and its coping strategies. but after the administration of structured teaching programme it enhancing knowledge of adolescent girls regarding pubertal changes and its coping strategies. Regarding the association of demographic variables, they show association with age, birth order, class of study, source of information, type of family, diet, sleeping pattern, are found to be significant at 0.05 level of significance with their pre-test knowledge score.

The Sociolinguistic Aspect of Ukrainian Russian Child Bilingualism on the Basis of a Survey of Ukrainian FamiliesThe article explores the linguistic situation in Ukraine, where a key sociolinguistic peculiarity is the large-scale spread of various types of Ukrainian–Russian bilingualism. A special focus is put on bilingualism among children speaking two closely related languages, which represents a current language situation beyond any historical or political context. The article describes the peculiarities of the formation of child bilingualism, which are a result of the changing priorities of the primary and secondary tools of communication. The article presents the findings of a survey covering the family environment, undertaken in order to identify key trends in children's speech in Ukraine. This knowledge subsequently allows for the tracing of the correlation between a mother tongue / parents' second language, the language of family communication, and the national language in Ukraine. Moreover, it helps when it comes to the decision of whether or not to introduce bilingual practices in the early stages of the linguistic personality formation of a child. The concept of a ‘bilingual linguistic personality' is covered, and certain aspects pertaining to how bilingual children perceive the world are listed. The article takes into consideration the issues and criteria of the ‘mother tongue' concept in bilingual settings. The notion of ‘linguistic code switching' is characterized, as well as its impact on the formation of bilingual communicative competence in children. A focus is laid on the use of mixed forms of Ukrainian–Russian bilingualism in the context of the communicative practices of bilingual children. The article also examines a peculiar type of bilingualism, typical of a certain category of bilingual pre-schoolers and primary school children, in which each party of a communicative act tends to preserve their dominant language in an informal setting. Socjolingwistyczny aspekt ukraińsko-rosyjskiej dwujęzyczności dzieci na podstawie badań rodzin ukraińskichW artykule przedstawiona zostaje sytuacja językowa na Ukrainie, gdzie kluczową osobliwością socjolingwistyczną jest masowe rozprzestrzenianie się różnych typów i rodzajów dwujęzyczności ukraińsko-rosyjskiej. Szczególny nacisk kładzie się na dwujęzyczność dzieci, posługujących się blisko spokrewnionymi językami, która reprezentuje rzeczywistą sytuację językową poza jakimkolwiek kontekstem historycznym lub politycznym. Opisano specyfikę formowania się dwujęzyczności dzieci przez pryzmat zmieniającego się priorytetu pierwotnego i wtórnego medium społecznego dla dziecka. Wyniki badania obejmują środowisko rodzinne, którego analiza jest metodą identyfikacji kluczowych trendów w mowie dzieci na Ukrainie, co pozwala następnie na śledzenie korelacji między językiem ojczystym / drugim językiem rodziców, językiem komunikacji rodzinnej a językiem narodowym na Ukrainie. Ponadto pomaga rozważyć możliwość wprowadzenia / niewprowadzania praktyk dwujęzycznych na wczesnych etapach kształtowania się osobowości językowej dziecka. Omówiono też koncepcję „dwujęzycznej osobowości językowej” i wymieniono pewne aspekty postrzegania świata przez dzieci dwujęzyczne. Rozważono kwestie i kryteria koncepcji „języka ojczystego” w środowiskach dwujęzycznych. Scharakteryzowano pojęcie „przełączania kodu językowego”, a także jego wpływ na kształtowanie się dwujęzycznych kompetencji komunikacyjnych u dzieci. Nacisk położono na wykorzystanie mieszanych form dwujęzyczności ukraińsko-rosyjskiej w kontekście praktyk komunikacyjnych dzieci dwujęzycznych. Poddano analizie osobliwy typ dwujęzyczności, typowy dla pewnej kategorii dwujęzycznych przedszkolaków i dzieci ze szkół podstawowych, kiedy każda strona aktu komunikacji ma tendencję do zachowania swojego dominującego języka w nieformalnym otoczeniu.

Introduction Children are beginning to use digital technologies at younger and younger ages. The emerging trend of very young children (babies, toddlers and pre-schoolers) using Internet connected devices, especially touch screen tablets and smartphones, has elicited polarising opinions from early childhood experts. At present there is little actual research about the risks or benefits of tablet and smartphone use by very young children. Current usage recommendations, based on research into passive television watching which claims that screen time is detrimental, is in conflict with advice from education experts and app developers who commend interactive screen time as engaging and educational. Guidelines from the health professions typically advise strict time limits on very young children’s screen-time. Based for the most part on policy developed by the American Academy of Paediatrics, it is usually recommended that children under two have no screen time at all (Brown), and children over this age have no more than two hours a day (Strasburger, et al.). On the other hand, early childhood education guidelines promote the development of digital literacy skills (Department of Education). Further, education-based research indicates that access to computers and the Internet in the preschool years is associated with overall educational achievement (Bittman et al.; Cavanaugh et al; Judge et al; Neumann). The US based National Association for Education of Young Children’s position statement on technology for zero to eight year-olds declares that “when used intentionally and appropriately, technology and interactive media are effective tools to support learning and development” (NAEYC). This article discusses the notion of Digitods—a name for those children born since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 who have ready access to touchscreen technologies since birth. It reports on the limited availability of evidence-based research about these children’s ICT use concluding that current research and recommendations are not grounded in the everyday life of very young children and their families. The article then reports on the beginnings of a research project funded by the Australian Research Council entitled Toddlers and Tablets: exploring the risks and benefits 0-5s face online. This research project recognises that at this stage it is parents who “are the real experts in their toddlers’ use of screen technologies. Accordingly, the project’s methodological approach draws on parents, pre-schoolers and their families as communities of practice in the construction of social meaning around toddlers’ use of touch screen technology. Digitods In 2000 Bill Gates introduced the notion of Generation I to describe the first cohort of children raised with the Internet as a reality in their lives. They are those born after the 1990s and will, in most cases; have no memory of life without the Net. [...] Generation I will be able to conceive of the Internet’s possibilities far more profoundly than we can today. This new generation will become agents of change as the limits of the Internet expand to include educational, scientific, and business applications that we cannot even imagine. (Gates)Digitods, on the other hand, is a term that has been used in education literature (Leathers et al.) to describe those children born after the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. These children often begin their lives with ready access to the Internet via easily usable touch screen devices, which could have been designed with toddlers’ touch and swipe movements in mind. Not only are they the youngest group of children to actively engage with the Internet they are the first group to grow up with a range of mobile Internet devices (Leathers et al.). The difference between Digitods and Gates’s Generation I is that Digitods are the first pre-verbal, non-ambulant infants to have ready access to digital technologies. Somewhere around the age of 10 months to fourteen months a baby learns to point with his or her forefinger. At this stage the child is ready to swipe and tap a touch screen (Leathers et al.). This is in contrast to laptops and PCs given that very young children often need assistance to use a mouse or keyboard. The mobility of touch screen devices allows very young children to play at the kitchen table, in the bedroom or on a car trip. These mobile devices have, of course, a myriad of mobile apps to go with them. These apps create an immediacy of access for infants and pre-schoolers who do not need to open a web browser to find their favourite sites. In the lives of these children it seems that it has always been possible to touch and swipe their way into games, books and creative and communicative experiences (Holloway et al. 149). The interactivity of most pre-school apps, as opposed to more passive screen activities such as watching television shows or videos (both offline or online), requires toddlers and pre-schoolers to pay careful attention, think about things and act purposefully (Leathers et al.). It is this interactivity which is the main point of difference, one which holds the potential to engage and educate our youngest children. It should be noted within this discussion about Digitods that, while the trope Digital Natives tends to homogenise an entire generation, the authors do not assume that all children born today are Digitods by default. Many children do not have the same privileged opportunities as others, or the (parental) cultural capital, to enable access, ease of use and digital skill development. In addition to this it is not implied that Digitods will be more tech savvy than their older siblings. The term is used more to describe and distinguish those children who have digital access almost since birth—in order to differentiate or tease out everyday family practices around these children’s ICT use and the possible risks and benefits this access affords babies, toddlers and pre-schoolers. While the term Digital Native has also been criticised as being a white middle class phenomenon this is not necessarily the case with Digitods. In the Southeast Asia and the Pacific region developed countries like Japan, Korea, New Zealand and Singapore have extremely high rates of touchscreen use by very young children (Child Sciences; Jie; Goh; Unantenne). Other countries such as the Philippines and Indonesia have moved to a high smart phone usage by very young children while at the same time have only nascent ICT access and instruction within their education systems (Unantenne). The Digitod Parent Parents of Digitods are usually experienced Internet users themselves, and many are comfortable with their children using these child-friendly touch screen devices (Findahl). Digital technologies are integral to their everyday lives, often making daily life easier and improving communication with family and friends, even during the high pressure parenting years of raising toddlers and pre-schoolers. Even though many parents and caregivers are enabling very young children’s use of touch screen technologies, they are also concerned about the changes they are making. This is because very young children’s use of touch screen devices “has become another area where they fear possible criticism and in which their parental practices risk negative evaluation by others” (Holloway et al). The tensions between expert advice regarding young children’s screen-time and parents’ and caregivers’ own judgments are also being played out online. Parenting blogs, online magazines and discussion groups are all joining in the debate: On the one hand, parents want their children to swim expertly in the digital stream that they will have to navigate all their lives; on the other hand, they fear that too much digital media, too early, will sink them. Parents end up treating tablets like precision surgical instruments, gadgets that might perform miracles for their child’s IQ and help him win some nifty robotics competition—but only if they are used just so. (Rosin)Thus, with over 80 000 children’s apps marketed as educational in the Apple App Store alone, parents can find it difficult to choose apps that are worth purchasing (Yelland). Nonetheless, recent research regarding Australian children shows that three to five year olds who access touch screen devices will typically have five or more specific apps to choose from (5.23 on average) (Neumann). With little credible evidence or considered debate, parents have been left to make their own choices about the pros and cons of their young children’s access to touch screens. Nonetheless, one immediate benefit that comes to mind is toddlers and pre-schoolers video chatting with dispersed family member—due to increased globalisation, guest worker arrangements, FIFO (fly-in fly-out) workforces and family separation or divorce. Such clear benefits around sociability and youngsters’ connection with significant others make previous screen-related guidelines out of date and no longer contextually relevant. Little Research Attention Family ownership of tablet devices as well as touch screen phones has risen dramatically in the last five years. With very young children being loaned these technologies by mum or dad, and a tendency in Australia to rely on market-orientated research regarding ownership and usage, there is very little knowledge about touch screen usage rates for very young Australian children. UK and US usage figures indicate that over the last few years there has been a five-fold increase in tablet uptake by zero to eight year olds (Ofcom; Rideout). Although large scale, comparative Australian data is not available, previous research regarding older children indicates that Australia is similar to high use countries like some Scandinavian nations and the UK (Green et al.). In addition to this, two small research projects in Australia, with under 160 participant families each, indicate that two thirds of these children (0-5) use touchscreen devices (Neumann; Coenenna et. al.). Beyond usage figures, there is also very limited evidence-based research about very young children’s app use. Interactive technologies available via touch screen technologies have been available domestically for a very short time. Consequently, “valid scientific research has not been completed and replicated due to [the lack of] available time” (Leathers el al. 129) and longitudinal studies which rely on an intervention group (in this case exposure to children’s apps) and a control group (no exposure) are even fewer and more time-consuming. Interestingly, researchers have revisited the issue of passive screen viewing. A recent 2015 review of previous 2007 research, which linked babies watching videos with poor language development, has found that there was statistical and methodological issues with the 2007 study and that there are no strong inferences to be drawn between media exposure and language development (Ferguson and Donellan). Thus, there seems to be no conclusive evidence-based research on which to inform parents and educators about the possible downside or benefits of touch screen use. Nonetheless, early childhood experts have been quick to weigh in on the possible effects of screen usage, some providing restrictive guidelines and recommendations, with others advocating the use of interactive apps for very young children for their educational value. This knowledge-gap disguises what is actually happening in the lives of real Australian families. Due to the lack of local data, as well as worldwide research, it is essential that Australian researchers obtain a comprehensive understanding about actual behaviour around touch screen use in the lives of children aged between zero and five and their families. Beginning Research While research into very young children’s touch screen use is beginning to take place, few results have been published. When researching two to three year olds’ learning from interactive versus non-interactive videos Kirkorian, Choi and Pempek found that “toddlers may learn more from interactive media than from non-interactive video” (Kirkorian et al). This means that the use of interactive apps on touch screen devices may hold a greater potential for learning than passive video or television viewing for children in this age range. Another study considered the degree to which the young children could navigate to and use apps on touch screen devices by observing and analysing YouTube videos of infants and young children using touch screens (Hourcade et al.). It was found that between the ages of 12 months and 17 months the children filmed seemed to begin to “make meaningful use of the tablets [and] more than 90 per cent of children aged two [had] reached this level of ability” (1923). The kind of research mentioned above, usually the preserve of psychologists, paediatricians and some educators, does not, however, ground very young children’s use in their domestic context—in the spaces and with those people with whom most touch screen usage takes place. With funding from the Australian Research Council Australian, Irish and UK researchers are about to adopt a media studies (domestication) approach to comprehensively investigate digital media use in the everyday lives of very young children. This Australian-based research project positions very young children’s touch screen use within the family and will help provide an understanding of the everyday knowledge and strategies that this cohort of technology users (very young children and their parents) have already developed—in the knowledge vacuum left by the swift appropriation and incorporation of these new media technologies into the lives of families with very young children. Whilst using a conventional social constructionist perspective, the project will also adopt a co-creation of knowledge approach. The co-creation of knowledge approach (Fong) has links with the communities of practice literature (Wegner) and recognises that parents, care-givers and the children themselves are the current experts in this field in terms of the everyday uses of these technologies by very young children. Families’ everyday discourse and practices regarding their children’s touch screen use do not necessarily work through obvious power hierarchies (via expert opinions), but rather through a process of meaning making where they shape their own understandings and attitudes through experience and shared talk within their own everyday family communities of practice. This Toddlers and Tablets research is innovative in many ways. It seeks to capture the enthusiasm of young children’s digital interactions and to pioneer new ways of ‘beginnings’ researching with very young children, as well as with their parents. The researchers will work with parents and children in their broad domestic contexts (including in and out-of-home activities, and grandparental and wider-family involvement) to co-create knowledge about young children’s digital technologies and the social contexts in which these technologies are used. Aspects of these interactions, such as interviews and observations of everyday digital interactions will be recorded (audio and video respectively). In addition to this, data collected from media commentary, policy debates, research publications and learned articles from other disciplinary traditions will be interrogated to see if there are correlations, contrasts, trends or synergies between parents’ construction of meaning, public commentary and current research. Critical discourse tools and methods (Chouliaraki and Fairclough) will be used to analyse verbatim transcripts, video, and all written materials. Conclusion Very young children are uniquely dependent upon others for the basic necessities of life and for the tools they need, and will need to develop, to claim their place in the world. Given the ubiquitous role played by digital media in the lives of their parents and other caregivers it would be a distortion of everyday life for children to be excluded from the technologies that are routinely used to connect with other people and with information. In the same way that adults use digital media to renew and strengthen social and emotional bonds across distance, so young children delight in ‘Facetime’ and other technologies that connect them audio-visually with friends and family members who are not physically co-present. Similarly, a very short time spent in the company of toddlers using touch screens is sufficient to demonstrate the sheer delight that these young infants have in developing their sense of agency and autonomy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXV-yaFmQNk). Media, communications and cultural studies are beginning to claim a space for evidence based policy drawn from everyday activities in real life contexts. Research into the beginnings of digital life, with families who are beginning to find a way to introduce these technologies to the youngest generation, integrating them within social and emotional repertoires, may prove to be the start of new understandings into the communication skills of the preverbal and preliterate young people whose technology preferences will drive future development – with their parents likely trying to keep pace. Acknowledgment This research is supported under Australia Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (project number DP150104734). References Bittman, Michael, et al. "Digital Natives? New and Old Media and Children's Outcomes." Australian Journal of Education 55.2 (2011): 161-75. Brown, Ari. "Media Use by Children Younger than 2 Years." Pediatrics 128.5 (2011): 1040-45. Burr, Vivien. Social Constructionism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2003. Cavanaugh, Cathy, et al. "The Effects of Distance Education on K–12 Student Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis." Naperville, Ill.: Learning Point Associates, 2004. 5 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.ncrel.org/tech/distance/index.html›. Child Sciences and Parenting Research Office. Survey of Media Use by Children and Parents (Summary). Tokyo: Benesse Educational Research and Development Institute, 2014. Coenena, Pieter, Erin Howiea, Amity Campbella, and Leon Strakera. Mobile Touch Screen Device Use among Young Australian Children–First Results from a National Survey. Proceedings 19th Triennial Congress of the IEA. 2015. Chouliaraki, Lilie and Norman Fairclough. Discourse in Late Modernity: Rethinking Critical Discourse Analysis. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999. Department of Education. "Belonging, Being and Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia." Australian Government, 2009. Ferguson, Christopher J., and M. Brent Donnellan. "Is the Association between Children’s Baby Video Viewing and Poor Language Development Robust? A Reanalysis of Zimmerman, Christakis, and Meltzoff (2007)." Developmental Psychology 50.1 (2014): 129. Findahl, Olle. Swedes and the Internet 2013. Stockholm: The Internet Infrastructure Foundation, 2013. Fong, Patrick S.W. "Co-Creation of Knowledge by Multidisciplinary Project Teams." Management of Knowledge in Project Environments. Eds. E. Love, P. Fong, and Z. Irani. Burlington, MA: Elsevier, 2005. 41-56. Gates, Bill. "Enter 'Generation I': The Responsibility to Provide Access for All to the Most Incredible Learning Tool Ever Created." Instructor 109.6 (2000): 98. Goh, Wendy W.L., Susanna Bay, and Vivian Hsueh-Hua Chen. "Young School Children’s Use of Digital Devices and Parental Rules." Telematics and Informatics 32.4 (2015): 787-95. Green, Lelia, et al. "Risks and Safety for Australian Children on the Internet: Full Findings from the AU Kids Online Survey of 9-16 Year Olds and Their Parents." Cultural Science Journal 4.1 (2011): 1-73. Holloway, Donell, Lelia Green, and Carlie Love. "'It's All about the Apps': Parental Mediation of Pre-Schoolers' Digital Lives." Media International Australia 153 (2014): 148-56. Hourcade, Juan Pablo, Sarah Mascher, David Wu, and Luiza Pantoja. Look, My Baby Is Using an iPad! An Analysis of YouTube Videos of Infants and Toddlers Using Tablets. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2015. Jie S.H. "ICT Use Statistics of Households and Individuals in Korea." 10th World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Meeting (WTIM-12). Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA), 25-7 Sep. 2012.Judge, Sharon, Kathleen Puckett, and Sherry Mee Bell. "Closing the Digital Divide: Update from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study." The Journal of Educational Research 100.1 (2006): 52-60. Kirkorian, H., K. Choi, and Pempek. "Toddlers' Word Learning from Contingent and Non-Contingent Video on Touchscreens." Child Development (in press). Leathers, Heather, Patti Summers, and Desollar. Toddlers on Technology: A Parents' Guide. Illinois: AuthorHouse, 2013. NAEYC. Technology and Interactive Media as Tools in Early Childhood Programs Serving Children from Birth through Age 8 [Position Statement]. Washington: National Association for the Education of Young Children, the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media at Saint Vincent College, 2012. Neumann, Michelle M. "An Examination of Touch Screen Tablets and Emergent Literacy in Australian Pre-School Children." Australian Journal of Education 58.2 (2014): 109-22. Ofcom. Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes Report. London, 2013. Rideout, Victoria. Zero to Eight: Children’s Media Use in America 2013. San Francisco: Common Sense Media, 2013. Rosin, Hanna. "The Touch-Screen Generation." The Atlantic, 20 Apr. 2013. Strasburger, Victor C., et al. "Children, Adolescents, and the Media." Pediatrics 132.5 (2013): 958-61. Unantenne, Nalika. Mobile Device Usage among Young Kids: A Southeast Asia Study. Singapore: The Asian Parent and Samsung Kids Time, 2014. Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Wenger, Etienne. "Communities of Practice and Social Learning Systems." Organization 7.2 (2000): 225-46. Yelland, Nicola. "Which Apps Are Educational and Why? It’s in the Eye of the Beholder." The Conversation 13 July 2015. 16 Aug. 2015 ‹http://theconversation.com/which-apps-are-educational-and-why-its-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder-37968›.

Blaise Pascal once offered the following advice to those perennially worried about knowing fact from fiction: “how few things can be demonstrated! Proofs only convince the mind; custom provides the strongest and most firmly held proofs” (148). The concern about whether or not God existed was for Pascal an unnecessary anxiety: the question couldn’t be answered by human knowledge, and so ultimately one just had to “wager” on whatever stood to be most beneficial, act as if this chosen answer was true, and the mind would eventually fall into line. For Pascal, if one stood to gain from believing in the truth of an idea then the great problems of epistemology could be reduced to a relatively simple and pragmatic calculation of benefit. Doubt, suspicion, and all the attendant epistemological worries would only count as wasted time.It might at first seem surprising that this somewhat antiquated idea of Pascal’s, conceived in seventeenth-century France, appears at the core of a novel by a writer considered to be the quintessential “modern” author, David Foster Wallace. But consider the following advice offered to a recovering drug addict in Wallace’s 1996 novelInfinite Jest. To reap the benefits of the AA program, Don Gately, one of the central characters of the novel, is told by resident counsellor Gene M to imagine he is holding a box of Betty Crocker Cake Mix. The box of cake mix represents Boston AA. Gately is advised that the “box came with directions on the side any eight-year-old could read”: Gene M. said all Gately had to do was for fuck’s sake give himself a break and relax and for once shut up and just follow the directions on the side of the fucking box. It didn’t matter one fuckola whether Gately like believed a cake would result, or whether he understood the like fucking baking-chemistry of howa cake would result: if he just followed the motherfucking directions, and had sense enough to get help from slightly more experienced bakers to keep from fucking the directions up if he got confused somehow, but basically the point was if he just followed the childish directions, a cake would result. He’d have his cake. (467) This advice indeed seems lifted from Pascal almost verbatim (plus or minus a few turns of phrase, of course):Learn from those who have been bound like you, and who now wager all they have. They are people who know the road you want to follow and have been cured of the affliction of which you want to be cured. Follow the way by which they began ... (Pascal 156).While the Pascalian influence on Wallace’s work is perhaps interesting in its own right, and there are certainly more extensive and capable analyses of it to be done than mine, I invoke it here to highlight a particular emphasis in Wallace’s work that I think exceeds the framework through which it is usually understood. Wallace’s fiction is commonly considered an attack on irony, being supposedly at the vanguard of a movement in recent American literature that Adam Kelly, in an illuminating analysis, has called the “New Sincerity” (131). But before anything else irony is a particular trope of understanding, a way of situating oneself in regards to an object of knowledge, and so Wallace’s work needs not only to be understood in terms of what a culture considers unhip, trite, and sentimental, but how it comes to decide upon those things at all, how it chooses to understand its reality. Inspired by the Pascalian influence apparent in Wallace’s portrayal of the Alcoholics Anonymous program, I intend to shift the focus away from issues of irony and sincerity and instead consider the importance of the epistemological tropes of suspicion and trust in reading Infinite Jest. More than anything else Wallace’s depiction of the AA program tells us he is interested, like Pascal, in the existential implications of suspicion, in what might be lost in following doubt to its most “radical” conclusions. I SuspicionIt is fruitful to view Western intellectual practice as exhibiting suspicious tendencies. From Descartes’s “hyperbolic doubt,” the “hermeneutics of suspicion” that Ricœur and Foucault see coming out of the legacy of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, to the endless “paranoia of the postmodern” that typifies recent academic trends (Bywater 79), the refusal to trust the veracity of surfaces has been a driving force in post-Enlightenment thought, becoming largely inextricable from how we understand the world. As a mode of critique, suspicion has a particular anxiety about the way fiction masquerades as truth. When a suspicious mind reads a given object, be it an advertisement, a novel, a film, a supermarket, or an egg carton, it most often proceeds by first separating the text into what Paul Ricœur calls an “architecture of meaning” (18), defining those elements it considers fictive and those it considers truer, more essential, in order to locate what it considers “the intentional structure of double meaning” (Ricœur 9). Beneath the fictive surface of a novel, for example, it might find hidden the “truer” forces of social repression and patriarchy. Behind the innocence of a bedtime tale it might discern the truth of the placating purpose of story, or the tyranny of naïve narrative closure, the fantasies of teleology and final consonance. And behind Pascal’s wager it might find a weak submission to ideological fictions, a confirmation of the processes of social conditioning.Over the years suspicion has doubtless proved itself a crucial resource for various politics of resistance, for challenging ossified structures of knowledge, and for exposing heinous fictions that definitely needed exposing. But some contend that these once fruitful intellectual practices have become so deeply entrenched that they are now the things to be suspiciously overcome. Rather than being a subversive tactic of liberation, the “routinisation” of suspicion can stand to mark a hermeneutic stasis. It can even, as Bruno Latour argues, mire important social and ecological issues in counterproductive doubt, the most obvious example being the tiresome “debates” about global warming:the danger would no longer be coming from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact—as we have learned to combat so efficiently in the past—but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases! (Latour 227) The work of David Foster Wallace can be considered another example of such a discourse, one that definitely admits suspicion’s hermeneutic force, but is a little uneasy with its predominance. While Wallace’s work is most commonly understood in relation to irony, irony itself, as I have suggested, can in turn be understood as related to a subtending culture of suspicion and cynicism. In his 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Wallace notes a complex interaction between knowledge, suspicion, art, and televisual culture, in which a particular rendering of irony—a mistrust in clichéd sentiment and all those words we now so confidently put between “shudder” quotes—is commoditised and exploited in order to constantly provide the psychological payoffs of knowingness, those feelings of superiority, safety, and power that come from suspiciously seeing through to the “truth” of things. In Wallace’s reading, ostensibly postmodern advertisements draw attention to their fictive layers to make viewers feel attuned to the supposed truth of their intent. But this access to the “truth” is itself just another fiction aimed to mislead them into commercial pliancy:[TV can] ease that painful tension between Joe’s need to transcend the crowd and his status as Audience member. For to the extent that TV can flatter Joe about “seeing through” the pretentiousness and hypocrisy of outdated values, it can induce in him precisely the feeling of canny superiority it’s taught him to crave, and can keep him dependent on the cynical TV-watching that alone affords this feeling. (Wallace 180) The ironic viewer who would stand above these deliberately naive appeals would then also, and perhaps before anything else, be a suspicious reader, someone predisposed to seeing through the “surface” of a text. Irony, in these examples, would even be alike to the effect gained from “successful” suspicion, something like its reward, rather than an epistemological mode in itself. While in his essay Wallace ultimately intends that his critique of such tendencies will highlight the way much contemporary fiction struggles to subvert this culture, and thus we cannot help but look to his own work to see how it supposedly “attacks” irony, it is also just as crucial to consider its embedded critique of suspicious hermeneutics.II Trust In Infinite Jest’s portrayal of Boston’s Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous programs, Wallace attempts to propose a kind of neo-Pascalian “wager.” And like Pascal’s, Wallace’s is based on the willed performance of that most critically maligned of concepts, trust: that is, a willingness to become, like Pascal, blasé with truth as long as it stands to be beneficial. Within the novel the fictitious Ennet Drug and Alcohol House, along with the adjacent Enfield Tennis Academy, is staged as a school of personal (re)development, dramatising approaches to self-help in the damaged landscape of the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment’s Boston. And it is here where Don Gately, the novel’s unlikely hero, has ended up on his quest to escape the “spider” of addiction. As it openly admits, Alcoholics Anonymous is an easy target for a suspicious mode of thought bent on locating fictions because it “literally makes no sense” (368). But like Pascal, Wallace’s AA submits the problem of truth and error to a more primary consideration of benefit, and celebrates the power of language and custom to create realities, rather than being suspicious of this process of linguistic mediation. So it is a system, like signification itself, that functions on “the carrot-and-donkey aspect of trudging to Meetings only to be told to trudge to still more Meetings” (1001); like any transcendental signifier, the revelations it hints at can never truly arrive. It is also based on assertions that “do not make anything resembling rational sense” (1002). For example, Joelle van Dyne battles with the AA precept “I’m Here But For the Grace of God.” She finds the phrase is literally senseless, and regardless of whether she hears it or not it’s meaningless, and that the foamy enthusiasm with which these folks can say what in fact means nothing at all makes her want to put her head in a Radarange. (366) But perhaps the strongest reason Joelle feels uncomfortable with the present example is that she senses in its obvious untruth the potential truth of all meaning’s fictitiousness, how all sense might just be made up of nonsense of one form or another. Within the AA program these words are a means to an end, rather than something to be resisted or deconstructed.To exist within Infinite Jest’s AA program is thus to be uncomfortably close to the linguistic production of reality, to work at meaning’s coalface, exposed to the flames of its fictitiousness, but all the while being forced to deny this very vista. So while AA is a process firmly against the mechanisms of denial (one of its favourite slogans is “Denial is not a river in Egypt” [272]), it is also based on a paradoxical imperative to deny the status of meaning as a production, as well as the denial of the significance of this paradox: For me, the slogan [Analysis-Paralysis] means there’s no set way to argue intellectual-type stuff about the Program [...] You can’t think about it like an intellectual thing [...] You can analyse it til you’re breaking tables with your forehead and find a cause to walk away, back Out There, where the Disease is. Or you can stay and hang in and do the best you can. (1002) Although it is common knowledge that its precepts are full of logical contradiction and impasse, that it is a blatantly fictitious enterprise, the difficulty which Wallace’s portrayal poses, both for his characters and for his readers schooled in suspicious hermeneutics, is that as a process of healing the AA program somehow seems to work with great efficacy. Enter the redemption of Don Gately.Despite his initial reluctance to embrace the program’s undertakings, much to his surprise Gately finds it having a definite effect: he “all of a sudden realised that quite a few days had gone by since he’d even thought about Demerol or Talwin or even weed” (467). The bracketing of the desire to know and interpret, and the willed trust in the efficacy of a process that one cannot know by necessity, initially frustrates him, and even makes him suspicious: “He couldn’t believe it. He wasn’t Grateful so much as kind of suspicious about it, the Removal [of his addiction]” (468). And all this can definitely be intellectually uncomfortable for a reader well-versed in suspicious hermeneutics, let alone the somewhat unintellectual Gately:It did, yes, tentatively seem maybe actually to be working, but Gately couldn’t for the life of him figure out how just sitting on haemorrhoid-hostile folding chairs every night looking at nose-pores and listening to clichés could work. Nobody’s ever been able to figure AA out, is another binding commonality. (349)Ultimately the AA program presents the novel’s hero and its readers with an impasse, a block to what one knows and can critique, refuting the basic assumption that links narrative progression and change with the acquisition of knowledge. While others in AA seek to understand and debunk it, they also significantly fail to achieve the kind of recovery experienced by Gately. As Elizabeth Freudenthal suggests, “despite the problems one may have with AA as a vehicle for healthy living, Gately’s mode of fighting addiction is the only one in the novel that actually works” (191). And while Freudenthal suggests that Gately’s success comes through a ritual “anti-interiority,” a “mode of identity founded in the material world of both objects and biological bodies and divested from an essentialist notion of inner emotional, psychological, and spiritual life” (192), to me it seems that were Gately unable to resist the pleasures of the suspicious mind then little of his “abiding” in the exterior world would be possible. Ultimately, what Gately achieves comes through a kind of epistemological “trust.”III Reading TrustfullyBy occupying such a central place in the narrative, this neo-Pascalian wager around which the novel’s AA program is built is obviously intended to bear not only on its characters, but on how the novel is read. So how might we also “learn” from such Pascalian gambits? How might we read the novel without suspicion? What might we gain by becoming Don Gately? What, on the other hand, might we lose? While this essay is far too short to conduct this kind of investigation in full, a few points might still be raised in lieu of a proper conclusion.By openly submitting to his ignorance of what his actions mean, Gately is able to approach success, conclusion, and fulfillment. What the novel’s ending has in store for him is another question altogether, but Freudenthal views Gately’s closing scenes as the apotheosis of his “anti-intellectual endeavor” (206). Gately’s narrative thus also presents a challenge to readers thoroughly led by suspicious hermeneutics, and encourages us, if we are to accept this notion that is key to Infinite Jest (but we can, of course, refuse not to), to place ourselves in the position of the AA attendee, as a subject of the text’s discourse, not in possession of knowledge through which to critique it and scale that “architecture of meaning.” Many aspects of the novel of course impel us to read suspiciously, to gather clues like detectives, to interrogate the veracity of claims. Consider, for example, the compounded conflicting accounts of whether Joelle van Dyne has been horribly disfigured by acid, or is sublimely beautiful (compare, for instance, the explanation given on 538 with that on 795). Yet ultimately, recalling the AA ethos, the narrative makes it difficult for us to successfully execute these suspicious reading practices. Similar to a text like Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, that for Brian McHale ultimately resists any attempt to answer the many questions it poses (90-91), Infinite Jest frequently invokes a logic of what we might call epistemological equivocation. Either the veil-wearing Joelle van Dyne is hideously and improbably deformed or is superlatively beautiful; either AA is a vapid institution of brainwashing or is the key to recovery from substance abuse; either the novel’s matriarch, Avril Incandenza, is a sinister “black widow” or a superlatively caring mother. The list goes on.To some extent, the plethora of conflicting accounts simply engages an “innocent” readerly curiosity. But regardless of the precise nature of this hermeneutic desire stimulated by the text, one cannot help but feel, as Marshall Boswell suggests, that “Wallace’s point seems to be that these issues are not the issue” (175). If we read the novel attempting to harmonise these elements, interrogating the reliability of the given textual evidence, we will be sorely disappointed, if not doomed to the “analysis paralysis” that is much feared in the novel’s AA program. While one of the pleasures Wallace’s novel offers readers is the encouragement to participate actively in the text, it is also something it is wary of. And this is where the rub of the book lies. Just like in AA, we can potentially keep analysing its ambiguities forever; it is indeed designed to be pleasurable in just this way. But it is also intended, at least so Wallace tells us, to resist the addictive nature of pure entertainment:The original title was A Failed Entertainment. The idea is that the book is structured as an entertainment that doesn’t work [...]. And the tension of the book is to try to make it at once extremely entertaining—and also sort of warped, and to sort of shake the reader awake about some of the things that are sinister in entertainment. (Wallace in Lipsky 79)If we consider what it might mean to view the book as a “Failed Entertainment,” and consider what it is we love to do when reading suspiciously, we can then see that it is perhaps intended to steer us away from trying to decode it, especially when it is constantly suggested to us that it is this effort of analysis that tends to move one out of the immediacy of a given moment. The fact that “nobody’s ever been able to figure AA out” (349), yet it still indubitably works, seems to suggests how we are to approach the novel.But what are we offered instead of these pleasures of suspicious reading? Perhaps, like the AA attendee, the novel wants us to learn to listen to what is already in front of us: for the AA member it is all those stories offered up at the “podium”; for us it is all the pain and joy written in the text. In place of a conclusive ending that gives us all that we want to know, that shows us everything that “happens,” in its final scene the novel instead tells the story of a man finding his “bottom,” his lowest ebb, waking up “flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand” (981). This man, of course, is Don Gately. If we see this final moment only as a frustration of narrative desire, as a turning away from full understanding, from a revelation of the “truth” the narrative has been withholding, then we perhaps fail the task Wallace’s text, like AA, constantly asks of us: to listen, to accept, to trust.ReferencesBoswell, Marshall. Understanding David Foster Wallace. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 2003.Bywater, William. “The Paranoia of Postmodernism.” Philosophy and Literature 14.1 (1990): 79–84. Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx.” Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–84, Volume 2. Ed. James Faubion. Trans. Robert Hurley et al. London: Penguin, 2000. 269–78. Freudenthal, Elizabeth. “Anti-Interiority: Compulsiveness, Objectification, and Identity in Infinite Jest.” New Literary History 41.1 (2010): 191–211. Kelly, Adam. “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction.” Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays. Los Angeles: Sideshow Media Group Press, 2010. 131–46.Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 225–48.Lipsky, David. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace. New York: Broadway Books, 2010.McHale, Brian. “Modernist Reading, Post-Modern Text: The Case of Gravity's Rainbow.” Poetics Today 1.1 (1979): 85–110.Pascal, Blaise. Pensées and Other Writings. Trans. Honor Levi. Ed.Anthony Levi. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.Ricœur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Trans. Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970.Wallace, David Foster. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2 (1993): 151–94. ---. Infinite Jest. New York: Back Bay Books, 1996.

As Lewis Carroll’s Alice comes to the end of her journey through the looking glass world, she has also come to the end of her patience with its strange power games and arbitrations. At every stage of the adventure, she has encountered someone who wants to dictate rules and protocols, and a lesson on table manners from the Red Queen finally triggers rebellion. “I can’t stand this any more,” Alice cries, as she seizes the tablecloth and hurls the entire setting into chaos (279). Then, catching hold of the Red Queen, she gives her a good shaking, until the rigid contours of the imperious figure become fuzzy and soft. At this point, the hold of the dream dissolves and Alice, awakening on the other side of the mirror, realises she is shaking the kitten. Queens have long been associated with ideas of transformation. As Alice is duly advised when she first looks out across the chequered landscape of the looking glass world, the rules of chess decree that a pawn may become a queen if she makes it to the other side. The transformation of pawn to queen is in accord with the fairy tale convention of the unspoiled country girl who wins the heart of a prince and is crowned as his bride. This works in a dual register: on one level, it is a story of social elevation, from the lowest to the highest rank; on another, it is a magical transition, as some agent of fortune intervenes to alter the determinations of the social world. But fairy tales also present us with the antithesis and adversary of the fortune-blessed princess, in the figure of the tyrant queen who works magic to shape destiny to her own ends. The Queen and the mirror converge in the cultural imaginary, working transformations that disrupt the order of nature, invert socio-political hierarchies, and flout the laws of destiny. In “Snow White,” the powers of the wicked queen are mediated by the looking glass, which reflects and affirms her own image while also serving as a panopticon, keep the entire realm under surveillance, to pick up any signs of threat to her pre-eminence. All this turbulence in the order of things lets loose a chaotic phantasmagoria that is prime material for film and animation. Two major film versions of “Snow White” have been released in the past few years—Mirror Mirror (2012) and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)—while Tim Burton’s animated 3D rendition of Alice in Wonderland was released in 2010. Alice through the Looking Glass (2016) and The Huntsman: Winter’s War, the 2016 prequel to Snow White and the Huntsman, continue the experiment with state-of-the-art-techniques in 3D animation and computer-generated imaging to push the visual boundaries of fantasy. Perhaps this escalating extravagance in the creation of fantasy worlds is another manifestation of the ancient lore and law of sorcery: that the magic of transformation always runs out of control, because it disrupts the all-encompassing design of an ordered world. This principle is expressed with poetic succinctness in Ursula Le Guin’s classic story A Wizard of Earthsea, when the Master Changer issues a warning to his most gifted student: But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. (48)In Le Guin’s story, transformation is only dangerous if it involves material change; illusions of all kinds are ultimately harmless because they are impermanent.Illusions mediated by the mirror, however, blur the distinction Le Guin is making, for the mirror image supposedly reflects a real world. And it holds the seductive power of a projected narcissism. Seeing what we wish for is an experience that can hold us captive in a way that changes human nature, and so leads to dangerous acts with material consequences. The queen in the mirror becomes the wicked queen because she converts the world into her image, and in traditions of animation going back to Disney’s original Snow White (1937) the mirror is itself an animate being, with a spirit whose own determinations become paramount. Though there are exceptions in the annals of fairy story, powers of transformation are typically dark powers, turbulent and radically elicit. When they are mediated through the agency of the mirror, they are also the powers of narcissism and autocracy. Through a Glass DarklyIn her classic cultural history of the mirror, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet tracks a duality in the traditions of symbolism associated with it. This duality is already evident in Biblical allusions to the mirror, with references to the Bible itself as “the unstained mirror” (Proverbs 7.27) counterpointed by images of the mortal condition as one of seeing “through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13.12).The first of these metaphoric conventions celebrates the crystalline purity of a reflecting surface that reveals the spiritual identity beneath the outward form of the human image. The church fathers drew on Plotinus to evoke “a whole metaphysics of light and reflection in which the visible world is the image of the invisible,” and taught that “humans become mirrors when they cleanse their souls (Melchior-Bonnet 109–10). Against such invocations of the mirror as an intermediary for the radiating presence of the divine in the mortal world, there arises an antithetical narrative, in which it is portrayed as distorting, stained, and clouded, and therefore an instrument of delusion. Narcissus becomes the prototype of the human subject led astray by the image itself, divorced from material reality. What was the mirror if not a trickster? Jean Delumeau poses this question in a preface to Melchior-Bonnet’s book (xi).Through the centuries, as Melchior-Bonnet’s study shows, these two strands are interwoven in the cultural imaginary, sometimes fused, and sometimes torn asunder. With Venetian advances in the techniques and technologies of mirror production in the late Renaissance, the mirror gained special status as a possession of pre-eminent beauty and craftsmanship, a means by which the rich and powerful could reflect back to themselves both the self-image they wanted to see, and the world in the background as a shimmering personal aura. This was an attempt to harness the numinous influence of the divinely radiant mirror in order to enhance the superiority of leading aristocrats. By the mid seventeenth century, the mirror had become an essential accessory to the royal presence. Queen Anne of Austria staged a Queen’s Ball in 1633, in a hall surrounded by mirrors and tapestries. The large, finely polished mirror panels required for this kind of display were made exclusively by craftsmen at Murano, in a process that, with its huge furnaces, its alternating phases of melting and solidifying, its mysterious applications of mercury and silver, seemed to belong to the transformational arts of alchemy. In 1664, Louis XIV began to steal unique craftsmen from Murano and bring them to France, to set up the Royal Glass and Mirror Company whose culminating achievement was the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.The looking glass world of the palace was an arena in which courtiers and visitors engaged in the high-stakes challenge of self-fashioning. Costume, attitude, and manners were the passport to advancement. To cut a figure at court was to create an identity with national and sometimes international currency. It was through the art of self-fashioning that the many princesses of Europe, and many more young women of title and hereditary distinction, competed for the very few positions as consort to the heir of a royal house. A man might be born to be king, but a woman had to become a queen.So the girl who would be queen looks in the mirror to assess her chances. If her face is her fortune, what might she be? A deep relationship with the mirror may serve to enhance her beauty and enable her to realise her wish, but like all magical agents, the mirror also betrays anyone with the hubris to believe they are in control of it. In the Grimm’s story of “Snow White,” the Queen practises the ancient art of scrying, looking into a reflective surface to conjure images of things distant in time and place. But although the mirror affords her the seer’s visionary capacity to tell what will be, it does not give her the power to control the patterns of destiny. Driven to attempt such control, she must find other magic in order to work the changes she desires, and so she experiments with spells of self-transformation. Here the doubleness of the mirror plays out across every plane of human perception: visual, ethical, metaphysical, psychological. A dynamic of inherent contradiction betrays the figure who tries to engage the mirror as a servant. Disney’s original 1937 cartoon shows the vain Queen brewing an alchemical potion that changes her into the very opposite of all she has sought to become: an ugly, ill-dressed, and impoverished old woman. This is the figure who can win and betray trust from the unspoiled princess to whom the arts of self-fashioning are unknown. In Tarsem Singh’s film Mirror Mirror, the Queen actually has two mirrors. One is a large crystal egg that reflects back a phantasmagoria of palace scenes; the other, installed in a primitive hut on an island across the lake, is a simple looking glass that shows her as she really is. Snow White and the Huntsman portrays the mirror as a golden apparition, cloaked and faceless, that materialises from within the frame to stand before her. This is not her reflection, but with every encounter, she takes on more of its dark energies, until, in another kind of reversal, she becomes its image and agent in the wider world. As Ursula Le Guin’s sage teaches the young magician, magic has its secret economies. You pay for what you get, and the changes wrought will come back at you in ways you would never have foreseen. The practice of scrying inevitably leads the would-be clairvoyant into deeper levels of obscurity, until the whole world turns against the seer in a sequence of manifestations entirely contrary to his or her framework of expectation. Ultimately, the lesson of the mirror is that living in obscurity is a defining aspect of the human condition. Jorge Luis Borges, the blind writer whose work exhibits a life-long obsession with mirrors, surveys a range of interpretations and speculations surrounding the phrase “through a glass darkly,” and quotes this statement from Leon Bloy: “There is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who he is. No one knows what he has come into this world to do . . . or what his real name is, his enduring Name in the register of Light” (212).The mirror will never really tell you who you are. Indeed, its effects may be quite the contrary, as Alice discovers when, within a couple of moves on the looking glass chessboard, she finds herself entering the wood of no names. Throughout her adventures she is repeatedly interrogated about who or what she is, and can give no satisfactory answer. The looking glass has turned her into an estranged creature, as bizarre a species as any of those she encounters in its landscapes.Furies“The furies are at home in the mirror,” wrote R. S. Thomas in his poem “Reflections” (265). They are the human image gone haywire, the frightening other of what we hope to see in our reflection. As the mirror is joined by technologies of the moving image in twentieth-century evolutions of the myth, the furies have been given a new lease of life on the cinema screen. In Disney’s 1937 cartoon of Snow White, the mirror itself has the face of a fury, which emerges from a pool of blackness like a death’s head before bringing the Queen’s own face into focus. As its vision comes into conflict with hers, threatening the dissolution of the world over which she presides, the mirror’s face erupts into fire.Computer-generated imaging enables an expansive response to the challenges of visualisation associated with the original furies of classical mythology. The Erinyes are unstable forms, arising from liquid (blood) to become semi-materialised in human guise, always ready to disintegrate again. They are the original undead, hovering between mortal embodiment and cadaverous decay. Tearing across the landscape as a flock of birds, a swarm of insects, or a mass of storm clouds, they gather into themselves tremendous energies of speed and motion. The 2012 film Snow White and the Huntsman, directed by Rupert Sanders, gives us the strongest contemporary realisation of the archaic fury. Queen Ravenna, played by Charlize Theron, is a virtuoso of the macabre, costumed in a range of metallic exoskeletons and a cloak of raven’s feathers, with a raised collar that forms two great black wings either side of her head. Powers of dematerialisation and rematerialisation are central to her repertoire. She undergoes spectacular metamorphosis into a mass of shrieking birds; from the walls around her she conjures phantom soldiers that splinter into shards of black crystal when struck by enemy swords. As she dies at the foot of the steps leading up to the great golden disc of her mirror, her face rapidly takes on the great age she has disguised by vampiric practices.Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen in Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is a figure midway between Disney’s fairy tale spectre and the fully cinematic register of Theron’s Ravenna. Bonham Carter’s Queen, with her accentuated head and pantomime mask of a face, retains the boundaries of form. She also presides over a court whose visual structures express the rigidities of a tyrannical regime. Thus she is no shape-shifter, but energies of the fury are expressed in her voice, which rings out across the presence chamber of the palace and reverberates throughout the kingdom with its calls for blood. Alice through the Looking Glass, James Bobin’s 2016 sequel, puts her at the centre of a vast destructive force field. Alice passes through the mirror to encounter the Lord of Time, whose eternal rule must be broken in order to break the power of the murdering Queen; Alice then opens a door and tumbles in free-fall out into nothingness. The place where she lands is a world not of daydream but of nightmare, where everything will soon be on fire, as the two sides in the chess game advance towards each other for the last battle. This inflation of the Red Queen’s macabre aura and impact is quite contrary to what Lewis Carroll had in mind for his own sequel. In some notes about the stage adaptation of the Alice stories, he makes a painstaking distinction between the characters of the queen in his two stories.I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion—a blind and aimless Fury. The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm—she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the 10th degree, the concentrated essence of governesses. (86)Yet there is clearly a temptation to erase this distinction in dramatisations of Alice’s adventures. Perhaps the Red Queen as a ‘not unkindly’ governess is too restrained a persona for the psychodynamic mythos surrounding the queen in the mirror. The image itself demands more than Carroll wants to accord, and the original Tenniel illustrations give a distinctly sinister look to the stern chess queen. In their very first encounter, the Red Queen contradicts every observation Alice makes, confounds the child’s sensory orientation by inverting the rules of time and motion, and assigns her the role of pawn in the game. Kafka or Orwell would not have been at all relaxed about an authority figure who practises mind control, language management, and identity reassignment. But here Carroll offers a brilliant modernisation of the fairy story tradition. Under the governance of the autocratic queen, wonderland and the looking glass world are places in which the laws of science, logic, and language are overturned, to be replaced by the rules of the queen’s games: cards and croquet in the wonderland, and chess in the looking glass world. Alice, as a well-schooled Victorian child, knows something of these games. She has enough common sense to be aware of how the laws of gravity and time and motion are supposed to work, and if she boasts of being able to believe six impossible things before breakfast, this signifies that she has enough logic to understand the limits of possibility. She would also have been taught about species and varieties and encouraged to make her own collections of natural forms. But the anarchy of the queen’s world extends into the domain of biology: species of all kinds can talk, bodies dissolve or change size, and transmutations occur instantaneously. Thus the world-warping energies of the Erinyes are re-imagined in an absurdist’s challenge to the scientist’s universe and the logician’s mentality.Carroll’s instinct to tame the furies is in accord with the overall tone and milieu of his stories, which are works of quirky charm rather than tales of terror, but his two queens are threatening enough to enable him to build the narrative to a dramatic climax. For film-makers and animators, though, it is the queen who provides the dramatic energy and presence. There is an over-riding temptation to let loose the pandemonium of the original Erinyes, exploiting their visual terror and their classical association with metamorphosis. FashioningThere is some sociological background to the coupling of the queen and the mirror in fairy story. In reality, the mirror might assist an aspiring princess to become queen by enchanting the prince who was heir to the throne, but what was the role of the looking glass once she was crowned? Historically, the self-imaging of the queen has intense and nervous resonances, and these can be traced back to Elizabeth I, whose elaborate persona was fraught with newly interpreted symbolism. Her portraits were her mirrors, and they reflect a figure in whom the qualities of radiance associated with divinity were transferred to the human monarch. Elizabeth developed the art of dressing herself in wearable light. If she lacked for a halo, she made up for it with the extravagant radiata of her ruffs and the wreaths of pearls around her head. Pearls in mediaeval poetry carried the mystique of a luminous microcosm, but they were also mirrors in themselves, each one a miniature reflecting globe. The Ditchely portrait of 1592 shows her standing as a colossus between heaven and earth, with the changing planetary light cycle as background. This is a queen who rules the world through the mediation of her own created image. It is an inevitable step from here to a corresponding intervention in the arrangement of the world at large, which involves the armies and armadas that form the backdrop to her other great portraits. And on the home front, a regime of terror focused on regular public decapitations and other grisly executions completes the strategy to remaking the world according to her will. Renowned costume designer Eiko Ishioka created an aesthetic for Mirror Mirror that combines elements of court fashion from the Elizabethan era and the French ancien régime, with allusions to Versailles. Formality and mannerism are the keynotes for the palace scenes. Julia Roberts as the Queen wears a succession of vast dresses that are in defiance of human scale and proportion. Their width at the hem is twice her height, and 100,000 Svarovski crystals were used for their embellishment. For the masked ball scene, she makes her entry as a scarlet peacock with a high arching ruff of pure white feathers. She amuses herself by arranging her courtiers as pieces on a chess-board. So stiffly attired they can barely move more than a square at a time, and with hats surmounted by precariously balanced ships, they are a mock armada from which the Queen may sink individual vessels on a whim, by ordering a fatal move. Snow White and the Huntsman takes a very different approach to extreme fashioning. Designer Colleen Atwood suggests the shape-shifter in the Queen’s costumes, incorporating materials evoking a range of species: reptile scales, fluorescent beetle wings from Thailand, and miniature bird skulls. There is an obvious homage here to the great fashion designer Alexander McQueen, whose hallmark was a fascination with the organic costuming of creatures in feathers, fur, wool, scales, shells, and fronds. Birds were everywhere in McQueen’s work. His 2006 show Widows of Culloden featured a range of headdresses that made the models look as if they had just walked through a flock of birds in full flight. The creatures were perched on their heads with outstretched wings askance across the models’ faces, obscuring their field of vision. As avatars from the spirit realm, birds are emblems of otherness, and associated with metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. These resonances give a potent mythological aura to Theron’s Queen of the dark arts.Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman accordingly present strikingly contrasted versions of self-fashioning. In Mirror Mirror we have an approach driven by traditions of aristocratic narcissism and courtly persona, in which form is both rigid and extreme. The Queen herself, far from being a shape-shifter, is a prisoner of the massive and rigid architecture that is her costume. Snow White and the Huntsman gives us a more profoundly magical interpretation, where form is radically unstable, infused with strange energies that may at any moment manifest themselves through violent transformation.Atwood was also costume designer for Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, where an invented framing story foregrounds the issue of fashioning as social control. Alice in this version is a young woman, being led by her mother to a garden party where a staged marriage proposal is to take place. Alice, as the social underling in the match, is simply expected to accept the honour. Instead, she escapes the scene and disappears down a rabbit hole to return to the wonderland of her childhood. In a nice comedic touch, her episodes of shrinking and growing involve an embarrassing separation from her clothes, so divesting her also of the demure image of the Victorian maiden. Atwood provides her with a range of fantasy party dresses that express the free spirit of a world that is her refuge from adult conformity.Alice gets to escape the straitjacket of social formation in Carroll’s original stories by overthrowing the queen’s game, and with it her micro-management of image and behaviour. There are other respects, though, in which Alice’s adventures are a form of social and moral fashioning. Her opening reprimand to the kitten includes some telling details about her own propensities. She once frightened a deaf old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena and you’re a bone!” (147). Playing kings and queens is one of little Alice’s favourite games, and there is more than a touch of the Red Queen in the way she bosses and manages the kitten. It is easy to laud her impertinence in the face of the tyrannical characters she meets in her fantasies, but does she risk becoming just like them?As a story of moral self-fashioning, Alice through the Looking Glass cuts both ways. It is at once a critique of the Victorian social straitjacket, and a child’s fable about self-improvement. To be accorded the status of queen and with it the freedom of the board is also to be invested with responsibilities. If the human girl is the queen of species, how will she measure up? The published version of the story excludes an episode known to editors as “The Wasp in a Wig,” an encounter that takes place as Alice reaches the last ditch before the square upon which she will be crowned. She is about to jump the stream when she hears a sigh from woods behind her. Someone here is very unhappy, and she reasons with herself about whether there is any point in stopping to help. Once she has made the leap, there will be no going back, but she is reluctant to delay the move, as she is “very anxious to be a Queen” (309). The sigh comes from an aged creature in the shape of a wasp, who is sitting in the cold wind, grumbling to himself. Her kind enquiries are greeted with a succession of waspish retorts, but she persists and does not leave until she has cheered him up. The few minutes devoted “to making the poor old creature comfortable,” she tells herself, have been well spent.Read in isolation, the episode is trite and interferes with the momentum of the story. Carroll abandoned it on the advice of his illustrator John Tenniel, who wrote to say it didn’t interest him in the least (297). There is interest of another kind in Carroll’s instinct to arrest Alice’s momentum at that critical stage, with what amounts to a small morality tale, but Tenniel’s instinct was surely right. The mirror as a social object is surrounded by traditions of self-fashioning that are governed by various modes of conformity: moral, aesthetic, political. Traditions of myth and fantasy allow wider imaginative scope for the role of the mirror, and by association, for inventive speculation about human transformation in a world prone to extraordinary upheavals. ReferencesBorges, Jorge Luis. “Mirrors of Enigma.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Eds. Donald A. Yates and James Irby. New York: New Directions, 2007. 209–12. Carroll, Lewis. Alice through the Looking Glass. In The Annotated Alice. Ed. Martin Gardner. London: Penguin, 2000.The King James Bible.Le Guin, Ursula. The Earthsea Quartet. London: Penguin, 2012.Melchior-Bonnet, Sabine. The Mirror: A History. Trans. Katherine H. Jewett. London: Routledge, 2014.Thomas, R.S. “Reflections.” No Truce with the Furies, Collected Later Poems 1988–2000. Hexham, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2011.

The usual postmodern suspicions about diligently deciphering authorial intent or stridently seeking fixed meaning/s and/or binary distinctions in an artistic work aside, this self-indulgent essay pushes the boundaries regarding normative academic research, for it focusses on my own (minimally celebrated) published creative writing’s status as a literary innovation. Dedicated to illuminating some of the less common denominators at play in Australian horror, my paper recalls the creative writing process involved when I set upon the (arrogant?) goal of creating a new genre of creative writing: that of the ‘Aboriginal Fantastic’. I compare my work to the literary output of a small but significant group (2.5% of the population), of which I am a member: Aboriginal Australians. I narrow my focus even further by examining that creative writing known as Aboriginal horror. And I reduce the sample size of my study to an exceptionally small number by restricting my view to one type of Aboriginal horror literature only: the Aboriginal vampire novel, a genre to which I have contributed professionally with the 2011 paperback and 2012 e-book publication of That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! However, as this paper hopefully demonstrates, and despite what may be interpreted by some cynical commentators as the faux sincerity of my taxonomic fervour, Aboriginal horror is a genre noteworthy for its instability and worthy of further academic interrogation.Surprising to many, Aboriginal Australian mythology includes at least one truly vampire-like entity, despite Althans’ confident assertion that the Bunyip is “Australia’s only monster” (16) which followed McKee’s equally fearless claim that “there is no blackfella tradition of zombies or vampires” (201). Gelder’s Ghost Stories anthology also only mentions the Bunyip, in a tale narrated by Indigenous man Percy Mumbulla (250). Certainly, neither of these academics claim Indigeneity in their ethnicity and most Aboriginal Australian scholars will happily agree that our heterogeneous Indigenous cultures and traditions are devoid of opera-cape wearing Counts who sleep in coffins or are repelled by crucifix-wielding Catholics. Nevertheless, there are fascinating stories--handed down orally from one generation to the next (Australian Aborigines, of course, have no ancestral writing system)--informing wide-eyed youngsters of bloodsucking, supernatural entities that return from the grave to feed upon still living blackfellas: hence Unaipon describes the red-skinned, fig tree-dwelling monster, the “Yara Ma Yha Who […] which sucks the blood from the victim and leaves him helpless upon the ground” (218). Like most vampires, this monster imparts a similarly monstrous existence upon his prey, which it drains of blood through the suckers on its fingers, not its teeth. Additionally, Reed warns: “Little children, beware of the Yara-ma-yha-who! If you do not behave yourselves and do as you are told, they will come and eat you!” (410), but no-one suggests this horrible creature is actually an undead human.For the purposes of this paper at least, the defining characteristics of a vampire are firstly that it must have once been an ordinary, living human. Secondly, it must have an appetite for human blood. Thirdly, it must have a ghoulish inability to undergo a permanent death (note, zombies, unlike vampires it seems, are fonder of brains than fresh hemoglobin and are particularly easy to dispatch). Thus, according to my criteria, an arguably genuine Aboriginal Australian vampire is referred to when Bunson writes of the Mrart being an improperly buried member of the tribe who has returned after death to feed upon the living (13) and when Cheung notes “a number of vampire-like creatures were feared, most especially the mrart, the ghost of a dead person who attacked victims at night and dragged them away from campsites” (40). Unfortunately, details regarding this “number of vampire-like creatures” have not been collated, nor I fear, in this era of rapidly extinguishing Aboriginal Australian language use, are they ever likely to be.Perhaps the best hope for preservation of these little known treasures of our mythology lies not with anthropologists but with the nation’s Indigenous creative writers. Yet no blackfella novelist, apparently, has been interested in the monstrous, bloodsucking, Aboriginal Undead. Despite being described as dominating the “Black Australian novel” (Shoemaker 1), writer Mudrooroo--who has authored three vampire novels--reveals nothing of Aboriginal Australian vampirology in his texts. Significantly, however, Mudrooroo states that Aboriginal Australian novelists such as he “are devoting their words to the Indigenous existential being” (Indigenous 3). Existentiality, of course, has to do with questions of life, death and dying and, for we Aboriginal Australians, such questions inevitably lead to us addressing the terrible consequences of British invasion and genocide upon our cultural identity, and this is reflected in Mudrooroo’s effective use of the vampire trope in his three ‘Ghost Dreaming’ novels, as they are also known. Mudrooroo’s bloodsuckers, however, are the invading British and Europeans in his extended ‘white man as ghost’ metaphor: they are not sourced from Aboriginal Australian mythology.Mudrooroo does, notably, intertwine his story of colonising vampires in Australia with characters created by Bram Stoker in his classic novel Dracula (1897). He calls his first Aborigine to become a familiar “Renfield” (Undying 93), and even includes a soft-porn re-imagining of an encounter between characters he has inter-textually named “Lucy” and “Mina” (Promised 3). This potential for a contemporary transplantation of Stoker’s European characters to Australia was another aspect I sought to explore in my novel, especially regarding semi-autobiographical writing by mixed-race Aboriginal Australians such as Mudrooroo and myself. I wanted to meta-fictionally insert my self-styled anti-hero into a Stoker-inspired milieu. Thus my work features a protagonist who is confused and occasionally ambivalent about his Aboriginal identity. Brought up as Catholic, as I was, he succumbs to an Australian re-incarnation of Stoker’s Dracula as Anti-Christ and finds himself battling the true-believers of the Catholic Church, including a Moroccan version of Professor Van Helsing and a Buffy-like, quasi-Islamic vampire slayer.Despite his once revered status, Mudrooroo is now exiled from the Australian literary scene as a result of his claim to Indigeneity being (apparently) disproven (see Clark). Illness and old age prevent him from defending the charges, hence it is unlikely that Mudrooroo (or Colin Johnson as he was formerly known) will further develop the Aboriginal Australian vampire trope in his writing. Which situation leaves me to cautiously identify myself as the sole Aboriginal Australian novelist exploring Indigenous vampires in his/her creative writing, as evidenced by my 312 page novel That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance!, which was a prescribed text in a 2014 Indiana University course on World Literature (Halloran).Set in a contemporary Australia where disparate existential explanations including the Aboriginal Dreamtime, Catholicism, vampirism and atheism all co-exist, the writing of my novel was motivated by the question: ‘How can such incongruent ideologies be reconciled or bridged?’ My personal worldview is influenced by all four of these explanations for the mysteries of life and death: I was brought up in Catholicism but schooled in scientific methodology, which evolved into an insipid atheism. Culturally I was drawn to the gothic novel and developed an intellectual interest in Stoker’sDracula and its significance as a pro-Catholic, covert mission of proselytization (see Starrs 2004), whilst simultaneously learning more of my totem, Garrawi (the Sulphur-crested White Cockatoo), and the Aboriginal Dreamtime legends of my ancestral forebears. Much of my novel concerns questions of identity for a relatively light-complexioned, mixed ancestry Aboriginal Australian such as myself, and the place such individuals occupy in the post-colonial world. Mudrooroo, perhaps, was right in surmising that we Aboriginal Australian authors are devoted to writing about “the Indigenous existential being” for my Aboriginal vampire novel is at least semi-autobiographical and fixated on the protagonist’s attempts to reconcile his atheism with his Dreamtime teachings and Catholicism. But Mudrooroo’s writing differs markedly from my own when it comes to the expectations he has regarding the audience’s acceptance of supernatural themes. He apparently fully believed in the possibility of such unearthly spirits existing, and wrote of the “Maban Reality” whereby supernatural events are entirely tenable in the Aboriginal Australian world-view, and the way these matters are presented suggests he expects the reader to be similarly convinced. With this Zeitgeist, Mudrooroo’s ‘Ghost Dreaming’ novels can be accurately described as Aboriginal Gothic. In this genre, Chanady explains, “the supernatural, as well as highly improbable events, are presented without any comment by the magical realist narrator” ("Magic Realism" 431).What, then, is the meaning of Aboriginal Gothic, given we Aboriginal peoples have no haunted castles or mist-shrouded graveyards? Again according to Chanady, as she set out in her groundbreaking monograph of 1985, in a work of Magical Realism the author unquestioningly accepts the supernatural as credible (10-12), even as, according to Althans, it combines “the magical and realist, into a new perspective of the world, thus offering alternative ways and new approaches to reality” (26). From this general categorisation, Althans proposes, comes the specific genre of Aboriginal Gothic, which is Magical Realism in an Indigenous context that creates a “cultural matrix foreign to a European audience [...] through blending the Gothic mode in its European tradition with the myths and customs of Aboriginal culture” (28-29). She relates the Aboriginal Gothic to Mudrooroo’s Maban Reality due to its acting “as counter-reality, grounded in the earth or country, to a rational worldview and the demands of a European realism” (28). Within this category sit not only the works of Aboriginal Australian novelists such as Mudrooroo, but also more recent novels by Aboriginal Australian writers Kim Scott and Alexis Wright, who occasionally indulge in improbable narratives informed by supernatural beings (while steering disappointingly clear of vampires).But there is more to the Aboriginal Gothic than a naïve acceptance of Maban Reality, or, for that matter, any other Magical Realist treatments of Aboriginal Australian mythology. Typically, the work of Aboriginal Gothic writers speaks to the historical horrors of colonisation. In contrast to the usually white-authored Australian Gothic, in which the land down under was seen as terrifying by the awestruck colonisers, and the Aborigine was portrayed as “more frightening than any European demon” (Turcotte, "Australian Gothic" 10), the Aboriginal Gothic sometimes reverses roles and makes the invading white man the monster. The Australian Gothic was for Aborigines, “a disabling, rather than enabling, discourse” (Turcotte, "Australian Gothic" 10) whilst colonial Gothic texts egregiously portrayed the colonised subject as a fearsome and savage Other. Ostensibly sub-human, from a psychoanalytic point of view, the Aborigine may even have symbolised the dark side of the British settler, but who, in the very act of his being subjugated, assures the white invader of his racial superiority, moral integrity and righteous identity. However, when Aboriginal Australian authors reiterate, when we subjugated savages wrestle the keyboard away, readers witness the Other writing back, critically. Receivers of our words see the distorted and silencing master discourse subverted and, indeed, inverted. Our audiences are subjectively repositioned to see the British Crown as the monster. The previously presumed civil coloniser is instead depicted as the author and perpetrator of a violently racist, criminal discourse, until, eventually, s/he is ultimately ‘Gothicised’: eroded and made into the Other, the villainous, predatory savage. In this style of vicious literary retaliation Mudrooroo excelled. Furthermore, as a mixed ancestry Aborigine, like myself, Mudrooroo represented in his very existence, the personification of Aboriginal Gothic, for as Idilko Riendes writes, “The half caste is reminiscent of the Gothic monstrous, as the half caste is something that seems unnatural at first, evoking fears” (107). Perhaps therein lies a source of the vehemency with which some commentators have pilloried Mudrooroo after the somewhat unconvincing evidence of his non-Indigeneity? But I digress from my goal of explicating the meaning of the term Aboriginal Gothic.The boundaries of any genre are slippery and one of the features of postmodern literature is its deliberate blurring of boundaries, hence defining genres is not easy. Perhaps the Gothic can be better understood when the meaning of its polar opposite, the Fantastic, is better understood. Ethnic authorial controversies aside and returning to the equally shady subject of authorial intent, in contrast to the Aboriginal Gothic of novelists Mudrooroo, Scott and Wright, and their accepting of the supernatural as plausible, the Fantastic in literature is characterised by an enlightened rationality in which the supernatural is introduced but ultimately rejected by the author, a literary approach that certainly sits better with my existential atheism. Chanady defined and illustrated the genre as follows: “the fantastic […] reaffirmed hegemonic Western rational paradigms by portraying the supernatural in a contradictory manner as both terrifying and logically impossible […] My examples of the fantastic were drawn from the work of major French writers such as Merimee and Maupassant” ("Magic Realism" 430). Unfortunately, Chanady was unable to illustrate her concept of the Fantastic with examples of Aboriginal horror writing. Why? Because none existed until my novel was published. Whereas Mudrooroo, Scott and Wright incorporated the Magical Realism of Aboriginal Australian mythology into their novels, and asked their readers to accept it as not only plausible but realistic and even factual, I wanted to create a style that blends Aboriginal mythology with the European tradition of vampires, but ultimately rejects this “cultural matrix” due to enlightened rationality, as I deliberately and cynically denounce it all as fanciful superstition.Certainly, the adjective “fantastic” is liberally applied to much of what we call Gothic horror literature, and the sub-genre of Indigenous vampire literature is not immune to this confusion, with non-Australian Indigenous author Aaron Carr’s 1995 Native American vampire novel, The Eye Killers, unhelpfully described in terms of the “fantastic nature of the genre” (Tillett 149). In this novel,Carr exposes contemporary Native American political concerns by skillfully weaving multiple interactive dialogues with horror literature and film, contemporary U.S. cultural preoccupations, postmodern philosophies, traditional vampire lore, contemporary Native literature, and Native oral traditions. (Tillett 150)It must be noted, however, that Carr does not denounce the supernatural vampire and its associated folklore, be it European or Laguna/Kerasan/Navajo, as illogical or fanciful. This despite his “dialogues with […] contemporary U.S. cultural preoccupations [and] postmodern philosophies”. Indeed, the character “Diana” at one stage pretends to pragmatically denounce the supernatural whilst her interior monologue strenuously defends her irrational beliefs: the novel reads: “‘Of course there aren’t any ghosts,’ Diana said sharply, thinking: Of course there were ghosts. In this room. Everywhere” (197). In taking this stock-standard approach of expecting the reader to believe wholeheartedly in the existence of the Undead, Carr locates his work firmly in the Aboriginal Gothic camp and renders commentators such as Tillett liable to be called ignorant and uninformed when they label his work fantastic.The Aboriginal Gothic would leave the reader convinced a belief in the supernatural is non-problematic, whereas the Aboriginal Fantastic novel, where it exists, would, while enjoying the temporary departure from the restraints of reality, eventually conclude there are no such things as ghosts or vampires. Thus, my Aboriginal Fantastic novel That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! was intended from the very beginning of the creative writing process to be an existentially diametric alternative to Magical Realism and the Aboriginal Gothic (at least in its climactic denouement). The narrative features a protagonist who, in his defeat, realises the danger in superstitious devotion and in doing so his interior monologue introduces to the literary world the new Aboriginal Fantastic genre. Despite a Foucauldian emphasis in most of my critical analysis in which an awareness of the constructed status and nature of the subject/focus of knowledge undermines the foundations of any reductive typology, I am unhesitant in my claim to having invented a new genre of literature here. Unless there is, undiscovered by my research, a yet-to-be heralded work of Aboriginal horror that recognises the impossibility of its subject, my novel is unique even while my attitude might be decried as hubristic. I am also cognizant of the potential for angry feedback from my Aboriginal Australian kin, for my innovative genre is ultimately denigrating of all supernatural devotion, be it vampiric or Dreamtime. Aboriginal Fantastic writing rejects such mythologies as dangerous, fanciful superstition, but I make the (probably) too-little-too-late defence that it rejects the Indigenous existential rationale somewhat less vigorously than it rejects the existential superstitions of Catholicism and/or vampirism.This potential criticism I will forbear, perhaps sullenly and hopefully silently, but I am likely to be goaded to defensiveness by those who argue that like any Indigenous literature, Aboriginal Australian writing is inherently Magical Realist, and that I forsake my culture when I appeal to the rational. Chanady sees “magic realism as a mode that expresses important points of view, often related to marginality and subalternity” ("Magic Realism" 442). She is not alone in seeing it as the generic cultural expression of Indigenous peoples everywhere, for Bhabha writes of it as being the literature of the postcolonial world (6) whilst Rushdie sees it as the expression of a third world consciousness (301). But am I truly betraying my ancestral culture when I dismiss the Mrart as mere superstition? Just because it has colour should we revere ‘black magic’ over other (white or colourless) superstitions? Should we not suspect, as we do when seated before stage show illusionists, some sleight of (writing) hand? Some hidden/sub-textual agenda meant to entertain not educate? Our world has many previously declared mysteries now easily explained by science, and the notion of Earth being created by a Rainbow Serpent is as farcical to me as the notion it was created a few thousand years ago in seven days by an omniscient human-like being called God. If, in expressing this dubiousness, I am betraying my ancestors, I can only offer detractors the feeble defence that I sincerely respect their beliefs whilst not personally sharing them. I attempt no delegitimising of Aboriginal Australian mythology. Indeed, I celebrate different cultural imaginaries for they make our quotidian existence more colourful and enjoyable. There is much pleasure to be had in such excursions from the pedantry of the rational.Another criticism I might hear out--intellectually--would be: “Most successful literature is Magical Realist, and supernatural stories are irresistible”, a truism most commercially successful authors recognise. But my work was never about sales, indeed, the improbability of my (irresistible?) fiction is didactically yoked to a somewhat sanctimonious moral. My protagonist realises the folly and danger in superstitious devotion, although his atheistic epiphany occurs only during his last seconds of life. Thus, whilst pushing this barrow of enlightened rationality, my novel makes a somewhat original contribution to contemporary Australian culture, presenting in a creative writing form rather than anthropological report, an understanding of the potential for melding Aboriginal mythology with Catholicism, the “competing Dreamtimes, white and black” as Turcotte writes ("Re-mastering" 132), if only at the level of ultimately accepting, atheistically, that all are fanciful examples of self-created beyond-death identity, as real--or unreal--as any other religious meme. Whatever vampire literature people read, most such consumers do not believe in the otherworldly antagonists, although there is profound enjoyment to be had in temporarily suspending disbelief and even perpetuating the meme into the mindsets of others. Perhaps, somewhere in the sub-conscious, pre-rational recesses of our caveman-like brains, we still wonder if such supernatural entities reflect a symbolic truth we can’t quite apprehend. Instead, we use a totemic figure like the sultry but terrifying Count Dracula as a proxy for other kinds of primordial anxieties we cannot easily articulate, whether that fear is the child rapist on the loose or impending financial ruin or just the overwhelming sense that our contemporary lifestyles contain the very seeds of our own destruction, and we are actively watering them with our insouciance.In other words, there is little that is new in horror. Yes, That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! is an example of what I call the new genre of Aboriginal Fantastic but that claim is not much of an original contribution to knowledge, other than being the invention of an extra label in an unnecessarily formalist/idealist lexicon of literary taxonomy. Certainly, it will not create a legion of fans. But these days it is difficult for a novelist to find anything really new to write about, genre-wise, and if there is a reader prepared to pay hard-earned money for a copy, then I sincerely hope they do not feel they have purchased yet another example of what the HBO television show Californication’s creative writing tutor Hank Moody (David Duchovny) derides as “lame vampire fiction” (episode 2, 2007). I like to think my Aboriginal Fantastic novel has legs as well as fangs. References Althans, Katrin. Darkness Subverted: Aboriginal Gothic in Black Australian Literature and Film. Bonn: Bonn UP, 2010. Bhabha, Homi. Nation and Narration. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Bunson, Matthew. The Vampire Encyclopedia. New York: Gramercy Books, 1993. Carr, Aaron A. Eye Killers. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1995. Chanady, Amaryll. Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved versus Unresolved Antinomy. New York: Garland Publishing, 1985. Chanady, Amaryll. “Magic Realism Revisited: The Deconstruction of Antinomies.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (June 2003): 428-444. Cheung, Theresa. The Element Encyclopaedia of Vampires. London: Harper Collins, 2009. Clark, Maureen. Mudrooroo: A Likely Story: Identity and Belonging in Postcolonial Australia. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2007. Gelder, Ken. The Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Halloran, Vivien. “L224: Introduction to World Literatures in English.” Department of English, Indiana University, 2014. 2 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.indiana.edu/~engweb/undergradCourses_spring.shtml›. McKee, Alan. “White Stories, Black Magic: Australian Horror Films of the Aboriginal.”Aratjara: Aboriginal Culture and Literature in Australia. Eds. Dieter Riemenschneider and Geoffrey V. Davis. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press (1997): 193-210. Mudrooroo. The Indigenous Literature of Australia. Melbourne: Hyland House, 1997. Mudrooroo. The Undying. Sydney: Harper Collins, 1998. Mudrooroo. The Promised Land. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2000. Reed, Alexander W. Aboriginal Myths, Legends and Fables. Sydney: Reed New Holland, 1999. Riendes, Ildiko. “The Use of Gothic Elements as Manifestations of Regaining Aboriginal Identity in Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart.” Topos 1.1 (2012): 100-114. Rushdie, Salman. “Gabriel Garcia Marquez.” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta and Penguin Books, 1991. Shoemaker, Adam. Mudrooroo. Sydney: Harper Collins, 1993. Starrs, D. Bruno. “Keeping the Faith: Catholicism in Dracula and its Adaptations.” Journal of Dracula Studies 6 (2004): 13-18. Starrs, D. Bruno. That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! Saarbrücken, Germany: Just Fiction Edition (paperback), 2011; Starrs via Smashwords (e-book), 2012. Tillett, Rebecca. “‘Your Story Reminds Me of Something’: Spectacle and Speculation in Aaron Carr’s Eye Killers.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 33.1 (2002): 149-73. Turcotte, Gerry. “Australian Gothic.” Faculty of Arts — Papers, University of Wollongong, 1998. 2 Aug. 2014 ‹http://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/60/›. Turcotte, Gerry. “Re-mastering the Ghosts: Mudrooroo and Gothic Refigurations.” Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo. Ed. Annalisa Oboe. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press (2003): 129-151. Unaipon, David. Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines. Eds. Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker. Carlton: The Miegunyah Press, 2006.

By most accounts, “resilience” is a pretty resilient concept. Or policy instrument. Or heuristic tool. It’s this last that really concerns us here: resilience not as a politics, but rather as a descriptive device for attempts in the humanities—particularly in rhetoric and cultural studies—to adequately describe a discursive event. Or rather, to adequately describe a class of discursive events: those that involve rhetorical resistance by victimised subjects. I’ve argued elsewhere (Munro, Descriptive; Reading) that Peircean semiosis, inflected by a rhetorical postulate of genre, equips us well to closely describe a discursive event. Here, I want briefly to suggest that resilience—“discursive” resilience, to coin a term—might usefully supplement these hypotheses, at least from time to time. To support this suggestion, I’ll signal some uses of resilience before turning briefly to a case study: a sensational Argentine homicide case, which occurred in October 2002, and came to be known as the caso Belsunce. At the time, Argentina was wracked by economic crises and political instability. The imposition of severe restrictions on cash withdrawals from bank deposits had provoked major civil unrest. Between 21 December 2001 and 2 January 2002, Argentines witnessed a succession of five presidents. “Resilient” is a term that readily comes to mind to describe many of those who endured this catastrophic period. To describe the caso Belsunce, however—to describe its constitution and import as a discursive event—we might appeal to some more disciplinary-specific understandings of resilience. Glossing Peircean semiosis as a teleological process, Short notes that “one and the same thing […] may be many different signs at once” (106). Any given sign, in other words, admits of multiple interpretants or uptakes. And so it is with resilience, which is both a keyword in academic disciplines ranging from psychology to ecology and political science, and a buzzword in several corporate domains and spheres of governmental activity. It’s particularly prevalent in the discourses of highly networked post-9/11 Anglophone societies. So what, pray tell, is resilience? To the American Psychological Association, resilience comprises “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity.” To the Resilience Solutions Group at Arizona State University, resilience is “the capacity to recover fully from acute stressors, to carry on in the face of chronic difficulties: to regain one’s balance after losing it.” To the Stockholm Resilience Centre, resilience amounts to the “capacity of a system to continually change and adapt yet remain within critical thresholds,” while to the Resilience Alliance, resilience is similarly “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure” (Walker and Salt xiii). The adjective “resilient” is thus predicated of those entities, individuals or collectivities, which exhibit “resilience”. A “resilient Australia,” for example, is one “where all Australians are better able to adapt to change, where we have reduced exposure to risks, and where we are all better able to bounce back from disaster” (Australian Government). It’s tempting here to synthesise these statements with a sense of “ordinary language” usage to derive a definitional distillate: “resilience” is a capacity attributed to an entity which recovers intact from major injury. This capacity is evidenced in a reaction or uptake: a “resilient” entity is one which suffers some insult or disturbance, but whose integrity is held to have been maintained, or even enhanced, by its resistive or adaptive response. A conjecturally “resilient” entity is thus one which would presumably evince resilience if faced with an unrealised aversive event. However, such abstractions ignore how definitional claims do rhetorical work. On any given occasion, how “resilience” and its cognates are construed and what they connote are a function, at least in part, of the purposes of rhetorical agents and the protocols and objects of the disciplines or genres in which these agents put these terms to work. In disciplines operating within the same form of life or sphere of activity—disciplines sharing general conventions and broad objects of inquiry, such as the capacious ecological sciences or the contiguous fields of study within the ambit of applied psychology—resilience acts, at least at times, as a something of a “boundary object” (Star and Griesemer). Correlatively, across more diverse and distant fields of inquiry, resilience can work in more seemingly exclusive or contradictory ways (see Handmer and Dovers). Rhetorical aims and disciplinary objects similarly determine the originary tales we are inclined to tell. In the social sciences, the advent of resilience is often attributed to applied psychology, indebted, in turn, to epidemiology (see Seery, Holman and Cohen Silver). In environmental science, by contrast, resilience is typically taken to be a theory born in ecology (indebted to engineering and to the physical sciences, in particular to complex systems theory [see Janssen, Schoon, Ke and Börner]). Having no foundational claim to stake and, moreover, having different purposes and taking different objects, some more recent uptakes of resilience, in, for instance, securitisation studies, allow for its multidisciplinary roots (see Bourbeau; Kaufmann). But if resilience is many things to many people, a couple of commonalities in its range of translations should be drawn out. First, irrespective of its discipline or sphere of activity, talk of resilience typically entails construing an object of inquiry qua system, be that system an individual, a community of circumstance, a state, a socio-ecological unit or some differently delimited entity. This bounded system suffers some insult with no resulting loss of structural, relational, functional or other integrity. Second, resilience is usually marshalled to promote a politics. Resilience talk often consorts with discourses of meliorative action and of readily quantifiable practical effects. When the environmental sciences take the “Earth system” and the dynamics of global change as their objects of inquiry, a postulate of resilience is key to the elaboration and implementation of natural resource management policy. Proponents of socio-ecological resilience see the resilience hypothesis as enabling a demonstrably more enlightened stewardship of the biosphere (see Folke et al.; Holling; Walker and Salt). When applied psychology takes the anomalous situation of disadvantaged, at-risk individuals triumphing over trauma as its declared object of inquiry, a postulate of resilience is key to the positing and identification of personal and environmental resources or protective factors which would enable the overcoming of adversity. Proponents of psychosocial resilience see this concept as enabling the elaboration and implementation of interventions to foster individual and collective wellbeing (see Goldstein and Brooks; Ungar). Similarly, when policy think-tanks and government departments and agencies take the apprehension of particular threats to the social fabric as their object of inquiry, a postulate of resilience—or of a lack thereof—is critical to the elaboration and implementation of urban infrastructure, emergency planning and disaster management policies (see Drury et al.; Handmer and Dovers). However, despite its often positive connotations, resilience is well understood as a “normatively open” (Bourbeau 11) concept. This openness is apparent in some theories and practices of resilience. In limnological modelling, for example, eutrophication can result in a lake’s being in an undesirable, albeit resilient, turbid-water state (see Carpenter et al.; Walker and Meyers). But perhaps the negative connotations or indeed perverse effects of resilience are most apparent in some of its political uptakes. Certainly, governmental operationalisations of resilience are coming under increased scrutiny. Chief among the criticisms levelled at the “muddled politics” (Grove 147) of and around resilience is that its mobilisation works to constitute a particular neoliberal subjectivity (see Joseph; Neocleous). By enabling a conservative focus on individual responsibility, preparedness and adaptability, the topos of resilience contributes critically to the development of neoliberal governmentality (Joseph). In a practical sense, this deployment of resilience silences resistance: “building resilient subjects,” observe Evans and Reid (85), “involves the deliberate disabling of political habits. […] Resilient subjects are subjects that have accepted the imperative not to resist or secure themselves from the difficulties they are faced with but instead adapt to their enabling conditions.” It’s this prospect of practical acquiescence that sees resistance at times opposed to resilience (Neocleous). “Good intentions not withstanding,” notes Grove (146), “the effect of resilience initiatives is often to defend and strengthen the political economic status quo.” There’s much to commend in these analyses of how neoliberal uses of resilience constitute citizens as highly accommodating of capital and the state. But such critiques pertain to the governmental mobilisation of resilience in the contemporary “advanced liberal” settings of “various Anglo-Saxon countries” (Joseph 47). There are, of course, other instances—other events in other times and places—in which resilience indisputably sorts with resistance. Such an event is the caso Belsunce, in which a rhetorically resilient journalistic community pushed back, resisting some of the excesses of a corrupt neoliberal Argentine regime. I’ll turn briefly to this infamous case to suggest that a notion of “discursive resilience” might afford us some purchase when it comes to describing discursive events. To be clear: we’re considering resilience here not as an anticipatory politics, but rather as an analytic device to supplement the descriptive tools of Peircean semiosis and a rhetorical postulate of genre. As such, it’s more an instrument than an answer: a program, perhaps, for ongoing work. Although drawing on different disciplinary construals of the term, this use of resilience would be particularly indebted to the resilience thinking developed in ecology (see Carpenter el al.; Folke et al.; Holling; Walker et al.; Walker and Salt). Things would, of course, be lost in translation (see Adger; Gallopín): in taking a discursive event, rather than the dynamics of a socio-ecological system, as our object of inquiry, we’d retain some topological analogies while dispensing with, for example, Holling’s four-phase adaptive cycle (see Carpenter et al.; Folke; Gunderson; Gunderson and Holling; Walker et al.). For our purposes, it’s unlikely that descriptions of ecosystem succession need to be carried across. However, the general postulates of ecological resilience thinking—that a system is a complex series of dynamic relations and functions located at any given time within a basin of attraction (or stability domain or system regime) delimited by thresholds; that it is subject to multiple attractors and follows trajectories describable over varying scales of time and space; that these trajectories are inflected by exogenous and endogenous perturbations to which the system is subject; that the system either proves itself resilient to these perturbations in its adaptive or resistive response, or transforms, flipping from one domain (or basin) to another may well prove useful to some descriptive projects in the humanities. Resilience is fundamentally a question of uptake or response. Hence, when examining resilience in socio-ecological systems, Gallopín notes that it’s useful to consider “not only the resilience of the system (maintenance within a basin) but also coping with impacts produced and taking advantage of opportunities” (300). Argentine society in the early-to-mid 2000s was one such socio-political system, and the caso Belsunce was both one such impact and one such opportunity. Well-connected in the world of finance, 57-year-old former stockbroker Carlos Alberto Carrascosa lived with his 50-year-old sociologist turned charity worker wife, María Marta García Belsunce, close to their relatives in the exclusive gated community of Carmel Country Club, Pilar, Provincia de Buenos Aires, Argentina. At 7:07 pm on Sunday 27 October 2002, Carrascosa called ambulance emergencies, claiming that his wife had slipped and knocked her head while drawing a bath alone that rainy Sunday afternoon. At the time of his call, it transpired, Carrascosa was at home in the presence of intimates. Blood was pooled on the bathroom floor and smeared and spattered on its walls and adjoining areas. María Marta lay lifeless, brain matter oozing from several holes in her left parietal and temporal lobes. This was the moment when Carrascosa, calm and coherent, called emergency services, but didn’t advert the police. Someone, he told the operator, had slipped in the bath and bumped her head. Carrascosa described María Marta as breathing, with a faint pulse, but somehow failed to mention the holes in her head. “A knock with a tap,” a police source told journalist Horacio Cecchi, “really doesn’t compare with the five shots to the head, the spillage of brain matter and the loss of about half a litre of blood suffered by the victim” (Cecchi and Kollmann). Rather than a bathroom tap, María Marta’s head had met with five bullets discharged from a .32-calibre revolver. In effect, reported Cecchi, María Marta had died twice. “While perhaps a common conceit in fiction,” notes Cecchi, “in reality, dying twice is, by definition, impossible. María Marta’s two obscure endings seem to unsettle this certainty.” Her cadaver was eventually subjected to an autopsy, and what had been a tale of clumsiness and happenstance was rewritten, reinscribed under the Argentine Penal Code. The autopsy was conducted 36 days after the burial of María Marta; nine days later, she was mentioned for the second time in the mainstream Argentine press. Her reappearance, however, was marked by a shift in rubrics: from a short death notice in La Nación, María Marta was translated to the crime section of Argentina’s dailies. Until his wife’s mediatic reapparition, Carroscosa and other relatives had persisted with their “accident” hypothesis. Indeed, they’d taken a range of measures to preclude the sorts of uptakes that might ordinarily be expected to flow, under functioning liberal democratic regimes, from the discovery of a corpse with five projectiles lodged in its head. Subsequently recited as part of Carrascosa’s indictment, these measures were extensively reiterated in media coverage of the case. One of the more notorious actions involved the disposal of the sixth bullet, which was found lying under María Marta. In the course of moving the body of his half-sister, John Hurtig retrieved a small metallic object. This discovery was discussed by a number of family members, including Carrascosa, who had received ballistics training during his four years of naval instruction at the Escuela Nacional de Náutica de la Armada. They determined that the object was a lug or connector rod (“pituto”) used in library shelving: nothing, in any case, to indicate a homicide. With this determination made, the “pituto” was duly wrapped in lavatory paper and flushed down the toilet. This episode occasioned a range of outraged articles in Argentine dailies examining the topoi of privilege, power, corruption and impunity. “Distinguished persons,” notes Viau pointedly, “are so disposed […] that in the midst of all that chaos, they can locate a small, hard, steely object, wrap it in lavatory paper and flush it down the toilet, for that must be how they usually dispose of […] all that rubbish that no longer fits under the carpet.” Most often, though, critical comment was conducted by translating the reporting of the case to the genres of crime fiction. In an article entitled Someone Call Agatha Christie, Quick!, H.A.T. writes that “[s]omething smells rotten in the Carmel Country; a whole pile of rubbish seems to have been swept under its plush carpets.” An exemplary intervention in this vein was the work of journalist and novelist Vicente Battista, for whom the case (María Marta) “synthesizes the best of both traditions of crime fiction: the murder mystery and the hard-boiled novels.” “The crime,” Battista (¿Hubo Otra Mujer?) has Rodolfo observe in the first of his speculative dialogues on the case, “seems to be lifted from an Agatha Christie novel, but the criminal turns out to be a copy of the savage killers that Jim Thompson usually depicts.” Later, in an interview in which he correctly predicted the verdict, Battista expanded on these remarks: This familiar plot brings together the English murder mystery and the American hard-boiled novels. The murder mystery because it has all the elements: the crime takes place in a sealed room. In this instance, sealed not only because it occurred in a house, but also in a country, a sealed place of privilege. The victim was a society lady. Burglary is not the motive. In classic murder mystery novels, it was a bit unseemly that one should kill in order to rob. One killed either for a juicy sum of money, or for revenge, or out of passion. In those novels there were neither corrupt judges nor fugitive lawyers. Once Sherlock Holmes […] or Hercule Poirot […] said ‘this is the murderer’, that was that. That’s to say, once fingered in the climactic living room scene, with everyone gathered around the hearth, the perpetrator wouldn’t resist at all. And everyone would be happy because the judges were thought to be upright persons, at least in fiction. […] The violence of the crime of María Marta is part of the hard-boiled novel, and the sealed location in which it takes place, part of the murder mystery (Alarcón). I’ve argued elsewhere (Munro, Belsunce) that the translation of the case to the genres of crime fiction and their metaanalysis was a means by which a victimised Argentine public, represented by a disempowered and marginalised fourth estate, sought some rhetorical recompense. The postulate of resilience, however, might help further to describe and contextualise this notorious discursive event. A disaffected Argentine press finds itself in a stability domain with multiple attractors: on the one hand, an acquiescence to ever-increasing politico-juridical corruption, malfeasance and elitist impunity; on the other, an attractor of increasing contestation, democratisation, accountability and transparency. A discursive event like the caso Belsunce further perturbs Argentine society, threatening to displace it from its democratising trajectory. Unable to enforce due process, Argentina’s fourth estate adapts, doing what, in the circumstances, amounts to the next best thing: it denounces the proceedings by translating the case to the genres of crime fiction. In so doing, it engages a venerable reception history in which the co-constitution of true crime fiction and investigative journalism is exemplified by the figure of Rodolfo Walsh, whose denunciatory works mark a “politicisation of crime” (see Amar Sánchez Juegos; El sueño). Put otherwise, a section of Argentina’s fourth estate bounced back: by making poetics do rhetorical work, it resisted the pull towards what ecology calls an undesirable basin of attraction. Through a show of discursive resilience, these journalists worked to keep Argentine society on a democratising track. References Adger, Neil W. “Social and Ecological Resilience: Are They Related?” Progress in Human Geography 24.3 (2000): 347-64. Alarcón, Cristina. “Lo Único Real Que Tenemos Es Un Cadáver.” 2007. 12 July 2007 ‹http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/subnotas/87986-28144-2007-07-12.html>. Amar Sánchez, Ana María. “El Sueño Eterno de Justicia.” Textos De Y Sobre Rodolfo Walsh. Ed. Jorge Raúl Lafforgue. Buenos Aires: Alianza, 2000. 205-18. ———. Juegos De Seducción Y Traición. Literatura Y Cultura De Masas. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2000. American Psychological Association. “What Is Resilience?” 2013. 9 Aug 2013 ‹http://www.apa.org/helpcenter/road-resilience.aspx>. Australian Government. “Critical Infrastructure Resilience Strategy.” 2009. 9 Aug 2013 ‹http://www.tisn.gov.au/Documents/Australian+Government+s+Critical+Infrastructure+Resilience+Strategy.pdf>. 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Resilience Solutions Group, Arizona State U. “What Is Resilience?” 2013. 9 Aug. 2013 ‹http://resilience.asu.edu/what-is-resilience>. Seery, Mark D., E. Alison Holman, and Roxane Cohen Silver. “Whatever Does Not Kill Us: Cumulative Lifetime Adversity, Vulnerability, and Resilience.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 99.6 (2010): 1025-41. Short, Thomas L. “What They Said in Amsterdam: Peirce's Semiotic Today.” Semiotica 60.1-2 (1986): 103-28. Star, Susan Leigh, and James R. Griesemer. “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39.” Social Studies of Science 19.3 (1989): 387-420. Stockholm Resilience Centre. “What Is Resilience?” 2007. 9 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.stockholmresilience.org/21/research/what-is-resilience.html>. Ungar, Michael ed. Handbook for Working with Children and Youth Pathways to Resilience across Cultures and Contexts. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2005. 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I can remember setting up the dish, all the excitement of assembling it [...] and then putting the motor on. And in the late afternoon, you position the dish and kind of turn it, to find the right spot, and all of a sudden on this blank television screen there was an image that came on. And it was shocking knowing that this noise and this thing would be there, and begin to infiltrate – because I see it as an infiltration, I see it as invasion – I’m not mad on television, very choosy really about what I watch – and I see it as an invasion, and there was GWN as well as the ABC. I just thought ‘by golly, I’m in the process of brain-washing people to accept stuff without thinking about it, like consciously considering either side of any case’ [...] The one thing that protected you from having it on at all times was the need to put on the generator in order to power it. I felt a bit sad actually. (Savannah Kingston, Female, 55+ – name changed – homestead respondent) This paper addresses the huge communications changes that occurred over the past fifty years in outback Western Australia. (What happened in WA also has parallels with equivalent events in the Northern Territory, Queensland, in the larger properties in western New South Wales and northern South Australia.) Although the ‘coming of television’ – associated in remote areas with using a satellite dish to scan for the incoming signal – is typically associated with a major shift in community and cultural life, the evidence suggests that the advent of the telephone had an equivalent or greater impact in remote areas. With the introduction of the telephone, the homestead family no longer had to tune into (or scan) the radio frequencies to check on predicted weather conditions, to respond to emergencies, to engage in roll call or to hold a ‘public meeting’. As the scanning of the radio frequencies ended, so the scanning of the satellite signals began. As Sandstone resident Grant Coleridge (pseudonym, male, 40-54) said, only half ironically, “We got the telephone and the telly at the same time, so civilisation sort of hit altogether actually.” The scale and importance of changes to the technological communications infrastructure in remote WA within a single life-time spans pre-2-way radio to video livestock auctions by satellite. It comes as a surprise to most Australians that these changes have occurred in the past generation. As recent viewers of the unexpectedly-successful Mongolian film The Story of the Weeping Camel (2004) would know, one of the themes of the Oscar-nominated movie is the coming of television and its impact upon a traditional rural life. The comparative availability of television outside the rural areas of Mongolia – and its attraction to, particularly, the younger family members in the Weeping Camel household – is a motif that is explored throughout the narrative, with an unspoken question about the price to be paid for including television in the cultural mix. It’s easy to construct this story as a fable about the ‘exotic other’, but the same theme was played out comparatively recently in remote Western Australia, where the domestic satellite service AUSSAT first made television an affordable option just under twenty years ago. This paper is about the people in remote Western Australia who started scanning for the satellite signal in 1986, and stopped scanning for the RFDS (Royal Flying Doctor Service) 2-way radio phone messages at about the same time. Savannah Kingston (name changed), who in 1989 generously agreed to an in-depth interview discussing the impact of satellite broadcasting upon her outback life, was a matriarch on a rural property with four grown children. She had clear views upon ways in which life had changed dramatically in the generation before the satellite allowed the scanning of the television signal. Her recollection of the weft and warp of the tapestry of life in outback WA started thirty-five years previously, with her arrival on the station as a young wife: When I went there [mid-1950s], we had a cook and we ate in the dining room. The cook and anyone who worked in the house ate in the kitchen and the men outside ate in the outside. So, with the progress of labour away from the bush, and the cost of labour becoming [prohibitive] for a lot of people, we got down to having governesses or house-girls. If the house-girls were white, they ate at the table with us and the governesses ate with us. If the house-girls were Aboriginal, they didn’t like eating with us, and they preferred to eat in the kitchen. The kids ate with them. Which wasn’t a good idea because two of my children have good manners and two of them have appalling manners. The availability of domestic help supported a culture of hospitality reminiscent of British between-the-wars country house parties, recreated in Agatha Christie novels and historically-based films such as The Remains of the Day (1993): In those early days, we still had lots of visitors [...] People visited a lot and stayed, so that you had people coming to stay for maybe two or three days, five days, a week, two weeks at a time and that required a lot of organisation. [int:] WHERE DID YOUR VISITORS COME FROM? City, or from the Eastern states, occasionally from overseas. [Int:] WOULD THEY BE RELATIVES? Sometimes relatives, friends or someone passing through who’d been, you know, someone would say ‘do visit’ and they’d say ‘they’d love to see you’. But it was lovely, it was good. It’s a way of learning what’s going on. (Savannah Kingston.) The ‘exotic other’ of the fabled hospitality of station life obscures the fact that visitors from the towns, cities and overseas were a major source of news and information in a society where radio broadcasts were unpredictable and there was no post or newspaper delivery. Visitors were supplemented by a busy calendar of social events that tied together a community of settlements in gymkhanas, cricket fixtures and golf tournaments (on a dirt course). Shifts in the communications environment – the introduction of television and telephone – followed a generation of social change witnessing the metamorphosis of the homestead from the hub of a gentrified lifestyle (with servants, governesses, polo and weekends away) to compact, efficient business-units, usually run by a skeleton staff with labour hired in at the peak times of year. Over the years between the 1960s-1980s isolation became a growing problem. Once Indigenous people won the fight for award-rate wages their (essentially) unpaid labour could no longer support the lifestyle of the station owners and the absence of support staff constrained opportunities for socialising off the property, and entertaining on it, and the communication environment became progressively poorer. Life on the homestead was conceived of as being more fragile than that in the city, and more economically vulnerable to a poor harvest or calamities such as wildfire. The differences wrought by the introduction of newer communication technologies were acknowledged by those in the country, but there was a clear resistance to city-dwellers constructing the changes as an attack upon the romance of the outback lifestyle. When the then Communications Minister Tony Staley suggested in 1979 that a satellite could help “dispel the distance – mental as well as geographical – between urban and regional dwellers, between the haves and the have-nots in a communication society”, he was buying into a discourse of rural life which effectively disempowered those who lived in rural and remote areas. He was also ignoring the reality of a situation where the Australian outback was provided with satellite communication a decade after it was made available to Canadians, and where the king-maker in the story – Kerry Packer – stood to reap a financial windfall. There was a mythological dimension to Australia (finally) having a domestic satellite. Cameron Hazelhurst’s article on ‘The Dawn of the Satellite Era in Australia’ includes a colourful account of Kerry Packer’s explanation to Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser of the capacity of domestic satellites to bring television, radio and telephone services to isolated communities in arctic Canada: And I [Packer] went and saw the Prime Minister and I explained to him my understanding of what was happening in those areas, and to his undying credit he grasped on to it immediately and said ‘Of course, it’s what we want. It’s exactly the sort of thing we need to stop the drift of people into urban areas. We can keep them informed. We can allow them to participate in whatever’s happening around the nation (Day 7, cited in Hazelhurst). Fraser here, as someone with experience of running a rural property in Victoria, propounds a pro-country rhetoric as a rationale for deployment of the satellite in terms of the Australian national policy agenda. (The desire of Packer to network his television stations and couple efficiency with reach is not addressed in this mythological reconstruction.) It is difficult, sometimes, to appreciate the level of isolation experienced on outback properties at the time. As Bryan Docker (male, 40-54), a resident of Broome at the time of the interviews, commented, “Telegrams, in those days, were the life-blood of the stations, through the Flying Doctor Service. But at certain times of the year the sun spots would interfere with the microwave links and we were still on morse from Broome to Derby during those periods.” Without reliable shortwave radio; with no television, newspapers or telephone; and with the demands of keeping the RFDS (Royal Flying Doctor Service) 2-way radio channel open for emergencies visitors were one of the ways in which station-dwellers could maintain an awareness of current events. Even at the time of the interviews, after the start of satellite broadcasting, I never travelled to an outback property without taking recent papers and offering to pick up post. (Many of the stations were over an hour’s journey from their nearest post office.) The RFDS 2-way radio service offered a social-lifeline as well as an emergency communication system: [Int:] DO YOU MISS THE ROYAL FLYING DOCTOR SERVICE AT ALL? Yes, I do actually. It’s – I think it’s probably more lonely now because you used to switch it on and – you know if you’re here on your own like I am a lot – and you’d hear voices talking, and you used to know what everybody was doing – sort of all their dramas and all their [...] Now you don’t know anything that’s going on and unless somebody rings you, you don’t have that communication, where before you used to just hop over to another channel and have a chat [...] I think it is lonelier on the telephone because it costs so much to ring up. (Felicity Rohrer, female, 40-54, homestead.) Coupled with the lack of privacy of 2-way radio communication, and the lack of broadcasting, was the particular dynamic of a traditional station family. Schooled at home, and integrated within their homestead lifestyle, station children spent most of their formative years in the company of one or other of their parents (or, in previous decades, the station staff). This all changed at secondary school age when the children of station-owners and managers tended to be sent away to boarding school in the city. Exposure of the next generation to the ways of city life was seen as a necessary background to future business competence, but the transitions from ‘all’ to ‘next-to-nothing’ in terms of children’s integration within family life had a huge socio-emotional cost which was aggravated, until the introduction of the phone service, by the lack of private communication channels. Public Relations and news theory talk about the importance of the ‘environmental scan’ to understand how current events are going to impact upon a business and a family: for many years in outback Australia the environmental scan occurred when families got together (typically in the social and sporting rounds), on the RFDS radio broadcasts and ‘meetings’, in infrequent visits to the closest towns and through the giving and receiving of hospitality. Felicity Rohrer, who commented (above) about how she missed the RFDS had noted earlier in her interview: “It’s made a big difference, telephone. That was the most isolating thing, especially when your children were away at school or your parents are getting older [...] That was the worst thing, not having a phone.” Further, in terms of the economics of running a property, Troy Bowen (male, 25-39, homestead respondent) noted that the phone had made commercial life much easier: I can carry out business on the phone without anyone else hearing [...] On the radio you can’t do it, you more or less have to say ‘well, have you got it – over’. ‘Yeah – over’. ‘Well, I’ll take it – over’. That’s all you can do [...] Say if I was chasing something [...] the cheapest I might get it down to might be [...] $900. Well I can go to the next bloke and I can tell him I got it down to $850. If you can’t do any better than that, you miss out. ‘oh, yes, alright $849, that’s the best I can do.’ So I’ll say ‘alright, I’ll take it’. But how can you do that on the radio and say that your best quote is [$850] when the whole district knows that ‘no, it isn’t’. You can’t very well do it, can you? This dynamic occurs because, for many homestead families prior to the telephone, the RFDS broadcasts were continuously monitored by the women of the station as a way of keeping a finger on the pulse of the community. Even – sometimes, especially – when they were not part of the on-air conversation, the broadcast could be received for as far as reception was possible. The introduction of the phone led to a new level of privacy, particularly appreciated by parents who had children away at school, but also introduced new problems. Fran Coleridge, (female, 40-54, Sandstone) predicted that: The phone will lead to isolation. There’s an old lady down here, she’s about 80, and she housekeeps for her brother and she’s still wearing – her mother died 50 years ago – but she’s still wearing her clothes. She is so encapsulated in her life. And she used to have her [RFDS] transceiver. Any time, Myrtle would know anything that’s going on. Anything. Birthday party at [local station], she’d know about it. She knew everything. Because she used to have the transceiver on all the time. And now there’s hardly any people on, and she’s a poor little old lonely lady that doesn’t hear anything now. Can you see that? Given the nuances of the introduction of the telephone (and the loss of the RFDS 2-way), what was the perceived impact of satellite broadcasting? Savannah Kingston again: Where previously we might have sat around the table and talked about things – at least the kids and I would – with television there is now more of a habit of coming in, showering and changing for dinner, putting on the motor and the men go and sit in front of the television during [...] six o’clock onwards, news programs and whatnot and um, I find myself still in the kitchen, getting the meal and then whoever was going to eat it, wanting to watch whatever was on the television. So it changed quite appreciably. Felicity Rohrer agrees: [Int:] DO YOU THINK THERE HAVE BEEN CHANGES IN THE TIME THAT YOU SPEND WITH EACH OTHER? Yes, I think so. They [the homestead household] come home and they – we all sit down here and look at the news and have a drink before tea whereas people used to be off doing their own tea. [Int] SO YOU THINK IT’S INCREASED THE AMOUNT OF TIME YOU SPEND TOGETHER? Yes, I think so – well, as a family. They all try and be home by 6 to see the [GWN] news. If they miss that, we look at the 7 o’clock [ABC], but they like the Golden West because it’s got country news in it. But the realities of everyday life, as experienced in domestic contexts, are sometimes ignored by commentators and analysts, except insofar as they are raised by interviewees. Thus the advent of the satellite might have made Savannah Kingston feel “a bit sad actually”, but it had its compensations: It was definitely a bit of a peace-maker. It sort of meant there wasn’t the stress that we had previously when going through [...] at least people sitting and watching something, you’re not so likely to get into arguments or [...] It definitely had value there. In fact, when I think about it, that might be one of its major applications, ’cos a lot of men in the bush tend to come in – if they drink to excess they start drinking in the evening, and that can make for very uncomfortable company. For film-makers like the Weeping Camel crew – and for audiences and readers of historical accounts of life in outback Australia – the changes heralded by the end of scanning the RFDS channels, and the start of scanning for satellite channels, may seem like the end of an era. In some ways the rhythms of broadcasting helped to homogenise life in the country with life in the city. For many families in remote homes, as well as the metropolis, the evening news became a cue for the domestic rituals of ‘after work’. A superficial evaluation of communications changes might lead to a consideration of how some areas of life were threatened by improved broadcasting, while others were strengthened, and how some of the uniqueness of a lifestyle had been compromised by an absorption into the communication patterns of urban life. It is unwise for commentators to construct the pre-television past as an uncomplicated romantic prior-time, however. Interviews with those who live such changes as their reality become a more revealing indicator of the nuances and complexities of communications environments than a quick scan from the perspective of the city-dweller. References Day, C. “Packer: The Man and the Message.” The Video Age (February 1983): 7 (cited in Hazelhurst). Hazelhurst, Cameron. “The Dawn of the Satellite Era.” Media Information Australia 58 (November 1990): 9-22. Staley, Tony. Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates. Canberra: House of Representatives Hansard (18 October 1979): 2225, 2228-9. The Remains of the Day. 1993. The Story of the Weeping Camel. Thinkfilm and National Geographic, 2004. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Green, Lelia. "Scanning the Satellite Signal in Remote Western Australia." M/C Journal 8.4 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/01-green.php>. APA Style Green, L. (Aug. 2005) "Scanning the Satellite Signal in Remote Western Australia," M/C Journal, 8(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0508/01-green.php>.

Introduction One in three Australian marriages ends in divorce (ABS, Parental Divorce). While such statistics may be interpreted to mean that marriage is becoming less significant to Australians, many Australians continue to invest heavily in marriage as a constitutive mode of subjectification. Recently released first-wave data from a longitudinal study being conducted with seven thousand high school students in Queensland indicates that the majority of high schoolers expect to get married (Skrbis et al. 76). Significant political attention and debate in Australia has centred on the issue of marriage “equality” in relation to legislating same-sex marriage. Many accounts problematise marriage in Australia today by focussing on the current inequities involved in who can and cannot legally get married, which are important debates to be had in the process of understanding the persistent importance of marriage as a social institution. This paper, however, provides a critical account of “equality” in contemporary heterosexual marriages or heteronormative monogamous relationships. I argue that, far from being a mundane “old” debate, the distribution of unpaid work between spouses has a significant effect on women’s spousal satisfaction, and it calls into question the notion of “marriage equality” in everyday heterosexual marriages whether these are civil or common law relationships. I suggest that the contemporary “Hollywood” fantasy about marriage, which informs the same-sex marriage movement, sets up expectations that belie most people’s lived realities.Project Overview This paper draws on data from a larger research project that explores the impact of globalised ideas about good womanhood and good motherhood on Western Australian women, and how local context shapes these women’s personal ideals about their own life trajectories. Interviews were conducted with a series of women living in regional Western Australia. While more women were interviewed as part of the larger research project, this paper draws on interviews with seven intending-to-mother women and fifteen mothers. Through several open-ended questions, the women were asked about either their plans for motherhood or their experiences of motherhood, in relation to additional expectations of women’s lives, such as participation in the paid sector and body ideals. Married women were also asked about how unpaid labour—that is, domestic and, where relevant, childcare labour—is divided between themselves and their husbands. Women’s responses to these questions provide a critical account of how marriage and the notion of “equality” is currently lived out in Australia. To ensure confidentiality, their real names have been replaced by pseudonyms. My purpose in drawing on my own data in conjunction with literature on the gendered division of unpaid labour is to emphasise that while the theoretical insights are not new, the fact that a gendered disparity continues to exist is of concern because of women’s dissatisfaction with the situation, particularly in the context of frequent claims that equality is already achieved, and given that it queries the fantasy of marriage continuing to circulate in contemporary culture. The women I interviewed responded openly to questions about the division of domestic, and where relevant, childcare labour and the affects of this on their relationships. Feminist approaches to the research process highlight the importance of being reflexive about the relationship(s) between researcher and researched to make the presence of the researcher in the research process explicit (Ramazanoglu and Holland 156). Ramazanoglu and Holland argue “producing knowledge through empirical research is not the same as acting as a conduit for the voices of others” (116). While the power dynamic between researcher and researched is not generally an equal one, the fact that I am younger than all of my participants bar one (who is the same age) I believe went some way towards diffusing my position of power in the interviews. Some of my participants were also either already known to me, or had been referred to me by another participant prior to the interview, which may have made the process of interview less intimidating and more comfortable. Importantly, in many instances, my participants’ reflections about the division of unpaid labour in their marriages, their expectations, hopes for the future, and feelings about it mirrored my own feelings and realities. I related personally to their experiences, and empathise with their dilemmas. This is significant methodologically because “emotional connectedness” (Coffey 158–9) including a close identification with participants (Conle 53–4) influences the process of interpretation. However, in Scott’s terms, power operated through my assessment of participants’ dilemmas being similar to my own and my writing up of their interviews (780). The findings presented in this paper are based on my interpretation of the voices of others, and are unavoidably influenced by my personal context as the researcher. Two predominate themes emerged from women’s accounts of unpaid domestic and childcare labour. Women anticipated their partner’s participation in domestic care activities, although in most cases, this expectation was not met. Further, women held these expectations for “when they had children,” even though their partners did not presently participate in domestic activities. At the same time, the women accepted that, while their husband’s should participate more in unpaid work, this participation would not be equal to their own responsibilities regardless of what other activities either were engaged in outside of the domestic and familial sphere. I found that while women expect a fairer division of domestic labour, they do not expect it to be “50/50.” I argue that the gendered division of labour has changed less than most couples readily admit, as seen through the following overview. Gender Relations: Changes and Stases In Western societies, women’s roles in the public sphere have changed considerably over the last fifty plus years. Women now constitute a significant percentage of the paid workforce. Today, couple families where both partners work in the paid sector are the most common of all families (ABS, Family Functioning). However, there has not been a corresponding shift in the way that unpaid labour is divided between partners. Only one half of the historical gendered division of labour has undergone change; while women as well as men now operate in the paid (and thus valued) sector (traditionally available only to men), women still predominately perform most of the unpaid (and undervalued) domestic work. Gender researchers have been reporting on the unequal division of domestic labour between couples, and the material and emotional consequences for women, for a long time (see Hochschild; DeVault; Coltrane), yet I argue that it remains largely unchanged, and dismissed as an important issue in the Australian community. Hochschild’s work, in particular, made a significant contribution to research into the gendered division of unpaid labour between couples by analysing and reporting on interview data collected from fifty couples, both working full-time in the paid sector, with young children. Hochschild identified and reported on couples justifications for the way they divide domestic and care, which, as I will demonstrate, are still common today (17, see also Hochschild with Machung 128). Several contemporary studies (Meisenbach; Shelton and Johnson) report that women perform the majority of domestic and care duties, despite women’s long established presence in the paid workforce. Indeed, historically, the majority of women participated in the workforce, with only middle and upper-class women experiencing a delayed entry to paid work. In their review of current research into the division of household labour in the United States Lachance-Grzela and Bouchard find that: In spite of women’s increased commitment to the labour force market and their associated political and social achievements, their advances have not been paralleled in the familiar sphere…the gains women have made outside the home have not translated directly into an egalitarian allocation of household labour…[American] women continue to perform the vast majority of unpaid tasks performed to satisfy the needs of family members or to maintain the home. (767) Exchange theories predicted that women’s increased participation in paid work would stimulate an increase in the time men spent performing domestic work (Carter 16). However, various studies including Lupton’s investigation into the distinctions, or indeed, commonalities, between the roles of “mother” and “father” find that women still perform the majority of childcare and domestic labour, even those who are also engaged in paid employment. Time use studies conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics also suggest that this prediction has not eventuated, and that whilst some women may have an improved capacity to negotiate with their partners about domestic labour division because of their income, this is not always the case (Carter 17). Ella (aged 32, mother of one) described “quite enjoying it” when her partner was away on business because it was less work not having to deal with his mess on top of other tasks. This is consistent with earlier research findings that single mothers spend less time on domestic work than women with children who live with men (Carter 17). It is common for men to do less domestic work than they create (Bittman 3). All of the women I interviewed who were in partnerships and intending to mother sometime in the future were either employed full-time in the paid sector, seeking full-time employment after completing graduate degrees, or combining paid work with tertiary study. One participant had recently dropped her hours from full-time to part-time because she was pregnant. All of the partnered women who were already mothering at the time of the interview were in full-time employment before the birth of their first child, and seven of them were still in paid employment; one full-time, one three-quarter time and five part time. Most women reported doing the majority, if not all, of the domestic and childcare labour regardless of whether they combined this work with paid work outside of the home. Whilst some women were indifferent to the inequity in their domestic labour and childcare responsibilities, most identified it as a source of tension, conflict, and disappointment in their spousal relationships. These women had anticipated greater participation by their husbands in the home, an optimism derived from some other source than those women with whom they interact.Anticipating Participation In their in-depth psychological study into the specific temporal disruptions and occasions of social dislocation ensuing from the birth of a child in the United States, Monk et al. found that the disruption to daily events and the reduction of social activities were more discernible for women than for men. Other research (Arendell; Hays; Mauthner; Nicolson) conducted at this time concurred with these findings. Similar results are found over a decade later. Choi et al. found most women feel at least some resentment about the impact of parenthood on their lives being “far greater for them than for their partner” (174). Influenced by reports of a supposed ideological shift in the late 1990s wherein fathers were encouraged to take a more active role in the raising of their children in ways previously considered maternal (Lupton 51), women today tend to anticipate that their husband’s will participate more in domestic and care activities, which predominately, does not eventuate. Consequently, feeling “let down” by partners has been identified as a key factor in the presentation of postnatal depression (Choi et al. 175). The women I interviewed who were planning to mother sometime in the future anticipated that their husbands would participate more in the home after the birth of a child. Gabrielle (aged 25, married for three years) hoped that this would be an 80/20 split. The idea of an 80/20 split as an “improvement” may be confronting, but this is Gabrielle’s reality, and her predicament—shared by many other women today—captures the prevailing importance of discussions around the gendered division of domestic labour. Several interviewees who were already mothering had also anticipated that their husbands would participate alongside them in household and childcare related activities. For most, this kind of participation had not eventuated and women were left with feelings of disappointment, and tensions and conflicts in their marriages. Grainne (aged 30, married for five years, mother of one) had expected her husband to be reasonably supportive and helpful around the house when they started their family. Yet she was unpleasantly surprised and intensely disappointed by how participation in the home had worked out since she and her husband had become parents six months ago. Grainne explained that she: expected that my husband would be more supportive and more helpful…I’ve been even more disappointed because he hasn’t followed through with…how I thought he would be…I almost despair a bit…we have actually struggled more in our relationship in the last six months than in the five and a half years. Grainne spoke about the impact of this inequity on the intimacy in her relationship. This is consistent with Pocock who identifies inequity in the division of unpaid work as one of “two work-related spokes in the wheel” (106–107) of spousal intimacy; the other being time and energy to communicate. According to Pocock intimacy, not necessarily sexual, is lacking in many Australian spousal relationships with unequal divisions of unpaid labour (107). While the loss of intimacy results in feelings of loss and regret, for some women, it is characterised as a past concern in their overworked and stressed lives (Pocock 107). Several women from professional backgrounds, in particular Lena and Freya, identified the inequity in their partnerships when it came to home duties and childcare as a significant, and even as the “main,” source of tension and conflict in their spousal relationships. Lena (aged 30, married for five years, mother of two) described having “great debates” with her husband about the division of domestic labour and childcare in their partnership. From her husband’s perspective, it is her “job…to do all the kids and the housework and everything else,” whereas from Lena’s perspective, “he should be able to feed the kids and clean up” on the weekend if she needs to go out. Freya (aged 30, married for ten years, mother of three) also talked about the “various rows” she had had with her husband about her domestic and childcare load. She described herself as “not coping” with the workload. For all of these women, domestic inequality in their marriages has real emotional consequences for them as individuals, and is a significant source of marital discontent. Women’s decisions about whether and when to have children, and how many to have, are influenced by the inequity experienced in marital relationships. Although I suggest that women’s desire to become mothers may eventually outweigh these immediate and everyday concerns, reports from already mothering women suggest that this source of conflict does not dissipate. The evidence gathered from my interviews demonstrates that trying to change dynamics in a relationship, when it comes to domestic tasks, is even more difficult when it is compounded with the emotional, mental and physical demands of motherhood, as Choi et al. also suggest (177).Accepting Inequality The findings of my study suggest that women intending to mother and those already mothering continue to expect to do more domestic and childcare labour than their partners. However, even with this concession, some women are still over-optimistic in their estimations about the amount of domestic labour their partner’s will perform. Fetterolf and Eagly find similar patterns in gender equality expectations in the United States amongst female college undergraduates planning to mother sometime in the future (90–91). Some women I interviewed who were planning to mother sometime in the future described their own attempts to negotiate with their partner to make them do more work. For instance, Gabrielle (aged 25, married for three years), who, as discussed earlier, hoped that her husband will participate more in the home after the birth of a child, said: Once we’ve had kids he might change and realise he might have to help out a little bit more, I can’t actually do everything…I don’t think it’ll be 50/50 just from experience of how we’ve been married so far… I do hope that it’ll be maybe 80/20 or something like that. When asked about whether their current division of house work was a concern for her, particularly in relation to having children, Gabrielle replied that she just “nagged” about it. Putting her discontent in the frame of “nagging” trivialises the issue. While it is men who tend to characterise women’s discontent as “nagging,” women can also internalise, and use this language to minimise their own feelings. That men “just don’t see mess and dirt” in the same way that women do is a popular idea drawn on to account for women’s acceptance of inequity in the home as evidenced in numerous statements from the women I interviewed. Commentaries like these align with Carter’s (1) observations that generally accepted ideas about women and men (for example, that women see dirt and men do not) are drawn on to explain and justify domestic labour arrangements. In response to how domestic labour is divided between her husband and herself, Marguerite (aged 25, married for ten months), like Gabrielle (aged 25, married for three years), described an “80/20 split,” with her as the 80%. Marguerite commented that “it’s not that he’s lazy, it’s just that he doesn’t see it, he doesn’t realise that a house needs cleaning.” Fallding described these ideas, and the behaviours that ensue, as a type of patriarchal family model, specifically “rightful patriarchy” (69) that includes the idea that women naturally pay more attention to detail than men. Conclusion “Falling in love” and “getting married” remains an important cultural narrative in Australian society. As Gabrielle (aged 25, married for three years) described, people ask you “when are you getting married? When are you having kids?” because “that’s just what you do.” I argue that offering critical accounts of heteronormative monogamous relationships/marriage equality from a variety of positions is important to understandings of these relationships in contemporary Australia. Accounts of the division of unpaid labour in the home between spouses provide one forum through which equality within marriage/heteronormative monogamous relationships can be examined. A tension exists between an expectation of participation on the part of women about their partner’s role in the home, and a latent acceptance by most women that equality in the division of unpaid work is unrealistic and unachievable. Men remain largely removed from work in the home and appear to have a degree of choice about their level of participation in domestic and care duties. The consistency of these findings with earlier work, some of which is over a decade old, suggests that the way families divide unpaid domestic and care labour remains gendered, despite significant changes in other aspects of gender relations. Many of the current discussions about marriage idealise it in ways that are not borne out in this research. This idealisation feeds into the romance of marriage, which maintains women’s investment in it, and thus the likelihood that they will find themselves in a relationship that disappoints them in significant and easily dismissed ways.ReferencesAustralian Bureau of Statistics. Australian Social Trends, 2003, Family Functioning: Balancing Family and Work. 4102.0 (2010). ‹http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/7d12b0f6763c78caca257061001cc588/c8647f1dd5f36f42ca2570eb00835397!OpenDocument›. Australian Bureau of Statistics. Australian Social Trends, 2010, Parental Divorce or Death During Childhood. 4102.0 (2010). ‹http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/4102.0Main+Features40Sep+2010›. Arendell, Terry. “Conceiving and Investigating Motherhood: The Decade's Scholarship.” Journal of Marriage and the Family 62.4 (2000): 1192–207. Bittman, Michael. Juggling Time: How Australian Families Use Time. Office of the Status of Women, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet: Canberra, 1991. Carter, Meg. Who Cares Anyway? Negotiating Domestic Labour in Families with Teenage Kids. (Doctoral dissertation). (2007). ‹http://researchbank.swinburne.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/swin:15946.› Choi, P., Henshaw, C , Baker, S, and J Tree. "Supermum, Superwife, Supereverything: Performing Femininity in the Transition to Motherhood." Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology 23.2 (2005): 167–180. Coffey, Amanda. The Ethnographic Self: Fieldwork and the Representation of Identity. London: Sage Publications, 1999. Coltrane, Scott. “Research on Household Labour: Modelling and Measuring Social Embeddedness of Routine Family Work.” Journal of Marriage and Family 62.4 (2000): 1208-1233. Conle, Carola. 2000. “Narrative Inquiry: Research Tool and Medium for Professional Development.” European Journal of Teacher Education 23.1 (2000): 773-97. DeVault, Marjorie. Feeding the Family: The Social Organisation of Caring as Gendered Work. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1991. Fallding, Harold. “Inside the Australian Family.” Marriage and the Family in Australia. Ed. Adolphus Elkin. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1957. 54–81. Fetterolf, Janell and Alice Eagly. “Do Young Women Expect Gender Equality in Their Future Lives? An Answer From a Possible Selves Experiment.” Sex Roles 65.1 (2011): 83–93. Hays, Susan. The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996. Hochschild, Arlie. The Second Shift. New York: Viking, 1989. Hochschild, Arlie with Anne Machung. The Second Shift. New York: Penguin Edition, 2003. Lachance-Grzela, Mylene, and Genevieve Bouchard. “Why Do Women Do the Lion's Share of Housework? A Decade of Research.” Sex Roles 63.1 (2010): 767–80. Lupton, Deborah. “‘A Love/Hate Relationship’: the Ideals and Experiences of First-Time Mothers.” Journal of Sociology 36.1 (2000): 50–63. Mauthner, Natasha. “Reassessing the Importance and Role of the Marital Relationship in Postnatal Depression: Methodological and Theoretical Implications.” Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology 1.16 (1998): 157–75. Meisenbach, Rebecca. “The Female Breadwinner: Phenomenological Experience and Gendered Identity in Work/Family Spaces.” Sex Roles 62.1 (2010): 2–19. Monk, Timonthy H., Marilyn J. Essex, Nancy A. Smider, Marjorie H. Klein, and David J. Kupfer. “The Impact of the Birth of a Baby on the Time Structure and Social Mixture of a Couple's Daily Life and Its Consequences for Well-Being.” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 26.14 (1996): 1237– 58. Nicolson, Paula. Postnatal Depression: Psychology, Science and the Transition to Motherhood. London: Routledge, 1998. Pocock, Barbara. The Work/Life Collision: What Work is Doing to Australians and What to Do About It. Sydney: The Federation Press, 2003. Ramazanoglu, Caroline and Janet Holland. Feminist Methodology: Challenges and Choices. London: Sage, 2002. Scott, Joan. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17.4 (1991): 773–97. Shelton, Nikki, and Sally Johnson. “'I Think Motherhood for Me Was a Bit Like a Double-Edged Sword': The Narratives of Older Mothers.” Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology 16.1 (2006): 316–30. Skrbis, Zlatko, Mark Western, Bruce Tranter, David Hogan, Rebecca Coates, Jonathan Smith, Belinda Hewitt, and Margery Mayall. “Expecting the Unexpected: Young People’s Expectations about Marriage and Family.” Journal of Sociology 48.1 (2012): 63–83.

We are our own subjects. How our subjectivity becomes entangled in the lives of others is and has always been our topic. (Denzin 27)This article reflects on the process of disclosing the ethnographic self, particularly in relation to the use of e-mails and social networking sites, such as Facebook. Previous work has examined virtual ethnography as the main research method or its place within a mixed method approach (Orgad; Hine, Virtual Ethnography; Fay; Greschke). My focus lies on the voluntary and involuntary intertwining of physical ethnographic work (i.e. going to a specific location to immerse oneself in a culture) and the virtual relations formed with informants in the course of such fieldwork. Connecting with informants on Facebook has brought a new dimension to the active approach of impression management that is encouraged in traditional texts on ethnography and participant observation (Hammersley and Atkinson; Taylor and Bogdan; Ellen). Examples are drawn from my experience of three phases of geographically located fieldwork for my thesis on Spanish- and English-language media and the Cuban-American community in Miami, Florida, and from online “repercussions” of my physical presence in the field.In an ideal (research) world, the process of immersing oneself in a culture, studying and understanding its values, dynamics and symbolism is paired with professional and personal distance and reflexivity. Most of the time, the reality of fieldwork does not adhere to this ideal (Kleinman and Copp). Data collection does not take place in a void. On the contrary, it is a personal, emotional, embodied and challenging experience in which the researcher’s persona is highly involved: “If informants are people and have rights that affect ethical practice, ethnographers are also human and have identities that affect research practice” (Brewer 99).The researcher’s identity has a strong influence on the research process, but the same holds true the other way around. Ethnographic encounters have an effect on the ethnographer’s sense of identity or sense of self. The researcher’s identity, just like the informant’s, is ever-changing and in a constant process of negotiation that continues throughout the ethnographic experience. As Sarah Pink (47) points out, individuals not only position themselves and their identity in relation to others, but also in relation to objects and discourses (see also: Miller).Therefore the process of relating to the field does not end with physically removing oneself from it (Coffey). Dealing, relating and “coming to terms” with the field and those we encounter is much more complex. The assumption made that the researcher would not be influenced by this, meaning that the field has no impact whatsoever on the one collecting data, has been challenged severely, often by feminist scholars among others, over the past decades (Hey; Roberts; Berger).Establishing and positioning oneself and one’s role in the field can be a daunting process (Lindner). It can be informed by fears of acceptance, uncertainties about conventions not (fully) understood yet and the underlying dynamics one still hopes to uncover. The process of role(s) and identity negotiation of the researcher in the field goes on when writing the field, going through field notes and making sense of what we have experienced (Okely). So even though strict temporal and spatial boundaries might never have existed to the extent ethnography textbooks would have us believe, the use of e-mails and social networking sites have brought the field even closer to home. I have structured the following reflections on disclosing the ethnographic self in face-to-face conversations, that is, exposures made while being physically present in the field, and those taking place online. However, it is worth remembering that this is an artificial distinction as they are clearly interlinked and can overlap in time. Disclosure in Face-to-Face ConversationsWith establishing and negotiating one’s identity in the field and fieldwork relations comes the question of how much to disclose of oneself. How much should informants know about me? There are obvious ethical requirements: Every researcher should be clear about scope and aim of the research project, institutional affiliations, the way data will be stored and used (Mauthner et al.). But beyond that, how much of myself do I have to expose? What stands in the way of a straight-forward answer is the undefined nature of relationships of those we meet in the field: “Fieldwork relationships are at once professional and personal, yet not necessarily readily characterized as either”(Coffey 39).Arguably, there is not one right way to proceed, as it depends on the kind of field the researcher is finding herself in, her personality, role, identity and the type of relationship she wishes to establish with informants. The process of relationship-building to the field as a whole as constructed in the ethnographer’s mind and to individuals in the field is of course ongoing and very likely to evolve and change over time. This applies not only to the relationships built but also to the researcher’s sense of self and how he or she relates to those encountered in the field. It is partly in and through these encounters that the researcher’s understanding of self is influenced, shaped and negotiated on a continual basis. During three phases of fieldwork in 2006, 2007 and 2008 I interviewed over 40 Hispanic journalists, media executives and active members of the Cuban-American community in Miami, Florida. How much was I willing to disclose of myself during these encounters and subsequent e-mail exchanges? Should I correct informants when they wrongly assumed I was British because I was based at a British institution? Do they need to know why I have chosen to research this particular topic and them as a group, why I was based at a Scottish university and what brought me to the U.K. in the first place? The answers were no secrets, but neither was I comfortable to share them with all informants I met in the field. Gender and age-related dynamics came into play here with the majority of interviewees being male and significantly older than me (Easterday). At times, I was uneasy when it came to talking about myself. While I defined the majority of my initial relations as mostly, though not entirely, professional, some interviewees did have a different take on this. In particular, I felt that one interviewee who after the interview started asking me personal questions about my move to Scotland, clearly overstepped an invisible line, although it would have been perfectly alright from my perspective to ask him questions similar, though different in tone, within the context of an interview. A further aspect of disclosure within the context of ethnographic work is the open discussion of the research process with informants. Although this can be very fruitful, it can also be source of scorn and end in closed doors, especially in the highly polarised field I was researching: Once interviews were finished, some interviewees would ask whom I had interviewed previously—maybe just out of interest, maybe to go on and suggest future interviewees. I had never considered in detail what kind of reactions interviewees might have by my naming of previous contacts because for one, reactions had so far been positive and secondly, all interviewees had some understanding of what research entails and that I would naturally want to speak to as many people and as many “sides” as possible. In one particular case, though, the interviewee showed clear disapproval of my talking to a journalist at a well-known Miami-based newspaper. At the time, I did not take this minor condemnation very seriously, but in retrospect it turned out that this interviewee could have been a valuable source for further information and contacts. It taught me that it is wise to hold my cards closer to my chest in such a sensitive environment. This does not mean, however, that secrecy and constant striving towards a neutral position is always the best way to proceed, nor a believable position to hold as Kloos (511) found out: “One of the clergymen in Eastern Flevoland asked me once: ‘Do you have any opinions of your own?’”Virtual Exposure and DisclosurePrevious studies underlined that relationships forged and maintained online mirror offline everyday-life contacts, interests, concerns and vice versa. (Castells; Miller and Slater) For ethnographers whose informants have ready Internet access, this can bring significant advantages as well as challenges. Contacting informants whom I had heard about but not yet met in person by e-mail proved an extremely useful approach. An e-mail allowed me to say a few words about myself and introduce my research project. If there was no response to the e-mail, I was much more comfortable to call the person at this stage—rather than before an e-mail had been sent. E-mails proved a very successful way in contacting informants, thanking people after the interview and exchanging further information that had been touched upon in conversation. What surprised me, however, was that e-mails were also used by interviewees to contact me months after I had been in touch with them and had physically left the field. On a couple of occasions, interviewees sent me information that they thought was essential for my research or, in fact, asked me to fill out a questionnaire and comment on matters relating to my research topic. My role in the field and my relation to informants had turned from researcher to research participant, or interviewee in this case.While e-mails offer a rather controlled environment when approaching informants, other information about the researcher might be more unpredictable and harder to control or manage. I sometimes found myself wondering what information about me informants would find when they Googled my name. How would they combine and make sense of their offline construction of me as a researcher with my virtual persona? And to which extent is impression management in the context of social networking sites feasible and perhaps to be recommended? Of course these questions do not solely apply in a research context. However, it is worth considering them in an effort of understanding the dynamics which underlie the research process. Even though my research methodology included an online component, such as the monitoring of selected blogs and discussion forums, the majority of the data was gathered in clearly defined periods of physical ethnographic work. The relationship that evolved via e-mails and on Facebook outside of fieldwork phases were initiated by informants. I could obviously have ignored these contacts, however, as someone involved in media research I thought it strange and discourteous not to respond or accept informants as “Friends,” while seeking them out offline.Disclosing (personal) information on Facebook can become a risky business due to the diverse relationship of the people merged through Facebook’s list of “Friends.” Facebook does not force users to define or distinguish between different types of relationships. In my role as a researcher, I have always been highly uneasy to put on detailed information about “What’s on my Mind,” the facility Facebook offers for bringing others up to date on what is happening in one’s life. Reporting to my “Friends,” including informants, that most of my time was spent struggling with the data I had gathered in the field, could undermine their view of me as a researcher and a person worth talking to. Apart from that, there were obvious faux-pas that I needed to avoid online. Joining a Ernesto “Che” Guevara Fan group—like wearing a ‘Che’ T-shirt or pin – is not a smart move when trying to build a relationship with Cuban exiles. But even expressing fairly main-stream political opinion did not seem a good idea. Without being aware of it at the time, I was trying to perform a “stable research self,” as opposed to a fragmented, continuously changing and relationally constructed one. Following Geertz’s line of thought, I furthermore hoped that “the natives” had a similar perspective to mine and would perceive me as the balanced, neutral researcher that I was trying to be (Geertz).Arguably, Facebook allows for personal information and entries to be hidden from some contacts. It gives users the option to group contacts, thereby specifying who gets to see what kind of information. However, all contacts can see all contacts, to allow for networking to take place. Given the politically-charged and polarised nature of the community I was researching—and keeping in mind the incident recounted above, with one informant disapproving of me talking to a certain journalist and subsequently breaking up all communication—being connected with some people can have unwelcome side-effects for the research process.Personal and intercultural variations when reading and making sense of social networking sites are a further aspect worth noting in this context. Dalsgaard (10-12) underlines the hierarchical nature which characterises the practical use of the Internet and often mirrors offline power constellations. Unlike earlier celebration of the horizontal communication devoid of power structures, Internet interaction reproduces and adds further stratifications and “forms of ranking—some hierarchical, some not”. This also holds true for the number of contacts on a social networking site:Networks consist of nodes, and in the ‘Facebook society’, every person is a node. But there are differences between nodes. Some are more central than others and function as the hub for many more transactions. Some may only have ten ‘connections’ or ‘friends’, while others may have several hundreds – notwithstanding that there is qualitative difference between relationships, that not all relationships are personal, that many ‘friends’ are perhaps what we would normally call acquaintances and so on. (Dalsgaard 10)Drawing on Goffman, Dalsgaard (12) argues that popularity on social networking sites, has a symbolic or performance-orientated character, as it can be safely assumed that not every contact is “an important relationship built on long-term mutual exchange of greetings, gifts, favours, opinions and so on.”Even the number of friends and contacts can be understood as disclosing something about ourselves. How many people from the field and from outside the field are on my list of contacts? Who is there and who is not? Which relations are not included, pursued online, kept secret or ignored? Concerns of how individual informants would read my Facebook profile have left me feeling uneasy while keeping my activities to a minimum. However, secrecy, inactivity—which is in a way an attempt of the impossible act of non-performance or disappearance, can be just as harmful as disclosure. During the time of research I kept wondering whether someone working towards a doctorate in communication studies should know how to “work” Facebook. My wariness of disclosing too much of myself, aspects of my identity that would threaten my performance as a “stable researcher self,” held other parts of my fragmented identity captive and disclosed. In a way, I was happy with the relational construction of myself as the doctoral researcher in face-to-face encounters, but online encounters, not initiated by myself, had a different quality to them. They led me to struggle with the authentic, stable and singular self that Facebook encourages people to present to the outside world.Concluding RemarksManaging and handling acts of disclosure in geographically located fieldwork has been explored in great depth in recent scholarship. Voluntary and involuntary disclosure of the researcher’s fragmented identity in the context of social networking sites is a new phenomenon, and an unexpected challenge for those who did not see virtual ethnography as part of their main methodology. Similar to the fading dichotomy of public/private, e-mails and social networking sites have torn down the temporal and spatial boundaries fieldwork and the performance of the ethnographic self has been associated with. For the researcher who is connected with informants on Facebook, or other social networking sites, this can mean an ongoing performance of the researcher’s role; a continuous relating and positioning to those encountered in the field. This process might fade out with the end of a project, turning the informant into an acquaintance, friend or someone who happens to be our “Friend” on Facebook but has little further impact on our life and sense of self. When researching a group of people with ready access to digital media, virtual ethnography should possibly be part of the mix from the start. Hine (Virtual Methods 8) has pointed out that defining what exactly ethnography entails is problematic in itself. Immersing oneself in the field can take many different forms. Ethnography as a method is flexible enough to encompass encountering informants on social networking sites. In itself, it is worth noting who is online, who is not and what kind of interaction the informant is looking for. However, gathering this type of information raises ethical questions about the research process. In my case, geographically located field work was considered and approved by the university’s ethics committee, but online encounters—outside the chosen methodology—were not covered. Dealings with research participants were therefore institutionally endorsed within temporal and spatial limits and this indisputably contributed to my sense of a professional research self. Being contacted by informants on a social networking site, significantly challenges this framework and clouds the terms of reference. Whose rules apply? Or are there no rules? Observing participants’ profiles as an add-on to previously collected data, though tempting it may be, seems not a good option. But then informants might monitor the researcher’s profile for their own purposes, be it general curiosity, entertainment, or simply an enjoyable free-time activity. Once again, traditional roles of researcher and researched are easily reversed in the online encounter. For the time being, ethical guidelines generally assume a situation in which the researcher in some form is seeking out the researched, not the other way around. With the proliferation of social networking sites and online encounters, standard institutional ethical protocols fall short here.Nonetheless, online encounters between researcher and researched also bear potential. Asymmetric power structures can shift with the informant being able to contact, construct the researcher and disclose aspects of the researcher’s identity, or rather online persona, on their own terms and in a less controlled environment. As the incidence recounted above shows, this can entail a role reversal which blurs the lines between researcher and researched and underlines the performative and relational aspect of self. 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