Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "Corps humain – Danse"

La vidéo de Robert Wilson, La Mort de Molière, contient quatre scènes où l’action peut être identifiée à une danse. Bien qu’une danse communique toujours l’image d’un corps humain en mouvement, cette production de Wilson génère une distinction et, par la suite, une interaction entre un corps dansant et d’autres images du corps, celles entre autres du corps de Molière mourant. Mon analyse porte plus spécifiquement sur ces interrelations entre le corps dansant et le corps mourant, afin de mieux comprendre celles entre le monde fictionnel de Molière et l’univers esthétique de Wilson.

La mise en mouvement du corps à travers la danse, la présence d’une pulsation régulière qui rythme ces mouvements et le fait de contrecarrer cette pulsation par des événements musicaux placés à côté, ce qu’on appelle la « contramétricité », sont des points communs à la plupart des musiques africaines traditionnelles. Ils témoignent à la fois d’une disposition universelle du système cognitif (capacité du corps humain de se synchroniser avec des signaux sonores périodiques) et d’une dimension profondément culturelle dans la mesure où la contramétricité s’est développée dans ces musiques beaucoup plus qu’ailleurs. On montrera comment cet aspect contramétrique contredit les théories de la perception du rythme inspirées des hypothèses de Lerdahl et Jackendoff. On comparera également ces musiques avec le jazz, car celui-ci a une particularité qui le distingue des musiques africaines, à savoir l’existence de niveaux hiérarchiques dans l’organisation métrique, dont on montrera qu’elle n’est pas aussi discriminante que ce qui est généralement admis.

En Hispanoamérica, las representaciones festivas son manifestaciones colectivas que se distinguen de la vida cotidiana y se pueden analizar con la ayuda de varias categorías, entre ellas, las danzas, las luchas, los espectáculos, los ritos y los juegos. En la actualidad, en el México indígena y rural, se utiliza comúnmente el término genérico de danza, que se refiere a una variedad de prácticas de origen diverso, derivadas tanto de los rituales teatrales prehispánicos como del teatro evangelizador colonial. La danza es una representación con motivo de una fiesta patronal con más o menos espectadores; combina música, danza o diálogos recitados. Hay todo tipo de danzas, pero lo que tienen en común es que se conciben como físicamente duras y se viven como un sacrificio personal. Así, algunas peleas se llaman bailes y algunos de estos incluyen enfrentamientos violentos.Les représentations festives de l’Amérique espagnole sont des manifestations collectives qui se distinguent de la vie quotidienne et relèvent de plusieurs catégories d’analyse en sciences humaines –entre autres, les danses, les combats, les spectacles, les rites et les jeux. De nos jours, le Mexique indien et rural utilise couramment le terme générique espagnol danza (danse) qui se réfère à des pratiques hétéroclites, et d’origine diverse, puisqu’elles dérivent tout à la fois des rituels théâtralisés précolombiens et du théâtre d’évangélisation colonial. La danza est une représentation exécutée à l’occasion d’une fête patronale avec plus ou moins de spectateurs ; elle conjugue musique, danse et/ou dialogues récités. Il en existe de toutes sortes mais leur point commun est qu’elles sont conçues comme physiquement dures et vécues comme un sacrifice personnel. En ce sens, certains combats reçoivent l’appellation de danses, tandis que certaines danses incluent des confrontations violentes.

Une caractéristique de la performance dansée est d’orienter l’attention sur le mouvement en tant que tel et d’induire une conscience proprioceptive aiguë. Elle a dès lors le potentiel de faire apparaître dans son accomplissement même la double action d’incorporation et de dilatation de la gestuelle humaine, identifiée par Marcel Jousse, ainsi que le rapport mimétique de l’individu au monde qui s’y réalise. Cet argument est exploré pour l’ikoku des Punu du Congo-Brazzaville. Dans cette danse qui célèbre la fertilité, un va-et-vient entre des danseurs de sexe différent donne lieu à une phase d’animation collective suivie d’une danse en couple. Par l’attention portée au corps en train de bouger à l’image de l’autre, qui est à la fois l’autre danseur et le génie de l’eau, garant du bien-être social, la performance met en acte le processus rythmomimique d’internalisation et d’externalisation de l’univers sociocosmique punu en tant qu’il est élaboré à la fois autour de la notion d’une complémentarité des sexes et de celle d’un enveloppement maternel.

According to M. Fforde, the era of postmodernity is characterized by a form of cultural collapse, as it reveals many phenomena indicating that contemporary humans are on the path towards ‘desocialization.’ This process represents an overall cultural shift as well as changes in the existing anthropological paradigms. This paper is dedicated to an analysis of the issue of religion as social capital in conditions of increasing societal risks. We work with an hypothesis that sociopathological phenomena are rather determined by cultural and secularization factors. In our article, we argue that desocialization is closely connected with current secularization processes, as well as with the progression of a materialistic view of man in compliance with the models and theories of postmodern anthropologies. We propose that the ongoing social enthropy in the form of desocialization should be dealt with holistically, i.e.,by analyzing the utilization (or the lack thereof) of religious resources for human and social flourishing.

À travers l’ouvrage Le Successeur de pierre (1999) par Jean-Michel Truong et à la lumière des théories de Félix Guattari, de Mark B. N. Hansen et de Brian Rotman relatives aux multiples virtualités de l’être humain, cet article étudiera la narration romanesque de l’imbrication des nouvelles technologies de l’information et de la communication (NTIC) dans les processus de matérialisation et d’agentivité du posthumain. Dans son roman, Truong nous invite en effet à repenser la contextualité du corps et de l’identité humaine en substituant un point de vue anthropocentrique et dualiste à une ontologie de l’émergence.

À travers l’ouvrage Le Successeur de pierre (1999) par Jean-Michel Truong et à la lumière des théories de Félix Guattari, de Mark B. N. Hansen et de Brian Rotman relatives aux multiples virtualités de l’être humain, cet article étudiera la narration romanesque de l’imbrication des nouvelles technologies de l’information et de la communication (NTIC) dans les processus de matérialisation et d’agentivité du posthumain. Dans son roman, Truong nous invite en effet à repenser la contextualité du corps et de l’identité humaine en substituant un point de vue anthropocentrique et dualiste à une ontologie de l’émergence.

The Generative Electronic Dance Music Algorithmic System (GEDMAS) is a generative music system that composes full Electronic Dance Music (EDM) compositions. The compositions are based on a corpus of transcribed musical data collected through a process of detailed human transcription. This corpus data is used to analyze genre-specific characteristics associated with EDM styles. GEDMAS uses probabilistic and first order Markov chain models to generate song form structures, chord progressions, melodies and rhythms. The system is integrated with Ableton Live, and allows its user to select one or several songs from the corpus, and generate a 16 tracks/parts composition in a few clicks.

This paper is the result of reflections inspired by observing and participating in dancing sessions with children. Our experience of the latter led to the production of images that provoked a variety of questions, and invited us to think about the relationships between bodies, dance, and various forms of education. Among these questions were: what clues about the experience of human embodiment are given through observing children’s dance? What can children teach us through participating with them in this performative medium, and what are its implications for education, most especially in light of our observations of children's inventiveness in this regard? Our impressions resonate and find expression in the oeuvre of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Jan Masschelein and Manoel de Barros. Placing ourselves under their influence, we mobilized our thinking and opened ourselves to the emergent character of their ideas, resulting in what might be called a form of “dancing-writing” in which those two forms of expression interact. This dancing-writing is informed by and imbued with children’s lived experience: step by step, we walked the paths that they opened, recording as best we could their multisensorial approach to the world—gaze, taste, smell, sound, touch, movement. Ours was an experience of research on movement, with movement, in movement. As such, we harbor no intention to present final answers, but rather offer the reader an invitation to think philosophically and childishly. Ours is an invitation to dance with and among the questions which that very dance inspired.

<p class="p1">Resumo:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p2">De um simples piscar de olhos a um pulo, a dança traz ao ser humano novos meios de conectar-se consigo e com o espaço a sua volta. Este artigo é um estudo sobre as relações da mediação com dança em comparação aos processos do <em>site specific</em> e performance, como produtos indiretos da experiência mediativa. Recorte da pesquisa de mestrado <em>Proibido tocar, permitido dançar: dança e mediação no museu de arte contemporânea</em>, que submete um grupo heterogêneo de pessoas a vivências de dança e, posteriormente, ao diálogo sobre a obra de arte no Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo.</p><p class="p3"><span class="s1">Palavras-chave:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span>Dança. Performance. <em>Site specific</em>. Mediação.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p><p class="p3"><span class="Apple-converted-space"><br /></span></p><p>MEDIATOR BODY: DANCE AND MEDIATION IN THE MUSEUM</p><p class="p1"><em>Abstract:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></em></p><p class="p5"><em>From a simple blink of eyes to an action of jumping, the dance provides to the human being new connections with himself and with the space around him. This article is a study about the relation among the mediation with dance, ‘site specific’ process and performance as indirect products from the mediation experience. Part of the Masters’ project “Do not touch. Dance, though. Dance and mediation in the Contemporary Museum</em><span class="s2"><em>”, the project put a heterogeneous group into living mediations that combine dance improvisations as a way to talk about contemporary art.</em></span></p><p class="p6"><span class="s1"><em>Keywords:<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></em></span><em>Dance. Performance. Site specific. Mediation.</em></p>

Abstract During their residence in Vienna, the editors of this magazine visited a part of the ImpulsTanz festival in order to map international trends in contemporary dance. They established that, following an increase in the production of contemporary dance, interest in theory (the Maska magazine being an important part of this scene for several years now) experienced a decrease. They divided the production into three categories: A Dance of Great Names (mentioning Ivo Dimchev with Selfie Concert, Jonathan Burrows with Rewriting, a piece by Wim Vandekeybus/Ultima Vez Go Figure Out Yourself and a classic by DD Dorvillier/Human Future Dance Corps: No Change, or »Freedom Is a Psycho-kinetic Skill«), the position of the viewer and the hermeticisms of the current contemporary dance (analysing Anna Juren's 42, a solo performance by Dani Michel Cutlass Spring and Compass by Simone Augherlony, Petra Hrašćanec and Saša Božić) and new formalisms and contemporary repetition (Tatiana Chizhikova and Roman Kutnov: Time to Time and Ellen Furey and Malik Nashad Sharpe: SOFTLAMP.Autonomies).

Dans cet article, j’aborde comment la santé est négociée selon plusieurs aspects de la pratique professionnelle de la danse. Alors que plusieurs chorégraphes, en sous-texte de leurs oeuvres, dénoncent des injustices humaines, nous pourrions escompter une considération de la santé et du bien-être des artistes qui donnent corps à ce regard sur le monde. Nos résultats d’entrevues auprès d’une quarantaine de chorégraphes, répétiteurs et interprètes professionnels s’apparentent toutefois à ceux d’autres études en regard de la passion et de la vocation souvent évoquées pour expliquer les atteintes corporelles auxquelles consentent les artistes. Ces derniers sont même parfois fort résistants à de nouvelles façons de penser et de vivre leur art. De nos entrevues est clairement apparu un discours dominant axé sur la préséance de l’oeuvre et le dépassement des limites corporelles. Si la danse contemporaine est née en réaction au codes du ballet, elle continue à perpétuer une culture du silence face aux souffrances physiques et à la détresse psychologique des interprètes.

What is universal about music, and what varies? We built a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of the world’s societies, as well as a discography of audio recordings. The ethnographic corpus reveals that music (including songs with words) appears in every society observed; that music varies along three dimensions (formality, arousal, religiosity), more within societies than across them; and that music is associated with certain behavioral contexts such as infant care, healing, dance, and love. The discography—analyzed through machine summaries, amateur and expert listener ratings, and manual transcriptions—reveals that acoustic features of songs predict their primary behavioral context; that tonality is widespread, perhaps universal; that music varies in rhythmic and melodic complexity; and that elements of melodies and rhythms found worldwide follow power laws.

Este artigo mostra como um currículo-dançante, criado a partir de experimentações com dança no território de um currículo em ação, se reinventou e desencadeou outros modos de aprender ao se conectar com uma dança-menor, aquela que está nos corpos estudantis e é frequentemente marginalizada no currículo maior. Utilizou-se como metodologia o dançarilhar, isto é: uma composição feita de cartografia + dança e que se inspira tanto nos estudos de Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari como no “Andarilho” de Nietzsche para apostar em um currículo-dançante. O objetivo deste artigo é mostrar como um currículo-dançante funcionou ao se conectar a uma dança-menor no território de um currículo, seguindo alguns sons da cultura hip-hop, como o funk, a trap dance e o k-pop. Essa dança-menor com um professorar sensível e à espreita de brechas para fazer o movimento acontecer no meio de disciplinas autorizadas ensinadas nas escolas possibilitou quebrar, romper e subverter as regras, a visão de corpo e de dança de um currículo-maior. O artigo mostra, também, que, por meio dessa conexão, estudantes aprendem seguindo a linha dançante do prazer e da alegria. O argumento desenvolvido é o de que um currículo-dançante se tornou um espaço de transgressão e criação ao se conectar a uma dança-menor, enunciando corpos, dança e um currículo por vir.

Maurice Henrie offre dans sa fiction un mélange de réalisme et de fantastique qui donne lieu à une critique sociale percutante. Connu surtout pour ses nouvelles, Henrie a également publié trois romans : Le balcon dans le ciel (1995), Une Ville lointaine (2001) et Le Chuchotement des étoiles (2007). Chez Henrie, la représentation de l’abject relève d’une équivalence établie entre la vie cérébrale au masculin et la vie corporelle au féminin. Il appert que l’œuvre d’Henrie participe de la « somotaphobie », ou dévalorisation du corps humain par rapport à l’esprit. Dans les trois romans de Maurice Henrie, trois images archétypales de la femme ressortent : la femme séduite et séduisante ; la mère et épouse avaleuse et accaparante ; et la vieillarde au corps menacé de désintégration et de putréfaction. Les thèmes principaux de l’œuvre d’Henrie se rattachent autant à la notion de l’absurde chez Camus qu’à la cosmogonie chrétienne de Dante.

Les fictions de tels écrivains que Boccace, Dante, Shakespeare et Harvey ont été influencées par la redécouverte par les anatomistes de la Renaissance des documents de l’Antiquité sur la dissection, ainsi que par des redéfinitions théologiques du cœur comme le site d’intériorité spirituelle. Ces représentations diverses du cœur apportent de façon paradoxale du réconfort et de la terreur à la fois, en juxtaposant l’incertitude spirituel et le corps matériel. On en obtient un aperçu de la signification de la condition humaine dans un monde de plus en plus perturbé par l’avènement de la science médicale moderne.

Cette recherche a été entreprise afin de comprendre les relations entre les champs scientifique, mystique et artistique et les premières doctrines de la motricité humaine. En effet, si la science impose son modèle dès la fin du XVIIIe siècle, elle dépasse son propre domaine en investissant les relations entre corps et âme. Face aux modèles biologique et psycho-corporel, le modèle artistique tend à s’ouvrir à la dimension spirituelle. Choisissant l’analyse de contenu comme technique d’investigation, cette étude s’est intéressée aux modèles ternaires corps-âme-esprit de François Delsarte (1811-1871), considéré comme l’un des précurseurs de la danse moderne, et de Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), créateur de «l’Anthroposophie», afin de démonter que le point de vue de l’art leur permet de concilier démarche scientifique et expérience spirituelle. Si les résultats permettent de confirmer chez eux une certaine rationalité, leur regard d’artiste, tout en prolongeant celui du scientifique, dépasse le champ reconnu comme scientifique. Le geste y est l’expression de l’âme en reliant le terrestre au céleste. Alors que Delsarte ne cherche qu’à saisir les rapports entre vie, âme et esprit, Steiner, inspiré par les travaux scientifiques de Goethe, vise à pénétrer au cœur des processus fondant ces rapports selon une approche plus vivante et plus subtile.

Lorsqu’une chorégraphie comme Ethnoscape de Cécile Proust, qui traite du sujet des migrations humaines, est présentée sur scène au public, elle se trouve prise dans un contexte de réception politique et éthique d’autant plus brûlant qu’il touche à une actualité immédiate et médiatisée. C’est cette rencontre que l’article proposé commence par interroger : comment rendre présents les corps des immigrés, à travers leurs témoignages, leurs voix, leurs images ? Leur présence différée ne marque-t-elle pas inéluctablement leur absence ? Comparant ce projet avec celui de Barbara Manzetti qui fait venir des réfugiés politiques dans le lieu de sa résidence artistique, je m’emploie à montrer que ces choix ne hiérarchisent en aucun cas la valeur des œuvres, mais sont fondamentaux quant à la façon dont chacune des chorégraphies tend à s’inscrire dans le discours contextuel sur la migration. Changeant d’échelle, je peux alors montrer que la démarche chorégraphique de Proust ne se limite pas à s’inscrire dans la polémique d’une époque, mais qu’elle est l’histoire de toute une vie où danse et migration sont intimement liées, et où il s’agit de chorégraphier le mouvement du voyage et de la rencontre.

Povzetek Urednici pričujoče revije sta v okviru rezidenčnega bivanja na Dunaju obiskali del festivala ImpulsTanz, da bi zmapirali mednarodne trende na področju sodobnega plesa. Ugotovili sta, da je na sodobnoplesni sceni ob povečani produkciji upadel interes za teorijo, kamor se že vrsto let pomembno umešča tudi delo revije Maska. Produkcijo sta razvrstili v tri kategorije: ples velikih imen (tu omenita Iva Dimcheva z delom Selfie Concert, Jonathana Burrowsa z delom Rewriting, komad Wima Vandekeybusa/Ultima Vez Go Figure Out Yourself ter klasiko DD Dorvillier/Human Future Dance Corps: No Change, or »freedom is a psycho-kinetic Skill«), mesto gledalca in hermetizmi aktualnega sodobnega plesa (tu obravnavata delo Anne Juren 42, solo Dani Michel Cutlass Spring in Compass Simone Augherlony, Petre Hrašćanec in Saše Božića) ter novi formalizmi in sodobna repeticija (Tatiana Chizhikova in Roman Kutnov: Time to time in Ellen Furey in Malik Nashad Sharpe: SOFTLAMP.Autonomies,).

Science at the Club explores the architecture of the nightclub space as a nucleus for queer testimony, relating it to a judiciary courtroom. This performance challenges legal doctrines of forensic identification and the binary of life and death, by transforming biological and forensic material into ephemeral essences within the performance of the dance floor. Divided into a case study surrounding my performances at nightclubs, research courses taken in human remains recovery and visits to various burial sites of South Texas, I pull from a variety of interdisciplinary studies relating to queer death theory, building on José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of ‘disidentification’ in relation to the human corpse, racial politics in science and the biological arts in a nightclub context. Science at the Club creates a catalyst platform challenging racial and scientific histories of the body and land within the current US political climate, while exploring questions of resurrection and disintegration with a focus on the language of forensics and identity.

Controllable generation of 3D human motions becomes an important topic as the world embraces digital transformation. Existing works, though making promising progress with the advent of diffusion models, heavily rely on meticulously captured and annotated (e.g., text) high-quality motion corpus, a resource-intensive endeavor in the real world. This motivates our proposed MotionMix, a simple yet effective weakly-supervised diffusion model that leverages both noisy and unannotated motion sequences. Specifically, we separate the denoising objectives of a diffusion model into two stages: obtaining conditional rough motion approximations in the initial T-T* steps by learning the noisy annotated motions, followed by the unconditional refinement of these preliminary motions during the last T* steps using unannotated motions. Notably, though learning from two sources of imperfect data, our model does not compromise motion generation quality compared to fully supervised approaches that access gold data. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate that our MotionMix, as a versatile framework, consistently achieves state-of-the-art performances on text-to-motion, action-to-motion, and music-to-dance tasks.

Most Human–Computer Interfaces are built on the paradigm of manipulating abstract representations. This can be limiting when computers are used in artistic performance or as mediators of social connection, where we rely on qualities of embodied thinking: intuition, context, resonance, ambiguity and fluidity. We explore an alternative approach to designing interaction that we call the emergent interface: interaction leveraging unsupervised machine learning to replace designed abstractions with contextually derived emergent representations. The approach offers opportunities to create interfaces bespoke to a single individual, to continually evolve and adapt the interface in line with that individual’s needs and affordances, and to bridge more deeply with the complex and imprecise interaction that defines much of our non-digital communication. We explore this approach through artistic research rooted in music, dance and AI with the partially emergent system Sonified Body. The system maps the moving body into sound using an emergent representation of the body derived from a corpus of improvised movement from the first author. We explore this system in a residency with three dancers. We reflect on the broader implications and challenges of this alternative way of thinking about interaction, and how far it may help users avoid being limited by the assumptions of a system’s designer.

The intangible cultural heritage in the Yangtze River Basin is rich and complete, therefore revealing its spatial distribution characteristics and influencing factors can provide a scientific basis for the diversified cultural protection and inheritance in the Yangtze River Basin and the high-quality sustainable development of the region. This study sets a total of 1250 national intangible cultural heritage from the first batch to the fifth batch in 11 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions which the main stream of the Yangtze River flows through as the research object. The results are visually expressed using ArcGIS spatial analysis technology in combination with the geographic concentration index, nearest neighbor index, kernel density analysis, geographical detector, and the like, which are as follows: (1) The Yangtze River Basin is a highly concentrated area for all categories of intangible cultural heritage in China. There is little difference in the overall distribution of intangible cultural heritage in the eastern, central, and western parts, but it differs a lot between different provincial areas. (2) The overall and different types of intangible cultural heritage in the Yangtze River Basin shows differentiated agglomeration characteristics, with the overall distribution structure of the “six cores and one belt”; from the perspective of types, intangible cultural heritages of traditional craftsmanship, traditional drama, folklore, folk literature, and traditional dance have obvious agglomeration; intangible cultural heritages of traditional medicine and traditional fine arts have little agglomeration; intangible cultural heritages of traditional sports, entertainment, and acrobatics are sparsely distributed, and have the least agglomeration. (3) Human and social factors are the primary factors that affect the spatial and temporal distribution of intangible cultural heritage in the Yangtze River Basin, followed by natural geographical factors, and the policy environment.

Il me regarde. Parfois il murmure des mots que je ne comprends pas. Et puis il s’assoit sur le lit, et il rabat les couvertures. Il dit mon nom tout bas, tu dormais, mon amour ? Là il n’y a plus d’espoir, je sais que ça commence. J’ouvre les yeux sur le noir de la chambre qui peu à peu s’éclaire et dévoile le visage de papa. Il n’y a pas de mots pour ce qu’il me fait dans la chambre. Voix coupée, je ne pourrai jamais le dire. À moi seule je le dis pour ne pas me perdre de vue. Lori Saint-Martin (1999). Mon père, la nuit (p. 7). L’instant même. Nous voilà au troisième solstice d’hiver pour la revue HYBRIDA. J’ai eu la chance de passer mon anniversaire à Montréal, de recevoir l’automne aux couleurs changeantes, de savourer l’énergie du jaune, ma couleur préférée, décliné à l’infini : citron, cadmium, moutarde, ocre, auréolin, indien, de Naples, de Sienne, de Cambodge… L’Association Internationale des Études Québécoises, incarnée dans la précieuse figure de Suzie Beaulieu, a contribué à la réussite de ce séjour d’un mois à l’Université de Montréal, accueilli par une personne magnifique et généreuse, écrivaine prestigieuse à juste titre, Catherine Mavrikakis, qui venait de publier son dernier roman Niagara (2022), ainsi que par son entourage académique et familial, son frère Nicolas Mavrikakis, perspicace critique d’art ; son conjoint, l’insigne professeur de littérature Terry Cochran, et leur fille Loulou, toujours le sourire aux lèvres et aux yeux… Le mois d’octobre est spécialement animé du point de vue culturel à Montréal ce qui m’a permis de participer à une intense vie culturelle : nouvelles publications, activités théâtrales, expositions artistiques, cycles organisés par la cinémathèque québécoise (dont la superbe rétrospective sur l’œuvre du canadien Bruce LaBruce)… Je me suis plu à visiter les intéressantes librairies montréalaises toujours en ébullition. J’ai eu la chance d’entrer en contact direct avec le monde éditorial québécois qui connaît certainement un nouvel âge d’or, des maisons d’édition d’une longue tradition comme Gallimard, dont l’ancien directeur Rolf Puls m’a parlé de tant d’anecdotes littéraires en nous régalant avec des huîtres et des oursins des mers du Nord, et dont l’actuelle directrice générale, Florence Noyer, m’a ouvert également les portes. Tout comme les éditions du Boréal où je suis passé plusieurs fois, reçu magnifiquement par Jean Bernier, avec qui j’ai passé des moments d’intense complicité où j’ai pu partager la passion pour Marie-Claire Blais, qu’il connaît dans le moindre détail, et le deuil à cause de la disparition douloureuse, cet intense mois d’octobre, du jeune écrivain Simon Roy, qui était venu à Valence présenter son premier roman Ma vie rouge Kubrick (2014) ; ainsi que celle de Lori Saint-Martin quelques jours plus tard. Il me reste à mentionner la maison d’édition Héliotrope. Un vrai bijou. J’ai eu le privilège de partager quelques conversations littéraires et humaines de haut niveau et une belle promenade du côté du Mont Royal, avec une halte dans la petite pâtisserie du quartier portugais pour prendre un vrai café, avec sa directrice, écrivaine elle-aussi, Olga Duhamel-Noyer, une âme sœur, qui dirige cette maison respirant sans aucun doute un air nouveau, fortement stimulant. Ma valise était donc bien pleine au retour à Valence et j’aurai de quoi lire dans les prochains mois. Tout cela m’a permis de rencontrer, parfois intensément, dans divers contextes, plusieurs écrivain·e·s, tous les âges confondus, dont je signalerai, par ordre alphabétique, Martine Audet, Arianne Bessette (écrivaine discrète et sensible avec qui j’ai connecté immédiatement), Lula Carballo (« ma Lula », mon double), David Clerson, Pierre-­André Doucet (charmant auteur et musicien acadien spécialement remarquable), Clara Dupuis-Morency, Benjamin Gagnon Chainey, Julien Guy-Béland (personne exceptionnelle, engagée, et écrivain percutant), Monique Proulx, que j’ai reçue à Valence et que j’apprécie énormément comme écrivaine et comme personne, avec qui j’ai partagé des croissants et de la confiture faite maison sur son balcon en regardant les arbres perdre leurs feuilles lorsqu’elle me dédicaçait son dernier roman Enlève la nuit (2022) ; et, bien entendu, Lori Saint-Martin. Je ne voudrais pas oublier le professeur de l’Université de Montréal Alex Noël, qui s’intéresse à la littérature québécoise récente et à la mémoire queer, et qui m’a fait découvrir le travail de l’artiste multidisciplinaire canadienne, originaire de l’île Maurice, Kama La Mackerel et le professeur espagnol de l’Université du Québec à Montréal Antonio Domínguez Leiva, écrivain lui-aussi, dont j’avais perdu la trace et avec qui je partage bien des intérêts littéraires autour du corps, de la monstruosité et du « panique ». Une dernière mention spéciale pour deux danseurs : Francis Paradis, personne instruite et empathique qui est restée tout le temps à mon écoute et m’a fait découvrir des lieux remarquables ; et, enfin, le danseur tunisien Achraf El Abed, en asile politique à Montréal à cause des persécutions LGBT dans son pays, n’ayant pas pu venir à Valence pour ces raisons lors du Colloque Queer Maghreb que nous avons organisé en juin 2022. Il a dansé pour nous en privé chez moi dans le quartier du Red Light de Montréal, pas loin de l’emblématique Café Cléopâtre, le jour de mon anniversaire, en compagnie de ma collègue et amie Adela Cortijo, qui était venue pour l’occasion. Je n’oublierai jamais ce moment magique. Merci à tous et à toutes pour avoir contribué à rendre ce séjour montréalais si spécial et si riche dans tous les sens. Comme je l’annonçais, nous avons perdu Lori Saint-Martin, excellente professeure, traductrice et écrivaine canadienne, ayant choisi le français comme langue d’asile et de refuge, d’identité réinventée, et surtout personne proche et généreuse, disparue dans la Seine, subitement. Des ombres spectrales ont envahi mon cœur et mes pensées à cause de ce destin trop funeste, trop tragique, trop romanesque, tellement j’ai envie de ne pas y croire… et, pourtant, Lori n’est plus là. Juste un dernier message sur WhatsApp quelques jours avant l’hécatombe : « Aquí todo bien » (« tout va vient ici »). Elle adorait l’espagnol, sa nouvelle demeure, sa nouvelle passion. Lori, mon amie, tu as troublé mon âme et laissé un grand vide difficile à combler. Je n’ai que des mots de gratitude envers toi. Et, pourtant, la vie continue à couler, elle coule et coule… comme les larmes des mères qui perdent leurs enfants dans toutes les guerres de la planète. Cette planète Terre qui pleure de plus en plus fort pour que l’on prenne soin d’elle, pour que l’on développe une conscience écologique efficace et durable… Temps catastrophiques, oui… excessifs, oui… scandaleux, oui… Et, pourtant, temps de Saturnales et de Noël, de fêtes, de chants et de vœux, de décorer les maisons, d’allumer les bougies et d’offrir des cadeaux, de rêves de santé, de paix et d’amour… tellement on a besoin de diluer les tensions que l’on ressent ; temps d’apaiser nos esprits… de se ressourcer, de reprendre haleine… de se projeter dans un meilleur avenir… malgré… Revenons à nos moutons… Le Dossier central de ce cinquième numéro de la revue HYBRIDA, coordonné par Fabio Libasci, vise à s’interroger sur les multiples enjeux de la notion d’extrême, que ce soit du point de vue chronologique que du point de vue conceptuel. En effet, l’expression « extrême contemporain », étant en perpétuel déplacement, reste spécialement attirante mais problématique, depuis sa création attribuée à Michel Chaillou, à la toute fin des années 80 du siècle dernier. On assisterait, de nos jours, à une « deuxième génération » de l’extrême contemporain. On pourrait donc l’actualiser pour faire référence aux productions littéraires et culturelles récentes au sens large. Du point de vue thématique, l’extrême est vite associé à la notion de limite, de démesure, voire de violence. En ce sens, force est de constater une tendance et une présence des esthétiques de rupture et des formes de l’excès chez des auteur·e·s contemporain·e·s, plus ou moins jeunes, ce qui nous a menés à nous pencher sur les usages et, peut-être les abus, de cette notion poreuse et changeante. Ce Dossier est composé de quatre articles venus de Côte d’Ivoire, de Finlande et de France. Ils abordent l’œuvre des écrivain·e·s Azo Vauguy, Koffi Kwahulé et Hélène Cixous et des cinéastes tels qu’Anne Fontaine, Christopher Doyle ou Julien Abraham. Dans la section Mosaïque, nous publions quatre articles très intéressants également. Hassna Mabrouk, de l’Université Chouaïb Doukkali (Maroc), en s’appuyant sur le révisionnisme historique proposé par les études postcoloniales et subalternes, s’empare de la figure historique de l’explorateur et interprète du début du XVIe siècle Mostafa Al-Azemmouri ou Estevanico, connue essentiellement en Europe sous l’angle de la relation de voyage de Cabeza de Vaca, trop eurocentrée, pour y opposer d’autres représentations de l’explorateur comme celle du personnage Al-Azemmouri qui apparaît dans le roman de Kebir M. Ammi, Les Vertus immorales (2009) où les représentations artistiques qui perdurent dans la ville marocaine d’Azzemmour où il est né. Ahmed Aziz Houdzi, de l’Université Chouaïb Doukkali également, analyse les transformations identitaires du sujet diasporique par rapport aux événements historiques dans le contexte français marqué par les attentats terroristes qui ont eu lieu à Paris en 2015. Il fait une fine lecture de Ce vain combat que tu livres au Monde (2016) de Fouad Laroui où le personnage principal se débat entre le désir d’intégration dans la société laïque et la tentation intégriste incarnée par l’État islamique. Lourdes Rubiales Bonilla de l’Université de Cadix (Espagne) se penche sur « l’affaire Batouala ». Dans son article, elle analyse avec précision les clés de la réception et de la diffusion dans la presse du moment du Prix Goncourt de 1921 octroyé au roman Batouala. Véritable roman nègre de René Maran. Ainsi, elle s’efforce de démontrer les mécanismes de la censure pour essayer de neutraliser le discours politique de l’auteur. Enfin, Diana Requena Romero de l’Université de Valence (Espagne) revient sur la problématique liée à l’étude des personnages féminins dans l’œuvre de Boris Vian. Pour ce faire, elle prend un corpus peu étudié qui est celui des nouvelles de l’auteur afin d’y déceler les processus de métamorphose du corps et les images de l’hybridation de la femme-animal située dans des espaces intermédiaires. Dans la section Traces, plus créative, nous publions trois contributions. Nous avons l’honneur de publier un texte fragmentaire bilingue (en français et en espagnol) de l’écrivaine québécoise, originaire de l’Uruguay, Lula Carballo intitulé restos de barrios (« des restes de quartiers ») où les bribes du passé se mélangent à la rupture du discours à la recherche de nouvelles voies d’expression littéraire. Son premier roman Créatures du hasard (2018) a été spécialement apprécié par la critique. Elle a aussi publié l’album illustré Ensemble nous voyageons (2021), co-écrit avec Catherine-Anne Laranjo et illustré par l’artiste Kesso. Carballo explore avec délicatesse et subtilité la mémoire liée aux souvenirs d’enfance et d’adolescence dans un contexte social spécialement marqué par la pauvreté et la migration, ainsi que les hybridations culturelles et la quête identitaire guidée par l’émotion et par un clair positionnement féministe aux côtés des minorités. Alexandre Melay nous offre [Timescapes], un document photographique présenté par l’auteur où il met en valeur ses préoccupations environnementales et nous fait partager son regard engagé face à « l’impossibilité du paysage » et « l’implacable déconstruction structuraliste du sujet ». Ces photographies en noir en blanc, sorte de cartographie de villes grises, polluées, envahies par les déchets et les éléments inhospitaliers, à l’ère du « Capitalocène », constituent un bel exemple de l’« extrême urbain contemporain ». Enfin, Natalia L. Ferreri de l’Université Nationale de Cordoba et Francisco Aiello de l’Université Nationale de Mar del Plata (toutes deux en Argentine) ont eu la générosité de choisir notre revue pour publier un long entretien en espagnol avec l’écrivaine française (née en Argentine en 1968) Laura Alcoba intitulé « ¿Para qué sirven las historias ? » (« À quoi servent les histoires ? »). Après l’évocation de son sixième et dernier roman intitulé Par la forêt (2022) où la narratrice évoque des expériences traumatiques telles que l’infanticide, le suicide et l’exil, Ferreri et Aiello passent en revue, d’une manière savante et subtile en même temps, les questions essentielles qui traversent l’écriture d’Alcoba où le geste de la traduction, la langue maternelle et la matière des histoires occupent une place prépondérante. Nous inaugurons la section Éventail, où nous voudrions, par le biais des recensions ou des comptes rendus, aérer et diffuser des publications de recherche ou de création proches des intérêts et des perspectives qui animent notre revue. En ce sens, nous publions l’intéressante et complète recension de Martine Renouprez de l’Université de Cadix (Espagne) sur le livre de Laurence Hansen-Love (2022), Planète en ébullition. Écologie, féminisme et responsabilité. Notre revue commence à décoller, à être indexée, répertoriée, présente un peu partout dans le monde grâce au grand intérêt démontré particulièrement par les chercheur·e·s africain·e·s. Un grand merci à vous. Bonne lecture et rendez-vous en juin 2023 pour questionner les « frontières » dans un Dossier intitulé LIMES. Sol invictus.

Abstract: The text presents a critical analysis of the roots of dance from the perspective of historical and dialectical materialism, the formulations of Marx and Engels, and of the Marxist aesthetes who followed them, proposing a study of the concept, reason and purpose of dance for the human race. It approaches themes such as work as the founding category of the human being. It then discusses human body movement as free creation work, intentional body movements of work and the process of their transition into dance movements. Finally, based on studies on human manifestations developed on the aesthetic level, it shows how the human being arrived at dance as art.

Au départ, une question d’érudit : quelle conception de la danse soufie pouvons-nous développer en premier lieu ? Cette question implique certainement un examen approfondi des traditions soufies turques. Or, au sens où nous, les modernes, l’entendons, en ce qui concerne le corps visible, il n'existe actuellement qu'une gesticulation très vivante et raffinée. Mais au regard de l’argumentation d’ensemble, il semble possible d'affirmer que la danse est finalement considérée comme un écart, même excessif, par rapport à un état ‘normal’ du corps communicant, du corps qui parle et gesticule dans l'intention de communiquer. La danse en vient finalement à se déterminer comme écart, et même écart excessif. Comme rupture de vraisemblance. La danse soufie désigne non seulement un écart quantitatif mais également le risque d’une bascule qualitative du corps hors de la signification, sa chute dans l’insignifiance sensible. Dans cette étude, je vais établir une approche sémiologique concernant les aspects gestuels, les mouvements et le corps dans la danse soufie ou le samâ, qui est en général classé dans la catégorie danse non-théâtrale. Il serait donc souhaitable que le terme non-théâtrale, à la fois vague et connoté, soit envisagé avec prudence et que son emploie soit justifié. Pour ce faire, il s’agit de montrer que les gestes dans la danse ne sont plus pensés comme l’accompagnement charnel et spontané de la parole, mais bel et bien comme le premier mode possible de communication, comme protolangage. Ensuite je vais traiter la danse soufie en relation avec la philosophie de la Grèce antique et la phénoménologie heideggérienne pour explorer les dimensions philosophiques et phénoménologiques de samâ, autour de la question de la transcendance et de la présence. Dans la danse soufie, les danseurs cherchent à atteindre un état de transe ou d’extase, transcendant ainsi les limites de la conscience ordinaire pour atteindre une expérience de présence et d’union mystique avec le divin. Cela peut être associé à l’idée de transcendance dans la philosophie de Plotin ; le corps dansant, en tant qu'une forme d'unité spontanée des articulations intelligibles, manifeste une intelligence unifiée à travers le corps appartenant à l'univers physique. La phénoménologie heideggérienne, développé par le philosophe Martin Heidegger, s’intéresse à l’étude de l’existence humaine et à la manière dont nous sommes au monde. L'approche phénoménologique de Heidegger à propos du corps dansant en tant qu'une œuvre d'art présente des similarités avec la philosophie cosmologique de Plotin : les tensions entre ce qui est physique et psychologique, en d'autres termes entre ce qui est incorporé et la vie psychique de ce corps qui s'efforce de s'exprimer, se trouvent dans l'opposition du monde et de la terre. Ainsi, il est possible d’améliorer notre compréhension de la dimension spirituelle, corporelle et phénoménologique de la danse soufie, ainsi que de sa signification existentielle en examinant les liens entre la philosophie de la Grèce antique et la phénoménologie heideggérienne.

ABSTRACT This Article presents aspects of Ilka Schönbein’s trajectory, a German puppeteer and dancer, in particular her game with the puppet and the singular way with which her images and her dance challenge the body. And it is these aspects that makes their images-bodies encounter the transgressive game and movements of Bataille’s and Georges Didi-Huberman’s eroticism. With them and Ilka, image and body are confused and, in this encounter, the image opens to the apparitions of the body: vital and funereal processes that jolt and disrupt the contours of correct human figures. Ilka Schönbein’s images draw our attention to other realities of the body. Her apparitions have a disquieting resemblance to human figures, poised between death, childbirth, and a fusion of bodies.

This paper aims to reflect on a hypothetical threshold-space between contemporary dance and performance art, questioning at the same time the prevalence of too strict a boundary between them. To this end, a range of works involving hybridization of artistic languages ​​were selected and analyzed, from Signals (1970) by American dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham to Café Müller (1978) by German choreographer Pina Bausch. Both dance and performance art are ephemeral arts or, according to the classical system, arts of time as opposed to the arts of space - painting, sculpture and architecture. They have also been called allographic arts, performative arts or, perhaps more specifically, arts of the body (Ribeiro, 1997). Unlike traditional fine arts, which materialize in a physical object other than the body, unlike video-art and cinema, arts without originals, mediated by the process of “technical reproducibility” (Benjamin, 1992), performative arts require the presence of a human body - and the duration of the present - as a fundamental instrument for their realization. In that sense, the paper also focuses on the ephemerality factor associated with dance and performing arts, and the consequent devaluation these have suffered vis-à-vis other artistic practices, considered to be academic and socially more significant.

Abstract Many regions of human movement capturing are commonly used. Still, it includes a complicated capturing method, and the obtained information contains missing information invariably due to the human's body or clothing structure. Recovery of motion that aims to recover from degraded observation and the underlying complete sequence of motion is still a difficult task, because the nonlinear structure and the filming property is integrated into the movements. Machine learning model based two-dimensional matrix computation (MM-TDMC) approach demonstrates promising performance in short-term motion recovery problems. However, the theoretical guarantee for the recovery of nonlinear movement information lacks in the two-dimensional matrix computation model developed for linear information. To overcome this drawback, this study proposes MM-TDMC for human motion and dance recovery. The advantages of the machine learning-based Two-dimensional matrix computation model for human motion and dance recovery shows extensive experimental results and comparisons with auto-conditioned recurrent neural network, multimodal corpus, low-rank matrix completion, and kinect sensors methods.

Dans une perspective théorique genrée et transdisciplinaire (théories des champs et de l’intersectionnalité), le présent article discute de l’androcentrisme en tant qu’ensemble de rapports de pouvoir focalisés sur l’hégémonie masculine, tel qu’il se déploie sur la scène musicale populaire de Kinshasa. L’enquête a démontré qu’assujettie sexuellement, débauchable ou « bien d’échange », la femme (chanteuse, choriste, danseuse) a en outre été soumise à un faisceau d’oppressions professionnelles par l’homme à travers a) une division sexuée du travail qui l’a confinée à la tâche érotique de la danse ; b) son instrumentalisation comme un corps-machine, support de marketing des spectacles vivants et vidéo à la faveur de son sex-appeal et de ses chorégraphies lascives ; c) une rémunération aléatoire ; bref, une précarisation sociale, culturelle, psychologique amenuisant, plus que pour son homologue masculin, ses droits humains. Tout cela est à lire dans le contexte du champ (acteurs directs) ou du hors-champ (acteurs périphériques) de cette scène. Cependant, sur cette scène prise pour un reflet du fonctionnement et un facteur de changement de la société kinoise, la femme ne fait toujours pas figure de victime, étant stratégiquement tournée vers des intérêts et désirs d’ingratiation, de célébrité, de mieux-vivre (en Europe), ou d’inversion de la domination – sans toujours y parvenir. Léon Tsambu, Sociologue et enseignant-chercheur, Laboratoire congolais de musique et des cultures populaires, Université de Kinshasa. E-mail : leon.tsambu@gmail.com

The present paper aims to investigate the way in which Africa is perceived by Danish speakers in light of the most petrified linguistic expressions and corpus data. As it turns out, the received picture is largely negative, with elements such as POVERTY, DISEASES, LACK OF DEMOCRACY, WARS and ETHNIC CLASHES in its foreground. Moreover, in the majority of the analyzed contexts Africa is presented as a cluster of similar countries facing the same challenges, with little room for the awareness of the great cultural diversity that flourishes on the continent. In this context, it is also worth adding that the analyzed collocations also convey a closely related stereotype of the inhabitants of Africa, regarded primarily through the prism of the color of their skin and the suffering they must endure on their continent. It is no surprise, then, that Africa and African people are quite often perceived as a problem for the western world, especially because of the highly-feared waves of immigrants and asylum seekers that occur regularly on the continent. On the other hand, at least in the light of the analyzed material, there seems to be no to little realization of the fact that many of the problems of Africa stem from the ages of draining its human and natural resources by the colonial powers. As argued by the author of the present article, such a picture of Africa is not only unfair but may have other consequences as well, possibly predetermining how Danes willview single issues such as immigration or military invasions, and letting them fall into the spiral of eurocentric and patronizing understanding of the world.

Sharing this article, the act of writing and then having it read, legitimises the point of it – that is, we (and we speak on behalf of each other here) managed to negotiate western academic expectations and norms from a just-as-legitimate-but-not-always-heard female Buginese perspective written in Standard Australian English (not my first choice-of-language and I speak on behalf of myself). At times we transgressed roles, guiding and following each other through different academic, cultural, social, and linguistic domains until we stumbled upon ways of legitimating our entanglement of experiences, when we heard the similar, faint, drum beat across boundaries and journeys.This article is one storying of the results of this four year relationship between a Buginese PhD candidate and an Indigenous Australian supervisor – both in the writing of the article and the processes that we are writing about. This is our process of knowing and validating knowledge through sharing, collaboration and cultural exchange. Neither the successful PhD thesis nor this article draw from authoethnography but they are outcomes of a lived, research standpoint that fiercely fought to centre a Muslim-Buginese perspective as much as possible, due to the nature of a postgraduate program. In the effort to find a way to not privilege Western ways of knowing to the detriment of my standpoint and position, we had to find a way to at times privilege my way of knowing the world alongside a Western one. There had to be a beat that transgressed cultural and linguistic differences and that allowed for a legitimised dialogic, intersubjective dance.The PhD research focused on potential dialogue between Australian culture and Buginese culture in terms of feminism and its resulting cultural hybridity where some Australian feminist thoughts are applicable to Buginese culture but some are not. Therefore, the PhD study centred a Buginese standpoint while moving back and forth amongst Australian feminist discourses and the dominant expectations of a western academic process. The PhD research was part of a greater Indonesian tertiary movement to include, study, challenge and extend feminist literary programs and how this could be respectfully and culturally appropriately achieved. This article is written by both of us but the core knowledge comes from a Buginese standpoint, that is, the principal supervisor learned from the PhD candidate and then applied her understanding of Indigenous standpoint theory, Tuhiwahi Smith’s decolonising methodologies and Spivakian self-reflexivity to aid the candidate’s development of her dancing methodology. For this reason, the rest of this article is written from the first-person perspective of Dr Abbas.The PhD study was a literary analysis on five stories from Helen Garner’s Postcards from Surfers (1985). My work translated these five stories from English into Indonesian and discussed some challenges that occurred in the process of translation. By using Edward Said’s work on contrapuntal reading and Robert Warrior’s metaphor of the subaltern dancing, I, the embodied learner and the cultural translator, moved back and forth between Buginese culture and Australian culture to consider how Australian women and men are represented and how mainstream Australian society engages with, or challenges, discourses of patriarchy and power. This movement back and forth was theorised as ‘dancing’. Ultimately, another dance was performed at the end of the thesis waltz between the work which centred my Buginese standpoint and academia as a Western tertiary institution.I have been dancing with Australian feminism for over four years. My use of the word ‘dancing’ signified my challenge to articulate and engage with Australian culture, literature, and feminism by viewing it from a Buginese perspective as opposed to a ‘Non-Western’ perspective. As a Buginese woman and scholar, I centred my specific cultural standpoints instead of accepting them generally and therefore dismissed the altering label of ‘Non-Western’. Juxtaposing Australian feminism with Buginese culture was not easy. However, as my research progressed I saw interesting cultural differences between Australian and Buginese cultures that could result in a hybridized way of engaging feminist issues. At times, my cultural standpoint took the lead in directing the research or the point, at other times a Western beat was more prominent, for example, using the English language to voice my work.The Buginese, also known as the Bugis, along with the Makassar, the Mandar, and the Toraja, are one of the four main ethnic groups of the province of South Sulawesi in Indonesia. The population of the Buginese in South Sulawesi spreads into major states (Bone, Wajo, Soppeng, and Sidenreng) and some minor states (Pare-Pare, Suppa, and Sinjai). Like other ethnic groups living in other islands of Indonesia such as the Javanese, the Sundanese, the Minang, the Batak, the Balinese, and the Ambonese, the Buginese have their own culture and traditions. The Buginese, especially those who live in the villages, are still bounded strictly by ade’ (custom) or pangadereng (customary law). This concept of ade’ provides living guidelines for Buginese and consists of five components including ade’, bicara, rapang, wari’, and sara’. Pelras clarifies that pangadereng is ‘adat-hood’, a corpus of interlinked ruling principles which, besides ade’ (custom), includes also bicara (jurisprudence), rapang (models of good behaviour which ensure the proper functioning of society), wari’ (rules of descent and hierarchy) and sara’ (Islamic law and institution, derived from the Arabic shari’a) (190). So, pangadereng is an overall norm which includes advice on how Buginese should behave towards fellow human beings and social institutions on a reciprocal basis. In addition, the Buginese together with Makassarese, mind what is called siri’ (honour and shame), that is the sense of honour and shame. In the life of the Buginese-Makassar people, the most basic element is siri’. For them, no other value merits to be more detected and preserved. Siri’ is their life, their self-respect and their dignity. This is why, in order to uphold and to defend it when it has been stained or they consider it has been stained by somebody, the Bugis-Makassar people are ready to sacrifice everything, including their most precious life, for the sake of its restoration. So goes the saying.... ‘When one’s honour is at stake, without any afterthought one fights’ (Pelras 206).Buginese is one of Indonesia’s ethnic groups where men and women are intended to perform equal roles in society, especially those who live in the Buginese states of South Sulawesi where they are still bound strictly by ade’ (custom) or pangadereng (customary law). These two basic concepts are guidelines for daily life, both in the family and the work place. Buginese also praise what is called siri’, a sense of honour and shame. It is because of this sense of honour and shame that we have a saying, siri’ emmi ri onroang ri lino (people live only for siri’) which means one lives only for honour and prestige. Siri’ had to remain a guiding principle in my theoretical and methodological approach to my PhD research. It is also a guiding principle in the resulting pedagogical praxis that this work has established for my course in Australian culture and literature at Hasanuddin University. I was not prepared to compromise my own ethical and cultural identity and position yet will admit, at times, I felt pressured to do so if I was going to be seen to be performing legitimate scholarly work. Novera argues that:Little research has focused specifically on the adjustment of Indonesian students in Australia. Hasanah (1997) and Philips (1994) note that Indonesian students encounter difficulties in fulfilling certain Western academic requirements, particularly in relation to critical thinking. These studies do not explore the broad range of academic and social problems. Yet this is a fruitful area for research, not just because of the importance of Indonesian students to Australia, and the importance of the Australia-Indonesia relationship to both neighbouring nations, but also because adjustment problems are magnified by cultural differences. There are clear differences between Indonesian and Australian cultures, so that a study of Indonesian students in Australia might also be of broader academic interest […]Studies of international student adjustment discuss a range of problems, including the pressures created by new role and behavioural expectations, language difficulties, financial problems, social difficulties, homesickness, difficulties in dealing with university and other authorities, academic difficulties, and lack of assertiveness inside and outside the classroom. (467)While both my supervisor and I would agree that I faced all of these obstacles during my PhD candidature, this article is focusing solely on the battle to present my methodology, a dialogic encounter between Buginese feminism and mainstream Australian culture using Helen Garner’s short stories, to a Western process and have it be “legitimised”. Endang writes that short stories are becoming more popular in the industrial era in Indonesia and they have become vehicles for writers to articulate the realities of social life such as poverty, marginalization, and unfairness (141-144). In addition, Noor states that the short story has become a new literary form particularly effective for assisting writers in their goal to help the marginalized because its shortness can function as a weapon to directly “scoop up” the targeted issues and “knock them out at a blow” (Endang 144-145). Indeed, Helen Garner uses short stories in a way similar to that described by Endang: as a defiant act towards the government and current circumstances (145). My study of Helen Garner’s short stories explored the way her stories engage with and resist gender relations and inequality between men and women in Australian society through four themes prevalent in the narratives: the kitchen, landscape, language, and sexuality. I wrote my thesis in standard Australian English and I complied with expected forms, formatting, referencing, structuring etc. My thesis also included the Buginese translations of some of Garner’s work. However, the theoretical approaches that informed my analysis cannot be separated from the personal. In the title, I use the term ‘dancing’ to indicate a dialogue with white Australian women by moving back and forth between Australian culture and Buginese culture. I use the term ‘dancing’ as an extension of Edward Said’s work on contrapuntal reading but employ it as a signifier of my movement between insider and outsider (of Australian feminism), that is, I extend it from just a literary reading to a whole body experience. According to Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, the “essence of Said’s argument is to know something is to have power over it, and conversely, to have power is to know the world in your own terms” (83). Ashcroft and Ahluwalia add how through music, particularly the work of pianist Glenn Gould, Said formulated a way of reading imperial and postcolonial texts contrapuntally. Such a reading acknowledges the hybridity of cultures, histories and literatures, allowing the reader to move back and forth between an internal and an external standpoint of cultural references and attitudes in “an effort to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented” (Said 66). While theorising about the potential dance between Australian and Buginese feminisms in my work, I was living the dance in my day-to-day Australian university experience. Trying to accommodate the expected requirements of a PhD thesis, while at the same time ensuring that I maintained my own personal, cultural and professional dignity, that is ade’, and siri’, required some fancy footwork. Siri’ is central to my Buginese worldview and had to be positioned as such in my PhD thesis. Also, the realities that women are still marginalized and that gender inequality and disparities persist in Indonesian society become a motivation to carry out my PhD study. The opportunity to study Australian culture and literature in that country, allowed me to increase my global and local complexity as an individual, what Pieterse refers to as “ a process of hybridization” and to become as Beck terms an “actor” and “manager’’ of my life (as cited in Edmunds 1). Gaining greater autonomy and reconceptualising both masculinity and femininity, while dominant themes in Garner’s work, are also issues I address in my personal and professional goals. In other words, this study resulted in hybridized knowledge of Australian concepts of feminism and Buginese societies that offers a reference for students to understand and engage with different feminist thought. By learning how feminism is understood differently by Australians and Buginese, my Indonesian students can decide what aspects of feminist ideas from a Western perspective can be applied to Buginese culture without transgressing Buginese customs and habits.There are few Australian literary works that have been translated into Indonesian. Those that have include Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (2007) and My Life is a Fake (2009), James Vance Marshall’s Walkabout (1957), Emma Darcy’s The Billionaire Bridegroom (2010) , Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987), and Colleen McCullogh’s The Thorn Birds (1978). My translation of five short stories from Postcards from Surfers complemented these works and enriched the diversity of Indonesian translations of world literary works, the bulk of which tends to come from the United Kingdom, America, the Middle East, and Japan. However, actually getting through the process of PhD research followed by examination required my supervisor and I to negotiate cross-cultural terrain, academic agendas and Western expectations of what legitimate thesis writing should look like. Employing Said’s contrapuntal pedagogy and Warrior’s notion of subaltern dancing became my illegitimate methodological frame.Said points out that contrapuntal analysis means that students and teachers can cross-culturally “elucidate a complex and uneven topography” (318). He adds that “we must be able to think through and interpret together experiences that are discrepant, each with its particular agenda and pace of development, its own internal formations, its internal coherence and system of external relationships, all of them co-existing and interacting with others” (32). Contrapuntal is a metaphor Said derived from musical theory, meaning to counterpoint or add a rhythm or melody, in this case, Buginese and Anglo-Australian feminisms. Warrior argues for an indigenous critique of how power and knowledge is read and in doing so he writes that “the subaltern can dance, and so sometimes can the intellectual” (85). In his rereading of Spivak, he argues that subaltern and intellectual positions can meet “and in meeting, create the possibility of communication” (86). He refers to this as dancing partly because it implicitly acknowledges without silencing the voices of the subaltern (once the subaltern speaks it is no longer the subaltern, so the notion of dancing allows for communication, “a movement from subalternity to something else” (90) which can mark “a new sort of non-complicitous relationship to a family, community or class of origin” (91). By “non-complicit” Warrior means that when a member of the subaltern becomes a scholar and therefore a member of those who historically silence the subaltern, there are other methods for communicating, of moving, between political and cultural spaces that allow for a multiplicity of voices and responses. Warrior uses a traditional Osage in-losh-ka dance as an example of how he physically and intellectually interacts with multiple voices and positions:While the music plays, our usual differences, including subalternity and intellectuality, and even gender in its own way, are levelled. For those of us moving to the music, the rules change, and those who know the steps and the songs and those who can keep up with the whirl of bodies, music and colours hold nearly every advantage over station or money. The music ends, of course, but I know I take my knowledge of the dance away and into my life as a critic, and I would argue that those levelled moments remain with us after we leave the drum, change our clothes, and go back to the rest of our lives. (93)For Warrior, the dance becomes theory into practice. For me, it became not only a way to soundly and “appropriately” present my methodology and purpose, but it also became my day to day interactions, as a female Buginese scholar, with western, Australian academic and cultural worldviews and expectations.One of the biggest movements I had to justify was my use of the first person “I”, in my thesis, to signify my identity as a Buginese woman and position myself as an insider of my community with a hybrid western feminism with Australia in mind. Perrault argues that “Writing “I” has been an emancipatory project for women” (2). In the context of my PhD thesis, uttering ‘I’ confirmed my position and aims. However, this act of explicitly situating my own identity and cultural position in my research and thesis was considered one of the more illegitimate acts. In one of the examiner reports, it was stated that situating myself centrally was fraught but that I managed to avoid the pitfalls. Judy Long argues that writing in the female first person challenges patriarchal control and order (127). For me, writing in the first person was essential if I had any chance of maintaining my Buginese identity and voice, in both my thesis and in my Australian tertiary experience. As Trinh-Minh writes, “S/he who writes, writes. In uncertainty, in necessity. And does not ask whether s/he is given permission to do so or not” (8).Van Dijk, cited in Hamilton, notes that the west and north are bound by an academic ethnocentrism and this is a particular area my own research had to negotiate. Methodologically I provided a comparative rather than a universalising perspective, engaging with middle-class, heterosexual, western, white women feminism but not privileging them. It is important for Buginese to use language discourses as a weapon to gain power, particularly because as McGlynn claims, “generally Indonesians are not particularly outspoken” (38). My research was shaped by a combination of ongoing dedication to promote women’s empowerment in the Buginese context and my role as an academic teaching English literature at the university level. I applied interpretive principles that will enable my students to see how the ideas of feminism conveyed through western literature can positively improve the quality of women’s lives and be implemented in Buginese culture without compromising our identity as Indonesians and Buginese people. At the same time, my literary translation provides a cultural comparison with Australia that allows a space for further conversations to occur. However, while attempting to negotiate western and Indonesian discourses in my thesis, I was also physically and emotionally trying to negotiate how to do this as a Muslim Buginese female PhD candidate in an Anglo-Australian academic institution. The notion of ‘dancing’ was employed as a signifier of movement between insider and outsider knowledge. Throughout the research process and my thesis I ‘danced’ with Australian feminism, traditional patriarchal Buginese society, Western academic expectations and my own emerging Indonesian feminist perspective. To ensure siri’ remained the pedagogical and ethical basis of my approach I applied Edward Said’s work on contrapuntal reading and Robert Warrior’s employment of a traditional Osage dance as a self-reflexive, embodied praxis, that is, I extended it from just a literary reading to a whole body experience. The notion of ‘dance’ allows for movement, change, contact, tension, touch and distance: it means that for those who have historically been marginalised or confined, they are no longer silenced. The metaphoric act of dancing allowed me to legitimise my PhD work – it was successfully awarded – and to negotiate a western tertiary institute in Australia with my own Buginese knowledge, culture and purpose.ReferencesAshcroft., B., and P. Ahluwalia. Edward Said. London: Routledge, 1999.Carey, Peter. True History of the Kelly Gang: A Novel. Random House LLC, 2007.Carey, Peter. My Life as a Fake: A NNovel. Random House LLC, 2009.Darcy, Emma. Billionaire Bridegroom 2319. Harlequin, 2010.Endang, Fransisca. "Disseminating Indonesian Postcoloniality into English Literature (a Case Study of 'Clara')." Jurnal Sastra Inggris 8.2: 2008.Edmunds, Kim. "The Impact of an Australian Higher Education on Gender Relations in Indonesia." ISANA International Conference "Student Success in International Education", 2007Garner, Helen. Postcards from Surfers. Melbourne: McPhee/Gribble, 1985.Hamilton, Deborah, Deborah Schriffrin, and Heidi E. Tannen, ed. The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Victoria: Balckwll, 2001.Long, Judy. 1999. Telling Women's Lives: Subject/Narrator/Reader/Text. New York: New York UP, 1999.McGlynn, John H. "Silent Voices, Muted Expressions: Indonesian Literature Today." Manoa 12.1 (2000): 38-44.Morgan, Sally. My Place. Fremantle Press, 1987.Pelras, Christian. The Bugis. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Perreault, Jeanne. Writing Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autography. London & Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1995.Pieterse, J.N. Globalisation as Hybridisation. In M. Featherstone, S. Lash, and R. Robertson, eds., Global Modernities. London: Sage Publications, 1995.Marshall, James V. Walkabout. London: Puffin, 1957.McCullough, C. The Thorn Birds Sydney: Harper Collins, 1978.Minh-ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other: Writing, Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1989.Novera, Isvet Amri. "Indonesian Postgraduate Students Studying in Australia: An Examination of Their Academic, Social and Cultural Experiences." International Education Journal 5.4 (2004): 475-487.Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Book, 1993. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books, 1999.Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" In C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, eds., Marxism and Interpretation of Culture. Chicago: University of lllinois, 1988. 271-313.Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1988.Warrior, Robert. ""The Subaltern Can Dance, and So Sometimes Can the Intellectual." Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 13.1 (2011): 85-94.

What are the possibilities of a body? This is a question that is answered best by thinking prosthetically. After all, the possibilities of a body extend beyond flesh and bone. Asked another way, one might query: what are the affective capacities of bodies—animal or otherwise? Philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari focus on affectivity as capacity, on what the body does or can do; thinking through Baruch Spinoza’s writing on the body, they state, “we know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects” (257). If bodies are defined by their affective capacities, I wonder: how can prosthetics be used to alter dominant and dominating relationships between the human and the non-human animal, particularly as these relationships bear on questions of race? In this essay, I forward a contemporary media installation, “The Slug Princess”, as a productive site for thinking through the prosthetic possibilities around issues of race, animality, and aesthetics. I contend that the Degenerate Art Ensemble’s installation works through uncommon prosthetics to activate what Deleuze and Guattari describe as becoming-animal. While animality has historically been mobilized to perpetuate Orientalist logics, I argue that DAE’s becoming-slug rethinks the capacities of the body prosthetically, and in so doing dismantles the hierarchy of the body normativity.The Degenerate Art Ensemble (DAE) is a collective of artists with international showings co-directed by Haruko Crow Nishimura, originally from Japan, and Joshua Kohl, from the United States. The ensemble is based in Seattle, Washington, USA. The group’s name is a reference to the 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich, Germany, organized by Adolf Ziegler and the Nazi Party. The exhibition staged 650 works from what Nazi officials referred to as “art stutterers”, the pieces were confiscated from German museums and defined as works that “insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural form or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill” (Spotts 163). DAE “selected this politically charged moniker partly in response to the murder in Olympia [Washington] of an Asian American youth by neo-Nazi skinheads” (Frye). DAE’s namesake is thus an embrace of bodies and abilities deemed unworthy by systems of corrupt power. With this in mind, I argue that DAE’s work provides an opportunity to think through intersections of prostheticity, animality, and race.“The Slug Princess” is part of a larger exhibition of their work shown from 19 March to 19 June 2011 at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle. The installation is comprised of two major elements: a crocheted work and a video projection. For me, both are prosthetics.A Crocheted Prosthetic and Orientalist AnimalityThe crocheted garment is not immediately recognizable as a prosthetic. It is displayed on a mannequin that stands mostly erect. The piece, described as a headdress, is however by no means a traditional garment. Yellow spirals and topographies flow and diverge in tangled networks of yarn that sometimes converge into recognizable form. The knit headdress travels in countless directions, somehow assembling as a wearable fibrous entity that covers the mannequin from head to ground, spreading out, away, and behind the figuration of the human. In slumped orbs, green knit “cabbages’ surround the slug princess headdress, exceeding the objects they intend to represent in mass, shape, and affect. In this bustling excess of movement, the headdress hints at how it is more than a costume, but is instead a prosthetic.The video projection makes the prosthetic nature of the crocheted headdress evident. It is a looped performance of Nishimura that runs from ceiling to floor and spans the semi-enclosed space in which it is displayed. In the video, Nishimura walks, then crawls – slowly, awkwardly – through a forest. She also eats whole cabbages, supporting procedure with mouth, foot, and appendage, throwing the function of her body parts into question. The crocheted element is vital to her movement and the perception of her body’s capacities.As Nishimura becomes slug princess, the DAE begins to intervene in complex regimes of racial identification. It is imperative to note that Nishimura’s boy gets caught up in interpretive schemas of Western constructions of Asians as animals. For example, in the early diaspora in the United States, Chinese men were often identified with the figure of the rat in 19th-century political cartoons. Mel Y. Chen points to the ways in which these racialized animalities have long reinforcing the idea of the yellow peril through metaphor (Chen 110-111). These images were instrumental in conjuring fear around the powerfully dehumanizing idea that hordes of rats were infesting national purity. Such fears were significant in leading to the Chinese exclusion acts of the United States and Canada. Western tropes of Asians find traction in animal symbolism. From dragon ladies to butterflies, Asian femininity in both women and men has been captured by simultaneous notions of treachery and passivity. As Nishimura’s body is enabled by prosthetic, it is also caught in a regime of problematic signs. Animal symbolism persists throughout Asian diasporic gender construction and Western fantasies of the East. Rachel C. Lee refers to the “process whereby the human is reduced to the insect, rodent, bird, or microbe” as zoe-ification, which she illustrates as a resolute means of excluding Asian Americans from species-being (Lee Exquisite 48). DAE’s Slug Princess, I argue, joins Lee’s energies herein by providing and performing alternative modes of understanding animality.The stakes of prosthetics in becoming-animal lie in the problem of domination through definition. Orientalist animality functions to devalue Asians as animals, ultimately justifying forms of subordination and exclusion. I want to suggest that becoming-slug, as I will elaborate below, provides a mode of resisting this narrow function of defining bodies by enacting prosthetic process. In doing so, it aligns with the ways in which prosthetics redefine the points of delineation against normativity. As Margarit Shildrick illuminates, “once it is acknowledged that a human body is not a discrete entity ending at the skin, and that material technologies constantly disorder our boundaries, either through prosthetic extensions or through the internalization of mechanical parts, it is difficult to maintain that those whose bodies fail to conform to normative standards are less whole or complete than others” (24). DAE’s Slug Princess transmutates how animality functions to Orientalize Asians as the degenerate other, heightening the ways in which prosthetics can resist the racialized ideologies of normative wholeness.Why Prosthetics? Or, a Comparative Case in Aesthetic AnimalityDAE is of course not alone in their animalistic interventions. In order to isolate what I find uniquely productive about DAE’s prosthetic performance, I turn to another artistic alternative to traditional modes of Orientalist animality. Xu Bing’s performance installation “Cultural Animal” (1994) at the Han Mo Art Center in in Beijing, China can serve as a useful foil. “Cultural Animal” featured a live pig and mannequin in positions that evoked queer bestial sexuality. The pig was covered in inked nonsensical Roman letters; the full body of the mannequin was similarly tattooed in jumbled Chinese characters. The piece was a part of a larger project entitled “A Case Study of Transference”. According to Xu’s website, “the intention was both to observe the reaction of the pig toward the mannequin and produce an absurd random drama—an intention that was realized when the pig reacted to the mannequin in an aggressively sexual manner” (Xu). The photographs, which were a component of the piece, indeed evoke the difficulty of the concept of transference, imbricating species, languages, and taboos. The piece more generally enacts the unexpected excesses of performance with non-scripted bodies. The pig at times caresses the cheek of the mannequin. The sensuous experience is inked by the cultural confusion that images the seeming sensibility of each language. Amidst the movement of the pig and the rubbings of the ink, the mannequin is motionless, bearing a look of resigned openness. His eyes are closed, with a slight furrowing of the brow and calm downturned lips. The performance piece enacts crossings that reorient the historical symbolic force of racialization and animality. These forms of species and cultural miscegenation evoke for Mel Y. Chen a form of queer relationality that exemplifies “animalities that live together with race and with queerness, the animalities that we might say have crawled into the woodwork and await recognition, and, concurrently, the racialized animalities already here” (104). As such, Chen does the work of pointing out how Xu destabilizes notions of proper boundaries between human and animal, positing a different form of human-animal relationality. In short, Xu’s Cultural Animal chooses relationality. This relationality does not extend the body’s capacities. I argue that by focusing in on the pivotal nature of prosthesis, DAE’s slug activates a becoming-animal that goes beyond relationship, instead rethinking what a body can do.Becoming-Slug: Prosthetics as InterventionBy way of differentiation, how might “The Slug Princess” function beyond symbolic universalism and in excess of human-animal relations? In an effort to understand this distinction, I forward DAE’s installation as a practice of becoming-animal. Becoming-animal is a theoretical intervention in hierarchy, highlighting a minoritarian tactic to resist domination, akin to Shildrick’s description of prosthetics.DAE’s installation enacts becoming-slug, as illustrated in an elaboration of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept they argue: “Becoming-animal always involves a pack” “a multiplicity” (Deleuze and Guatttari 239). The banner of becoming-animal is “I am legion”. DAE is and are a propagation of artists working together. They enact legion. Led by a pack of collaborators, DAE engage a range of artists in continual, ongoing, and fluctuating process. Their current collaborators include (and surpass): architect/designer Alan Maskin, costume designer ALenka Loesch, dancer/singer Dohee Lee, performance artist/expressionist/songwriter/shape-shifter Okanomodé, and sound/installation artist Robb Kunz. For the broader exhibition at the Frye, they listed the biographies of fifteen artists and the names of around 200 artists. Yet, it is not the mere number of collaborators that render DAE a multiplicity – it is the collaborative excess of their process that generates potential at the intersection of performance and prosthetic. Notably, it is important that the wearable prosthetic headpiece used in “Slug Princess” was created in collaboration. “The contagion of the pack, such is the path becoming-animal takes” (Deleuze and Guattari, 243). Created by Many Greer but worn by Nishimura, it weighs on Nishimura’s body in ways that steer her performance. She is unable to stand erect as the mannequin in the exhibition. The prosthetic changes her capacities in unpredictable ways. The unexpected headdress causes her to hunch over and crawl, pushing her body into slow contact with the earth. As the flowing garment slows her forward progress, it activates new modes of movement. Snagging, and undulating, Nishimura moves slowly over the uncertain terrain of a forest. As Greer’s creation collides with Nishimura’s body and the practice of the dance, they enact becoming-slug. This is to suggest, then, following Deleuze and Guattari’s affective understanding of becoming-animal, that prosthetics have a productive role to play in disrupting normative modes of embodiment.Further, as Deleuze and Guattari indicate, becoming-animal is non-affiliative (Deleuze and Guattari 238). Becoming-animal is that which is “not content to proceed by resemblance and for which resemblance, on the contrary, would represent an obstacle or stoppage” (Deleuze and Guattari 233). Likewise, Nishimura’s becoming-slug is neither imitative (305) nor mimetic because it functions in the way of displaced doing through prosthetic process. Deleuze and Guattari describe in the example of Little Hans and his horse, becoming-animal occurs in putting one’s shoes on one’s hands to move, as a dog: “I must succeed in endowing the parts of my body with relations of speed and slowness that will make it become dog, in an original assemblage proceeding neither by resemblance nor by analogy” (258). The headdress engages an active bodily process of moving as a slug, rather than looking like a slug. Nishimura’s body begin as her body human begins, upright, but it is pulled down and made slow by the collaborative force of the wearable piece. As such, DAE enacts “affects that circulate and are transformed within the assemblage: what a horse [slug] ‘can do’” (257). This assemblage of affects pushes beyond the limited capacities of the screen, offering new productive entanglements.The Stuplime Loop as ProstheticTo the extent that conceiving of a headdress as a collaborative bodily prosthetic flows from common understandings of prosthetic, the medial interface perhaps stirs up a more foreign example of prosthesis and becoming-animal. The medial performance of DAE’s “The Slug Princess” operates through the video loop, transecting the human, animal, and technological in a way that displaces being in favor of becoming. The looping video creates a spatio-temporal contraction and elongation of the experience of time in relation to viewing. It functions as an experiential prosthetic, reworking the ability to think in a codified manner—altering the capacities of the body. Time play breaks the chronological experience of straight time and time as mastery by turning to the temporal experience as questioning normativity. Specifically, “The Slug Princess” creates productive indeterminacy through what Siane Ngai designates as “stuplimity”. Ngai’s punning contraction of stupidity and sublimity works in relation to Deleuze’s thinking on repetition and difference. Ngai poses the idea of stuplimity as beginning with “the dysphoria of shock and boredom” and culminating “in something like the ‘open feeling’ of ‘resisting being’—an indeterminate affective state that lacks the punctuating ‘point’ of individuated emotion” (284). Ngai characterizes this affecting openness and stupefying: it stops the viewer in their/her/his tracks. This importation of the affective state cannot be overcome through the exercise of reason (270). Departing from Kant’s description of the sublime, Ngai turns to the uglier, less awe-inspiring, and perhaps more debase form of aesthetic encounter. This is the collaboration of the stupid with the sublime. Stuplimity operates outside reason and sublimity but in alliance with their processes. Viewers seem to get “stuck” at “The Slug Princess”, lost in the stuplimity of the loop. Some affect of the looping videos generates not thoughtfulness or reflection, but perhaps cultural stupidity – the relative and temporary cessation or abatement of cultural logics and aesthetic valuations. The video loop comes together with the medial enactment of becoming-slug in such a manner that performs into stuplimity. Stuplimity, in this case, creates an opening of an affectively stupid or illegible (per Xu) space/time alternative being/becoming. The loop is, of course, not unique to the installation and is a common feature of museum pieces. Yet, the performance, the becoming-slug itself, creates sluggishness. Ngai posits that sluggishness works out the boredom of repetition, which I argue is created through the loop of becoming-slug. The slug princess’ slowness, played in the loop creates a “stuplimity [that] reveals the limits of our ability to comprehend a vastly extended form as totality” (271). That is, the loop, by virtue of its sluggishness, opens up becoming-animal not as a finite thing, but as an ongoing, cycling, and thoughtlessly tedious process. DAE’s installation thus demonstrates an attempt to adopt prosthetics to rethink the logics of control and power. In his writing on contemporary shifts in prosthetic function, Paul Preciado argues that digitalization is a core component of the transition from prosthetics to what emerge as “microprosthetic”, in which “power acts through molecules that incorporate themselves into our [bodies]” (78-79). I would like to consider the stuplime loops of becoming-slug to counter what Preciado describes as an “ensemble of new microprosthetic mechanisms of control of subjectivity by means of biomolecular and multimedia technical protocols” (33). Emerging in the same fashion as microproesthetics, which function as modes of control, the stuplime loops instead suspend the logics of control and power enabled by dominant modes of microprosthetic technologies. Rather than infesting one’s body with modes of control, the stuplime loops hijack the digital message and present the possibility of thinking otherwise. In her writing on queer cyborgs, Mimi Nguyen argues that “as technologies of the self, prostheses are both literal and discursive in the digital imaginary. They are a means of habitation and transformation, a humanmachine mixture engaged as a site of contest over meanings – of the self and the nonself” (373). Binaries perhaps structure a thinking between human and animal, but prosthetics as process goes beyond the idea of the cyborg as a mixture and maps a new terrain altogether.ReferencesChen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012.Frye. “Degenerate Art Ensemble.” Frye Museum. 2017. <http://fryemuseum.org/exhibition/3816/>.Lee, Rachel C. The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies. New York: New York University Press, 2014.Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. Nguyen, Mimi. “Queer Cyborgs and New Mutants: Race, Sexuality, and Prosthetic Sociality in Digital Space.” American Studies: An Anthology. Eds. Janice A. Radway, Kevin K. Gaines, Barry Shank, and Penny Von Eschen. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 281-305.Preciado, Beatriz [Paul]. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitis in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Trans. Bruce Benderson. New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2013.Shildrick, Margarit. “‘Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?’: Embodiment, Boundaries, and Somatechnics.” Hypatia 30.1 (2015): 13-29.Spotts, Frederic. Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. New York: Harry N. Abrams Publishers, 2003.Xu, Bing. “Cultural Animal.” 2017. <http://www.xubing.com/index.php/site/projects/year/1994/cultural_animal>.

Dégueulasse is French slang for “disgusting,” derived in 1867 from the French verb dégueuler, to vomit. Despite its vulgar status, it is frequently used by almost every French speaker, including foreigners and students. It is also a term that has often been employed to describe the 1973 cult film, La Grande bouffe [Blow Out], by Marco Ferreri, which recounts in grotesque detail the gastronomic suicide of four male protagonists. This R-rated French-Italian production was booed, and the director spat on, at the 26th Cannes Film Festival—the Jury President, Ingrid Bergman, said it was the most “sordid” film she’d ever seen, and is even reported to have vomited after watching it (Télérama). Ferreri nevertheless walked away with the Prix FIPRESCI, awarded by the Federation of International Critics, and it is apparently the largest grossing release in the history of Paris with more than 700,000 entries in Paris and almost 3 million in France overall. Scandal sells, and this was especially seemingly so 1970s, when this film was avidly consumed as part of an unholy trinity alongside Bernardo Bertolucci’s Le Dernier Tango à Paris [Last Tango in Paris] (1972) and Jean Eustache’s La Maman et la putain [The Mother and the Whore] (1973). Fast forward forty years, though, and at the very moment when La Grande bouffe was being commemorated with a special screening on the 2013 Cannes Film Festival programme, a handful of University of Melbourne French students in a subject called “Matters of Taste” were boycotting the film as an unacceptable assault to their sensibilities. Over the decade that I have been showing the film to undergraduate students, this has never happened before. In this article, I want to examine critically the questions of taste that underpin this particular predicament. Analysing firstly the intradiegetic portrayal of taste in the film, through both gustatory and aesthetic signifiers, then the choice of the film as a key element in a University subject corpus, I will finally question the (dis)taste displayed by certain students, contextualising it as part of an ongoing socio-cultural commentary on food, sex, life, and death. Framed by a brief foray into Bourdieusian theories of taste, I will attempt to draw some conclusions on the continual renegotiation of gustatory and aesthetic tastes in relation to La Grande bouffe, and thereby deepen understanding of why it has become the incarnation of dégueulasse today. Theories of Taste In the 1970s, the parameters of “good” and “bad” taste imploded in the West, following political challenges to the power of the bourgeoisie that also undermined their status as the contemporary arbiters of taste. This revolution of manners was particularly shattering in France, fuelled by the initial success of the May 68 student, worker, and women’s rights movements (Ross). The democratization of taste served to legitimize desires different from those previously dictated by bourgeois norms, enabling greater diversity in representing taste across a broad spectrum. It was reflected in the cultural products of the 1970s, including cinema, which had already broken with tradition during the New Wave in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and became a vector for political ideologies as well as radical aesthetic choices (Smith). Commonly regarded as “the decade that taste forgot,” the 1970s were also a time for re-assessing the sociology of taste, with the magisterial publication of Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979, English trans. 1984). As Bourdieu refuted Kant’s differentiation between the legitimate aesthetic, so defined by its “disinterestedness,” and the common aesthetic, derived from sensory pleasures and ordinary meanings, he also attempted to abolish the opposition between the “taste of reflection” (pure pleasure) and the “taste of sense” (facile pleasure) (Bourdieu 7). In so doing, he laid the foundations of a new paradigm for understanding the apparently incommensurable choices that are not the innate expression of our unique personalities, but rather the product of our class, education, family experiences—our habitus. Where Bourdieu’s theories align most closely with the relationship between taste and revulsion is in the realm of aesthetic disposition and its desire to differentiate: “good” taste is almost always predicated on the distaste of the tastes of others. Tastes (i.e. manifested preferences) are the practical affirmation of an inevitable difference. It is no accident that, when they have to be justified, they are asserted purely negatively, by the refusal of other tastes. In matters of taste, more than anywhere else, all determination is negation; and tastes are perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance (“sick-making”) of the tastes of others. “De gustibus non est disputandum”: not because “tous les goûts sont dans la nature,” but because each taste feels itself to be natural—and so it almost is, being a habitus—which amounts to rejecting others as unnatural and therefore vicious. Aesthetic intolerance can be terribly violent. Aversion to different life-styles is perhaps one of the strongest barriers between the classes (Bourdieu). Although today’s “Gen Y” Melbourne University students are a long way from 1970s French working class/bourgeois culture clashes, these observations on taste as the corollary of distaste are still salient tools of interpretation of their attitudes towards La Grande bouffe. And, just as Bourdieu effectively deconstructed Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and the 18th “century of taste” notions of universality and morality in aesthetics (Dickie, Gadamer, Allison) in his groundbreaking study of distinction, his own theories have in turn been subject to revision in an age of omnivorous consumption and eclectic globalisation, with various cultural practices further destabilising the hierarchies that formerly monopolized legitimate taste (Sciences Humaines, etc). Bourdieu’s theories are still, however, useful for analysing La Grande bouffe given the contemporaneous production of these texts, as they provide a frame for understanding (dis)taste both within the filmic narrative and in the wider context of its reception. Taste and Distaste in La Grande bouffe To go to the cinema is like to eat or shit, it’s a physiological act, it’s urban guerrilla […] Enough with feelings, I want to make a physiological film (Celluloid Liberation Front). Marco Ferreri’s statements about his motivations for La Grande bouffe coincide here with Bourdieu’s explanation of taste: clearly the director wished to depart from psychological cinema favoured by contemporary critics and audiences and demonstrated his distaste for their preference. There were, however, psychological impulses underpinning his subject matter, as according to film academic Maurizio Viano, Ferrari had a self-destructive, compulsive relation to food, having been forced to spend a few weeks in a Swiss clinic specialising in eating disorders in 1972–1973 (Viano). Food issues abound in his biography. In an interview with Tullio Masoni, the director declared: “I was fat as a child”; his composer Phillipe Sarde recalls the grand Italian-style dinners that he would organise in Paris during the film; and, two of the film’s stars, Marcello Mastroianni and Ugo Tognazzi, actually credit the conception of La Grande bouffe to a Rabelaisian feast prepared by Tognazzi, during which Ferreri exclaimed “hey guys, we are killing ourselves!” (Viano 197–8). Evidently, there were psychological factors behind this film, but it was nevertheless the physiological aspects that Ferreri chose to foreground in his creation. The resulting film does indeed privilege the physiological, as the protagonists fornicate, fart, vomit, defecate, and—of course—eat, to wild excess. The opening scenes do not betray such sordid sequences; the four bourgeois men are introduced one by one so as to establish their class credentials as well as display their different tastes. We first encounter Ugo (Tognazzi), an Italian chef of humble peasant origins, as he leaves his elegant restaurant “Le Biscuit à soupe” and his bourgeois French wife, to take his knives and recipes away with him for the weekend. Then Michel (Piccoli), a TV host who has pre-taped his shows, gives his apartment keys to his 1970s-styled baba-cool daughter as he bids her farewell, and packs up his cleaning products and rubber gloves to take with him. Marcello (Mastroianni) emerges from a cockpit in his aviator sunglasses and smart pilot’s uniform, ordering his sexy airhostesses to carry his cheese and wine for him as he takes a last longing look around his plane. Finally, the judge and owner of the property where the action will unfold, Philippe (Noiret), is awoken by an elderly woman, Nicole, who feeds him tea and brioche, pestering him for details of his whereabouts for the weekend, until he demonstrates his free will and authority, joking about his serious life, and lying to her about attending a legal conference in London. Having given over power of attorney to Nicole, he hints at the finality of his departure, but is trying to wrest back his independence as his nanny exhorts him not to go off with whores. She would rather continue to “sacrifice herself for him” and “keep it in the family,” as she discreetly pleasures him in this scene. Scholars have identified each protagonist as an ideological signifier. For some, they represent power—Philippe is justice—and three products of that ideology: Michel is spectacle, Ugo is food, and Marcello is adventure (Celluloid Liberation Front). For others, these characters are the perfect incarnations of the first four Freudian stages of sexual development: Philippe is Oedipal, Michel is indifferent, Ugo is oral, and Marcello is impotent (Tury & Peter); or even the four temperaments of Hippocratic humouralism: Philippe the phlegmatic, Michel the melancholic, Ugo the sanguine, and Marcello the choleric (Calvesi, Viano). I would like to offer another dimension to these categories, positing that it is each protagonist’s taste that prescribes his participation in this gastronomic suicide as well as the means by which he eventually dies. Before I develop this hypothesis, I will first describe the main thrust of the narrative. The four men arrive at the villa at 68 rue Boileau where they intend to end their days (although this is not yet revealed). All is prepared for the most sophisticated and decadent feasting imaginable, with a delivery of the best meats and poultry unfurling like a surrealist painting. Surrounded by elegant artworks and demonstrating their cultural capital by reciting Shakespeare, Brillat-Savarin, and other classics, the men embark on a race to their death, beginning with a competition to eat the most oysters while watching a vintage pornographic slideshow. There is a strong thread of masculine athletic engagement in this film, as has been studied in detail by James R. Keller in “Four Little Caligulas: La Grande bouffe, Consumption and Male Masochism,” and this is exacerbated by the arrival of a young but matronly schoolmistress Andréa (Ferréol) with her students who want to see the garden. She accepts the men’s invitation to stay on in the house to become another object of competitive desire, and fully embraces all the sexual and gustatory indulgence around her. Marcello goes further by inviting three prostitutes to join them and Ugo prepares a banquet fit for a funeral. The excessive eating makes Michel flatulent and Marcello impotent; when Marcello kicks the toilet in frustration, it explodes in the famous fecal fountain scene that apparently so disgusted his then partner Catherine Deneuve, that she did not speak to him for a week (Ebert). The prostitutes flee the revolting madness, but Andréa stays like an Angel of Death, helping the men meet their end and, in surviving, perhaps symbolically marking an end to the masculinist bourgeoisie they represent.To return to the role of taste in defining the rise and demise of the protagonists, let me begin with Marcello, as he is the first to die. Despite his bourgeois attitudes, he is a modern man, associated with machines and mobility, such as the planes and the beautiful Bugatti, which he strokes with greater sensuality than the women he hoists onto it. His taste is for the functioning mechanical body, fast and competitive, much like himself when he is gorging on oysters. But his own body betrays him when his “masculine mechanics” stop functioning, and it is the fact that the Bugatti has broken down that actually causes his death—he is found frozen in driver’s seat after trying to escape in the Bugatti during the night. Marcello’s taste for the mechanical leads therefore to his eventual demise. Michel is the next victim of his own taste, which privileges aesthetic beauty, elegance, the arts, and fashion, and euphemises the less attractive or impolite, the scatological, boorish side of life. His feminized attire—pink polo-neck and flowing caftan—cannot distract from what is happening in his body. The bourgeois manners that bind him to beauty mean that breaking wind traumatises him. His elegant gestures at the dance barre encourage rather than disguise his flatulence; his loud piano playing cannot cover the sound of his loud farts, much to the mirth of Philippe and Andréa. In a final effort to conceal his painful bowel obstruction, he slips outside to die in obscene and noisy agony, balanced in an improbably balletic pose on the balcony balustrade. His desire for elegance and euphemism heralds his death. Neither Marcello nor Michel go willingly to their ends. Their tastes are thwarted, and their deaths are disgusting to them. Their cadavers are placed in the freezer room as silent witnesses to the orgy that accelerates towards its fatal goal. Ugo’s taste is more earthy and inherently linked to the aims of the adventure. He is the one who states explicitly: “If you don’t eat, you won’t die.” He wants to cook for others and be appreciated for his talents, as well as eat and have sex, preferably at the same time. It is a combination of these desires that kills him as he force-feeds himself the monumental creation of pâté in the shape of the Cathedral of Saint-Peter that has been rejected as too dry by Philippe, and too rich by Andréa. The pride that makes him attempt to finish eating his masterpiece while Andréa masturbates him on the dining table leads to a heart-stopping finale for Ugo. As for Philippe, his taste is transgressive. In spite of his upstanding career as a judge, he lies and flouts convention in his unorthodox relationship with nanny Nicole. Andréa represents another maternal figure to whom he is attracted and, while he wishes to marry her, thereby conforming to bourgeois norms, he also has sex with her, and her promiscuous nature is clearly signalled. Given his status as a judge, he reasons that he can not bring Marcello’s frozen body inside because concealing a cadaver is a crime, yet he promotes collective suicide on his premises. Philippe’s final transgression of the rules combines diabetic disobedience with Oedipal complex—Andréa serves him a sugary pink jelly dessert in the form of a woman’s breasts, complete with cherries, which he consumes knowingly and mournfully, causing his death. Unlike Marcello and Michel, Ugo and Philippe choose their demise by indulging their tastes for ingestion and transgression. Following Ferreri’s motivations and this analysis of the four male protagonists, taste is clearly a cornerstone of La Grande bouffe’s conception and narrative structure. It is equally evident that these tastes are contrary to bourgeois norms, provoking distaste and even revulsion in spectators. The film’s reception at the time of its release and ever since have confirmed this tendency in both critical reviews and popular feedback as André Habib’s article on Salo and La Grande bouffe (2001) meticulously demonstrates. With such a violent reaction, one might wonder why La Grande bouffe is found on so many cinema studies curricula and is considered to be a must-see film (The Guardian). Corpus and Corporeality in Food Film Studies I chose La Grande bouffe as the first film in the “Matters of Taste” subject, alongside Luis Bunuel’s Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast, and Laurent Bénégui’s Au Petit Marguery, as all are considered classic films depicting French eating cultures. Certainly any French cinema student would know La Grande bouffe and most cinephiles around the world have seen it. It is essential background knowledge for students studying French eating cultures and features as a key reference in much scholarly research and popular culture on the subject. After explaining the canonical status of La Grande bouffe and thus validating its inclusion in the course, I warned students about the explicit nature of the film. We studied it for one week out of the 12 weeks of semester, focusing on questions of taste in the film and the socio-cultural representations of food. Although the almost ubiquitous response was: “C’est dégueulasse!,” there was no serious resistance until the final exam when a few students declared that they would boycott any questions on La Grande bouffe. I had not actually included any such questions in the exam. The student evaluations at the end of semester indicated that several students questioned the inclusion of this “disgusting pornography” in the corpus. There is undoubtedly less nudity, violence, gore, or sex in this film than in the Game of Thrones TV series. What, then, repulses these Gen Y students? Is it as Pasolini suggests, the neorealistic dialogue and décor that disturbs, given the ontologically challenging subject of suicide? (Viano). Or is it the fact that there is no reason given for the desire to end their lives, which privileges the physiological over the psychological? Is the scatological more confronting than the pornographic? Interestingly, “food porn” is now a widely accepted term to describe a glamourized and sometimes sexualized presentation of food, with Nigella Lawson as its star, and hundreds of blog sites reinforcing its popularity. Yet as Andrew Chan points out in his article “La Grande bouffe: Cooking Shows as Pornography,” this film is where it all began: “the genealogy reaches further back, as brilliantly visualized in Marco Ferreri’s 1973 film La Grande bouffe, in which four men eat, screw and fart themselves to death” (47). Is it the overt corporeality depicted in the film that shocks cerebral students into revulsion and rebellion? Conclusion In the guise of a conclusion, I suggest that my Gen Y students’ taste may reveal a Bourdieusian distaste for the taste of others, in a third degree reaction to the 1970s distaste for bourgeois taste. First degree: Ferreri and his entourage reject the psychological for the physiological in order to condemn bourgeois values, provoking scandal in the 1970s, but providing compelling cinema on a socio-political scale. Second degree: in spite of the outcry, high audience numbers demonstrate their taste for scandal, and La Grande bouffe becomes a must-see canonical film, encouraging my choice to include it in the “Matters of Taste” corpus. Third degree: my Gen Y students’ taste expresses a distaste for the academic norms that I have embraced in showing them the film, a distaste that may be more aesthetic than political. Oui, c’est dégueulasse, mais … Bibliography Allison, Henry E. Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2001. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1984. Calvesi, M. “Dipingere all moviola” (Painting at the Moviola). Corriere della Sera, 10 Oct. 1976. Reprint. “Arti figurative e il cinema” (Cinema and the Visual Arts). Avanguardia di massa. Ed. M. Calvesi. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978. 243–46. Celluloid Liberation Front. “Consumerist Ultimate Indigestion: La Grande Bouffe's Deadly Physiological Pleasures.” Bright Lights Film Journal 60 (2008). 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://brightlightsfilm.com/60/60lagrandebouffe.php#.Utd6gs1-es5›. Chan, Andrew. “La Grande bouffe: Cooking Shows as Pornography.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture 3.4 (2003): 47–53. Dickie, George. The Century of Taste: The Philosophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. Ebert, Roger, “La Grande bouffe.” 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/la-grande-bouffe-1973›. Ferreri, Marco. La Grande bouffe. Italy-France, 1973. Freedman, Paul H. Food: The History of Taste. U of California P, 2007. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Winsheimer and Donald C. Marshall. New York: Continuum, 1999. Habib, André. “Remarques sur une ‘réception impossible’: Salo and La Grande bouffe.” Hors champ (cinéma), 4 Jan. 2001. 11 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/cinema/030101/salo-bouffe.html›. Keller, James R. “Four Little Caligulas: La Grande bouffe, Consumption and Male Masochism.” Food, Film and Culture: A Genre Study. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co, 2006: 49–59. Masoni, Tullio. Marco Ferreri. Gremese, 1998. Pasolini, P.P. “Le ambigue forme della ritualita narrativa.” Cinema Nuovo 231 (1974): 342–46. Ross, Kristin. May 68 and its Afterlives. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Smith, Alison. French Cinema in the 1970s: The Echoes of May. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005. Télérama: “La Grande bouffe: l’un des derniers grands scandales du Festival de Cannes. 19 May 2013. 13 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.telerama.fr/festival-de-cannes/2013/la-grande-bouffe-l-un-des-derniers-grands-scandales-du-festival-de-cannes,97615.php›. The Guardian: 1000 films to see before you die. 2007. 17 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/film/series/1000-films-to-see-before-you-die› Tury, F., and O. Peter. “Food, Life, and Death: The Film La Grande bouffe of Marco Ferreri in an Art Psychological Point of View.” European Psychiatry 22.1 (2007): S214. Viano, Maurizio. “La Grande Abbuffata/La Grande bouffe.” The Cinema of Italy. Ed. Giorgio Bertellini. London: Wallflower Press, 2004: 193–202.

This paper is part of a larger project exploring Australian literary responses to the Great War of 1914-1918. It draws on theories of embodiment, mourning, ritual and the recuperative potential of writing, together with a brief discussion of selected exemplars, to suggest that literary works of the period contain and lay bare a suite of creative, corporeal and social impulses, including resurrection, placation or stilling of ghosts, and formation of an empathic and duty-bound community. In Negotiating with the Dead, Margaret Atwood hypothesises that “all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality—by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead” (156). She asks an attendant question: “why should it be writing, over and above any other art or medium,” that functions this way? It is not only that writing acquires the appearance of permanence, by surviving “its own performance,” but also that some arts are transient, like dance, while others, like painting and sculpture and music, do “not survive as voice.” For Atwood, writing is a “score for voice,” and what the voice does mostly is tell stories, whether in prose or poetry: “Something unfurls, something reveals itself” (158). Writing, by this view, conjures, materialises or embodies the absent or dead, or is at least laden with this potential. Of course, as Katherine Sutherland observes, “representation is always the purview of the living, even when the order it constructs contains the dead” (202). She argues that all writing about death “might be regarded as epitaph or memorial; such writing is likely to contain the signs of ritual but also of ambiguity and forgetting” (204). Arguably writing can be regarded as participation in a ritual that “affirms membership of the collectivity, and through symbolic manipulation places the life of an individual within a much broader, sometimes cosmic, interpretive framework” (Seale 29), which may assist healing in relation to loss, even if some non-therapeutic purposes, such as restoration of social and political order, also lie behind both rites and writing. In a critical orthodoxy dating back to the 1920s, it has become accepted wisdom that the Australian literary response to the war was essentially nationalistic, “big-noting” ephemera, and thus of little worth (see Gerster and Caesar, for example). Consequently, as Bruce Clunies Ross points out, most Australian literary output of the period has “dropped into oblivion.” In his view, neglect of writings by First World War combatants is not due to its quality, “for this is not the only, or even the essential, condition” for consideration; rather, it is attributable to a “disjunction between the ideals enshrined in the Anzac legend and the experiences recorded or depicted” (170). The silence, we argue, also encompasses literary responses by non-combatants, many of whom were women, though limited space precludes consideration here of their particular contributions.Although poetry and fiction by those of middling or little literary reputation is not normally subject to critical scrutiny, it is patently not the case that there is no body of literature from the war period worthy of scholarly consideration, or that most works are merely patriotic, jingoistic, sentimental and in service of recruitment, even though these elements are certainly present. Our different proposition is that the “lost literatures” deserve attention for various reasons, including the ways they embody conflicting aims and emotions, as well as overt negotiations with the dead, during a period of unprecedented anguish. This is borne out by our substantial collection of creative writing provoked by the war, much of which was published by newspapers, magazines and journals. As Joy Damousi points out in The Labour of Loss, newspapers were the primary form of communication during the war, and never before or since have they dominated to such a degree; readers formed collective support groups through shared reading and actual or anticipated mourning, and some women commiserated with each other in person and in letters after reading casualty lists and death notices (21). The war produced the largest body count in the history of humanity to that time, including 60,000 Australians: none was returned to Australia for burial. They were placed in makeshift graves close to where they died, where possible marked by wooden crosses. At the end of the war, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) was charged with the responsibility of exhuming and reinterring bodily remains in immaculately curated cemeteries across Europe, at Gallipoli and in the Middle East, as if the peace demanded it. As many as one third of the customary headstones were inscribed with “known unto God,” the euphemism for bodies that could not be identified. The CWGC received numerous requests from families for the crosses, which might embody their loved one and link his sacrificial death with resurrection and immortality. For allegedly logistical reasons, however, all crosses were destroyed on site. Benedict Anderson suggested the importance to nationalism of the print media, which enables private reading of ephemera to generate a sense of communion with thousands or millions of anonymous people understood to be doing likewise. Furthermore, Judith Herman demonstrates in Trauma and Recovery that sharing traumatic experience with others is a “precondition for the restitution of a sense of a meaningful world” (70). Need of community and restitution extends to the dead. The practices of burying the dead together and of returning the dead to their homeland when they die abroad speak to this need, for “in establishing a society of the dead, the society of the living regularly recreates itself” (Hertz qtd. in Searle 66). For Australians, the society of the dead existed elsewhere, in unfamiliar terrain, accentuating the absence inherent in all death. The society of the dead and missing—and thus of the living and wounded—was created and recreated throughout the war via available means, including literature. Writers of war-related poems and fiction helped create and sustain imagined communities. Dominant use of conventional, sometimes archaic, literary forms, devices, language and imagery indicates desire for broadly accessible and purposeful communication; much writing invokes shared grief, resolve, gratitude, and sympathy. Yet, in many stories and poems, there is also ambivalence in relation to sacrifice and the community of the dead.Speaking in the voice of the other is a fundamental task of the creative writer, and the ultimate other, the dead, gaze upon and speak to or about the living in a number of poems. For example, they might vocalise displeasure and plead for reinforcements, as, for example, in Ella M’Fadyen’s poem “The Wardens,” published in the Sydney Mail in 1918, which includes the lines: “Can’t you hear them calling in the night-time’s lonely spaces […] Can’t you see them passing […] Those that strove full strongly, and have laid their lives away?” The speaker hears and conveys the pleading of those who have given their breath in order to make explicit the reader’s responsibility to both the dead and the Allied cause: “‘Thus and thus we battled, we were faithful in endeavour;/Still it lies unfinished—will ye make the deed in vain?’” M’Fadyen focusses on soldierly sacrifice and “drafts that never came,” whereas a poem entitled “Your Country’s Call,” published in the same paper in 1915 by “An Australian Mother, Shirley, Queensland,” refers to maternal sacrifice and the joys and difficulties of birthing and raising her son only to find the country’s claims on him outweigh her own. She grapples with patriotism and resistance: “he must go/forth./Where? Why? Don’t think. Just smother/up the pain./Give him up quickly, for his country’s gain.” The War Precautions Act of October 1914 made it “illegal to publish any material likely to discourage recruiting or undermine the Allied effort” (Damousi 21), which undoubtedly meant that, to achieve publication, critical, depressing or negative views would need to be repressed or cast as inducement to enlist, though evidently many writers also sought to convince themselves as well as others that the cause was noble and the cost redeemable. “Your Country’s Call” concludes uncertainly, “Give him up proudly./You have done your share./There may be recompense—somewhere.”Sociologist Clive Seal argues that “social and cultural life involves turning away from the inevitability of death, which is contained in the fact of our embodiment, and towards life” (1). He contends that “grief for embodiment” is pervasive and perpetual and “extends beyond the obvious manifestations of loss by the dying and bereaved, to incorporate the rituals of everyday interaction” (200), and he goes so far as to suggest that if we recognise that our bodies “give to us both our lives and our deaths” then we can understand that “social and cultural life can, in the last analysis, be understood as a human construction in the face of death” (210). To deal with the grief that comes with “realisation of embodiment,” Searle finds that we engage in various “resurrective practices designed to transform an orientation towards death into one that points towards life” (8). He includes narrative reconstruction as well as funeral lament and everyday conversation as rituals associated with maintenance of the social bond, which is “the most crucial human motive” (Scheff qtd. in Searle 30). Although Seale does not discuss the acts of writing or of reading specifically, his argument can be extended, we believe, to include both as important resurrective practices that contain desire for self-repair and reorientation as well as for inclusion in and creation of an empathic moral community, though this does not imply that such desires can ever be satisfied. In “Reading,” Virginia Woolf reminds that “somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in whatever is written down is the form of a human being” (28-29), but her very reminder assumes that this knowledge of embodiment tends to be forgotten or repressed. Writing, by its aura of permanence and resurrective potential, points towards life and connection, even as it signifies absence and disconnection. Christian Riegel explains that the “literary work of mourning,” whether poetry, fiction or nonfiction, often has both a psychic and social function, “partaking of the processes of mourning while simultaneously being a product for public reception.” Such a text is indicative of ways that societies shape and control responses to death, making it “an inherently socio-historical construct” (xviii). Jacques Derrida’s passionate and uneasy enactment of this labour in The Work of Mourning suggests that writing often responds to the death of a known person or their oeuvre, where each death changes and reduces the world, so that the world as one knew it “sinks into an abyss” (115). Of course, writing also wrestles with anonymous, large-scale loss which is similarly capable of shattering our sense of “ontological security” (Riegel xx). Sandra Gilbert proposes that some traumatic events cause “death’s door” to swing “so publicly and dramatically open that we can’t look away” (xxii). Derrida’s work of mourning entails imaginative revival of those he has lost and is a struggle with representation and fidelity, whereas critical silence in respect of the body of literature of the First World War might imply repeated turning from “grief for embodiment” towards myths of immortality and indebtedness. Commemorating the war dead might be regarded as a resurrective practice that forges and fortifies communities of the living, while addressing the imagined demands of those who die for their nation.Riegel observes that in its multiplicity of motivations and functions, the literary work of mourning is always “an attempt to make present that which is irrefutably lost, and within that paradoxical tension lies a central tenet of all writerly endeavour that deals with the representation of death” (xix). The literary work of mourning must remain incomplete: it is “always a limiting attempt at revival and at representation,” because words inevitably “fail to replace a lost one.” Even so, they can assist in the attempt to “work through and understand” loss (xix). But the reader or mourner is caught in a strange situation, for he or she inevitably scrutinises words not the body, a corpus not a corpse, and while this is a form of evasion it is also the only possibility open to us. Even so, Derrida might say that it is “as if, by reading, by observing the signs on the drawn sheet of paper, [readers are] trying to forget, repress, deny, or conjure away death—and the anxiety before death.” But he also concedes (after Sarah Kofman), that this process might involve “a cunning affirmation of life, its irrepressible movement to survive, to live on” (176), which supports Seale’s contention in relation to resurrective practices generally. Atwood points out that the dead have always made demands on the living, but, because there is a risk in negotiating with the dead, there needs to be good reason or reward for doing so. Our reading of war literature written by noncombatants suggests that in many instances writers seek to appease the unsettled dead whose death was meant to mean something for the future: the living owe the dead a debt that can only be paid by changing the way they live. The living, in other words, must not only remember the fallen, but also heed them by their conduct. It becomes the poet’s task to remind people of this, that is, to turn them from death towards life.Arthur H Adams’s 1918 poem “When the Anzac Dead Came Home,” published in the Bulletin, is based on this premise: the souls of the dead— the “failed” and “fallen”—drift uncertainly over their homeland, observing the world to which they cannot return, with its “cheerful throng,” “fair women swathed in fripperies,” and “sweet girls” that cling “round windows like bees on honeycomb.” One soul recognises a soldier, Steve, from his former battalion, a mate who kept his life but lost his arm and, after hovering for a while, again “wafts far”; his homecoming creates a “strange” stabbing pain, an ache in his pal’s “old scar.” In this uncanny scene, irreconcilable and traumatic knowledge expresses itself somatically. The poet conveys the viewpoint of the dead Anzac rather than the returned one. The living soldier, whose body is a site of partial loss, does not explicitly conjure or mourn his dead friend but, rather, is a living extension of his loss. In fact, the empathic connection construed by the poet is not figured as spectral orchestration or as mindful on the part of man or community; rather, it occurs despite bodily death or everyday living and forgetting; it persists as hysterical pain or embodied knowledge. Freud and Breuer’s influential Studies on Hysteria, published in 1895, raised the issue of mind/body relations, given its theory that the hysteric’s body expresses psychic trauma that she or he may not recollect: repressed “memories of aetiological significance” result in “morbid symptoms” (56). They posited that experience leaves traces which, like disinterred archaeological artefacts, inform on the past (57). However, such a theory depends on what Rousseau and Porter refer to as an “almost mystical collaboration between mind and body” (vii), wherein painful or perverse or unspeakable “reminiscences” are converted into symptoms, or “mnemic symbols,” which is to envisage the body as penetrable text. But how can memory return unbidden and in such effective disguise that the conscious mind does not recognise it as memory? How can the body express pain without one remembering or acknowledging its origin? Do these kinds of questions suggest that the Cartesian mind/body split has continued valency despite the challenge that hysteria itself presents to such a theory? Is it possible, rather, that the body itself remembers—and not just its own replete form, as suggested by those who feel the presence of a limb after its removal—but the suffering body of “the other”? In Adam’s poem, as in M’Fadyen’s, intersubjective knowledge subsists between embodied and disembodied subjects, creating an imagined community of sensation.Adams’s poem envisions mourning as embodied knowledge that allows one man to experience another’s pain—or soul—as both “old” and “strange” in the midst of living. He suggests that the dead gaze at us even as they are present “in us” (Derrida). Derrida reminds that ghosts occupy an ambiguous space, “neither life nor death, but the haunting of the one by the other” (41). Human mutability, the possibility of exchanging places in a kind of Socratic cycle of life and death, is posited by Adams, whose next stanzas depict the souls of the war dead reclaiming Australia and displacing the thankless living: blown to land, they murmur to each other, “’Tis we who are the living: this continent is dead.” A significant imputation is that the dead must be reckoned with, deserve better, and will not rest unless the living pay their moral dues. The disillusioned tone and intent of this 1918 poem contrasts with a poem Adams published in the Bulletin in 1915 entitled “The Trojan War,” which suggests even “Great Agamemnon” would “lift his hand” to honour “plain Private Bill,” the heroic, fallen Anzac who ventured forth to save “Some Mother-Helen sad at home. Some obscure Helen on a farm.” The act of war is envisaged as an act of birthing the nation, anticipating the Anzac legend, but simultaneously as its epitaph: “Upon the ancient Dardanelles New peoples write—in blood—their name.” Such a poem arguably invokes, though in ambiguous form, what Derrida (after Lyotard) refers to as the “beautiful death,” which is an attempt to lift death up, make it meaningful, and thereby foreclose or limit mourning, so that what threatens disorder and despair might instead reassure and restore “the body politic,” providing “explicit models of virtue” (Nass 82-83) that guarantee its defence and survival. Adams’ later poem, in constructing Steve as “a living fellow-ghost” of the dead Anzac, casts stern judgement on the society that fails to notice what has been lost even as it profits by it. Ideological and propagandist language is also denounced: “Big word-warriors still played the Party game;/They nobly planned campaigns of words, and deemed/their speeches deeds,/And fought fierce offensives for strange old creeds.” This complaint recalls Ezra Pound’s lines in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley about the dead who “walked eye-deep in hell/believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving/came home, home to a lie/home to many deceits,/home to old lies and new infamy;/usury age-old and age-thick/and liars in public places,” and it would seem that this is the kind of disillusion and bitterness that Clunies Ross considers to be “incompatible with the Anzac tradition” (178) and thus ignored. The Anzac tradition, though quieted for a time, possibly due to the 1930s Depression, Second World War, Vietnam War and other disabling events has, since the 1980s, been greatly revived, with Anzac Day commemorations in Australia and at Gallipoli growing exponentially, possibly making maintenance of this sacrificial national mythology, or beautiful death, among Australia’s most capacious and costly creative industries. As we approach the centenary of the war and of Gallipoli, this industry will only increase.Elaine Scarry proposes that the imagination invents mechanisms for “transforming the condition of absence into presence” (163). It does not escape us that in turning towards lost literatures we are ourselves engaging in a form of resurrective practice and that this paper, like other forms of social and cultural practice, might be understood as one more human construction motivated by grief for embodiment.Note: An archive and annotated bibliography of the “Lost Literatures of the First World War,” which comprises over 2,000 items, is expected to be published online in 2015.References Adams, Arthur H. “When the Anzac Dead Came Home.” Bulletin 21 Mar. 1918.---. “The Trojan War.” Bulletin 20 May 1915.An Australian Mother. “Your Country’s Call.” Sydney Mail 19 May 1915.Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd ed. London: Verso, 1991.Atwood, Margaret. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. New York: Random House, 2002.Caesar, Adrian. “National Myths of Manhood: Anzac and Others.” The Oxford Literary History of Australia. Eds. Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Strauss. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998. 147-168.Clunies Ross, Bruce. “Silent Heroes.” War: Australia’s Creative Response. Eds. Anna Rutherford and James Wieland. West Yorkshire: Dangaroo Press, 1997. 169-181.Damousi, Joy. The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.Derrida, Jacques. The Work of Mourning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.Freud, Sigmund, and Joseph Breuer. Studies on Hysteria. Pelican Freud Library. Vol. 3. Trans. and eds. James Strachey, Alix Strachey, and Angela Richards. London: Penguin, 1988.Gerster, Robin. Big Noting: The Heroic Theme in Australian War Writing. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1992.Gilbert, Sandra M. Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1992. M’Fayden, Ella. “The Wardens.” Sydney Mail 17 Apr. 1918.Naas, Michael. “History’s Remains: Of Memory, Mourning, and the Event.” Research in Phenomenology 33 (2003): 76-96.Pound, Ezra. “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly.” iv. 1920. 19 June 2012. ‹http://www.archive.org/stream/hughselwynmauber00pounrich/hughselwynmauber00pounrich_djvu.txt›.Riegal, Christian, ed. Response to Death: The Literary Work of Mourning. Edmonton, Alberta: University of Alberta Press, 2005. Rousseau, G.S., and Roy Porter. “Introduction: The Destinies of Hysteria.” Hysteria beyond Freud. Ed. Sander L. Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G.S. Rousseau, and Elaine Showalter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.Seale, Clive. Constructing Death: The Sociology of Dying and Bereavement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.Sutherland, Katherine. “Land of Their Graves: Maternity, Mourning and Nation in Janet Frame, Sara Suleri, and Arundhati Roy.” Riegel 201-16.Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays Volume 2. London: Hogarth, 1966. 28-29.

In a field of study as well-established as the Gothic, it is surprising how much contention there is over precisely what that term refers to. Is Gothic a genre, for example, or a mode? Should it be only applicable to literary and film texts that deal with tropes of haunting and trauma set in a gloomy atmosphere, or might it meaningfully be applied to other cultural forms of production, such as music or animation? Can television shows aimed at children be considered Gothic? What about food? When is something “Gothic” and when is it “horror”? Is there even a difference? The Gothic as a phenomenon is commonly identified as beginning with Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), which was followed by Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778), the romances of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796). Nineteenth-century Gothic literature was characterised by “penny dreadfuls” and novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Frequently dismissed as sensational and escapist, the Gothic has experienced a critical revival in recent decades, beginning with the feminist revisionism of the 1970s by critics such as Ellen Moers, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. With the appearance of studies such as David Punter’s The Literature of Terror (1980), Gothic literature became a reputable field of scholarly research, with critics identifying suburban Gothic, imperial Gothic, postcolonial Gothic and numerous national Gothics, including Irish Gothic and the Gothic of the American South. Furthermore, as this special edition on Gothic shows, the Gothic is by no means limited to literature, with film, television, animation and music all partaking of the Gothic inflection. Indeed, it would be unwise to negate the ways in which the Gothic has developed to find fertile ground beyond the bounds of literature. In our media-centred twenty-first century, the Gothic has colonised different forms of expression, where the impact left by literary works, that were historically the centre of the Gothic itself, is all but a legacy. Film, in particular, has a close connection to the Gothic, where the works of, for instance, Tim Burton, have shown the representative potential of the Gothic mode; the visual medium of film, of course, has a certain experiential immediacy that marries successfully with the dark aesthetics of the Gothic, and its connections to representing cultural anxieties and desires (Botting). The analysis of Gothic cinema, in its various and extremely international incarnations, has now established itself as a distinct area of academic research, where prominent Gothic scholars such as Ken Gelder—with the recent publication of his New Vampire Cinema (2012)—continue to lead the way to advance Gothic scholarship outside of the traditional bounds of the literary.As far as cinema is concerned, one cannot negate the interconnections, both aesthetic and conceptual, between traditional Gothic representation and horror. Jerrold Hogle has clearly identified the mutation and transformation of the Gothic from a narrative solely based on “terror”, to one that incorporates elements of “horror” (Hogle 3). While the separation between the two has a long-standing history—and there is no denying that both the aesthetics and the politics of horror and the Gothic can be fundamentally different—one has to be attuned to the fact that, in our contemporary moment, the two often tend to merge and intersect, often forming hybrid visions of the Gothic, with cinematic examples such as Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) playing testament to this. Indeed, the newly formed representations of “Gothic Horror” and “Gothic Terror” alerts us to the mutable and malleable nature of the Gothic itself, an adaptable mode that is always contextually based. Film is not, however, the only non-literary medium that has incorporated elements of the Gothic over the years. Other visual representations of the Gothic abound in the worlds of television, animation, comics and graphic novels. One must only think here of the multiple examples of recent television series that have found fruitful connections with both the psychologically haunting aspects of Gothic terror, and the gory and grisly visual evocations of Gothic horror: the list is long and diverse, and includes Dexter (2006-2013), Hannibal (2013-), and Penny Dreadful (2014-), to mention but a few. The animation front —in its multiple in carnations —has similarly been entangled with Gothic tropes and concerns, a valid interconnection that is visible both in cinematic and television examples, from The Corpse Bride (2005) to Coraline (2009) and Frankenweeinie (2012). Comics and graphics also have a long-standing tradition of exploiting the dark aesthetics of the Gothic mode, and its sensationalist connections to horror; the instances from this list pervade the contemporary media scope, and feature the inclusion of Gothicised ambiences and characters in both singular graphic novels and continuous comics —such as the famous Arkham Asylum (1989) in the ever-popular Batman franchise. The inclusion of these multi-media examples here is only representative, and it is an almost prosaic accent in a list of Gothicised media that extends to great bounds, and also includes the worlds of games and music. The scholarship, for its part, has not failed to pick up on the transformations and metamorphoses that the Gothic mode has undergone in recent years. The place of both Gothic horror and Gothic terror in a multi-media context has been critically evaluated in detail, and continues to attract academic attention, as the development of the multi-genre and multi-medium journey of the Gothic unfolds. Indeed, this emphasis is now so widespread that a certain canonicity has developed for the study of the Gothic in media such as television, extending the reach of Gothic Studies into the wider popular culture scope. Critical texts that have recently focused on identifying the Gothic in media beyond not only literature, but also film, include Helen Wheatley’s Gothic Television (2007), John C. Tibbetts’ The Gothic Imagination: Conversation of Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction in the Media (2011), and Julia Round’s Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels (2014). Critics often suggest that the Gothic returns at moments of particular cultural crisis, and if this is true, it seems as if we are in such a moment ourselves. Popular television shows such as True Blood and The Walking Dead, books such as the Twilight series, and the death-obsessed musical stylings of Lana Del Ray all point to the pertinence of the Gothic in contemporary culture, as does the amount of submissions received for this edition of M/C Journal, which explore a wide range of Gothic texts. Timothy Jones’ featured essay “The Black Mass as Play: Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out” suggests that although scholarly approaches to the Gothic tend to adopt the methodologies used to approach literary texts and applied them to Gothic texts, yielding readings that are more-or-less congruous with readings of other sorts of literature, the Gothic can be considered as something that tells us about more than simply ourselves and the world we live in. For Jones, the fact that the Gothic is a production of popular culture as much as “highbrow” literature suggests there is something else happening with the way popular Gothic texts function. What if, Jones asks, the popular Gothic were not a type of work, but a kind of play? Jones uses this approach to suggest that texts such as Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out might direct readers not primarily towards the real, but away from it, at least for a time. Wheatley’s novel is explored by Jones as a venue for readerly play, apart from the more substantial and “serious” concerns that occupy most literary criticism. Samantha Jane Lindop’s essay foregrounds the debt David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive owes to J. Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) thus adding to studies of the film that have noted Lynch’s intertextual references to classic cinema such as Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966). Lindop explores not just the striking similarity between Carmilla and Mulholland Drive in terms of character and plot, but also the way that each text is profoundly concerned with the uncanny. Lorna Piatti-Farnell’s contribution, “What’s Hidden in Gravity Falls: Strange Creatures and the Gothic Intertext” is similarly interested in the intertextuality of the Gothic mode, noting that since its inception this has taken many and varied incarnations, from simple references and allusions to more complicated uses of style and plot organisation. Piatti-Farnell suggests it is unwise to reduce the Gothic text to a simple master narrative, but that within its re-elaborations and re-interpretations, interconnections do appear, forming “the Gothic intertext”. While the Gothic has traditionally found fertile ground in works of literature, other contemporary media, such as animation, have offered the Gothic an opportunity for growth and adaptation. Alex Hirsch’s Gravity Falls is explored by Piatti-Farnell as a visual text providing an example of intersecting monstrous creatures and interconnected narrative structures that reveal the presence of a dense and intertextual Gothic network. Those interlacings are connected to the wider cultural framework and occupy an important part in unravelling the insidious aspects of human nature, from the difficulties of finding “oneself” to the loneliness of the everyday. Issues relating to identity also feature in Patrick Usmar’s “Born To Die: Lana Del Rey, Beauty Queen or Gothic Princess?”, which further highlights the presence of the Gothic in a wide range of contemporary media forms. Usmar explores the music videos of Del Rey, which he describes as Pop Gothic, and that advance themes of consumer culture, gender identity, sexuality and the male gaze. Jen Craig’s “The Agitated Shell: Thinspiration and the Gothic Experience of Eating Disorders” similarly focuses on contemporary media and gender identity, problematising these issues by exploring the highly charged topic of “thinspiration” web sites. Hannah Irwin’s contribution also focuses on female experience. “Not of this earth: Jack the Ripper and the development of Gothic Whitechapel” focuses on the murder of five women who were the victims of an assailant commonly referred to by the epithet “Jack the Ripper”. Irwin discusses how Whitechapel developed as a Gothic location through the body of literature devoted to the Whitechapel murders of 1888, known as “Ripperature”. The subject of the Gothic space is also taken up by Donna Brien’s “Forging Continuing Bonds from the Dead to the Living: Gothic Commemorative Practices along Australia’s Leichhardt Highway.” This essay explores the memorials along Leichhardt’s highway as Gothic practice, in order to illuminate some of the uncanny paradoxes around public memorials, as well as the loaded emotional terrain such commemorative practices may inhabit. Furthering our understanding of the Australian Gothic is Patrick West’s contribution “Towards a Politics & Art of the Land: Gothic Cinema of the Australian New Wave and its Reception by American Film Critics.” West argues that many films of the Australian New Wave of the 1970s and 1980s can be defined as Gothic and that international reviews of such films tended to overlook the importance of the Australian landscape, which functions less as a backdrop and more as a participating element, even a character, in the drama, saturating the mise-en-scène. Bruno Starrs’ “Writing My Indigenous Vampires: Aboriginal Gothic or Aboriginal Fantastic” is dedicated to illuminating a new genre of creative writing: that of the “Aboriginal Fantastic”. Starrs’ novel That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! is part of this emerging genre of writing that is worthy of further academic interrogation. Similarly concerned with the supernatural, Erin Mercer’s contribution “‘A Deluge of Shrieking Unreason’: Supernaturalism and Settlement in New Zealand Gothic Fiction” explores the absence of ghosts and vampires in contemporary Gothic produced in New Zealand, arguing that this is largely a result of a colonial Gothic tradition utilising Maori ghosts that complicates the processes through which contemporary writers might build on that tradition. Although there is no reason why the Gothic must include supernatural elements, it is an enduring feature that is taken up by Jessica Balanzategui in “‘You Have a Secret that You Don’t Want To Tell Me’: The Child as Trauma in Spanish and American Horror Film.” This essay explores the uncanny child character and how such children act as an embodiment of trauma. Sarah Baker’s “The Walking Dead and Gothic Excess: The Decaying Social Structures of Contagion” focuses on the figure of the zombie as it appears in the television show The Walking Dead, which Baker argues is a way of exploring themes of decay, particularly of family and society. The essays contained in this special Gothic edition of M/C Journal highlight the continuing importance of the Gothic mode in contemporary culture and how that mode is constantly evolving into new forms and manifestations. The multi-faceted nature of the Gothic in our contemporary popular culture moment is accurately signalled by the various media on which the essays focus, from television to literature, animation, music, and film. The place occupied by the Gothic beyond representational forms, and into the realms of cultural practice, is also signalled, an important shift within the bounds of Gothic Studies which is bound to initiate fascinating debates. The transformations of the Gothic in media and culture are, therefore, also surveyed, so to continue the ongoing critical conversation on not only the place of the Gothic in contemporary narratives, but also its duplicitous, malleable, and often slippery nature. It is our hope that the essays here stimulate further discussion about the Gothic and we will hope, and look forward, to hearing from you. References Botting, Fred. Gothic: The New Critical Idiom. 2nd edition. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014. Hogle, Jerrold. “Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture”. The Cambridge Companion of Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 1-20.

1909–22: Turkey exterminated over 1.5 million of its ethnically Armenian, and hundreds of thousands of its ethnically Greek and Assyrian, citizens. Most died in 1915. This period of decimation in now widely called the Armenian Genocide (Balakian 179-80).1910: Siamanto first published his poem, The Dance: “The corpses were piled as trees, / and from the springs, from the streams and the road, / the blood was a stubborn murmur.” When springs run red, when the dead are stacked tree-high, when “everything that could happen has already happened,” then time is nothing: “there is no future [and] the language of civilised humanity is not our language” (Nichanian 142).2007: In my novel The Edge of the World a ceramic bowl, luminous blue, recurs as motif. Imagine you are tiny: the bowl is broken but you don’t remember breaking it. You’re awash with tears. You sit on the floor, gather shards but, no matter how you try, you can’t fix it. Imagine, now, that the bowl is the sky, huge and upturned above your head. You have always known, through every wash of your blood, that life is shockingly precarious. Silence—between heartbeats, between the words your parents speak—tells you: something inside you is terribly wrong; home is not home but there is no other home; you “can never be fully grounded in a community which does not share or empathise with the experience of persecution” (Wajnryb 130). This is the stubborn murmur of your body.Because time is nothing, this essay is fragmented, non-linear. Its main characters: my mother, grandmother (Hovsanna), grandfather (Benyamin), some of my mother’s older siblings (Krikor, Maree, Hovsep, Arusiak), and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (Ottoman military officer, Young Turk leader, first president of Turkey). 1915–2013: Turkey invests much energy in genocide denial, minimisation and deflection of responsibility. 24 April 2012: Barack Obama refers to the Medz Yeghern (Great Calamity). The use of this term is decried as appeasement, privileging political alliance with Turkey over human rights. 2003: Between Genocide and Catastrophe, letters between Armenian-American theorist David Kazanjian and Armenian-French theorist Marc Nichanian, contest the naming of the “event” (126). Nichanian says those who call it the Genocide are:repeating every day, everywhere, in all places, the original denial of the Catastrophe. But this is part of the catastrophic structure of the survivor. By using the word “Genocide”, we survivors are only repeating […] the denial of the loss. We probably cannot help it. We are doing what the executioner wanted us to do […] we claim all over the world that we have been “genocided;” we relentlessly need to prove our own death. We are still in the claws of the executioner. We still belong to the logic of the executioner. (127)1992: In Revolution and Genocide, historian Robert Melson identifies the Armenian Genocide as “total” because it was public policy intended to exterminate a large fraction of Armenian society, “including the families of its members, and the destruction of its social and cultural identity in most or all aspects” (26).1986: Boyajian and Grigorian assert that the Genocide “is still operative” because, without full acknowledgement, “the ghosts won’t go away” (qtd. in Hovannisian 183). They rise up from earth, silence, water, dreams: Armenian literature, Armenian homes haunted by them. 2013: My heart pounds: Medz Yeghern, Aksor (Exile), Anashmaneli (Indefinable), Darakrutiun (Deportation), Chart (Massacre), Brnagaght (Forced migration), Aghed (Catastrophe), Genocide. I am awash. Time is nothing.1909–15: Mustafa Kemal Ataturk was both a serving Ottoman officer and a leader of the revolutionary Young Turks. He led Ottoman troops in the repulsion of the Allied invasion before dawn on 25 April at Gallipoli and other sites. Many troops died in a series of battles that eventually saw the Ottomans triumph. Out of this was born one of Australia’s founding myths: Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs), courageous in the face of certain defeat. They are commemorated yearly on 25 April, ANZAC Day. To question this myth is to risk being labelled traitor.1919–23: Ataturk began a nationalist revolution against the occupying Allies, the nascent neighbouring Republic of Armenia, and others. The Allies withdrew two years later. Ataturk was installed as unofficial leader, becoming President in 1923. 1920–1922: The last waves of the Genocide. 2007: Robert Manne published A Turkish Tale: Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide, calling for a recontextualisation of the cultural view of the Gallipoli landings in light of the concurrence of the Armenian Genocide, which had taken place just over the rise, had been witnessed by many military personnel and widely reported by international media at the time. Armenian networks across Australia were abuzz. There were media discussions. I listened, stared out of my office window at the horizon, imagined Armenian communities in Sydney and Melbourne. Did they feel like me—like they were holding their breath?Then it all went quiet. Manne wrote: “It is a wonderful thing when, at the end of warfare, hatred dies. But I struggle to understand why Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide continue to exist for Australians in parallel moral universes.” 1992: I bought an old house to make a home for me and my two small children. The rooms were large, the ceilings high, and behind it was a jacaranda with a sturdy tree house built high up in its fork. One of my mother’s Armenian friends kindly offered to help with repairs. He and my mother would spend Saturdays with us, working, looking after the kids. Mum would stay the night; her friend would go home. But one night he took a sleeping bag up the ladder to the tree house, saying it reminded him of growing up in Lebanon. The following morning he was subdued; I suspect there were not as many mosquitoes in Lebanon as we had in our garden. But at dinner the previous night he had been in high spirits. The conversation had turned, as always, to politics. He and my mother had argued about Turkey and Russia, Britain’s role in the development of the Middle East conflict, the USA’s roughshod foreign policy and its effect on the world—and, of course, the Armenian Genocide, and the killingof Turkish governmental representatives by Armenians, in Australia and across the world, during the 1980s. He had intimated he knew the attackers and had materially supported them. But surely it was the beer talking. Later, when I asked my mother, she looked at me with round eyes and shrugged, uncharacteristically silent. 2002: Greek-American diva Diamanda Galas performed Dexifiones: Will and Testament at the Perth Concert Hall, her operatic work for “the forgotten victims of the Armenian and Anatolian Greek Genocide” (Galas).Her voice is so powerful it alters me.1925: My grandmother, Hovsanna, and my grandfather, Benyamin, had twice been separated in the Genocide (1915 and 1922) and twice reunited. But in early 1925, she had buried him, once a prosperous businessman, in a swamp. Armenians were not permitted burial in cemeteries. Once they had lived together in a big house with their dozen children; now there were only three with her. Maree, half-mad and 18 years old, and quiet Hovsep, aged seven,walked. Then five-year-old aunt, Arusiak—small, hungry, tired—had been carried by Hovsanna for months. They were walking from Cilicia to Jerusalem and its Armenian Quarter. Someone had said they had seen Krikor, her eldest son, there. Hovsanna was pregnant for the last time. Together the four reached Aleppo in Syria, found a Christian orphanage for girls, and Hovsanna, her pregnancy near its end, could carry Arusiak no further. She left her, promising to return. Hovsanna’s pains began in Beirut’s busy streets. She found privacy in the only place she could, under a house, crawled in. Whenever my mother spoke of her birth she described it like this: I was born under a stranger’s house like a dog.1975: My friend and I travelled to Albany by bus. After six hours we were looking down York Street, between Mount Clarence and Mount Melville, and beyond to Princess Royal Harbour, sapphire blue, and against which the town’s prosperous life—its shopfronts, hotels, cars, tourists, historic buildings—played out. It took away my breath: the deep harbour, whaling history, fishing boats. Rain and sun and scudding cloud; cliffs and swells; rocky points and the white curves of bays. It was from Albany that young Western Australian men, volunteers for World War I, embarked on ships for the Middle East, Gallipoli, sailing out of Princess Royal Harbour.1985: The Australian Government announced that Turkey had agreed to have the site of the 1915 Gallipoli landings renamed Anzac Cove. Commentators and politicians acknowledged it as historic praised Turkey for her generosity, expressed satisfaction that, 70 years on, former foes were able to embrace the shared human experience of war. We were justifiably proud of ourselves.2005: Turkey made her own requests. The entrance to Albany’s Princess Royal Harbour was renamed Ataturk Channel. A large bronze statue of Ataturk was erected on the headland overlooking the Harbour entrance. 24 April 1915: In the town of Hasan Beyli, in Cilicia, southwest Turkey, my great grandfather, a successful and respected businessman in his 50s, was asleep in his bed beside his wife. He had been born in that house, as had his father, grandfather, and all his children. His brother, my great uncle, had bought the house next door as a young man, brought his bride home to it, lived there ever since; between the two households there had been one child after another. All the cousins grew up together. My great grandfather and great uncle had gone to work that morning, despite their wives’ concerns, but had returned home early. The women had been relieved to see them. They made coffee, talked. Everyone had heard the rumours. Enemy ships were massing off the coast. 1978: The second time in Albany was my honeymoon. We had driven into the Goldfields then headed south. Such distance, such beautiful strangeness: red earth, red rocks; scant forests of low trees, thin arms outstretched; the dry, pale, flat land of Norseman. Shimmering heat. Then the big, wild coast.On our second morning—a cool, overcast day—we took our handline to a jetty. The ocean was mercury; a line of cormorants settled and bobbed. Suddenly fish bit; we reeled them in. I leaned over the jetty’s side, looked down into the deep. The water was clear and undisturbed save the twirling of a pike that looked like it had reversed gravity and was shooting straight up to me. Its scales flashed silver as itbroke the surface.1982: How could I concentrate on splicing a film with this story in my head? Besides the desk, the only other furniture in the editing suite was a whiteboard. I took a marker and divided the board into three columns for the three generations: my grandparents, Hovsanna and Benyamin; my mother; someone like me. There was a lot in the first column, some in the second, nothing in the third. I stared at the blankness of my then-young life.A teacher came in to check my editing. I tried to explain what I had been doing. “I think,” he said, stony-faced, “that should be your third film, not your first.”When he had gone I stared at the reels of film, the white board blankness, the wall. It took 25 years to find the form, the words to say it: a novel not a film, prose not pictures.2007: Ten minutes before the launch of The Edge of the World, the venue was empty. I made myself busy, told myself: what do you expect? Your research has shown, over and over, this is a story about which few know or very much care, an inconvenient, unfashionable story; it is perfectly in keeping that no-one will come. When I stepped onto the rostrum to speak, there were so many people that they crowded the doorway, spilled onto the pavement. “I want to thank my mother,” I said, “who, pretending to do her homework, listened instead to the story her mother told other Armenian survivor-women, kept that story for 50 years, and then passed it on to me.” 2013: There is a section of The Edge of the World I needed to find because it had really happened and, when it happened, I knew, there in my living room, that Boyajian and Grigorian (183) were right about the Armenian Genocide being “still operative.” But I knew even more than that: I knew that the Diaspora triggered by genocide is both rescue and weapon, the new life in this host nation both sanctuary and betrayal. I picked up a copy, paced, flicked, followed my nose, found it:On 25 April, the day after Genocide memorial-day, I am watching television. The Prime Minister stands at the ANZAC memorial in western Turkey and delivers a poetic and moving speech. My eyes fill with tears, and I moan a little and cover them. In his speech he talks about the heroism of the Turkish soldiers in their defence of their homeland, about the extent of their losses – sixty thousand men. I glance at my son. He raises his eyebrows at me. I lose count of how many times Kemal Ataturk is mentioned as the Father of Modern Turkey. I think of my grandmother and grandfather, and all my baby aunts and uncles […] I curl over like a mollusc; the ache in my chest draws me in. I feel small and very tired; I feel like I need to wash.Is it true that if we repeat something often enough and loud enough it becomes the truth? The Prime Minister quotes Kemal Ataturk: the ANZACS who died and are buried on that western coast are deemed ‘sons of Turkey’. My son turns my grandfather’s, my mother’s, my eyes to me and says, It is amazing they can be so friendly after we attacked them.I draw up my knees to my chest, lay my head and arms down. My limbs feel weak and useless. My throat hurts. I look at my Australian son with his Armenian face (325-6).24 April 1915 cont: There had been trouble all my great grandfather’s life: pogrom here, massacre there. But this land was accustomed to colonisers: the Mongols, the Persians, latterly the Ottomans. They invade, conquer, rise, fall; Armenians stay. This had been Armenian homeland for thousands of years.No-one masses ships off a coast unless planning an invasion. So be it. These Europeans could not be worse than the Ottomans. That night, were my great grandfather and great uncle awoken by the pounding at each door, or by the horses and gendarmes’ boots? They were seized, each family herded at gunpoint into its garden, and made to watch. Hanging is slow. There could be no mistakes. The gendarmes used the stoutest branches, stayed until they were sure the men weredead. This happened to hundreds of prominent Armenian men all over Turkey that night.Before dawn, the Allies made landfall.Each year those lost in the Genocide are remembered on 24 April, the day before ANZAC Day.1969: I asked my mother if she had any brothers and sisters. She froze, her hands in the sink. I stared at her, then slipped from the room.1915: The Ottoman government decreed: all Armenians were to surrender their documents and report to authorities. Able-bodied men were taken away, my grandfather among them. Women and children, the elderly and disabled, were told to prepare to walk to a safe camp where they would stay for the duration of the war. They would be accompanied by armed soldiers for their protection. They were permitted to take with them what they could carry (Bryce 1916).It began immediately, pretty young women and children first. There are so many ways to kill. Months later, a few dazed, starved survivors stumbled into the Syrian desert, were driven into lakes, or herded into churches and set alight.Most husbands and fathers were never seen again. 2003: I arrived early at my son’s school, parked in the shade, opened The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk, and began to read. Soon I was annotating furiously. Ruth Wajnryb writes of “growing up among innocent peers in an innocent landscape” and also that the notion of “freedom of speech” in Australia “seems often, to derive from that innocent landscape where reside people who have no personal scars or who have little relevant historical knowledge” (141).1984: I travelled to Vancouver, Canada, and knocked on Arusiak’s door. Afraid she would not agree to meet me, I hadn’t told her I was coming. She was welcoming and gracious. This was my first experience of extended family and I felt loved in a new and important way, a way I had read about, had observed in my friends, had longed for. One afternoon she said, “You know our mother left me in an orphanage…When I saw her again, it was too late. I didn’t know who they were, what a family was. I felt nothing.” “Yes, I know,” I replied, my heart full and hurting. The next morning, over breakfast, she quietly asked me to leave. 1926: When my mother was a baby, her 18 year-old sister, Maree, tried to drown her in the sea. My mother clearly recalled Maree’s face had been disfigured by a sword. Hovsanna, would ask my mother to forgive Maree’s constant abuse and bad behaviour, saying, “She is only half a person.”1930: Someone gave Hovsanna the money to travel to Aleppo and reclaim Arusiak, by then 10 years old. My mother was intrigued by the appearance of this sister but Arusiak was watchful and withdrawn. When she finally did speak to my then five-year-old mother, she hissed: “Why did she leave me behind and keep you?”Soon after Arusiak appeared, Maree, “only half a person,” disappeared. My mother was happy about that.1935: At 15, Arusiak found a live-in job and left. My mother was 10 years old; her brother Hovsep, who cared for her before and after school every day while their mother worked, and always had, was seventeen. She adored him. He had just finished high school and was going to study medicine. One day he fell ill. He died within a week.1980: My mother told me she never saw her mother laugh or, once Hovsep died, in anything other than black. Two or three times before Hovsep died, she saw her smile a little, and twice she heard her singing when she thought she was alone: “A very sad song,” my mother would say, “that made me cry.”1942: At seventeen, my mother had been working as a live-in nanny for three years. Every week on her only half-day off she had caught the bus home. But now Hovsanna was in hospital, so my mother had been visiting her there. One day her employer told her she must go to the hospital immediately. She ran. Hovsanna was lying alone and very still. Something wasn’t right. My mother searched the hospital corridors but found no-one. She picked up a phone. When someone answered she told them to send help. Then she ran all the way home, grabbed Arusiak’s photograph and ran all the way back. She laid it on her mother’s chest, said, “It’s all right, Mama, Arusiak’s here.”1976: My mother said she didn’t like my boyfriend; I was not to go out with him. She said she never disobeyed her own mother because she really loved her mother. I went out with my boyfriend. When I came home, my belongings were on the front porch. The door was bolted. I was seventeen.2003: I read Wajnryb who identifies violent eruptions of anger and frozen silences as some of the behaviours consistent in families with a genocidal history (126). 1970: My father had been dead over a year. My brothers and I were, all under 12, made too much noise. My mother picked up the phone: she can’t stand us, she screamed; she will call an orphanage to take us away. We begged.I fled to my room. I couldn’t sit down. I couldn’t keep still. I paced, pressed my face into a corner; shook and cried, knowing (because she had always told us so) that she didn’t make idle threats, knowing that this was what I had sometimes glimpsed on her face when she looked at us.2012: The Internet reveals images of Ataturk’s bronze statue overlooking Princess Royal Harbour. Of course, it’s outsized, imposing. The inscription on its plinth reads: "Peace at Home/ Peace in the World." He wears a suit, looks like a scholar, is moving towards us, a scroll in his hand. The look in his eyes is all intensity. Something distant has arrested him – a receding or re-emerging vision. Perhaps a murmur that builds, subsides, builds again. (Medz Yeghern, Aksor, Aghed, Genocide). And what is written on that scroll?2013: My partner suggested we go to Albany, escape Perth’s brutal summer. I tried to explain why it’s impossible. There is no memorial in Albany, or anywhere else in Western Australia, to the 1.5 million victims of the Armenian Genocide. ReferencesAkcam, Taner. “The Politics of Genocide.” Online Video Clip. YouTube. YouTube, 11 Dec. 2011. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watchv=OxAJaaw81eU&noredirect=1genocide›.Balakian, Peter. The Burning Tigress: The Armenian Genocide. London: William Heinemann, 2004.BBC. “Kemal Ataturk (1881–1938).” BBC History. 2013. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/ataturk_kemal.shtml›.Boyajian, Levon, and Haigaz Grigorian. “Psychological Sequelae of the Armenian Genocide.”The Armenian Genocide in Perspective. Ed. Richard Hovannisian. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1987. 177–85.Bryce, Viscount. The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1916.Galas, Diamanda. Program Notes. Dexifiones: Will and Testament. Perth Concert Hall, Perth, Australia. 2001.———.“Dexifiones: Will and Testament FULL Live Lisboa 2001 Part 1.” Online Video Clip. YouTube, 5 Nov. 2011. Web. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvVnYbxWArM›.Kazanjian, David, and Marc Nichanian. “Between Genocide and Catastrophe.” Loss. Eds. David Eng and David Kazanjian. Los Angeles: U of California P, 2003. 125–47.Manne, Robert. “A Turkish Tale: Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide.” The Monthly Feb. 2007. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.themonthly.com.au/turkish-tale-gallipoli-and-armenian-genocide-robert-manne-459›.Matiossian, Vartan. “When Dictionaries Are Left Unopened: How ‘Medz Yeghern’ Turned into a Terminology of Denial.” The Armenian Weekly 27 Nov. 2012. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.armenianweekly.com/2012/11/27/when-dictionaries-are-left-unopened-how-medz-yeghern-turned-into-terminology-of-denial/›.Melson, Robert. Revolution and Genocide. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.Nicholson, Brendan. “ASIO Detected Bomb Plot by Armenian Terrorists.” The Australian 2 Jan. 2012. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/in-depth/cabinet-papers/asio-detected-bomb-plot-by-armenian-terrorists/story-fnbkqb54-1226234411154›.“President Obama Issues Statement on Armenian Remembrance Day.” The Armenian Weekly 24 Apr. 2012. 5 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.armenianweekly.com/2012/04/24/president-obama-issues-statement-on-armenian-remembrance-day/›.Polain, Marcella. The Edge of the World. Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2007.Siamanto. “The Dance.” Trans. Peter Balakian and Nervart Yaghlian. Adonias Dalgas Memorial Page 5 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.terezakis.com/dalgas.html›.Stockings, Craig. “Let’s Have a Truce in the Battle of the Anzac Myth.” The Australian 25 Apr. 2012. 6 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/lets-have-a-truce-in-the-battle-of-the-anzac-myth/story-e6frgd0x-1226337486382›.Wajnryb, Ruth. The Silence: How Tragedy Shapes Talk. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2001.

All critics declare not only their judgment of the work but also their claim to the right to talk about it and judge it. In short, they take part in a struggle for the monopoly of legitimate discourse about the work of art, and consequently in the production of the value of the work of art. (Pierre Bourdieu 36). As it becomes blindingly obvious that ‘cultural production’, including the cinema, now underpins an economy every bit as brutal in its nascent state as the Industrial Revolution was for its victims 200 years ago, both critique and cinephilia seem faded and useless to me. (Meaghan Morris 700). The music’s loud, the lights are low. I’m at a party and somebody’s shouting at me. “How many films do you see every week?” “Do you really get in for free?” “So what should I see next Saturday night?” These are the questions that shape the small talk of my life. After seven years of reviewing movies you’d think I’d have ready answers and sparkling rehearsed tip-offs to scatter at the slightest quiver of interest. And yet I feel anxious when I’m asked to predict some stranger’s enjoyment – their 15-odd bucks worth of dark velvet pleasure. Who am I to say what they’ll enjoy? Who am I to judge what’s worthwhile? As editor of the film pages of The Big Issue magazine (Australian edition), I make such value judgments every day, sifting through hundreds of press releases, invitations and interview offers. I choose just three films and three DVDs to be reviewed each fortnight, and one film to form the subject of a feature article or interview. The film pages are a very small part of an independent magazine that exists to provide an income for the homeless and long-term unemployed people who sell it on the streets of Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. And no, homeless people don’t go to the movies very often but our relatively educated and affluent city-dwelling readers do. The letters page of the magazine suggests that readers’ favourite pages are the Vendor Portraits – the extraordinary and sobering photographs and life stories of the people who are out there on the streets selling the magazine. Yet the editorial policy is to maintain a certain lightness of touch amidst the serious business. Thus, the entertainment pages (music, books, film, TV and humour) have no specific social justice agenda. But if there’s a new Australian film out there that deals with the topic of homelessness, it seems imperative to at least consider the story. Rather than offering in-depth analysis of particular films and the ways I go about judging them, the following diary excerpts instead offer a sketch of the practical process of editorial decision-making. Why review this film and not that one? Why interview this actor or that film director? And how do these choices fit within the broad goals of a social justice publication? Created randomly, from a quick scan of the last twelve months, the diary is a scribbled attempt to justify, or in Bourdieu’s terms, “legitimate” the critical role I play, and to try and explain how that role can never be fully defined by an aesthetic that is divorced from social and political realities. August 2004 My editor calls me and asks if I’ve seen Tom White, the new low-budget Australian film by Alkinos Tsilimidos. I have, and I hated it. Starring Colin Friels, the film follows the journey of a middle-aged middle-class man who walks out of his life and onto the streets. It’s a grimy, frustrating film, supported by only the barest bones of narrative. I was bored and infuriated by the central character, and I know it’s the kind of under-developed story that’s keeping Australian audiences away from our own films. And yet … it’s a local film that actually dares to tackle issues of homelessness and mental illness, and it’s a story that presents a truth about homelessness that’s borne out by many of our vendors: that any one of us could, except by the grace of God or luck, find ourselves sleeping rough. My editor wants me to interview Colin Friels, who will appear on the cover of the magazine. I don’t want to touch the film, and I prefer interviewing people whose work genuinely interests and excites me. But there are other factors to be considered. The film’s exhibitor, Palace Films, is offering to hold charity screenings for our benefit, and they are regular advertising supporters of The Big Issue. My editor, a passionate and informed film lover himself, understands the quandary. We are in no way beholden to Palace, he assures me, and we can tread the fine line with this film, using it to highlight the important issues at hand, without necessarily recommending the film to audiences. It’s tricky and uncomfortable; a simple example of the way in which political and aesthetic values do not always dance so gracefully together. Nevertheless, I find a way to write the story without dishonesty. September 2004 There’s no denying the pleasure of writing (or reading) a scathing film review that leaves you in stitches of laughter over the dismembered corpse of a bad movie. But when space is limited, I’d rather choose the best three films every fortnight for review and recommendation. In an ideal world I’d attend every preview and take my pick. They’d be an excitingly diverse mix. Say, one provocative documentary (maybe Mike Moore or Errol Morris), one big-budget event movie (from the likes of Scorsese or Tarantino), and one local or art-house gem. In the real world, it’s a scramble for deadlines. Time is short and some of the best films only screen in one or two states, making it impossible for us to cover them for our national audience. Nevertheless, we do our best to keep the mix as interesting and timely as possible. For our second edition this month I review the brilliant documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky), while I send other reviewers to rate Spielberg’s The Terminal (only one and a half stars out of five), and Cate Shortland’s captivating debut Australian feature Somersault (four stars). For the DVD review page we look at a boxed set of The Adventures of Tintin, together with the strange sombre drama House of Sand and Fog (Vadim Perelman), and the gripping documentary One Day in September (Kevin MacDonald) about the terrorist attacks at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. As editor, I try to match up films with the writers who’ll best appreciate them. With a 200-word limit we know that we’re humble ‘reviewers’ rather than lofty ‘critics’, and that we can only offer the briefest subjective response to a work. Yet the goal remains to be entertaining and fair, and to try and evaluate films on their own terms. Is this particular movie an original and effective example of the schlocky teen horror thriller? If so, let’s give it the thumbs up. Is this ‘worthy’ anti-globalisation documentary just a boring preachy sermon with bad hand-held camera work? Then we say so. For our film feature article this edition, I write up an interview with Italian director Luigi Falorni, whose simple little film The Weeping Camel has been reducing audiences to tears. It’s a strange quiet film, a ‘narrative documentary’ set in the Gobi desert, about a mother camel that refuses to give milk to her newborn baby. There’s nothing political or radical about it. It’s just beautiful and interesting and odd. And that’s enough to make it worthy of attention. November 2004 When we choose to do a ‘celebrity’ cover, we find pretty people with serious minds and interesting causes. This month two gorgeous film stars, Natalie Portman and Gael Garcia Bernal find their way onto our covers. Portman’s promoting the quirky coming of age film, Garden State (Zach Braff), but the story we run focuses mainly on her status as ambassador for the Foundation of International Community Assistance (FINCA), which offers loans to deprived women to help them start their own businesses. Gabriel Garcia Bernal, the Mexican star of Walter Salle’s The Motorcycle Diaries appears on our cover and talks about his role as the young Che Guevara, the ultimate idealist and symbol of rebellion. We hope this appeals to those radicals who are prepared to stop in the street, speak to a homeless person, and shell out four dollars for an independent magazine – and also to all those shallow people who want to see more pictures of the hot-eyed Latin lad. April 2005 Three Dollars is Robert Connelly’s adaptation of Elliot Perlman’s best-selling novel about economic rationalism and its effect on an average Australian family. I loved the book, and the film isn’t bad either, despite some unevenness in the script and performances. I interview Frances O’Connor, who plays opposite David Wenham as his depressed underemployed wife. O’Connor makes a beautiful cover-girl, and talks about the seemingly universal experience of depression. We run the interview alongside one with Connelly, who knows just how to pitch his film to an audience interested in homelessness. He gives great quotes about John Howard’s heartless Australia, and the way we’ve become an economy rather than a society. It’s almost too easy. In the reviews section of the magazine we pan two other Australian films, Paul Cox’s Human Touch, and the Jimeoin comedy-vehicle The Extra. I’d rather ignore bad Australian films and focus on good films from elsewhere, or big-budget stinkers that need to be brought down a peg. But I’d lined up reviews for these local ones, expecting them to be good, and so we run with the negativity. Some films are practically critic-proof, but small niche films, like most Australian titles, aren’t among these Teflon giants. As Joel Pearlman, Managing Director of Roadshow Films has said, “There are certain types of films that are somewhat critic-proof. They’ve either got a built-in audience, are part of a successful franchise, like The Matrix or Bond films, or have a popular star. It’s films without the multimillion-dollar ad campaigns and the big names where critics are far more influential” ( Pearlman in Bolles 19). Sometimes I’m glad that I’m just a small fish in the film critic pond, and that my bad reviews can’t really destroy someone’s livelihood. It’s well known that a caning from reviewers like David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz (ABC, At the Movies), or the Melbourne Age’s Jim Schembri can practically destroy the prospects of a small local film, and I’m not sure I have the bravery or conviction of the value of my own tastes to bear such responsibility. Admittedly, that’s just gutless tender-heartedness for, as reviewers, our responsibility is to the audience not to the filmmaker. But when you’ve met with cash-strapped filmmakers, and heard their stories and their struggles, it’s sometimes hard to put personal compassion aside and see the film as the punter will. But you must. August 2005 It’s a busy time with the Melbourne International Film Festival just finishing up. Hordes of film directors accompany their films to the festival, promoting them here ahead of a later national release schedule, and making themselves available for rare face-to face interviews. This year I find a bunch of goodies that seem like they were tailor-made for our readership. There are winning local films like Sarah Watt’s life-affirming debut Look Both Ways; and Rowan Woods’ gritty addiction-drama Little Fish. There’s my personal favourite, Bahman Ghobadi’s stunning and devastating Kurdish/Iranian feature Turtles Can Fly; and Avi Lewis’s inspiring documentary The Take, about Argentine factory workers who unite to revive their bankrupt workplaces. It’s when I see films like this, and get to talk to the people who bring them into existence, that I realize how much I value writing about films for a publication that doesn’t exist just to make a profit or fill space between advertisements. As the great American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has eloquently argued, most of the worldwide media coverage concerning film is merely a variation on the ‘corporate stories’ that film studios feed us as part of their advertising. To be able to provide some small resistance to that juggernaut is a wonderful privilege. I love to be lost in the dark, studying films frame by frame, and with reference only to some magical internal universe of ‘cinema’ and its endless references to itself. But as the real world outside falls apart, such airless cinephilia feels just plain wrong. As a writer whose subject is films, what I’m compelled to do is to come out of the cinema and try to use my words to convey the best of what I’ve seen to my friends and readers, pointing them towards small treasures they may have overlooked amidst the hype. So maybe I’m not a ‘pure’ critic, and maybe there’s no shame in that. The films I’ll gravitate towards share an almost indefinable quality – to use Jauss’s phrase, they reconstruct and expand my “horizon of expectation” (28). Sometimes these films are overtly committed to a cause, but often they’re just beautiful and strange and fresh. Always they expand me, open me, make me feel that there’s more to the world than expected, and make me want more too – more information, more freedom, more compassion, more equality, more beauty. And, after all these years in the dark, I still want more films like that. Endnotes As of August 2005, the role of DVD editor of The Big Issue has been filled by Anthony Morris. According the latest Morgan Poll, readers of The Big Issue are likely to be young (18-39), urban, educated, and affluent professionals. Current readership is estimated at 144,000 fortnightly and growing. References Bolles, Scott. “The Critics.” Sunday Life. The Age 10 Jul. 2005: 19. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. Randal Johnson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993. Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Trans. Timothy Bahti. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1982. Morris, Meaghan. “On Going to Bed Early: Once Upon a Time in America.” Meanjin 4 (1998): 700. Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Junket Bonds.” Chicago Reader Movie Review (2000). 2 Sept. 2005 http://www.chicagoreader.com/movies/archives/2000/1000/00117.html>. The Big Issue Australia. http://www.bigissue.org.au/> 10 Oct. 2005. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Siemienowicz, Rochelle. "Diary of a Film Reviewer: Intimate Reflections on Writing about the Screen for a Popular Audience." M/C Journal 8.5 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/01-siemienowicz.php>. APA Style Siemienowicz, R. (Oct. 2005) "Diary of a Film Reviewer: Intimate Reflections on Writing about the Screen for a Popular Audience," M/C Journal, 8(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/01-siemienowicz.php>.

IntroductionCirque du Soleil, the largest live entertainment company in the world, has eight standing shows in Las Vegas alone, KÀ, Love, Mystère, Zumanity, Believe, Michael Jackson ONE, Zarkana and O. Close to 150 million spectators have seen Cirque du Soleil shows since the company’s beginnings in 1984 and it is estimated that over 15 million spectators will see a Cirque du Soleil show in 2014 (Cirque du Soleil). The Cirque du Soleil concept of circus as a form of theatre, with simple, often archetypal, narrative arcs conveyed without words, virtuoso physicality with the circus artists presented as characters in a fictional world, cutting-edge lighting and visuals, extraordinary innovative staging, and the uptake of new technology for special effects can all be linked back to an early form of circus which is sometimes termed illegitimate circus. In the late 18th century and early 19th century, in the age of Romanticism, only two theatres in London, Covent Garden and Drury Lane, plus the summer theatre in the Haymarket, had royal patents allowing them to produce plays or text-based productions, and these were considered legitimate theatres. (These theatres retained this monopoly until the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843; Saxon 301.) Other circuses and theatres such as Astley’s Amphitheatre, which were precluded from performing text-based works by the terms of their licenses, have been termed illegitimate (Moody 1). Perversely, the effect of licensing venues in this way, instead of having the desired effect of enshrining some particular forms of expression and “casting all others beyond the cultural pale,” served instead to help to cultivate a different kind of theatrical landscape, “a theatrical terrain with a new, rich and varied dramatic ecology” (Reed 255). A fundamental change to the theatrical culture of London took place, and pivotal to “that transformation was the emergence of an illegitimate theatrical culture” (Moody 1) with circus at its heart. An innovative and different form of performance, a theatre of the body, featuring spectacle and athleticism emerged, with “a sensuous, spectacular aesthetic largely wordless except for the lyrics of songs” (Bratton 117).This writing sets out to explore some of the strong parallels between the aesthetic that emerged in this early illegitimate circus and the aesthetic of the Montreal-based, multi-billion dollar entertainment empire of Cirque du Soleil. Although it is not fighting against legal restrictions and can in no way be considered illegitimate, the circus of Cirque du Soleil can be seen to be the descendant of the early circus entrepreneurs and their illegitimate aesthetic which arose out of the desire to find ways to continue to attract audiences to their shows in spite of the restrictions of the licenses granted to them. BackgroundCircus has served as an inspiration for many innovatory theatre productions including Peter Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970) and Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers (1972) as well as the earlier experiments of Meyerhold, Eisenstein, Mayakovsky and other Soviet directors of the 1920’s (Saxon 299). A. H. Saxon points out, however, that the relationship between circus and theatre is a long-standing one that begins in the late 18th century and the early 19th century, when circus itself was theatre (Saxon 299).Modern circus was founded in London in 1768 by an ex-cavalryman and his wife, Philip and Patty Astley, and consisted of spectacular stunt horse riding taking place in a ring, with acts from traditional fairs such as juggling, acrobatics, clowning and wire-walking inserted to cover the changeovers between riding acts. From the very first shows entry was by paid ticket only and the early history of circus was driven by innovative, risk-taking entrepreneurs such as Philip Astley, who indeed built so many new amphitheatres for his productions that he became known as Amphi-Philip (Jando). After years of legal tussles with the authorities concerning the legal status of this new entertainment, a limited license was finally granted in 1783 for Astley’s Amphitheatre. This license precluded the performing of plays, anything text-based, or anything which had a script that resembled a play. Instead the annual license granted allowed only for “public dancing and music” and “other public entertainments of like kind” (St. Leon 9).Corporeal Dramaturgy and TextIn the face of the ban on scripted text, illegitimate circus turned to the human body and privileged it as a means of dramatic expression. A resultant dramaturgy focusing on the expressive capabilities of the performers’ bodies emerged. “The primacy of rhetoric and the spoken word in legitimate drama gave way […] to a corporeal dramaturgy which privileged the galvanic, affective capacity of the human body as a vehicle of dramatic expression” (Moody 83). Moody proposes that the “iconography of illegitimacy participated in a broader cultural and scientific transformation in which the human body began to be understood as an eloquent compendium of visible signs” (83). Even though the company has the use of text and dramatic dialogue freely available to it, Cirque du Soleil, shares this investment in the bodies of the performers and their “galvanic, affective capacity” (83) to communicate with the audience directly without the use of a scripted text, and this remains a constant between the two forms of circus. Robert Lepage, the director of two Cirque du Soleil shows, KÀ (2004) and more recently Totem (2010), speaking about KÀ in 2004, said, “We wanted it to be an epic story told not with the use of words, but with the universal language of body movement” (Lepage cited in Fink).In accordance with David Graver’s system of classifying performers’ bodies, Cirque du Soleil’s productions most usually present performers’ ‘character bodies’ in which the performers are understood by spectators to be playing fictional roles or characters (Hurley n/p) and this was also the case with illegitimate circus which right from its very beginnings presented its performers within narratives in which the performers are understood to be playing characters. In Cirque du Soleil’s shows, as with illegitimate circus, this presentation of the performers’ character bodies is interspersed with acts “that emphasize the extraordinary training and physical skill of the performers, that is which draw attention to the ‘performer body’ but always within the context of an overall narrative” (Fricker n.p.).Insertion of Vital TextAfter audience feedback, text was eventually added into KÀ (2004) in the form of a pre-recorded prologue inserted to enable people to follow the narrative arc, and in the show Wintuk (2007) there are tales that are sung by Jim Comcoran (Leroux 126). Interestingly early illegitimate circus creators, in their efforts to circumvent the ban on using dramatic dialogue, often inserted text into their performances in similar ways to the methods Cirque du Soleil chose for KÀ and Wintuk. Illegitimate circus included dramatic recitatives accompanied by music to facilitate the following of the storyline (Moody 28) in the same way that Cirque du Soleil inserted a pre-recorded prologue to KÀ to enable audience members to understand the narrative. Performers in illegitimate circus often conveyed essential information to the audience as lyrics of songs (Bratton 117) in the same way that Jim Comcoran does in Wintuk. Dramaturgical StructuresAstley from his very first circus show in 1768 began to set his equestrian stunts within a narrative. Billy Button’s Ride to Brentford (1768), showed a tailor, a novice rider, mounting backwards, losing his belongings and being thrown off the horse when it bucks. The act ends with the tailor being chased around the ring by his horse (Schlicke 161). Early circus innovators, searching for dramaturgy for their shows drew on contemporary warfare, creating vivid physical enactments of contemporary battles. They also created a new dramatic form known as Hippodramas (literally ‘horse dramas’ from hippos the Attic Greek for Horse), a hybridization of melodrama and circus featuring the trick riding skills of the early circus pioneers. The narrative arcs chosen were often archetypal or sourced from well-known contemporary books or poems. As Moody writes, at the heart of many of these shows “lay an archetypal narrative of the villainous usurper finally defeated” (Moody 30).One of the first hippodramas, The Blood Red Knight, opened at Astley’s Amphitheatre in 1810.Presented in dumbshow, and interspersed with grand chivalric processions, the show featured Alphonso’s rescue of his wife Isabella from her imprisonment and forced marriage to the evil knight Sir Rowland and concluded with the spectacular, fiery destruction of the castle and Sir Rowland’s death. (Moody 69)Another later hippodrama, The Spectre Monarch and his Phantom Steed, or the Genii Horseman of the Air (1830) was set in China where the rightful prince was ousted by a Tartar usurper who entered into a pact with the Spectre Monarch and received,a magic ring, by aid of which his unlawful desires were instantly gratified. Virtue, predictably won out in the end, and the discomforted villain, in a final settling of accounts with his dread master was borne off through the air in a car of fire pursued by Daemon Horsemen above THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA. (Saxon 303)Karen Fricker writes of early Cirque du Soleil shows that “while plot is doubtless too strong a word, each of Cirque’s recent shows has a distinct concept or theme, that is urbanity for Saltimbanco; nomadism in Varekai (2002) and humanity’s clownish spirit for Corteo (2005), and tend to follow the same very basic storyline, which is not narrated in words but suggested by the staging that connects the individual acts” (Fricker n/p). Leroux describes the early Cirque du Soleil shows as following a “proverbial and well-worn ‘collective transformation trope’” (Leroux 122) whilst Peta Tait points out that the narrative arc of Cirque du Soleil “ might be summarized as an innocent protagonist, often female, helped by an older identity, seemingly male, to face a challenging journey or search for identity; more generally, old versus young” (Tait 128). However Leroux discerns an increasing interest in narrative devices such as action and plot in Cirque du Soleil’s Las Vegas productions (Leroux 122). Fricker points out that “with KÀ, what Cirque sought – and indeed found in Lepage’s staging – was to push this storytelling tendency further into full-fledged plot and character” (Fricker n/p). Telling a story without words, apart from the inserted prologue, means that the narrative arc of Kà is, however, very simple. A young prince and princess, twins in a mythical Far Eastern kingdom, are separated when a ceremonial occasion is interrupted by an attack by a tribe of enemy warriors. A variety of adventures follow, most involving perilous escapes from bad guys with flaming arrows and fierce-looking body tattoos. After many trials, a happy reunion arrives. (Isherwood)This increasing emphasis on developing a plot and a narrative arc positions Cirque as moving closer in dramaturgical aesthetic to illegitimate circus.Visual TechnologiesTo increase the visual excitement of its shows and compensate for the absence of spoken dialogue, illegitimate circus in the late 18th and early 19th century drew on contemporaneous and emerging visual technologies. Some of the new visual technologies that Astley’s used have been termed pre-cinematic, including the panorama (or diorama as it is sometimes called) and “the phantasmagoria and other visual machines… [which] expanded the means through which an audience could be addressed” (O’Quinn, Governance 312). The panorama or diorama ran in the same way that a film runs in an analogue camera, rolling between vertical rollers on either side of the stage. In Astley’s production The Siege and Storming of Seringapatam (1800) he used another effect almost equivalent to a modern day camera zoom-in by showing scenic back drops which, as they moved through time, progressively moved geographically closer to the battle. This meant that “the increasing enlargement of scale-each successive scene has a smaller geographic space-has a telescopic event. Although the size of the performance space remains constant, the spatial parameters of the spectacle become increasingly magnified” (O’Quinn, Governance 345). In KÀ, Robert Lepage experiments with “cinematographic stage storytelling on a very grand scale” (Fricker n.p.). A KÀ press release (2005) from Cirque du Soleil describes the show “as a cinematic journey of aerial adventure” (Cirque du Soleil). Cirque du Soleil worked with ground-breaking visual technologies in KÀ, developing an interactive projected set. This involves the performers controlling what happens to the projected environment in real time, with the projected scenery responding to their movements. The performers’ movements are tracked by an infra-red sensitive camera above the stage, and by computer software written by Interactive Production Designer Olger Förterer. “In essence, what we have is an intelligent set,” says Förterer. “And everything the audience sees is created by the computer” (Cirque du Soleil).Contemporary Technology Cutting edge technologies, many of which came directly from contemporaneous warfare, were introduced into the illegitimate circus performance space by Astley and his competitors. These included explosions using redfire, a new military explosive that combined “strontia, shellac and chlorate of potash, [which] produced […] spectacular flame effects” (Moody 28). Redfire was used for ‘blow-ups,’ the spectacular explosions often occurring at the end of the performance when the villain’s castle or hideout was destroyed. Cirque du Soleil is also drawing on contemporary military technology for performance projects. Sparked: A Live interaction between Humans and Quadcopters (2014) is a recent short film released by Cirque du Soleil, which features the theatrical use of drones. The new collaboration between Cirque du Soleil, ETH Zurich and Verity Studios uses 10 quadcopters disguised as animated lampshades which take to the air, “carrying out the kinds of complex synchronized dance manoeuvres we usually see from the circus' famed acrobats” (Huffington Post). This shows, as with early illegitimate circus, the quick theatrical uptake of contemporary technology originally developed for use in warfare.Innovative StagingArrighi writes that the performance space that Astley developed was a “completely new theatrical configuration that had not been seen in Western culture before… [and] included a circular ring (primarily for equestrian performance) and a raised theatre stage (for pantomime and burletta)” (177) joined together by ramps that were large enough and strong enough to allow horses to be ridden over them during performances. The stage at Astley’s Amphitheatre was said to be the largest in Europe measuring over 130 feet across. A proscenium arch was installed in 1818 which could be adjusted in full view of the audience with the stage opening changing anywhere in size from forty to sixty feet (Saxon 300). The staging evolved so that it had the capacity to be multi-level, involving “immense [moveable] platforms or floors, rising above each other, and extending the whole width of the stage” (Meisel 214). The ability to transform the stage by the use of draped and masked platforms which could be moved mechanically, proved central to the creation of the “new hybrid genre of swashbuckling melodramas on horseback, or ‘hippodramas’” (Kwint, Leisure 46). Foot soldiers and mounted cavalry would fight their way across the elaborate sets and the production would culminate with a big finale that usually featured a burning castle (Kwint, Legitimization 95). Cirque du Soleil’s investment in high-tech staging can be clearly seen in KÀ. Mark Swed writes that KÀ is, “the most lavish production in the history of Western theatre. It is surely the most technologically advanced” (Swed). With a production budget of $165 million (Swed), theatre designer Michael Fisher has replaced the conventional stage floor with two huge moveable performance platforms and five smaller platforms that appear to float above a gigantic pit descending 51 feet below floor level. One of the larger platforms is a tatami floor that moves backwards and forwards, the other platform is described by the New York Times as being the most thrilling performer in the show.The most consistently thrilling performer, perhaps appropriately, isn't even human: It's the giant slab of machinery that serves as one of the two stages designed by Mark Fisher. Here Mr. Lepage's ability to use a single emblem or image for a variety of dramatic purposes is magnified to epic proportions. Rising and falling with amazing speed and ease, spinning and tilting to a full vertical position, this huge, hydraulically powered game board is a sandy beach in one segment, a sheer cliff wall in another and a battleground, viewed from above, for the evening's exuberantly cinematic climax. (Isherwood)In the climax a vertical battle is fought by aerialists fighting up and down the surface of the sand stone cliff with defeated fighters portrayed as tumbling down the surface of the cliff into the depths of the pit below. Cirque du Soleil’s production entitled O, which phonetically is the French word eau meaning water, is a collaboration with director Franco Dragone that has been running at Las Vegas’ Bellagio Hotel since 1998. O has grossed over a billion dollars since it opened in 1998 (Sylt and Reid). It is an aquatic circus or an aquadrama. In 1804, Charles Dibdin, one of Astley’s rivals, taking advantage of the nearby New River, “added to the accoutrements of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre a tank three feet deep, ninety feet long and as wide as twenty-four feet which could be filled with water from the New River” (Hays and Nickolopoulou 171) Sadler’s Wells presented aquadramas depicting many reconstructions of famous naval battles. One of the first of these was The Siege of Gibraltar (1804) that used “117 ships designed by the Woolwich Dockyard shipwrights and capable of firing their guns” (Hays and Nickolopoulou 5). To represent the drowning Spanish sailors saved by the British, “Dibdin used children, ‘who were seen swimming and affecting to struggle with the waves’”(5).O (1998) is the first Cirque production to be performed in a proscenium arch theatre, with the pool installed behind the proscenium arch. “To light the water in the pool, a majority of the front lighting comes from a subterranean light tunnel (at the same level as the pool) which has eleven 4" thick Plexiglas windows that open along the downstage perimeter of the pool” (Lampert-Greaux). Accompanied by a live orchestra, performers dive into the 53 x 90 foot pool from on high, they swim underwater lit by lights installed in the subterranean light tunnel and they also perform on perforated platforms that rise up out of the water and turn the pool into a solid stage floor. In many respects, Cirque du Soleil can be seen to be the inheritors of the spectacular illegitimate circus of the 18th and 19th Century. The inheritance can be seen in Cirque du Soleil’s entrepreneurial daring, the corporeal dramaturgy privileging the affective power of the body over the use of words, in the performers presented primarily as character bodies, and in the delivering of essential text either as a prologue or as lyrics to songs. It can also be seen in Cirque du Soleil’s innovative staging design, the uptake of military based technology and the experimentation with cutting edge visual effects. Although re-invigorating the tradition and creating spectacular shows that in many respects are entirely of the moment, Cirque du Soleil’s aesthetic roots can be clearly seen to draw deeply on the inheritance of illegitimate circus.ReferencesBratton, Jacky. “Romantic Melodrama.” The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre 1730-1830. Eds. Jane Moody and Daniel O'Quinn. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2007. 115-27. Bratton, Jacky. “What Is a Play? Drama and the Victorian Circus in the Performing Century.” Nineteenth-Century Theatre’s History. Eds. Tracey C. Davis and Peter Holland. Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 250-62.Cavendish, Richard. “Death of Madame Tussaud.” History Today 50.4 (2000). 15 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/death-madame-tussaud›.Cirque du Soleil. 2014. 10 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.cirquedusoleil.com/en/home/about-us/at-a-glance.aspx›.Davis, Janet M. The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Hays, Michael, and Anastasia Nikolopoulou. Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999.House of Dancing Water. 2014. 17 Aug. 2014 ‹http://thehouseofdancingwater.com/en/›.Isherwood, Charles. “Fire, Acrobatics and Most of All Hydraulics.” New York Times 5 Feb. 2005. 12 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/05/theater/reviews/05cirq.html?_r=0›.Fink, Jerry. “Cirque du Soleil Spares No Cost with Kà.” Las Vegas Sun 2004. 17 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2004/sep/16/cirque-du-soleil-spares-no-cost-with-ka/›.Fricker, Karen. “Le Goût du Risque: Kà de Robert Lepage et du Cirque du Soleil.” (“Risky Business: Robert Lepage and the Cirque du Soleil’s Kà.”) L’Annuaire théâtral 45 (2010) 45-68. Trans. Isabelle Savoie. (Original English Version not paginated.)Hurley, Erin. "Les Corps Multiples du Cirque du Soleil." Globe: Revue Internationale d’Études Quebecoise. Les Arts de la Scene au Quebec, 11.2 (2008). (Original English n.p.)Jacob, Pascal. The Circus Artist Today: Analysis of the Key Competences. Brussels: FEDEC: European Federation of Professional Circus Schools, 2008. 5 June 2010 ‹http://sideshow-circusmagazine.com/research/downloads/circus-artist-today-analysis-key-competencies›.Jando, Dominique. “Philip Astley, Circus Owner, Equestrian.” Circopedia. 15 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.circopedia.org/Philip_Astley›.Kwint, Marius. “The Legitimization of Circus in Late Georgian England.” Past and Present 174 (2002): 72-115.---. “The Circus and Nature in Late Georgian England.” Histories of Leisure. Ed. Rudy Koshar. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2002. 45-60. ---. “The Theatre of War.” History Today 53.6 (2003). 28 Mar. 2012 ‹http://www.historytoday.com/marius-kwint/theatre-war›.Lampert-Greaux, Ellen. “The Wizardry of O: Cirque du Soleil Takes the Plunge into an Underwater World.” livedesignonline 1999. 17 Aug. 2014 ‹http://livedesignonline.com/mag/wizardry-o-cirque-du-soleil-takes-plunge-underwater-world›.Lavers, Katie. “Sighting Circus: Perceptions of Circus Phenomena Investigated through Diverse Bodies.” Doctoral Thesis. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2014. Leroux, Patrick Louis. “The Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas: An American Striptease.” Revista Mexicana de Estudio Canadiens (Nueva Época) 16 (2008): 121-126.Mazza, Ed. “Cirque du Soleil’s Drone Video ‘Sparked’ is Pure Magic.” Huffington Post 22 Sep. 2014. 23 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/22/cirque-du-soleil-sparked-drone-video_n_5865668.html›.Meisel, Martin. 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Circus: The Australian Story. Melbourne: Melbourne Books, 2011. Stoddart, Helen. Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Swed, Mark. “Epic, Extravagant: In Ka the Acrobatics and Dazzling Special Effects Are Stunning and Enchanting.” Los Angeles Times 5 Feb. 2005. 22 Aug. 2014 ‹http://articles.latimes.com/2005/feb/05/entertainment/et-ka5›.Sylt, Cristian, and Caroline Reid. “Cirque du Soleil Swings to $1bn Revenue as It Mulls Shows at O2.” The Independent Oct. 2011. 14 Sep. 2014 ‹http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/cirque-du-soleil-swings-to-1bn-revenue-as-it-mulls-shows-at-o2-2191850.html›.Tait, Peta. Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance. London: Routledge, 2005.Terdiman, Daniel. “Flying Lampshades: Cirque du Soleil Plays with Drones.” CNet 2014. 22 Sept 2014 ‹http://www.cnet.com/news/flying-lampshades-the-cirque-du-soleil-plays-with-drones/›.Venables, Michael. “The Technology Behind the Las Vegas Magic of Cirque du Soleil.” Forbes Magazine 30 Aug. 2013. 16 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelvenables/2013/08/30/technology-behind-the-magical-universe-of-cirque-du-soleil-part-one/›.

Human history has witnessed varied surveillance and counter-surveillance activities from time immemorial. Human beings could not surveille others effectively and accurately without the technology of their era. Technology is a tool that can empower both people and governments. The outcomes are different based on the users’ intentions and aims. 2,500 years ago, Sun Tzu noted that ‘If you know both yourself and your enemy, you can win numerous (literally, "a hundred") battles without jeopardy’. His words still ring true. To be a good surveiller and counter-surveiller it is essential to know both sides, and in order to be good at these activities access to technology is vital. There is no doubt that knowledge is power, and without technology to access the information, it is impossible to be powerful. As we become more expert at technology, we will learn what makes surveillance and counter-surveillance more effective, and will be more powerful.“Surveillance” is one of the most important aspects of living in the convergent media environment. This essay illustrates government surveillance and counter-surveillance during the Iranian Green Movement (2009) on social and mobile media. The Green Movement refers to a non-violent movement that arose after the disputed presidential election on June 2009. After that Iran was facing its most serious political crisis since the 1979 revolution. Claims of vote fraud triggered massive street protests. Many took to the streets with “Green” signs, chanting slogans such as ‘the government lied’, and ‘where is my vote?’ There is no doubt that social and mobile media has played an important role in Iran’s contemporary politics. According to Internet World Stats (IWS) Internet users in 2009 account for approximately 48.5 per cent of the population of Iran. In 2009, Iran had 30.2 million mobile phone users (Freedom House), and 72 cellular subscriptions for every 100 people (World Bank). Today, while Iran has the 19th-largest population in the world, its blogosphere holds the third spot in terms of number of users, just behind the United States and China (Beth Elson et al.). In this essay the use of social and mobile media (technology) is not debated, but the extent of this use, and who, why and how it is used, is clearly scrutinised.Visibility and Surveillance There have been different kinds of surveillance for a very long time. However, all types of surveillance are based on the notion of “visibility”. Previous studies show that visibility is not a new term (Foucault Discipline). The new things in the new era, are its scale, scope and complicated ways to watch others without being watched, which are not limited to a specific time, space and group, and are completely different from previous instruments for watching (Andrejevic). As Meikle and Young (146) have mentioned ‘networked digital media bring with them a new kind of visibility’, based on different kinds of technology. Internet surveillance has important implications in politics to control, protect, and influence (Marx Ethics; Castells; Fuchs Critique). Surveillance has been improved during its long history, and evolved from very simple spying and watching to complicated methods of “iSpy” (Andrejevic). To understand the importance of visibility and its relationship with surveillance, it is essential to study visibility in conjunction with the notion of “panopticon” and its contradictory functions. Foucault uses Bentham's notion of panopticon that carries within itself visibility and transparency to control others. “Gaze” is a central term in Bentham’s view. ‘Bentham thinks of a visibility organised entirely around a dominating, overseeing gaze’ (Foucault Eye). Moreover, Thomson (Visibility 11) notes that we are living in the age of ‘normalizing the power of the gaze’ and it is clear that the influential gaze is based on powerful means to see others.Lyon (Surveillance 2) explains that ‘surveillance is any collection and processing of personal data, whether identifiable or not, for the purpose of influencing or managing those whose data have been granted…’. He mentions that today the most important means of surveillance reside in computer power which allows collected data to be sorted, matched, retrieved, processed, marketed and circulated.Nowadays, the Internet has become ubiquitous in many parts of the world. So, the changes in people’s interactions have influenced their lives. Fuchs (Introduction 15) argues that ‘information technology enables surveillance at a distance…in real time over networks at high transmission speed’. Therefore, visibility touches different aspects of people’s lives and living in a “glasshouse” has caused a lot of fear and anxiety about privacy.Iran’s Green Movement is one of many cases for studying surveillance and counter-surveillance technologies in social and mobile media. Government Surveillance on Social and Mobile Media in Iran, 2009 In 2009 the Iranian government controlled technology that allowed them to monitor, track, and limit access to the Internet, social media and mobiles communication, which has resulted in the surveillance of Green Movement’s activists. The Iranian government had improved its technical capabilities to monitor the people’s behavior on the Internet long before the 2009 election. The election led to an increase in online surveillance. Using social media the Iranian government became even more powerful than it was before the election. Social media was a significant factor in strengthening the government’s power. In the months after the election the virtual atmosphere became considerably more repressive. The intensified filtering of the Internet and implementation of more advanced surveillance systems strengthened the government’s position after the election. The Open Net Initiative revealed that the Internet censorship system in Iran is one of the most comprehensive and sophisticated censorship systems in the world. It emphasized that ‘Advances in domestic technical capacity have contributed to the implementation of a centralized filtering strategy and a reduced reliance on Western technologies’.On the other hand, the authorities attempted to block all access to political blogs (Jaras), either through cyber-security methods or through threats (Tusa). The Centre for Investigating Organized Cyber Crimes, which was founded in 2007 partly ‘to investigate and confront social and economic offenses on the Internet’ (Cyber Police), became increasingly important over the course of 2009 as the government combated the opposition’s online activities (Beth Elson et al. 16). Training of "senior Internet lieutenants" to confront Iran's "virtual enemies online" was another attempt that the Intelligence minister announced following the protests (Iran Media Program).In 2009 the Iranian government enacted the Computer Crime Law (Jaras). According to this law the Committee in Charge of Determining Unauthorized Websites is legally empowered to identify sites that carry forbidden content and report that information to TCI and other major ISPs for blocking (Freedom House). In the late fall of 2009, the government started sending threatening and warning text messages to protesters about their presence in the protests (BBC). Attacking, blocking, hacking and hijacking of the domain names of some opposition websites such as Jaras and Kaleme besides a number of non-Iranian sites such as Twitter were among the other attempts of the Iranian Cyber Army (Jaras).It is also said that the police and security forces arrested dissidents identified through photos and videos posted on the social media that many imagined had empowered them. Furthermore, the online photos of the active protesters were posted on different websites, asking people to identify them (Valizadeh).In late June 2009 the Iranian government was intentionally permitting Internet traffic to and from social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter so that it could use a sophisticated practice called Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) to collect information about users. It was reportedly also applying the same technology to monitor mobile phone communications (Beth Elson et al. 15).On the other hand, to cut communication between Iranians inside and outside the country, Iran slowed down the Internet dramatically (Jaras). Iran also blocked access to Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Twitter and many blogs before, during and after the protests. Moreover, in 2009, text message services were shut down for over 40 days, and mobile phone subscribers could not send or receive text messages regardless of their mobile carriers. Subsequently it was disrupted on a temporary basis immediately before and during key protests days.It was later discovered that the Nokia Siemens Network provided the government with surveillance technologies (Wagner; Iran Media Program). The Iranian government built a complicated system that enabled it to monitor, track and intercept what was said on mobile phones. Nokia Siemens Network confirmed it supplied Iran with the technology needed to monitor, control, and read local telephone calls [...] The product allowed authorities to monitor any communications across a network, including voice calls, text messaging, instant messages, and web traffic (Cellan-Jones). Media sources also reported that two Chinese companies, Huawei and ZTE, provided surveillance technologies to the government. The Nic Payamak and Saman Payamak websites, that provide mass text messaging services, also reported that operator Hamrah Aval commonly blocked texts with words such as meeting, location, rally, gathering, election and parliament (Iran Media Program). Visibility and Counter-Surveillance The panopticon is not limited to the watchers. Similarly, new kinds of panopticon and visibility are not confined to government surveillance. Foucault points out that ‘the seeing machine was once a sort of dark room into which individuals spied; it has become a transparent building in which the exercise of power may be supervised by society as a whole’ (Discipline 207). What is important is Foucault's recognition that transparency, not only of those who are being observed but also of those who are observing, is central to the notion of the panopticon (Allen) and ‘any member of society will have the right to come and see with his own eyes how schools, hospitals, factories, and prisons function’ (Foucault, Discipline 207). Counter-surveillance is the process of detecting and mitigating hostile surveillance (Burton). Therefore, while the Internet is a surveillance instrument that enables governments to watch people, it also improves the capacity to counter-surveille, and draws public attention to governments’ injustice. As Castells (185) notes the Internet could be used by citizens to watch their government as an instrument of control, information, participation, and even decision-making, from the bottom up.With regards to the role of citizens in counter-surveillance we can draw on Jay Rosen’s view of Internet users as ‘the people formerly known as the audience’. In counter-surveillance it can be said that passive citizens (formerly the audience) have turned into active citizens. And this change was becoming impossible without mobile and social media platforms. These new techniques and technologies have empowered people and given them the opportunity to have new identities. When Thompson wrote ‘the exercise of power in modern societies remains in many ways shrouded in secrecy and hidden from the public gaze’ (Media 125), perhaps he could not imagine that one day people can gaze at the politicians, security forces and the police through the use of the Internet and mobile devices.Furthermore, while access to mobile media allows people to hold authorities accountable for their uses and abuses of power (Breen 183), social media can be used as a means of representation, organization of collective action, mobilization, and drawing attention to police brutality and reasons for political action (Gerbaudo).There is no doubt that having creativity and using alternative platforms are important aspects in counter-surveillance. For example, images of Lt. Pike “Pepper Spray Cop” from the University of California became the symbol of the senselessness of police brutality during the Occupy Movement (Shaw). Iranians’ Counter-Surveillance on Social and Mobile Media, 2009 Iran’s Green movement (2009) triggered a lot of discussions about the role of technology in social movements. In this regard, there are two notable attitudes about the role of technology: techno-optimistic (Shriky and Castells) and techno-pessimistic (Morozov and Gladwell) views should be taken into account. While techno-optimists overrated the role of social media, techno-pessimists underestimated its role. However, there is no doubt that technology has played a great role as a counter-surveillance tool amongst Iranian people in Iran’s contemporary politics.Apart from the academic discussions between techno-optimists and techno-pessimists, there have been numerous debates about the role of new technologies in Iran during the Green Movement. This subject has received interest from different corners of the world, including Western countries, Iranian authorities, opposition groups, and also some NGOs. However, its role as a means of counter-surveillance has not received adequate attention.As the tools of counter-surveillance are more or less the tools of surveillance, protesters learned from the government to use the same techniques to challenge authority on social media.Establishing new websites (such as JARAS, RASA, Kalemeh, and Iran green voice) or strengthening some previous ones (such as Saham, Emrooz, Norooz), also activating different platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube accounts to broadcast the voice of the Iranian Green Movement and neutralize the government’s propaganda were the most important ways to empower supporters of Iran’s Green Movement in counter-surveillance.‘Reporters Without Borders issued a statement, saying that ‘the new media, and particularly social networks, have given populations collaborative tools with which they can change the social order’. It is also mentioned that despite efforts by the Iranian government to prevent any reporting of the protests and due to considerable pressure placed on foreign journalists inside Iran, social media played a significant role in sending the messages and images of the movement to the outside world (Axworthy). However, at that moment, many thought that Twitter performed a liberating role for Iranian dissenters. For example, Western media heralded the Green Movement in Iran as a “Twitter revolution” fuelled by information and communication technologies (ICTs) and social media tools (Carrieri et al. 4). “The Revolution Will Be Twittered” was the first in a series of blog posts published by Andrew Sullivan a few hours after the news of the protests was released.According to the researcher’s observation the numbers of Twitter users inside Iran who tweeted was very limited in 2009 and social media was most useful in the dissemination of information, especially from those inside Iran to outsiders. Mobile phones were mostly influential as an instrument firstly used for producing contents (images and videos) and secondly for the organisation of protests. There were many photos and videos that were filmed by very simple mobile cell phones, uploaded by ordinary people onto YouTube and other platforms. The links were shared many times on Twitter and Facebook and released by mainstream media. The most frequently circulated story from the Iranian protests was a video of Neda Agha-Sultan. Her final moments were captured by some bystanders with mobile phone cameras and rapidly spread across the global media and the Internet. It showed that the camera-phone had provided citizens with a powerful means, allowing for the creation and instant sharing of persuasive personalised eyewitness records with mobile and globalised target populations (Anden-Papadopoulos).Protesters used another technique, DDOS (distributed denial of service attacks), for political protest in cyber space. Anonymous people used DDOS to overload a website with fake requests, making it unavailable for users and disrupting the sites set as targets (McMillan) in effect, shutting down the site. DDOS is an important counter-surveillance activity by grassroots activists or hackers. It was a cyber protest that knocked the main Iranian governmental websites off-line and caused crowdsourcing and false trafficking. Amongst them were Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's supreme leader’s websites and those which belong to or are close to the government or security forces, including news agencies (Fars, IRNA, Press TV…), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Justice, the Police, and the Ministry of the Interior.Moreover, as authorities uploaded the pictures of protesters onto different platforms to find and arrest them, in some cities people started to put the pictures, phone numbers and addresses of members of security forces and plain clothes police officers who attacked them during the protests and asked people to identify and report the others. They also wanted people to send information about suspects who infringed human rights. Conclusion To sum up, visibility, surveillance and counter-surveillance are not new phenomena. What is new is the technology, which increased their complexity. As Foucault (Discipline 200) mentioned ‘visibility is a trap’, so being visible would be the weakness of those who are being surveilled in the power struggle. In the convergent era, in order to be more powerful, both surveillance and counter-surveillance activities aim for more visibility. Although both attempt to use the same means (technology) to trap the other side, the differences are in their subjects, objects, goals and results.While in surveillance, visibility of the many by the few is mostly for the purpose of control and influence in undemocratic ways, in counter-surveillance, the visibility of the few by the many is mostly through democratic ways to secure more accountability and transparency from the governments.As mentioned in the case of Iran’s Green Movement, the scale and scope of visibility are different in surveillance and counter-surveillance. The importance of what Shaw wrote about Sydney occupy counter-surveillance, applies to other places, such as Iran. She has stressed that ‘protesters and police engaged in a dance of technology and surveillance with one another. Both had access to technology, but there were uncertainties about the extent of technology and its proficient use…’In Iran (2009), both sides (government and activists) used technology and benefited from digital networked platforms, but their levels of access and domains of influence were different, which was because the sources of power, information and wealth were divided asymmetrically between them. Creativity was important for both sides to make others more visible, and make themselves invisible. Also, sharing information to make the other side visible played an important role in these two areas. References Alen, David. “The Trouble with Transparency: The Challenge of Doing Journalism Ethics in a Surveillance Society.” Journalism Studies 9.3 (2008): 323-40. 8 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616700801997224#.UqRFSuIZsqN›. 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Dream, 2008Go to visit a friend with vulvodynia who recently had a baby only to find that she is desolate. I realise the baby–a little boy–died. We go for a walk together. She has lost weight through the ordeal & actually looks on the edge of beauty for the first time. I feel like saying something to this effect–like she had a great loss but gained beauty as a result–but don’t think it would be appreciated. I know I shouldn’t stay too long &, sure enough, when we get back to hers, she indicates she needs for me to go soon. In her grief though, her body begins to spasm uncontrollably, describing the arc of the nineteenth-century hysteric. I start to gently massage her back & it brings her great relief as her body relaxes. I notice as I massage her, that she has beautiful gold and silver studs, flowers, filigree on different parts of her back. It describes a scene of immense beauty. I comment on it.In 2008, I was following a writing path dictated by my vulvodynia, or chronic vulval pain, and was exploring the possibility of my disorder being founded in trauma. The theory did not, in my case, hold up and I had decided to move on when serendipity intervened. Books ordered for different purposes arrived simultaneously and, as I dipped into the texts, I found startling correspondence between them. The books? Neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s lectures on hysteria, translated into English in 1889; psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers’s explication of a biological theory of the neuroses published in 1922; and trauma neurologist Robert C. Scaer’s interpretation, in 2007, of the psychosomatic symptoms of his patients. The research grasped my intellect and imagination and maintained its grip until the ensuing chapter was done with me: my day life, papers and books skewed across tables; my night life, dreams surfeited with suffering and beauty, as I struggled with the possibility of any relationship between the two. Just as Rivers recognised that the shell-shock of World War I was not a physical injury as such but a trigger for and form of hysteria, so too, a few decades earlier, did Charcot insistently equate the railway brain/spine that resulted from railway accidents, with the hysteria of other of his patients, recognising that the precipitating incident constituted trauma that lodged in the body/mind of the victim (Clinical 221). More recently, Scaer notes that the motor vehicle accident (MVA) from which whiplash ensues is usually of insufficient force to logically cause bodily injury and, through this understanding, links whiplash and the railway brain/spine of the nineteenth century (25).In terms of comparative studies, most exciting for a researcher is the detail with which Charcot described patient after patient with hysteria in the Salpêtrière hospital, and elements of correspondence in symptomatology between these and Scaer’s patients, the case histories of which open most chapters of his book, titled appropriately, The Body Bears the Burden.Here are symptoms selected from a case study from each clinician:She subsequently developed headaches, neck pain, panic attacks, and full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder, along with significant cognitive problems [...] As her neck pain worsened and spread to her lower back, shoulders and arms, she noted increasing morning stiffness, and generalized pain and sensitivity to touch. With the development of interrupted, non-restorative sleep and chronic fatigue, she was ultimately diagnosed by a rheumatologist with fibromyalgia (Scaer 107).And:The patient suffers from a permanent headache of a constrictive character [...] All kinds of sound are painful to his ear, and he does his best to avoid them. It is impossible for him to fix his attention to any matter, or to devote himself to anything without speedily experiencing very great fatigue [...] He has insomnia and is frequently tormented by horrible dreams [...] Further, his memory appears to be considerably weakened (Charcot, Clinical 387).In the case of both patients, there was no significant physical injury, though both were left physically, as well as psychically, disabled. In the accidents that precipitated these symptoms, both were placed in positions of terrified helplessness as potential destruction bore down on them. In the case of Scaer’s patient, she froze in the driver’s seat at traffic lights as a large dump truck slowly reversed back on to her car, crushing the bonnet and engine compartment as it moved inexorably toward her. In the case of Charcot’s patient, he was dragging his barrow along the road when a laundryman’s van, pulled at “railway speed” by a careering horse, bore down on him, striking the wheel of his barrow (Clinical 375). It took some hours for the traumatised individuals of each incident to return to their senses.Scaer describes whiplash syndrome as “a diverse constellation of symptoms consisting of pain, neurologic symptoms, cognitive impairment, and emotional complaints” (xvii), and argues that the somatic or bodily expressions of the syndrome “may represent a universal constellation of symptoms attributable to any unresolved life-threatening experience” (143). Thus, as we look back through history, whiplash equals shell-shock equals railway brain equals the “swooning” and “vapours” of the eighteenth century (Shorter Chap. 1). All are precipitated by different causes, but all share the same outcome; diverse, debilitating symptoms affecting the body and mind, which have no reasonable physical explanation and which show no obvious organic cause. Human stress and trauma have always existed.In modern and historic studies of hysteria, much is made of the way in which the symptoms of hysterics have, over the centuries, mimicked “real” organic conditions (e.g. Shorter). Rivers discusses mimesis as a quality of the “gregarious” or herd instinct, noting that the enhanced suggestibility of such a state was utilised in military training. Here, preparation for combat focused on an unthinking obedience to duty and orders, and a loss of individual agency within the group: “The most successful training is one which attains such perfection of this responsiveness that each individual soldier not merely reacts at once to the expressed command of his superior, but is able to divine the nature of a command before it is given and acts as a member of the group immediately and effectively” (211–12). In the animal kingdom, the herd instinct manifests in behaviour that impacts the survival of prey and predator: schools of sardines move as one organism, seeking safety in numbers, while predatory sailfish act in silent concert to push the school into a tighter formation from which they can take orchestrated turns to feed.Unfortunately, the group mimesis created through a passive surrender of the individual ego to the herd, while providing a greater sense of security and chance of survival, also made World War I soldiers more vulnerable to the development of post-traumatic hysteria. At the Salpêtrière, Charcot described in meticulous detail the epileptic-like convulsions of hysteria major (la grande hystérie), which appeared to be an unwitting imitation of the seizures of epileptic inmates with whom hysteria patients were housed. Such convulsions included the infamous arc en circle, or backward-arched bodily semicircle, through which the individual’s body was thrust, up into the air, in an arc of distress only earthed by flexed feet and contorted neck (Veith 231). The suffering articulated in this powerful image stayed with me as I read, and percolated through my dreams.The three texts in which I remained transfixed had issued from different eras and used different language from each other, but all three contained similar and complementary insights. I found further correspondence between Charcot and Scaer in their understanding of the neurophysiology underlying hysteria/trauma. Though he did not have the technology to observe it, Charcot insisted that the symptoms of hysteria were the result of real changes in the nervous system. He distinguished between “organic” causes of disease, and the “functional” or “dynamic” causes of such disorders as hysteria and epilepsy: as he noted of the “hystero-traumatic paraplegia” of a patient, “it depends upon a dynamic lesion affecting the motor and sensory zones of the grey cortex of the brain which in a normal state preside over the functions of that limb” (Clinical 382). He proposed a potentially reversible “dynamic alteration” in the brain of the hysteric (Clinical 223–24). Compare Scaer: “Clinical syndromes previously categorized as ‘nonphysiological,’ ‘psychosomatic,’ or ‘functional’ may be based on demonstrable dynamic neurophysiological changes in the brain” (xx–xxi).Another link between the work of Charcot and Scaer is their insistence on the mind/body as a continuum, rather than separate entities. The perspicacity of the two researcher/clinicians forms bookends to a model separating mind from body that, in the wake of the popularisation and distortion of Freudian theory, characterised the twentieth-century. Said Charcot: “the physician must be a psychologist if he wants to interpret the most refined of cerebral functions, since psychology is nothing else but physiology of a part of the brain” (cited by Goetz 32). Says Scaer: “The distinction between the ‘psychological’ and physical pathological manifestations of traumatic stress, as suggested in the term ‘psychosomatic,’ needs to be discarded” (127). He proposes that, instead, we consider a mind/brain/body continuum which more accurately reflects, “the pathophysiological, neurobiological, endocrinological, and immunological changes induced by trauma” and the bodily manifestations of disease which follow (127).Charcot’s modernity is perhaps most evident in his understanding of equivalence between mind and brain, and his belief in what we now call “neuroplasticity”. Dealing with two patients with hysterical (traumatic) paralysis, Charcot recognised the value of friction, massage, and passive movements of the paralysed limb, not to build muscle strength, but to “revive” the “motor representation” in the brain as a necessary precursor to voluntary movement (Clinical 310). He noted the way in which, through repetition, movement strengthens. The parallel between Charcot’s insight, and recent research and practice which indicates that intense exercise for stroke victims assists the retrieval of motor programmes in the nervous system, in turn facilitating increased strength and movement, is quite astounding (Doidge Chap. 5).Scaer, like Rivers before him, understands the “freeze” or immobility response to threat as a very primitive or arcane level of the survival instinct. When neither fight nor flight will ensure an animal’s survival, it often manifests the freeze response, playing “dead”. After danger has passed, the animal might vibrate and shake, discharging the stored energy, physiologically “effecting” its defence or escape, and becoming fully functional again. Scaer describes this discharge process in animals as being “as imperceptible as a shudder, or as dramatic as a grand mal seizure” (19). The human, being an animal, also instinctually resorts to immobility when that is the reaction that will best ensure survival. As a result of this response, energy that would have been discharged in fighting or fleeing is bound up in the nervous system, along with accompanying terror, rage and helplessness. Unlike other animals that naturally discharge this energy when safe, humans often cognitively override the subtle but essential restorative behaviours that complete the full instinctual response, leaving them in a vicious cycle of fear and immobility and ultimately generating the symptoms of trauma.Scaer writes, “this apparent lack of discharge of autonomic energy after the occurrence of freezing [...] may represent a dangerous suppression of instinctual behavior, resulting in the imprinting of the traumatic experience in unconscious memory and arousal systems of the brain” (21). He proposes a persuasive model of “somatic dissociation” in which the body continues to manifest a threat to survival through impairment of the region of the body that perceived the sensory messages, and disability that reflects the incomplete motor defence (100). He writes of his patients in a chronic pain programme: “We invariably noticed that the patient’s unconscious posture reflected not only the pain, but also the experience of the traumatic event that produced the pain. The asymmetrical postural patterns, held in procedural memory, almost always reflect the body’s attempt to move away from the injury or threat that caused the injury” (84).Scaer’s concept of somatic dissociation, when applied to some of Charcot’s case studies, makes sense of their bodily symptoms. Charcot’s patient P— experiences no life threat, but a shock that involves grief and shame (Clinical 131–39). On a fox-hunting outing, he mistakes his friend’s dog for a fox, accidently shooting it dead. The friend is distraught, and P— consequently deeply distressed. He continues with the hunt, but later, when he raises his fire-arm to shoot a rabbit, collapses with a paralysis of the right side (he is right-handed), and then a loss of consciousness, with consequent confused recollection. Charcot’s lecture focuses on the “word-blindness” P— evidences, apparently associated with post-traumatic memory-deficits, but what is also arresting is the right-sided paralysis which lasts for some days, and the loss of vision on his right side. It is as if the act to shoot again is prevented by a body, shocked by its former action. The body parts affected hold meaning.In the case of the barrow man discussed earlier; although he has no lasting organic damage to his legs, nevertheless, his “feet remain literally fixed to the ground” (Clinical 378) when he is standing, perhaps reproducing the immobility with which he faced the rapidly looming van as it bore down on him. His paralysis speaks of his frozen helplessness, the trauma now locked in his body.In the case of the patient Ler—, aged around sixty, Charcot links her symptoms with a “series of frights” (Lectures 279): at eleven she was terrorised by a mad dog; at sixteen she was horrified by the sight of the corpse of a murdered woman; and, at the same age, she was threatened by robbers in a wood. During her violent hystero-epileptic attacks Ler— “hurls furious invectives against imaginary individuals, crying out, ‘villains! robbers! brigands! fire! fire! O, the dogs! I’m bitten!’” (Lectures 281). Here, the compilation of trauma is articulated through the body and the voice. Given that the extreme early childhood poverty and deprivation of Ler— were typical of hysterical patients at the Salpêtrière (Goetz 193), one might speculate that the hospital population of hysterics was composed of often severely traumatised women.The traumatised person is left with a constellation of symptoms familiar to anyone who has studied the history of hysteria. These comprise, but are not limited to, flashbacks, panic attacks, insomnia, depression, and unprovoked rage. The individual is also affected by physical symptoms that might include blindness or mutism, paralysis, spasms, skin anaesthesia, chronic fatigue, irritable bowel, migraines, or chronic pain. For trauma theorist Peter A. Levine, the key to healing lies in completing the original instinctual response; “trauma is part of a natural physiological process that simply has not been allowed to be completed” (155). The traumatised person stays stuck in or compulsively relives trauma in order to do just that. In 1885, Jean-Martin Charcot lectured at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, including among his case studies the patient he names Deb—. She resides more evocatively in my imagination as “the lady in the carriage”, a title drawn from Charcot’s description of her symptoms, and from the associated photographs which capture static moments of her frenzied and compulsive dance:Now look at this patient [...] In the first phase, rhythmical jerkings of the right arm, like the movements of hammering, occur [...] Then after this period there succeeds a period of tonic spasms, and of contortions of the arm and head, recalling partial epilepsy [...] Finally, measured movements of the head to the right and the left occur; rapid movements defying all interpretation, for I ask you, what do they correspond to in the region of physiological acts? At the same time the patient utters a cry, or rather a kind of plaintive wail, always the same [...] You see by this example that rhythmical chorea may be in certain cases a grave affection [affliction]. Not that it directly menaces life, but that it may persist over a very long period of time, and become a most distressing infirmity [...] The chorea has lasted for more than thirty years [...] The onset occurred at the age of thirty-six. About this time, when out driving in a carriage with her husband, she fell over a precipice with the horse and carriage. After the great fright which she had thus experienced she lost consciousness for three hours. This was followed by a convulsive seizure of hysteria major, by rigidity of the limbs of the right side, and cries like the barking of a dog (Clinical 193–95).I found this case study early in my reading of Charcot, but the lady in the carriage stayed with me as a trope of the relentless embodiment of trauma in its drive to be conclusively expressed, properly acknowledged, and potentially understood. Hence the persistent pain and distress of Scaer’s MVA patients; the patients treated by Rivers, with limbs and vocal-chords frozen in a never-ending moment of self-defence; the dramatic hysterical attacks of the impoverished patients in Charcot’s Salpêtrière; and the rhythmical chorea of the lady in the carriage, her involuntary jerky dance a physical re-enactment of her original trauma, when the carriage in which she was driving went over a precipice. Her helplessness in the event which precipitated her hysteria is a central factor in her continuing distress, her involuntary passivity removing her sense of agency and, like the soldier confined endlessly and powerlessly in the trenches waiting for inevitable terrifying action, rendering her unable to fight or flee.The fact that the lady in the carriage may be stuck in a traumatic incident experienced more than thirty years before attests to the way in which trauma insistently pushes to be resolved. Her re-enactment is literal, but Levine acknowledges the relevance of a “repetition compulsion” (181), expressed originally by Freud as the “compulsion to repeat” (19). This describes the often subtle way in which we continue to involve ourselves in situations that are replays of traumatic themes from childhood—symbolic re-enactments. Levine revitalises the idea however, by focusing on the interrupted instinctual response that calls for physiological resolution: “the drive to complete the freezing response remains active no matter how long it has been in place” (111).The knowledge a traumatised person seeks is, in trauma, literally locked in the body/mind. It rises up through dreams and throws itself aggressively at one in memories that are experienced as a terrifying present. It twists limbs in painful contractures and paralyzes the limb that was lifted in defence. The fear of turning to face this knowledge locks the individual in a recurring cycle of terror and immobility. At its end-point, s/he survives in the pathological limbo of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), avoiding any arousal that might trigger all the physiological and emotional events of the original trauma. The original threat or trauma continues to exist in a perpetual present, with the individual unable to relegate it to the past as a bearable memory.It is possible to interpret such suffering in many ways. One might, for instance, focus on the pathology of an apparent system malfunction, which keeps the body/mind inefficiently glued to an unsolvable past. I choose to emphasise here, however, the creativity and persistence of the human body/mind in its drive to resolve the response to trauma, recover equilibrium and face effectively the recurrent challenges of life. As well as physical symptoms which exact attention, this drive or instinct might include the prompting of dreams and the meaningful coincidences we notice as we open our eyes to them, all of which can lead us down previously unconsidered paths. Does the body/mind only continue to malfunction due to our inability to correctly decipher its language? In relation to trauma, the body/mind bears the burden, but it might also hold the key to recovery.References Charcot, Jean-Martin. Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System. Trans. George Sigerson. London: The New Sydenham Society, 1877.---. Clinical Lectures on Diseases of the Nervous System: Volume 3. Trans. Thomas Savill. London: The New Sydenham Society, 1889.Doidge, Norman. The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. Melbourne: Scribe, 2008.Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1955. 7–64.Goetz, Christopher G, Michel Bonduelle, and Toby Gelfand. Charcot: Constructing Neurology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.Levine, Peter A. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1997.Rivers, W. H. R. Instinct and the Unconscious: A Contribution to a Biological Theory of the Psycho-Neuroses. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922.Scaer, Robert C. The Body Bears the Burden: Trauma, Dissociation, and Disease. 2nd ed. New York: Haworth Press, 2007.Shorter, Edward. From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era. New York: Free Press, 1992.Veith, Ilza. Hysteria: The History of a Disease. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.

Introduction A 2021 listicle pronouncing “10 Things That Are Bisexual Culture” concludes that “claiming that random things are ‘bi culture’ is the most bi-culture thing of all” (Wilber n.p.). While posed as tongue-in-cheek, the assignment of status as a signifier of bisexuality to seemingly arbitrary actions and items reinforces the notion that bi people seek a distinct visual and cultural identity and struggle to make one. We consider how creators on the algorithmically driven social media platform TikTok responded to an open-ended 2019 prompt (“ayo, bisexual check”) to show off styles and accessories that project a bisexual display, and how these videos, understood collectively, contribute to the cohesion of a prototype for a bisexual social uniform. By social uniform, we refer to informally standardised clothing that identifies members of a group but lacks the bureaucratic regulation of an institutional uniform (Joseph). This lens is productive for interpreting subcultural dress norms, including those of queer identities at various scopes (e.g. Nelson, “Here”; Stines). The development of these social uniforms can allow for stronger group coherence and provide individuals with “self-esteem through conformity” with one’s group and “self-regard by conflict” with other groups (Joseph 74). There is added utility to this signalling for queer people as a means to seek community and partnership against a societal backdrop of stigmatisation (Brennan). Being able to identify who is like oneself at a glance lets one know when and where one is safe to outwardly present an authentic version of oneself (Huxley and Hayfield; Rostosky et al.; Wang and Feinstein). Bisexual communities notably lack such a uniform (Hayfield, Bisexual; Hayfield, “Invisibility”; Hayfield, “Never”; Hayfield and Wood; Huxley et al.). While bi people have expressed interest in having a distinct, coherent aesthetic or set of visual markers to express their bisexuality and recognise others as specifically bisexual, they have encountered obstacles towards the establishment of such a bi uniform (Madison, “Representing”; Nelson, “What”). The conception of homosexuality and heterosexuality as a binary leaves little room for the notion of bisexuality at all (Nelson, “Here”). In instances when people do attempt to stake a claim to a specifically bisexual visual identity, the result tends to be read binaristically nonetheless (Daly et al.; Hartman; Hayfield, Bisexual; Morgan and Davis-Delano; Nelson, “What”). Attempts to visually “split the middle” of established gay and straight styles have thus historically failed, with onlookers (even bisexual onlookers) either assuming the bi person in question is gay or straight (Hartman). Rosie Nelson goes so far as to contend that “the body of the bisexual is incapable of declaring itself outwardly bisexual to a monosexist society” (“Here” 87). In other words, Nelson argues that a distinctly bi visual identity—a bi social uniform—may be impossible so long as bisexuality remains invisible in broader discourses of sexual orientation and that only improved or increased representations of bisexuality in media, law, research, and culture can foment the conditions for bisexual visibility in the most literal sense (“Here”). TikTok’s Bisexual Displays Within this context of binary assumptions of gender and sexual orientation, Julie Hartman-Linck conceived the “bisexual display” (Hartman 39). By analogy with gender display as theorised by Lorber and building on Goffman’s construction of identity performance, the bisexual display refers to attempts to project a bisexual identity “using the accoutrements of gender, as well as more direct visual and verbal cues” (Hartman 43). Bisexuality is discursively erased, and even seemingly straightforward attempts to make bi identities known are often misconstrued by observers, either through ignorance (e.g., unfamiliarity with the significance of the bi pride flag) or through willful disbelief (e.g., doubt in the authenticity of bisexuality / the bisexual; see Alarie and Gaudet). Therefore, analysis of bisexual display focusses on the intended effect of the performer rather than on the actual understandings of their audiences: bisexual display offers a productive theoretical lens through which to consider how a bisexual identity is intentionally fashioned, even if attempts to fashion the bisexual identity may be misunderstood or ignored. Emiel Maliepaard, in his research on bisexual geographies, argues that bisexual spaces are “temporal, local and (often) unplanned” (47). We identified one such space on TikTok, an algorithmically driven video-centric social media platform. TikTok affords creators a great deal of power to respond to and remix other creators’ content, most prominently with the “use this sound” function which lets creators incorporate audio either originating from or used in another video (colloquially a TikTok) into their own (Abidin and Kaye). The memetic process of (re)using a sound with some amount of variation generates a constituency of creators and other users whose participation in the video creation and engagement process aligns with what Zulli and Zulli theorised as TikTok’s imitation publics: “a collection of people whose digital connectivity is constituted through the shared ritual of content imitation and replication” (1882). These imitation publics in turn may spawn these temporal, local, and unplanned spaces, including virtual bisexual spaces. Here, we conducted a content analysis of 50 short videos posted in 2019 with over 1,000 likes using the “ayo, bisexual check” (“ABC”) sound, which was first uploaded in late March 2019. The originator of the sound posted a video of themselves saying “ayo, bisexual check” and then showing off certain elements of clothing and reifying or countering certain stereotypes about bi identity. When other creators subsequently began to use the sound and associated format to do the same, they constituted the “ABC” sound’s imitation public. While there are multiple possible ways creators might have understood the prompt of a “bisexual check” (e.g., as encouraging them to dress in a way that projects their own bisexuality; to dress in a way that projects bisexuality most legibly to other bisexual or nonbisexual people; to dress in a way that feels most comfortable to them, as a bisexual; etc.), the intention behind these videos can be understood broadly to display some bisexual identity. The simple and direct nature of the prompt (“bisexual check”) generates the virtual “bisexual space”, both “highly temporal and specific” (Maliepaard 59). This space both offers an open-ended venue for creators to engage with a culture of visual identity, and maximises the potential for audiences to read what transpires in the videos as demonstrative (if not constitutive) of bisexual identity. By creating these TikToks, users are not waiting for more or better bisexual representation on TikTok but instead are actively embodying it, responding to the need identified by Nelson. Elements of the Bisexual Check At the broadest level, creators in the 50 sampled videos primarily showcased discrete fashion elements or accessories, rather than entire outfits. The structure of “ABC” TikToks allowed creators to draw attention to specific pieces of clothing, jewelry, haircuts and styles, makeup looks, and ways of fashioning clothes (see fig. 1 for an example). This mode of engaging with the “bisexual check” challenge differs from the mode of engagement we saw in videos using the “ABC” sound posted after 2019; while onscreen text, closed captions, and video descriptions in TikToks posted in 2019 were primarily in English, text in videos posted in 2020 and later was mostly in Tagalog. This suggested that 2019 and post-2019 TikToks emerged from distinct and separate cultural contexts; despite using the same “ABC” sound, they represented different imitation publics. The post-2019 videos tended to show their creators posing for one or several shots without focussing on particular elements of their outfits, instead displaying their looks as a whole. The later videos offer a useful variation in memetic content and stance (Shifman), a contrast which permits us to understand the 2019 “ABC” videos as attempts to display bisexuality chiefly through discrete visual markers (e.g., fashion elements). Fig. 1: A screencap from the authors’ mocked-up “ABC” TikTok in which the creator uses a fingergun to showcase their cuffed jeans. Studies of bi people in the past two decades (almost all of which have been about bi women; see Clarke et al., though see Rogers for a recent exception) have identified several ways bi subjects attempt to make their bisexuality known in the face of overwhelming invisibility. Hayfield summarised research about bi women’s fashion, documenting styles that are “funky, flamboyant, or associated with alternative looks and looking (e.g., hippie, Goth, punk, and so on) including through piercings and tattoos” (“Invisibility” 180). Hartman-Linck recorded bi women using bumper stickers, pride flags and pride flag iconography, pins, and jewelry using the pink-purple-blue bi pride flag design, as well as a general playfulness with specific gendered markers (Hartman). Madison likewise found bi people using the bi pride flag design and colours on clothes and jewelry, as well as bi-specific iconography like the biangles (overlapping pink and blue triangles that generate a smaller purple triangle between them), interlocking Mars and Venus signs (⚤), and pun-based symbols like the “bisexuwhale” (“Representing” 151–3). More recently, the Internet has been a fruitful venue for discussions among bisexuals about a visual culture (Madison, “Bisexual”); discourse among bisexual people on social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr has generated some seemingly novel styles and fashions that have been highlighted as specifically bi looks. A 2017 tweet about jeans cuffed at the ankles (see fig. 1) and baggy shirts tucked in at the waist being “bisexual culture” has been mentioned in numerous popular news articles and blogs (e.g., Cao; Wilber). A Tumblr post from around the same time with images of three fictional characters sporting neck-length hairstyles cut straight at the bottoms appears to have been the genesis of the “bisexual bob”, a bob haircut worn by a bi person (usually a woman) that received similar coverage and discussion to the cuffed jeans and tucked-in shirts tweet (e.g., Locke; Vandervalk; Wilber). Other items identified in listicles as constituting “bi culture” include: being unable to sit in chairs “correctly”, dyed pink hair, puns, Converse brand shoes, plaid shirts, outer space, (excessive) use of the bi pride flag and colours, and anxiety disorders. Within our sample, we identified an uptake of these nascent bi fashions, with 62% of videos featuring clothing being cuffed (most frequently jeans), 36% of videos highlighting shirts tucked into pants, and 20% of videos demonstrating bi bobs. More explicit iconography like bi pride flags and colours (what Hartman-Linck referred to as “sign equipment” in her conceptualisation of bisexual display) appeared in 16% of videos, compared to more general rainbow iconography, which showed up in 20% of them (Hartman). Button-down shirts appeared in 34% of videos, and both floral print shirts and Converse shoes appeared in 18% of the total corpus. Nose piercings actively contributed to the “bisexual check” in 12% of sampled TikToks, while a full-body dress appeared in just one video (2%). We identified no instances of biangles, interlocking Mars and Venus signs, or punny sign equipment. Display Becoming Prototype, Prototype Becoming Uniform Interpreting “ABC” videos as bisexual displays on the individual level and conceptualising the community of “ABC” creators and engagers as an imitation public allows us to understand the process taking place as social identity work, “the construction of identities for groups of people” (Eschler and Menking 2). Eschler and Menking (drawing upon Donath as well as Schwalbe and Mason-Schrock) argued that for social identities (like bisexuality), certain memes can offer prototypes: “a set of minimal social cues that a person can use to infer other information about an individual’s social world” (9). Similarly, Joseph argued that for any complex of sartorial meaning, there is a minimal symbol: “the least symbol necessary to suggest a uniform” (24). By their nature, prototypes (or minimal symbols) will be limited to the fewest key elements required to demarcate a social identity. TikTok creators have the capacity to share their own “bisexual checks” with the “use this sound” feature or duet other creators’ videos to mirror or counter elements of the original creators’ checks in their own lives. Further, even if not posting their own “ABC” content, users have the ability to share, comment on, and like TikToks to engage with a creator’s bisexual display. Each new “ABC” video accomplishes what Rogers identified in his research on images of bi men on Instagram: they “add to a discourse and visual culture of bisexuality that both describes and prescribes the visual forms in which bisexuality appears” (366). Each contribution introduces a new, or more likely reifies an existing (if nascent) indicator of a bisexual identity. It is no surprise, then, that visual indicators that had already garnered some popular support within online bisexual spaces (bi bobs, cuffed jeans, tucked-in shirts) were among the most common in our sample. Still, a fashion choice having already entered the bisexual public consciousness does not solely explain why it recurred in our sample while other choices and items mentioned in listicles did not. The userbase of creators who tend to achieve virality on TikTok skews young, white, wealthy, and female (Boffone; Kennedy), so styles favoured by bi people who share at least some of these identities (e.g., white teen or twentysomething girls and women with personal or familial wealth) are likely to recur more frequently and receive increased engagement from the broader TikTok userbase, which also skews young and female (Cyca). Anecdotally, this demographic picture of TikTok mirrored our sample, suggesting that markers posited by creators and received by users were most likely to reflect the tastes and norms of young, white, and female creators. Indeed, one of the few nonwhite “ABC” creators was the only person in our sample to use the sound to argue against the core premise of the videos, contending that all one needed to be bisexual was attraction to people of multiple genders rather than any of the specific visual markers posed by others in the sample. While a universal “bisexual check” is suggested by the sparse wording of the challenge, the resulting videos nonetheless demonstrate a specific racially, temporally, and culturally positioned understanding of bi identity. Just because anyone has the capacity to contribute their own vision of the “bisexual check” does not mean that all “ABC” videos will land with equal frequency on users’ For You Page feeds (TikTok’s “homepage” where videos are algorithmically delivered to users; see Simpson and Semaan), nor enjoy the same volume of attention from TikTok’s userbase. Eschler and Menking consider the prototype to be “the least common denominator” (9), meaning that users will take the few most common elements shared amongst the “ABC” videos as symbols of a bisexual style. That the top “ABC” videos (those we sampled) heavily skew young, white, and female means that a bi uniform emerges from elements favoured by users sharing those demographics. Our mode of investigating this sound’s videos (moving systematically through all the videos using the “ABC” sound from most liked to less liked) does not contravene the affordances of TikTok’s platform but is somewhat outside of the app’s environment of expected use (Light et al.), which we understand to be either scrolling through the user’s For You Page or receiving and viewing TikToks messaged privately by friends. Still, users in these settings served two or more “ABC” videos are likely to consciously or unconsciously begin to identify the prototypical elements of a bisexual look as being those shared across multiple videos: the most frequently recurring markers creators choose to share as part of their bisexual displays reify existing styles already identified as “bi looks” or introduce new ones to the viewer. Through the continuous and repeated proposal of bisexual looks, the prototype emerges for a bisexual uniform. These accoutrements (cuffed sleeves and pantlegs, especially on jeans, bi bob haircuts, tucked-in shirts) point towards a bi uniform that is put-together and favours clothes like jeans and button-down shirts that are commonly worn across genders. That a bisexual uniform that may be comfortably worn by members of any gender follows logically from the necessity for a bi look that is both shaped by and liable to be worn by bisexuals, who may be of any gender. Further, this bi uniform emphasises alterations that may be undertaken on items commonly already held rather than distinct new pieces that must first be acquired. This may be one reason that creators favoured these styles, rather than more blatant sign equipment like pins or shirts with bi iconography on them: they were simply more likely to have jeans in their closet than a biangles T-shirt. The creators in our sample, regardless of the specific accoutrements displayed, answered Nelson’s call for increased and better bisexual representation, building one of many possible images for how bi people can fashion themselves (“Here”). The “ABC” imitation public’s collagic vision of a bisexual uniform may, in the future, be adapted, rejected, or serve as inspiration for others in the endlessly cyclical process of identity formation and reinforcement. Conclusion We have sought to understand what TikTok users have accomplished through the creation of and engagement with “ABC” videos, both specifically (i.e., what are the predominant visual indicators across the most popular videos) and generally (i.e., what processes are taking place and how they contribute towards the establishment of a bisexual social uniform). Creators are unlikely to have set out with a larger project of developing a bi uniform in mind when posting their 15-second “ayo, bisexual check” videos, but as part of one of TikTok’s innumerable imitation publics, their personal bisexual displays nonetheless offer prototypes for what a bisexual uniform could be. Any single “ABC” video is an example of a creator using TikTok’s affordances to respond individually to an open-ended prompt, but taken collectively, a consensus about the least common denominators for a bisexual uniform begins to emerge. Whether this online effort to cohere bisexual style results in bi people being able to identify one another (and/or be identified by nonbisexuals) remains to be seen, but we hope this article provides both a useful record of styles favoured by bisexuals on TikTok in 2019 and a productive explanation of the way individual posts in TikTok’s ecosystem of imitation publics may begin to constitute a social uniform for a community whose members have historically lacked one. Acknowledgments Thanks to Elizabeth Fetterolf, Amy Giacomucci, Trevor Harty, and the editors and reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. All online sources have been archived via Archive.org. References Abidin, Crystal, and D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye. “Audio Memes, Earworms, and Templatability: The ‘Aural Turn’ of Memes on TikTok.” Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image. Eds. Chloë Arkenbout, Jack Wilson, and Daniel de Zeeuw. 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