Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "Liberated company"

This article explores the question of why the liberated enterprise model, despite its apparent superiority, has not become the standard model, outperforming the traditional hierarchical management structure. We will being by analyzing a series of approaches that fail to explain why this model has not been widely adopted. Meanwhile, contemporary institutionalism analysis suggests the key factor in the slow spread of this model. We have compared the theses of two institutionalism approaches to the three phases of evolution of the liberated enterprise model, which include the first two phases of slow evolution and the current phase of accelerated diffusion. The institutional environment appears to be the decisive factor influencing the expansion of this model. Our aim is to demonstrate the relevance of institutionalism approaches to the problem of disseminating new management methods.

The effects of management innovations on performance are understudied, especially with respect to social performance. Our study contributes to this debate by examining the potential benefits of adopting liberation management, a typical management innovation when it comes to addressing a social performance gap. If employee empowerment is regarded as a lever of social performance in liberated companies, the extant literature does not reach a consensus on these alleged positive effects either. Our quantitative method – a quasiexperiment comparing two units (one liberated and another non-liberated) of a French industrial company – allows us to conclude that three liberation practices can in fact have a positive effect on social performance: participative decision-making, personalised support, and right to make mistakes.

A liberated company is an emerging concept, which is based on trust and autonomy and is radically opposed to hierarchical principles. The empirical literature describes liberation as a complex process of cultural and organizational transformation, wherein managerial functions are questioned or even eliminated, and blind spots are a source of numerous pitfalls. Against this backdrop, the central issue of transforming leadership, and the roles it entails, remains underexplored in liberated companies, whereas reflections are primarily focused on the liberating leader. Using a single case study and a processual, multilevel approach to liberation, this study analyzes the evolution of key leadership roles at the individual (supporting), collective (catalyst), and organizational (driving) levels. The results show that the distribution and sharing of leadership roles is an evolutionary and dynamic process rather than a tipping point and question the opportunities and limits of role distribution at different stages of the process.

This article explores how an allegedly ‘non-hierarchical’ and aestheticized managerial practice reconfigures power relations within a creative industry. The key problematic is ‘governmental’ in the sense suggested by Michel Foucault, in as much as the manager’s ethical self-practice—which involves expressive and ‘liberated’ bodily comportment—is used tactically to shape the space of conduct of others in the company. The study foregrounds the managerial body as ‘signifier’ in its own right. Empirically, this is done through an analysis of video material produced by the film company Zentropa about their apparently eccentric Managing Director, Peter Aalbæk. Contrary to much of the literature discussing embodiment and ethics in organization studies, we do not identify an ‘ethics of organization’ dominated by instrumental rationality, efficiency and desire for profit which is ostensibly juxtaposed to a non-alienating, embodied ethics. Rather, when the body becomes invested in management, we observe tensions, tactics of domination and unpredictability.

I spent over 30 years in a highly structured, hierarchical organization where good ideas could only flow top-down and where the firm’s intellectual capital was more defined by the level of organizational “box” that a person occupied than by the actual insight that person possessed. In January 2000, as a “second career”, I set out to build a company that would be liberated from such restrictions of thought and, instead, would capitalize on the intellectual bandwidth of the entire organization to “Innovate Every Day”. Such a company would be based upon two of my most fundamental beliefs: “No one is as smart as everyone”, that is to say that good ideas are not bounded by organizational structure, but can come from anyone, in any place, at any time; and second, that the Hierarchical Pyramid as an organizational business structure is an enigma in the 21st century knowledge economy. An enigma more suited to controlling information flow than fostering innovation.My challenge in building such a company was two-fold: to develop a mechanism that could “operationalize” innovation by tapping the collective genius in my organization in a non-intimidating, fun way to generate these good ideas continuously; and, second, to institute a new organizational model with enough control to operate as a responsible, profitable business, but with sufficient flexibility to leverage and disseminate brilliant, innovative ideas across the organization – that’s all!!

This paper contrasts the iconic embodiments of empowered femininity characteristic of Martha Graham's choreographic work and the gender ambiguity found in Mary Wigman's early solos. These modern dance pioneers both emancipated the female body from dominant Western culture's insistence on binary gender definitions. However, their differing approaches to how a liberated female body looks, moves, and dresses provides an opportunity to examine modern dance as a forum for diverse shifts in gender representation. This research draws on my personal experience dancing with the Martha Graham company and historic research investigating Wigman's solo concerts in Germany from 1917 to 1919. This paper makes the claim that modern dance, as a conscious fusion of body and mind, can embrace the fluid complexity of personal identity and encourage both conceptual and embodied transcendence of hegemonic male/female paradigms.

Abstract The African presence in India, especially in the Deccan and Gujarat, has been well documented. Scattered references to discrete groups of Africans in other parts of India are less well known. The author recently identified a group of African slave descendants living in Lucknow, the capital of a former kingdom in northern India, following the discovery of pertinent East India Company records in the National Archives, New Delhi. Why the Africans were brought to this particular kingdom will be examined, together with their treatment by the British Government in India after the Mutiny of 1857/58. At the same time, the Government was setting up an ‘African Asylum’ in Bombay, to house and educate African children liberated from an Arab slave ship at Karachi. The question of inconsistent government policy towards African slaves in British India will be examined and it will be argued that it was tempered by differing regional and political considerations.

The occurrence features of ultrafine iron minerals in a cyanide leaching residue produced from a superlarge gold mining company in Yunnan Province were determined with chemical composition analysis, iron phase analysis, and mineral liberation analysis (MLA). The results show that the residue contains 26.74% iron, mainly occurring in the form of magnetite (26.33%) and limonite (69.41%), in which 67.40% magnetite and 73.00% limonite particles are fully liberated with particle sizes ranging from 9.6 µm to 75.0 µm. The rest are adjacent and wrapped intergrowths. Low-intensity magnetic separation and pulsating high-gradient magnetic separation were, respectively, proposed to recover magnetite and limonite from the residue, and under the optimized conditions, a high-grade magnetite concentrate assaying 64.05% Fe with 85.59% magnetite recovery and a qualified limonite concentrate assaying 50.94% Fe with 54.33% limonite recovery were, respectively, produced. The iron recovery for −30 µm fraction in the magnetite and limonite concentrates reached as high as 51.46%. It was found that the iron recovery for −30µm ultrafine fraction is lower than those of coarser fractions, as a result of the relatively enhanced hydrodynamic drag acting onto the particles, compared with the magnetic force. Entrainment occurs between the ultrafine iron minerals and gangues, thereby reducing the iron grade for the ultrafine fraction. This research outcome would provide a valuable reference for the economic and effective utilization of iron resources from such residues.

The characteristics of ultrafine gold minerals in gold concentrate with a high copper content produced by a large gold mining company in Shandong Province were determined via chemical composition analysis, phase analysis, and mineral liberation analysis. The results showed that the concentrate contained 48.13 g/t gold, which was mainly in the form of native gold and electrum. Regarding the gold mineral particles, 57.65% were completely liberated and 35.75% were associated with chalcopyrite and pyrite. The remainder mainly comprised wrapped intergrowths. The cumulative distributions of native gold and electrum fractions with diameters of less than 75 µm were 82.55% and 90.15%, respectively. Enhanced Cu–S bulk flotation, and then, Cu–S separation from the raw material were proposed to effectively enrich the gold minerals and decrease the treatment throughput during the leaching operation. The optimized conditions yielded a concentrate with a high copper content (3.89% Cu and 545.62 g/t Au contents, and 83.15% Cu and 77.54% Au recoveries) and a concentrate with a high sulfur content (0.059% Cu and 15.03 g/t Au contents, and 83.15% Cu and 21.28% Au recoveries). The capacity of the subsequent leaching process was reduced by 25%. Ammonia pretreatment was introduced to decrease the adverse effect of copper on cyanidation leaching for the copper concentrate. Under the optimized leaching conditions, gold dissolution reached 99.76%, which was approximately 4% higher than that obtained via direct leaching. The NaCN consumption decreased over 10 kg/t. These results could serve as a valuable reference for the economic and green utilization of gold resources from concentrate with a high copper content.

Abstract The extracellular matrices (ECMs) of mammalian tissues play important roles in mediating and maintaining tissue function. However, aberrant and progressive remodelling of ECM components is a key feature in the pathology and ageing of many organs, including skin. Crucially, these degradative processes not only impair function, but may also release peptide fragments, known as matrikines, with cell signalling capabilities. In addition to endogenously produced matrikines, many exogenously applied bioactive peptides, with proven activity in skin, are homologous to naturally occurring amino acid sequences within ECM proteins. Despite the ability of some peptides to induce clinical benefits in aged skin, there has been no published conceptual framework to guide the prediction of new therapeutic matrikines. Here, we tested the hypothesis that small bioactive peptides (matrikines) can be predicted by the in silico digestion of dermal proteins by ECM proteases. We first identified a target cohort of 27 ECM proteins that were abundant in the dermis and/or were reported to undergo age-related remodelling. Utilizing an established machine-learning tool (PROSPER) we developed a PYTHON algorithm that could predict peptides liberated by in silico cleavage with eight skin-active enzymes [matrix metalloproteinase (MMP)-2, MMP-3, MMP-7 and MMP-9, cathepsin G and cathepsin K, granzyme B and elastase-2]. For the 27 target proteins this approach predicted the identity of 453 tetrapeptides. These peptides were predicted to be liberated predominantly from collagens (I, III, IV, VI and VII), some elastic fibre-associated proteins (EMILIN1 and fibulin-1) and the adhesive glycoprotein fibronectin. Eight peptides were selected for synthesis and biological activity testing based on their predicted protein sources, high solubility and likelihood of successful manufacture. The ability of these peptides to promote ECM synthesis (procollagen I, fibronectin, decorin, collagen IV, hyaluronic acid and fibrillin-1) in cultured human dermal fibroblasts (HDFs) was assessed by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay or immunofluorescence (fibrillin-1 only). With the exception of hyaluronic acid, all of the peptides enhanced the synthesis of at least some ECM markers, including procollagen-I and decorin. Deposition of fibrillin-1, which is a sensitive marker of both skin ageing and repair, was significantly enhanced by three peptides. The ability of the peptides to influence the wider HDF secretome was assessed by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry proteomics. Four of the peptides modulated synthesis of proteins in a wide range of functional classes, including enzyme inhibitors, ECM-affiliated proteins, cell adhesion molecules and basement membrane components, while the remaining four exhibited more targeted activities. We conclude that bioinformatic prediction of cleaved peptide fragments from ECM proteins can identify multiple small peptides with potentially beneficial activities for skin. This approach can both identify new matrikines and provide insights into the mechanisms underpinning tissue repair. Funding sources: this study was funded by the No. 7 Beauty Company.

CanMEDS 2005 includes health advocate. Pertinently Michel Foucault wrote “The first task of the doctor is therefore political…Man will be totally and definitively cured only if first liberated.” No one exemplified this more than Thomas Hodgkin widely known for his eponymous disease. What is less known is his unceasing work, as a Quaker, for aboriginal people around the world. He was secretary of the Aboriginal Protection Society. He had been interested in Canada since meeting John Norton, as a teenager. His involvement in the plight of Canada’s Indians may have cost him a staff position at Guy’s Hospital; the Treasurer, Benjamin Harrison, is quoted as saying “he would have no officer of the hospital who drove about with a North American Indian in his carriage.” Hodgkin played an active role in the history of Manitoba. His friend Dr Richard King undertook expeditions in Western Canada to find Sir John Franklin corresponded with Hodgkin on his anthropological observations on the Aboriginals and the treatment of them by the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). Hodgkin campaigned actively about the management of the Manitoba aboriginals by the HBC. The presentation will illustrate this with excerpts from his letters to Sir George Simpson, Governor HBC, from Captain Kennedy who also sought Franklin and the archives of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Manitoba. He presented evidence to the House of Commons as HBC was ceded to Canada. As editor of the Colonial Intelligencer he wrote much on Manitoba and received a letter from Louis Riel. Hodgkin was passionately committed to ensure that people were free both politically and economically. Foucault M. The Birth of the Clinic. Archaeology of Medical Perception. trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Wilks S, Bettany GT. A Biographical History of Guy’s Hospital. London: Ward, Lock and Co., 1892. Kass AM, Kass EH. Perfecting the World. The Life and Times of Dr. Thomas Hodgkin 1798-1866. Boston: Harcourt Brace Johanovich Publishers, 1988.

The world recently paused to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the historic D-Day landings that on June 6, 1944 began to liberate Europe from Adolf Hitler’s bloody occupation. This edition of Museums, Archives, Artifacts, and Documents explores the role one family-owned NJ company played in this momentous undertaking.

With the rapid development of information technology and the deepening of the concept of value chain management, the enterprise management mode has been liberated from the traditional vertical integration structure, and opened a new chapter of all-round horizontal integration and value management. Many domestic and foreign enterprises have launched business process reengineering plans to strengthen enterprise management and enhance comprehensive competitiveness. This radical change has a huge impact on the traditional real estate sales model, forcing the sales business process must adapt to the new market development trend, and more closely integrate with other business processes to meet the comprehensive needs of modern enterprise management. In order to adapt to the changes of external environment, real estate enterprises must optimize and reconstruct their internal processes. Through business process reengineering, enterprises can break the traditional functional organizational structure, establish a new process organizational structure, eliminate ineffective processes, shorten the time required for processes, improve the execution efficiency of processes, and finally achieve the goal of improving management level and work efficiency, optimizing resource allocation and standardizing management processes. Marketing process management plays an important role in enterprise operation. By effectively organizing and coordinating individual business processes, marketing process management can improve the overall operational efficiency of a company. This paper focuses on the problem of marketing process in the field of real estate. Firstly, it emphasizes the importance of studying business process management. Then, according to the background of China's real estate development, the main links of the marketing process management of real estate enterprises are discussed in a targeted way (analyzing the target market, formulating sales strategies, implementing promotion activities, building sales channels, implementing sales activities, providing after-sales service). On the basis of the above links, this paper comprehensively analyzes the challenges faced by real estate enterprises in the marketing process. These challenges come from many aspects, such as market environment, sales channels, monitoring and evaluation. In order to deal with these challenges, this paper discusses and puts forward some countermeasures. These strategies include perfecting market research, diversifying sales channels, optimizing promotion strategies and strengthening marketing team building.

The article deals with the biography of the peasant Andrii Sapsai, whose life came at a time of the great turmoil in the first half of the twentieth century.On the eve of the 1917 revolution his family successfully farmed in the village Pryyut of Katerynoslav province. In the post-revolutionary years they continued to farm: they kept cattle, cultivated land. The turning point for the family was the dislocation and eviction from the village.The whole family was deported to live in the Urals at the Lisna Vovchanka station. There Andrii was sentenced under a political article. On the eve of the German-Soviet war he returned to Ukraine and settled not far from the village Pryyut.With the arrival of German troops he volunteered with the police, moved to the village Pryyut where he settled down in his house. He was responsible for sending local youth to Germany, searching the villages of those in hiding, and sending them to the collection point in the village Friesendorf, and from there escorted to the train station. Aboveall, Andrii Sapsai participated in the execution of the Jews of the village Kamyana in the Berestianabalka.In May 1942, police officers from the area were summoned to the Friesendorf meeting, for a total of 50 men arrived. The police chief Keller ordered everyone to get into two trucks and to go to the village Zlatoustovka.The policemen were brought to the Berestiana balka, which was located near the village, where a hole up to 20 m long, 2 m wide and 2 m deep had already been dug.They were informed that the Jews were going to be brought now and they would have to be shot. Those who would refuse to participate in the shooting would face severe punishment. Following the police the chief of the Friesendorf Gendarmerie, who had organized the whole process, arrived. In 1934 he left the territory of Ukraine together with some German troops, reaching Romania and leaving them there. In the summer of 1944 local authorities gathered those who had retreated with the Germans at the camp and they worked to rebuild the airfield and then they were transferred to the Soviet command. Then Andrii was called to the ranks of the Red Army by the field enlistment office. To the 4th platoon of the 1st military company, 375 special assault battalion 41 rifle regiment of the 2nd Ukrainian Front.He participated in the battles for the liberation of Hungary, in January 1944 became a German prisoner, and in May 1945 in the territory of Austria he was liberated by Soviet troops and again drafted into the army, where he served until 1946.

News agencies function as 'wholesalers' of news, collecting news from various parts of the world, shaping it, and distributing it to their clients, mainly traditional mass media, and/or end users, the audience. Since their beginnings in the 19th century, agencies have been essential 'gatekeepers' defining the 'agenda' of mass media and, thus, practically the entire world. Additionally, news agencies represent a pillar of national identity, similar to the national bank, the army, or the post office; they symbolise statehood. Countries that were liberated in waves of anti-colonial struggles, immediately before or shortly after gaining independence, started their own national news agencies, representing one of the symbols of their independence. The Srna is the first and only news agency in the Republic of Srpska, and one of the leading agencies in Bosnia and Herzegovina, servicing a large number of mass media with its content. Since its inception, the Srna news agency has performed its informative role, maintaining a developed network of correspondents in the country, as well as in all major centers in Europe and around the world. The Srna also keeps pace with modern technological challenges; since its inception, it has offered photo and phono services, and since 2016, it has also provided video services, making it one of the most advanced modern news agencies. It can be said that the Srna has been essentially a witness, but also a participant, in all major socio-political, cultural, and historical events in the Republic of Srpska. However, the agency not only mediates information and news but also, in times of crisis, contributes to a kind of social homogenisation. As part of international communication highways, this agency represents an important agent of international communication. The inclusion of Srna in international communication highways, through which all major news in the world travels, has been an important part of a kind of international and political affirmation of the Republic of Srpska. Therefore, it can be said that the Srna news agency was actually created based on two primary goals: first, to inform domestic media and the public about the most significant local and global events, and secondly, to inform the world about events in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republic of Srpska. Finally, the Srna was one of the main drivers of cultural life in the Republic of Srpska in the early nineties of the 20th century. As an important media company, an agent of international communication, and an important initiator of cultural life, among other things, this enterprise was the initiator of the establishment of cultural institutions (Srna film, Srna fest), a sponsor of various cultural events (Monodrama Festival of the Republic of Srpska), and it appeared as a publisher of books by domestic writers.

El artículo analiza el crecimiento del cultivo del banano en Costa Rica durante el primer ciclo bananero (1899-1930), enfocándose en la expansión de la frontera del banano en el contexto de la comoditización de la fruta. Se destaca la importancia de los denuncios de terrenos baldíos y la influencia de la United Fruit Company en la producción de banano en la región Caribe costarricense. Se presta especial atención a la conformación de la división político-administrativa de Limón por parte de los gobiernos liberales. Asimismo, se enfatiza en el establecimiento de los Distritos Agrícolas dentro de la División de Limón, espacio diseñado por la United Fruit Company para impulsar el cultivo comercial en gran escala del banano.

After restoration of independence in 1918 the Lithuanian state from the very beginning of its activities had to defend the recognition of its very existence and territory by means of both diplomatic measures and armed struggle. One of the neighbouring states, which were encroaching on the independence of the nation, was Poland. The Poles from ancient times had not shown a favourable view toward the Lithuanian national movement, which they saw only as a certain separatism, and the Poles had been living with ideas of a union that had been unacceptable to Lithuanians for ages. In Polish eastern policy all their principal political groups assigned Vilnius a special place, which was to be one of the main points of support in creating a "great Poland". Later their aspirations to add all of ethnographic Lithuania became clear. In company with these aims, the opposing actions for the national aspirations of the Lithuanians ignited the spark of the military conflict between the two states. At the end of 1918 in Vilnius and its environs, the Poles founded a number of soldiers' organisations and self-defence units. Taking advantage of the German army's withdrawal and the relocation of the Temporary Government of Lithuania to Kaunas, they proclaimed the occupation of Vilnius on 01 January 1919. Vilnius remained in their hands for only 5 days this time since they were unable to resist the onslaught on the city by the Bolsheviks. Having not renounced their idea to repeat military actions, the Poles, taking advantage of a favourable situation, by a sudden assault on 19-21 April 1919, beat the Bolsheviks and drove them out of Vilnius. In governing the city until 14 July 1920, they not only had no consideration for the position of the Lithuanian Government but also persistently infiltrated further into the country, occupying a greater area. In the middle of June 1920, while the martial activity between Soviet Russia and Poland was tending to the disadvantage of the latter, the hope of getting back their capital Vilnius was ignited for the Lithuanians. The peace treaty between Soviet Russia and Lithuania concluded in Moscow on 12 July, on the basis of which Vilnius and its area together with Suvalkia and Gardinas were recognised as belonging to Lithuania, especially strengthened this hope. With the Poles withdrawing, the Lithuanian Army on 07 July 1920 began to occupy the localities they had abandoned. On 15 July a part of the Lithuanian Army advanced into Vilnius, and by the end of August had liberated southern Suvalkia. However, the Lithuanian Army faced a serious defeat, and in a large force on 28 August, the small Lithuanian Army units did not attempt to resist. A number of important places were lost and large losses experienced. The Polish-Lithuanian war ended on 07 October 1920 with a treaty signed in Suvalkia. However, the next day by order of the Polish leader J. Pilsudskis, Gen. L. Želigovskis, as if implementing the will of the "border's" inhabitants, broke the aforementioned treaty and occupied Vilnius. The lingering war ended by the end of November with the route of Želigovskis's soldiers near Širvintos, Giedraičiai, Musninkai. Military actions ended on 01 December. The Poles did not succeed in implementing their aim of union. The young Lithuanian Army, just being formed, had defended the country's independence.

This paper examines the ebb and flow of organizational power and control during an organizational change where a CEO mobilized narratives to liberate his company from top-down control. The emergent conceptual model makes sense of what appears to be discursive disorder – a cacophony of change narratives. Its contribution is twofold. Firstly, by identifying three ‘narratives in the making’ – the initial, counter and corrective narratives, it elaborates the meso-level narrative mechanisms at the heart of discursive struggles during change and extends Boje’s (2010) triad of narrativity. Secondly, it confirms the utility of the ‘organizational becoming’ and CCO perspectives of organizing for understanding change.

An important but easily forgotten moment in the history of film-philosophy is Jean Epstein's assertion that cinema, more than merely thinking, has a kind of intelligence. If it is a newfound conception of rationality that is needed for any contemporary ethical relation to the world, as thinkers from Reza Negarestani and Pete Wolfendale to feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks have espoused in their respective neo-rationalist projects, then cinema as a thinking thing must be interrogated in its relation to reason. A somatophilia of purely affective and phenomenological approaches in film theory alongside micropolitical injunctions to undermine common-sense and liberate one's desire in extremity can fall limp in view of such calls for universal thinking around rationality. To understand cinema's specific form of intelligence, this article will explore Luc Besson's Lucy (2014) as an instance of how film is able to represent intelligence. Besson's film provides a site where Western cultural anxieties and assumptions around intelligence are manifested. This will allow an explication of contemporary approaches to intelligence in philosophy whilst confronting these discourses with the insidious problematics of gender and race that undergird the film. I argue that Lucy shares many of its ambitions with the emerging vectors of thought associated with the neo-rationalist perspective in its engaging with a rethinking of universal values and the Promethean possibilities of human action. Reading the film through these philosophies will help position the ethical stakes it sets up, but also to distinguish it from a trend of contemporary “posthuman” films that it finds itself in company with. While it is certainly true that posthuman themes, as well as transhumanist fantasies, seem to permeate Besson's film, this article will incorporate another neologism, taken from neo-rationalist thinkers, in order to emphasise moments that can be productive from the standpoint of a philosophical account of intelligence: “rationalist inhumanism.”

Este estudo teve como objetivo avaliar a diversidade genética entre acessos tradicionais de mandioca da coleção da Universidade do Estado de Mato Grosso - UNEMAT, através de caracteres morfoagronômicos. A coleção está localizada na Empresa Matogrossense de Pesquisa, Assistência e Extensão Rural (EMPAER) de Cáceres. Foram utilizados 21 acessos para a avaliação dos caracteres morfoagronômicos: comprimento do lóbulo foliar; largura do lóbulo foliar; comprimento do pecíolo; altura de plantas; altura da primeira ramificação; comprimento das raízes; diâmetro da raiz; peso da raiz; contagem do número de polpas sadias por planta; número de raízes; peso em água; matéria seca e teor de amido. A análise de dissimilaridade foi baseada na Distância Euclidiana e o agrupamento pelo método Hierárquico UPGMA. Os resultados obtidos com o uso de características morfoagronômicas e da Distância Euclidiana dos 21 acessos de mandioca da coleção da UNEMAT evidenciaram a existência de variabilidade genética, onde a maior similaridade ocorreu entre os acessos Rondônia e N.I. 10 - 0501, e a maior divergência entre os acessos Sinop e Liberatão 0507.O Grupo I alocou o maior número de acessos pelo UPGMA e a característica altura média da primeira ramificação foi determinante na formação do Grupo IV. Os acessos analisados apresentaram divergência genética, onde os descritores analisados foram suficientes para a diferenciação dos acessos, onde os NI 02-2816, Poupa Branca e Sinop foram os mais promissores como parentais para cruzamentos entre os demais acessos.Palavras-chave: produção de mandioca, coleção de germoplasma, variabilidade genética. ANALYSIS OF GENETIC DIVERGENCE AMONG Manihot esculenta (crantz) ACCESS VIA MORPHOAGRONOMIC TRAITS ABSTRACT: This study aimed to evaluate the genetic diversity among accessions of traditional cassava collection at the University of Mato Grosso - UNEMAT through morphoagronomic traits. The collection is located in Mato Grosso Company Research, Assistance and Rural Extension (EMPA) of Cáceres. We used 21 accessions for the evaluation of morphoagronomic traits: length of the leaf lobe; lobe leaf width; length petiole; plant height; height of first branching; length of roots; diameter of the root; root weight; counting the number of healthy pulps per plant; number of roots; weight in water; dry matter and starch content. The dissimilarity analysis was based on Euclidean distance and hierarchical clustering method UPGMA. The results obtained with the use of morphoagronomic traits and the Euclidean distance of 21 cassava accessions from the collection of UNEMAT showed the existence of genetic variability, where the greatest similarity was between the Rondônia and N.I. 10 - 0501, and the greatest divergence among the accessions Sinop and Liberatão 0507. The Group I allocated the highest number of accesses by UPGMA and the characteristic height of the first branch was instrumental in the formation of Group IV. The analyzed accessions presented genetic divergence, where the descriptors analyzed were sufficient for the differentiation of the accesses where NI 02-2816, Poupa Branca and Sinop were the most promising as parental for crossings between the other accessions.Keywords: cassava production, germplasm collection, genetic variability.

In September of 2008, declining grapevines were observed in two vineyards (Vitis interspecific hybrids ‘Canada Muscat’ and ‘Chardonel’) in Fennville, MI. Affected vines were stunted with shortened internodes and yellow leaves; others had dead cordons or were entirely dead. The grower reported that vines were losing vigor and collapsing during a period of 2 years. Renewal trunks would collapse during the second season of growth. Several symptomatic vines showed signs of root decay. On one vine, distinctive fruiting bodies (mazaedia) were apparent on the roots below the soil line and resembled those of Roesleria subterranea (Weinm.) Redhead (2,3,4). The mazaedia were 4 to 5 mm tall and 1 mm in diameter with white-to-tan stipes and powdery, gray-to-greenish hemispherical heads. Ascospores were hyaline to light grayish green, disk shaped, and 4 to 6 μm in diameter. This fungus, also known as R. hypogaea Thüm & Pass., has been previously reported to cause grape root rot, vine decline, and replant problems in North America and Europe (2,3,4). The fungus was cultured from ascospores on potato dextrose agar (PDA). Colonies grew slowly (approximately 2 mm per day at 22 to 24°C) and were green in the center. No spores were produced. DNA was extracted, and internal transcribed spacer (ITS) sequences obtained by PCR were compared with known sequences using BLASTn (1). Our isolate had 100% ITS sequence homology to an isolate from Germany, Roesleria subterranea strain IB (Accession No. EF060304.1). To test for pathogenicity, the fungus was grown in potato dextrose broth for 14 days at 22 to 24°C. An aqueous suspension (0.1 g of fungus per ml) was prepared by blending mycelia with sterile deionized water (SDW) in a food processor. Five two-node, rooted ‘Chardonnay’ cuttings (45 days old) were placed in the suspension. Five other cuttings were placed in SDW (control). After 3 h, plants were removed and repotted in fresh BACTO soil (Michigan Peat Company, Houston, TX) and kept in a growth chamber at 23°C with a 16/8-h light/dark cycle. After 25 days, inoculated plants were, on average, 63% smaller with 77% lower fresh-root weight and fewer fine roots than the control plants. The pathogen was recovered from surface-disinfested roots of all five inoculated plants but not from the control plants. Cultures appeared similar to the original isolate and their identity was confirmed by ITS sequencing. To our knowledge, this is the first report of R. subterranea on grapes in Michigan and the Midwest. This fungus needs to be recognized as a potential cause of vine decline and replant problems in Midwestern vineyards. References: (1) S. F. Altschul et al. J. Mol. Biol. 215:403, 1990. (2) W. Gärtel. Page 40 in: Compendium of Grape Diseases. R. C. Pearson and A. C. Goheen, eds. The American Phytopathological Society, St. Paul, MN, 1988. (3) M. Kirchmair et al. Mycol. Res. 112:1210, 2009. (4) J. R. Liberato et al. Pest and Diseases Image Library. Online publication, 2009.

Abstract Introduction: Daratumumab is a human IgGκ monoclonal antibody that targets CD38 with a direct on-tumor and immunomodulatory mechanism of action. In the primary analysis (median follow-up, 16.5 months) of the global phase 3 ALCYONE trial, daratumumab in combination with bortezomib, melphalan, and prednisone (D-VMP) significantly improved progression-free survival (PFS) versus VMP alone in patients with newly diagnosed multiple myeloma (NDMM) who were ineligible for transplant (median PFS, not reached vs 18.1 months; hazard ratio [HR], 0.50; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.38-0.65; P<0.001). In the primary analysis (median follow-up, 12.3 months) of the phase 3 OCTANS trial, D-VMP significantly prolonged PFS versus VMP in transplant-ineligible Asian patients with NDMM (median PFS, not reached vs 18.2 months; HR, 0.43; 95% CI, 0.24-0.77; P=0.0033). Here, we present a pooled subgroup analysis of PFS stratified by best response in Asian and global patients from the OCTANS and ALCYONE studies, respectively. Methods: Eligible patients in OCTANS and ALCYONE were ≥18 years of age, were diagnosed with NDMM, and were not eligible for autologous stem cell transplant due to age (≥65 years) or comorbidities. All patients received up to 9 cycles (42-days) of bortezomib (1.3 mg/m 2; subcutaneous) twice weekly on Weeks 1, 2, 4, and 5 of Cycle 1 and once weekly on Weeks 1, 2, 4, and 5 of Cycles 2 to 9; melphalan (9 mg/m 2; oral) once daily on Days 1 to 4 of each cycle; prednisone (60 mg/m 2; oral) once daily on Days 1 to 4 of each cycle. For patients in the D-VMP group, daratumumab (16 mg/kg, intravenous) was administered once weekly in Cycle 1, once every 3 weeks in Cycles 2 to 9, and once every 4 weeks thereafter until disease progression or unacceptable toxicity. Response over time (at 6, 12, 18, 24, 54 weeks) and disease progression were assessed by a validated computer algorithm in accordance with the IMWG criteria. Minimal residual disease (MRD) negativity (10 -5) was assessed by multi-parameter flow cytometry in OCTANS and by next-generation sequencing in ALCYONE. Results: In the OCTANS study, 220 Asian patients were randomized (D-VMP, n=146; VMP, n=74); in the ALCYONE study, 706 global patients were randomized (D-VMP, n=350; VMP, n=356). Median age in OCTANS was 69 (range, 57-84) years and 71 (range 40-93) years in ALCYONE. Patients were pooled from both studies (D-VMP, n=496; VMP, n=430). D-VMP increased the rate of complete response or better (≥CR; 10.2% vs 5.6%) and the rate of very good partial response or better (≥VGPR; 58.5% vs 38.1%) versus VMP after 18 weeks of treatment (Figure A). Responses deepened over time among patients in both the D-VMP and VMP groups, as shown by the ≥CR rate (D-VMP, 38.8%; VMP, 21.6%) and the ≥VGPR rate (D-VMP, 74.0%; VMP, 50.7%) at 54 weeks. At a median follow-up of 12.3 months for OCTANS and 16.5 months for ALCYONE, among patients who achieved a VGPR (D-VMP: n=145 [29.2%]; VMP: n=109 [25.3%]), the median PFS was not reached in the D-VMP group versus 19.9 months in the VMP group (HR, 0.61; 95% CI, 0.36-1.00; P=0.0499; Figure B). All patients who achieved ≥CR with or without MRD negativity (10 -5) demonstrated prolonged PFS, regardless of treatment (≥CR: HR, 1.54; 95% CI, 0.65-3.65; P=0.3210; ≥CR+MRD negativity: HR, 0.67; 95% CI, 0.13-3.40; P=0.6225; Figure B); however, more patients treated with D-VMP achieved this level of response (≥CR: D-VMP , n=212 [42.7%]; VMP, n=100 [23.3%]; ≥CR+MRD negativity: D-VMP, n=116 [23.4%]; VMP, n=27 [6.3%]; Figure B). Conclusion: In a pooled analysis of OCTANS and ALCYONE, more patients with transplant-ineligible NDMM achieved deeper responses with D-VMP versus VMP. More patients treated with D-VMP achieved ≥CR with or without MRD negativity compared with those treated with VMP alone, leading to prolonged PFS regardless of treatment. These results support the use of daratumumab in addition to VMP in transplant-ineligible Asian patients with NDMM. Figure 1 Figure 1. Disclosures Wang: AbbVie: Consultancy; Astellas Pharma, Inc.: Research Funding. Kim: BMS: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Janssen: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding. Li: Suzhou Zelgen Biopharmaceuticals Co.,Ltd.: Honoraria. Chim: Janssen, Takeda & Amgen: Other: received sponsorship for overseas meetings. Rodriguez-Otero: Janssen: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Celgene-BMS: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; GSK: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Pfizer: Consultancy; Sanofi: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Kite: Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Amgen: Honoraria; Regeneron: Honoraria; Clínica Universidad de Navarra: Current Employment. Liberati: abbvie, amgen, archigen, beigene, BMS, celgene, DR REDDY'S LABORATORIES SPA, fibrogen, glaxo, Janssen, Karyopharm, Morphosys, Novartis, Onconova, Oncopeptides ab, Roche, Sanophi, Secura Bio, Takeda, Verastem,: Research Funding. Takamatsu: Bristol-Myers Squibb: Honoraria, Research Funding; SRL: Consultancy; Adaptive Biotechnologies, Eisai: Honoraria; Janssen: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding. Dimopoulos: BMS: Honoraria; Takeda: Honoraria; Beigene: Honoraria; Janssen: Honoraria; Amgen: Honoraria. Wroblewski: Janssen: Current Employment, Current equity holder in publicly-traded company. Carson: Janssen: Current Employment. Qi: Janssen: Current Employment, Current equity holder in publicly-traded company. Wang: Janssen: Current Employment. Song: Janssen: Current Employment. Jia: Janssen: Current Employment. Yang: Janssen: Current Employment, Current equity holder in publicly-traded company. Liu: Janssen: Ended employment in the past 24 months. Li: Janssen: Current Employment. Zhang: Janssen: Current Employment.

Statement of the problem. The article provides an overview of the theoretical provisions and research on the formation of alcohol dependence in adolescence. At the same time, alcohol dependence is presented as a complex phenomenon, which includes the following components: addictive liability, dependent behavior, motives of alcohol consumption. There is a contradiction between the continuous growth of adolescent alcoholism, decrease in the age of persons who consume alcoholic beverages, the increasing number of adolescent girls who consume alcoholic beverages, and the insufficient number of psychological and pedagogical studies in the field of alcohol addiction development among elder adolescents. As a research task, the authors identified an attempt to identify and describe the indicators of alcohol dependence among elder adolescents. It has been shown that there is a connection between addictive behavior, alcohol dependence and the motives of alcohol consumption in adolescence. The purpose of the article is to reveal the features of alcohol dependence development in adolescence. Research methodology. In the study, we rely on the scientific ideas of age-related development in the context of studying addictive behavior among adolescents in the works by L.S. Vygotsky, A.V. Petrovsky, E. Erickson, and others; research on the problems of addictive behavior and its prevention (A.A. Aleksandrova, A.V. Gogoleva, M.V. Romannikova, N.A.Sirota, T.A.Shilova, V.M. Yaltonsky, etc.). The total sample size was 162 adolescents in the 9th grade: 80 boys and 82 girls studying in educational institutions of Krasnoyarsk. The diagnostic package is represented by the following methods: questionnaire survey “Attitude of adolescents to alcoholic beverages”, test questionnaire “Addictive liability” by V.V. Yusupov and V.A. Korzunina, test questionnaire “Liability to addictive behavior” (on the example of alcohol dependence) by V.D. Mendelevich, V.Yu. Zavyalov’s questionnaire “The motives for consuming alcohol”. To compare the samples, the Mann-Whitney U-test and calculation of the Spearman correlation coefficient were used. Results. The study showed that adolescents are characterized by low psychological resistance to an unfavorable social environment and poor adaptation in the educational space. The risk of alcohol dependence development was revealed under certain social conditions, and the girls were more strongly oriented towards the use of alcoholic beverages. The first acquaintance with alcohol of adolescents took place before the age of 10, adolescents tried alcohol, and half of them prefer beer, but at the same time drink strong drinks. Internal psychological reasons allow adolescents to use alcohol more often to raise their spirits, to liberate themselves in communication, to become ‘cronies’ in the group. The latter is especially true for girls. The leading motives for alcohol consumption are mainly the motives of the traditional and hedonic subtypes among girls and the pseudo-cultural and ataractic subtypes among boys, which may indicate the absence of alcoholic illness as such, but this is an alarming symptom for adolescents. There is a relationship between the severity of addiction, alcohol dependence and motivation for alcohol consumption (moderately pronounced addictive risk, signs of a tendency, addiction to alcohol, traditional motives, signs of increased addiction, submissive motives, pronounced signs of addiction, signs of increased liability, alcohol consumption for the company, pseudo-cultural type of motives, hedonistic motives, ataractic motives). Conclusion. The study made it possible to identify adolescents with varying degrees of risk of alcohol dependence, who require preventive work to be carried out with them. It is concluded that the study of adolescents’ attitudes to alcohol will expand the understanding of the phenomenon of alcohol dependence, and, no doubt, will be useful for purposeful planning and implementation of psychological and pedagogical prevention in an educational institution. Based on the data obtained, a prevention program can be developed using modern interactive technologies.

Abstract Introduction: Treatment of multiple myeloma (MM) has greatly improved over the last two decades. However, most pts will relapse and develop refractory disease. Most anti-cancer regimens require dose modifications (interruption, reduction, or discontinuation) during the treatment course in order to optimize the therapeutic window; appropriate modifications improve tolerability while maintaining anti-cancer activity. Selinexor, an oral selective inhibitor of XPO1-mediated nuclear export (SINE) compound, enforces the nuclear retention and functional activation of tumor suppressor proteins within the nucleus and prevents the translation of oncoproteins. The combination of once weekly (QW) selinexor, QW bortezomib, and dexamethasone (XVd) is FDA approved for previously treated MM. Compared to standard twice weekly (BIW) bortezomib plus dexamethasone (Vd) and using 40% less bortezomib and 25% less dexamethasone, XVd demonstrated significantly prolonged median progression-free survival (PFS) and time-to-next-treatment (TTNT), increased the overall response rate (ORR), reduced rates of peripheral neuropathy, and showed a trend towards improved overall survival (OS) in the Phase 3 randomized BOSTON study (NCT03110562). The recommended starting dose of selinexor in XVd is 100mg QW, but the median dose administered in BOSTON was 80 mg QW. Here, we analyzed the efficacy outcomes and adverse events (AEs) in pts whose dose was reduced compared to those where it was not. Methods: The BOSTON study consisted of two arms: pts treated with selinexor QW (100mg), bortezomib QW (1.3mg/m 2) and dexamethasone BIW (20 mg) (XVd; n=195 in the intention-to-treat [ITT] population) compared to standard BIW Vd. Results: Of the XVd pts in the BOSTON study, 126 had a dose reduction of selinexor and 69 did not. The median age was 66.0 in both groups (range: with reduction, 47-87; without, 40-84) and the median number of prior therapies was 1.0 (range, 1-3) for both groups (Table 1). The median time to dose reduction in these pts was 68 days (range, 8-561 days). The median duration of study treatment for these pts was 34.5 weeks (range, 3-120 weeks) compared to 20.0 weeks (range, 1-118) in pts with no dose reduction. In the group with dose reduction, the median dose of selinexor received per week was 71.3 mg (range, 29.7, 101.4) compared to 100 mg (range, 33.3, 136.7) in pts with no reduction. Pts who dose reduced had a median PFS of 16.6 months compared to 9.2 months in pts who did not (one-sided p value, <0.01), with a median follow up of 14.1 months with reduction and 10.6 months without. The ORR in the dose reduced group compared to pts who did not dose reduce was 81.7% vs 66.7% (one-sided p value, <0.01), and the rate of VGPR or better was 51.6% vs 31.8% (Table 2). Duration of response (DOR) was NR in the dose reduced group and was 12.0 months in the group without reduction. TTNT was 22.6 months in the dose reduced group and 10.5 months in pts with no dose reductions (one-sided p value, <0.001). The most common adverse events (AEs; dose reduction and without dose reduction) of any grade were thrombocytopenia (69.8% and 42.0%), nausea (55.6% and 40.6%), and fatigue (49.2% and 29.0%). The rate of treatment discontinuation in the dose reduced group was 24.6% and 14.5% without dose reductions. In the dose reduced group, there were 6 (4.8%) deaths and 6 (8.7%) in the group with no dose reduction. As pts with a dose reduction stayed on therapy for a prolonged period of time, to best understand the impact of dose reduction on the AE, we present the duration-adjusted incidence rates of AEs of clinical interest. The duration-adjusted incidence rates of AE were considerably lower after dose reduction of selinexor compared to the rates on or before dose reduction: thrombocytopenia (62.5% vs 47.6%), nausea (31.6% vs 7.3%), fatigue (28.1% vs 9.9%), decreased appetite (21.5% vs 6.4%), anemia (17.9% vs 10.3%), and diarrhea (12.9% vs 5.2) (Table 3). Conclusions: While all pts on XVd initiated therapy at 100mg selinexor QW, and it was associated with very low rates of progressive disease (1 in 195 pts), appropriate dose reductions of selinexor were associated with a longer PFS, DOR, and TTNT, and significantly reduced AE with improved tolerability, highlighting dose reductions as an important tool to personalize and optimize the therapeutic window for pts with RRMM. Figure 1 Figure 1. Disclosures Jagannath: Bristol Myers Squibb: Consultancy; Janssen Pharmaceuticals: Consultancy; Karyopharm Therapeutics: Consultancy; Legend Biotech: Consultancy; Sanofi: Consultancy; Takeda: Consultancy. Badros: Janssen: Research Funding; GlaxoSmithKline: Research Funding; J&J: Research Funding; BMS: Research Funding. Levy: Takeda, Celgene, Seattle Genetics, AbbVie, Jazz Pharmaceuticals, Gilead Sciences, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Amgen, Spectrum Pharmaceuticals,Janssen.: Consultancy. Moreau: Celgene BMS: Honoraria; Oncopeptides: Honoraria; Amgen: Honoraria; Sanofi: Honoraria; Abbvie: Honoraria; Janssen: Honoraria. Delimpasi: Takeda: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; Janssen: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau; Amgen: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau. Kriachok: Takeda, Roche, Abbivie, Janssen, MSD: Consultancy; Takeda, Roche, Abbvie, Janssen, MSD, Pfizer: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau. Gavriatopoulou: Takeda: Honoraria; Sanofi: Honoraria; GSK: Honoraria; Janssen: Honoraria; Karyopharm: Honoraria; Genesis: Honoraria; Amgen: Honoraria. Auner: Janssen: Speakers Bureau; Amgen: Research Funding; Takeda, Karyopharm: Other: Advisory role. Leleu: Bristol-Myers Squibb: Honoraria; Carsgen Therapeutics Ltd: Honoraria; Celgene: Honoraria; Gilead Sciences: Honoraria; Janssen-Cilag: Honoraria; Karyopharm Therapeutics: Honoraria; Merck: Honoraria; Mundipharma: Honoraria; Novartis: Honoraria; Oncopeptides: Honoraria; Pierre Fabre: Honoraria; Roche: Honoraria; Sanofi: Honoraria; Amgen: Honoraria; AbbVie: Honoraria; Takeda: Honoraria, Other: Non-financial support. Usenko: Janssen: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: Clinical Trials Investigator; AbbVie: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: Clinical Trials Investigator; Pfizer: Consultancy, Honoraria; Acerta: Other: Clinical Trials Investigator; Ascentage: Other: Clinical Trials Investigator; Celgene: Other: Clinical Trials Investigator; Il-Yang: Other: Clinical Trials Investigator; Karyopharm: Other: Clinical Trials Investigator; Oncopeptides: Other: Clinical Trials Investigator; Rigel: Other: Clinical Trials Investigator; Takeda: Other: Clinical Trials Investigator; UCB: Other: Clinical Trials Investigator. Hajek: Janssen: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Novartis: Consultancy, Research Funding; Amgen: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; AbbVie: Consultancy, Honoraria; Pharma MAR: Consultancy, Honoraria; Celgene: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; BMS: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Takeda: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding. Venner: BMS: Honoraria; Amgen: Research Funding; Celgene: Research Funding; Amgen: Honoraria; Takeda: Honoraria; Janssen: Honoraria; Sanofi: Honoraria; Pfizer: Honoraria. Garg: University Hospital Leicester: Current Employment; Amgen Janssen Novartis Sanofi Takeda: Honoraria; Takeda Janssen Novartis Sanofi: Other: Travel Accommodations, Expenses. Gironella Mesa: BMS, Janssen: Honoraria. Jurczyszyn: Janssen-Cilag, Amgen: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau. Robak: Biogen, Abbvie, Octapharma, Janssen: Honoraria, Other: Advisory board; AstraZeneca, Abbvie, Janssen, Octapharma, Gilead,Oncopeptides AB, Pharmacyclics, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Biogen: Research Funding; Medical University of Lodz: Current Employment. Galli: BMS, Celgene, Janssen, Sanofi, Takeda: Honoraria. Radinoff: Janssen, Pfizer, Novartis, Servier etc.: Consultancy, Honoraria; Amgen, Bayer, Takeda, etc.: Research Funding; the Bulgarian Minister of Health: Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees. Liberati: abbvie, amgen, archigen, beigene, BMS, celgene, DR REDDY'S LABORATORIES SPA, fibrogen, glaxo, Janssen, Karyopharm, Morphosys, Novartis, Onconova, Oncopeptides ab, Roche, Sanophi, Secura Bio, Takeda, Verastem,: Research Funding. Quach: Amgen: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Sanofi: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Antengene: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Janssen/Cilag: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; GlaxoSmithKline: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Bristol Myers Squibb: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Celgene: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; Takeda: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees; Karyopharm: Consultancy, Honoraria, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; CSL: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees. Bila: Takeda, AMGEN, Janssen: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Speakers Bureau. Katodritou: GSK, Amgen, Karyopharm, Abbvie, Janssen-Cilag, Genesis Pharma, Sanofi: Honoraria, Research Funding. DeCastro: Karyopharm: Current Employment, Current equity holder in publicly-traded company. Chai: Karyopharm: Current Employment. Van Domelen: Karyopharm: Current Employment, Current equity holder in publicly-traded company. Mishal: Karyopharm: Current Employment. Bentur: Karyopharm Therapeutics: Current Employment, Current equity holder in publicly-traded company. Shah: Karyopharm: Current Employment. Shacham: Karyopharm: Current Employment, Current equity holder in publicly-traded company, Patents & Royalties: (8999996, 9079865, 9714226, PCT/US12/048319, and I574957) on hydrazide containing nuclear transport modulators and uses, and pending patents PCT/US12/048319, 499/2012, PI20102724, and 2012000928) . Kauffman: Karyopharm Therapeutics Inc.: Current Employment, Current equity holder in publicly-traded company. Richardson: GlaxoSmithKline: Consultancy; Sanofi: Consultancy; AstraZeneca: Consultancy; Regeneron: Consultancy; Karyopharm: Consultancy, Research Funding; Janssen: Consultancy; AbbVie: Consultancy; Protocol Intelligence: Consultancy; Secura Bio: Consultancy; Takeda: Consultancy, Research Funding; Celgene/BMS: Consultancy, Research Funding; Oncopeptides: Consultancy, Research Funding; Jazz Pharmaceuticals: Consultancy, Research Funding.

ResumenLa Feria de Loja es un evento comercial tradicional de la ciudad de Loja y de la región sur de Ecuador, que se ha desarrollado ininterrumpidamente por 189 años. Desde 2016, la administración y gestión del evento está a cargo de la Corporación de Ferias de Loja, buscando potenciar el emprendimiento, la innovación y la cultura como sus ejes estratégicos. El estudio investiga y relaciona los perfiles de identidad e imagen de la Feria de Loja, a partir del análisis de su visión estratégica y de las percepciones de sus principales públicos. Se aplicó una entrevista especializada al director ejecutivo de la Corporación de Ferias de Loja y se realizaron grupos focales con tres grupos de stakeholders del evento: medios de comunicación, empleados-colaboradores y estudiantes de segundo año de bachillerato de los colegios de la ciudad. Los resultados muestran el perfil de identidad del evento, especificando los atributos de personalidad, institucionales y competitivos, así como priorizándolos como principales, secundarios y periféricos. Por otra parte, se exponen los perfiles de imagen corporativa por público estudiado y el perfil general de imagen. Finalmente, se hace una relación de los perfiles de identidad e imagen, para detectar las brechas entre la identidad y la imagen proyectada de la Feria de Loja en sus públicos estratégicos, que a su vez representan insumos de planificación de la comunicación de identidad del evento.Palabras Clave: Relaciones públicas, identidad, imagen, Feria, Loja. AbstractCorporate identity and image are concepts that are intertwined and sometimes confused and distorted. Identity is what the organization is, represents its character and is shaped by its central, distinctive and lasting characteristics, according to the criteria of Gioia, Schultz & Corley (2000). The image, according to Terkla & Pagano (cited by Oliva & Prieto, 2015,117), is the public perception of an organization, is how people imagine and believe it as an institution or company. Therefore, the organization can manage its identity because it is built inside, but not its image because it is formed in the minds of its public and has no control over it. The present study investigates the values and corporate beliefs of the members and executive management of the Feria de Loja, a commercial and traditional event in the southern region of Ecuador, which has been continuously developed for 189 year, since the Liberator Simón Bolívar decreed it in 1829. Based on the research, the identity profile of the Loja Fair is established, recognizing the main, secondary and peripheral attributes. The Feria de Loja was managed by the Standing Committee of Fairs, but since 2016 the Loja Fairs Corporation was set up. Among its management objectives, it proposed to change the concept of the event, going from a purely comercial fair to promoting entrepreneurship, innovation and culture. Therefore, entrepreneurship is the core attribute of the Loja Fair, highlighting also the characteristics of tradition and fun. Likewise, the image profile of the Feria de Loja is presented, through research through focus groups to three types key element: media, employees- collaborators and second-year high school students from the city´s schools. The first ones were analyzed because according to the Communication Plan they are considered as strategies to focus the communication of the event according to the new concept, the second group becomes important because it is the closest to the event, in charge of operational management and therefore of being in contact with visitors and exhibitors. Also because for some authors the image has mainly a conception in the internal public, as mentioned by Berstein (1984). And the third group is important because in the preliminary research of the Strategic Communication Plan, it was identified that young people between 15 and 18 years old represent less than 10% of the visitors, so in the following editions events and communicative actions were organized to relate and attract this group of people, also becoming a public priority. The perceptions of each of the groups are very heterogeneous, with entrepreneurship being the most recognized attribute by the media, but with little visibility in the internal public and almost nonexistent for young external audiences. Fun is the main feature of the fair in the minds of young people but it is not representative in the media. While for employees and collaborators, work (generation of employment) is the main attribute of the event. Finally, the graphic relationship of the identity profiles and corporate image of the Loja Fair is analyzed, to know the differences presented, which is an important input for the planning of the management of their identity.Keywords: Public Relations, Identity, Image, Fair, Loja.

Abstract This study examines the change of criteria for selecting texts for translation in Shinchunji, the most influential magazine in liberated Korea. Using data mining methods, the study analyzes the topics and narratives of the source texts on the two occupiers of Korea: the US and the USSR. The results reveal that institutional, domestic, and international changes affected the magazine’s selection process, as its editors’ perceptions of the two powers changed over time. The selected texts’ topics and narratives show the ideological transformation of the publishing company from a left-leaning or moderate to an anti-communist governmental mouthpiece, expressing the editors’ desire to win over the minds of the Koreans for nation-building.

This article investigates the reasons for and experiences of voluntary childlessness throughout the life course. Thirteen voluntarily childless people aged 60 years and older (Belgium) were interviewed using the McAdams approach (2005). Four profiles were derived from the reasons given for voluntary childlessness: the “liberated careerist,” the “social critic,” the “acquiescent partner,” and “voluntarily childless because of life course circumstances.” Results further indicate that older people experience feelings of acceptance, loss (missing familiarity with current trends, being helped, and children’s company), and relief concerning their voluntary childlessness. Moreover, they rarely seem to regret their choice. The discussion indicates the existence of voluntary childlessness among older people, a phenomenon sometimes questioned in the existing scientific literature. As part of a diverse target group, each of these older adults has their personal reasons and experiences regarding childlessness.

This article examines how the process of adopting or rejecting liberated company management practices is constructed; this process is often portrayed as long, difficult, and complex. To address this question, we use a qualitative study based on narratives (Dumez, 2016) from two cases of companies in the process of liberation. Our results show that it is important for the process to be doubly coherent in order to sustain the adoption of liberation practices. We first show that the process involves three bundles of practices. These communication, support, and empowerment bundles have content coherence, i.e., configurations of interdependent practices. We then observe temporal coherence in the adoption of management practices, i.e., the preferred timeline for sustaining liberation. Beyond this double coherence, our analysis shows that adapting the process to the idiosyncrasies of the organisation is still necessary.

I greet you from Cologne in Germany, Europe. It is the fourth largest city in Germany, the oldest, founded two thousand years ago by the Roman Empire. The University of this leading Catholic archbishopric led the way in the feudal Middle Ages with the Papal Inquisition in Rome to theologically justify the torture and public burning of heretics and “witches”. But Cologne became the most important German city for the development of Marxism in the 19th century. This was because the Cologne region was liberated from feudalism by Napoleon in 1794 as a result of the French Revolution. Napoleon closed the university and promoted bourgeois-capitalist industry and trade. When resistance to the new Prussian monarchy came to a head in 1842, a certain Karl Marx went to Cologne: the bourgeois forces were strongest here. Marx and Engels ran a joint-stock company with Cologne bankers and industrialists: they financed the newspaper Rheinische Zeitung für Politik, Handel und Gewerbe. It was Marx’s first journalistic-political project. He was not yet a Marxist. He had to deal with economics for the first time; he still spoke vaguely of “material interests”. The monarchy banned the newspaper. Marx and Engels fled into exile, to Paris.

In view of the higher demand and customer expectations on the speed and accuracy of e-commerce logistics service as well as the repetitive and time-consuming nature of manual order processing operation. This paper proposes a robotic process automation (RPA) model to liberate human resources over time-consuming, inefficient, non-value-added, and repetitive operational processes occupying workforces. This paper proposed an RPA model that integrates three functional RPA bots in (1) tracking order status, (2) capturing order data, and (3) verifying order data to increase the efficiency and accuracy of logistics operation and the order-handling process in small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) logistics company. A case study was conducted on an SME logistics service providing customers with inbound and outbound operation services. The result demonstrated that the proposed model significantly improves logistics operations performance against a human approach concerning key indicators after implementation. Logistics companies could free up the workforce for value-creating activities in value-added services.

The study aims to capture the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) from the perspectives of Lyotard and Huyula culture. CSR practices serve as a grand narrative used to obtain legitimacy for corporate practices and to mitigate negative impacts. This research adopts a qualitative approach within the framework of Postmodernism. The HUYULA culture is employed to dissect the reality of CSR. The findings of the study reveal that (1) the grand narrative in CSR practices is evident in CSR disclosures that primarily focus on fulfilling CSR item requirements according to GRI guidelines, without considering the actual facts and practices within the company. Moral values are disregarded when cases of environmental exploitation and human exploitation occur. CSR disclosures can serve as a tool for legitimizing the actions of corporate elites in serving their own interests. (2) CSR disclosures that accommodate Indonesian culture and noble values can liberate CSR disclosures from the grand narrative. The values of the Huyula culture can be integrated into CSR practices, making CSR implementation and disclosure tangible expressions of corporate care for stakeholders through a culture of mutual assistance. These values can foster the company's love for its stakeholders. Thus, CSR activities and disclosures go beyond being mere grand narratives. They become acts of corporate compassion towards fellow human beings through local wisdom values. This research provides broad insights and implies that cultural values can serve as the foundation for implementing CSR practices

The development of innovative antibacterial drugs against foodborne pathogens has led to an interest in novel materials such as nanomaterials. The unique features of nanomaterial qualify it for use as an antibacterial treatment. Noble metals and metal oxide nanoparticles, such as silver and magnetite nanoparticles, have been shown to be effective antibacterial medications against a range of microorganisms. In this work, Ag@Fe3O4 -NPs were fabricated by using a wet chemical reduction and modified co-precipitation techniques. The antibacterial efficiency of the Ag/Fe3O4 core shell nanoparticles was investigated by applying various techniques, such as the Kirby–Bauer Disk Diffusion test, minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) and bactericidal concentration (MBC), Colony Forming Unit (CFU), and kill time assay. The toxicity mechanism of Ag@Fe3O4 -NPs against Salmonella typhimurium and Escherichia coli was studied by apoptosis and reactive oxygen species (ROS) assays. The data revealed that a cubic core was surrounded by a silver shell, which indicated the regular morphology of silver magnetite core shell nanoparticles without any aggregation. Furthermore, Ag@Fe3O4 -NPs is more toxic against S. typhimurium and E. coli than Ag-NPs and Fe3O4 NPs. The MIC values for Ag/Fe3O4 NPs against S. typhimurium and E. coli were 3.1 and 5.4 μg/ml, respectively, whereas the MIC values for Ag-NPs and MNPs against S. typhimurium and E. coli were 4.1 and 8.2 μg/ml for Ag-NPs and 6.9 and 10.3 μg/ml for MNPs. The results showed the ability of Ag@Fe3O4 -NPs to induce apoptosis by generating ROS. Also, the ability of Ag@Fe3O4 -NPs to liberate free Ag+ and generate ROS via the Haber-Weiss cycle may be a plausible mechanism to explain the toxicity of Ag@Fe3O4 -NPs - NPs.

Scholars could not come to unanimity on definition of entrepreneurship but agreement exist that an entrepreneur should be a natural leader having thorough understanding of the business and visualize the changes and take calculated risk. Skills and abilities required for entrepreneurship are so great and numerous that it is difficult to find persons having entrepreneurship trailts. Most of the entrepreneurs either fail at early stages or unable to expand the business beyond a small shop. A successful entrepreneur in addition to being a visionary and possessing qualities like innovativeness, resilience, perseverance etc. should have the honest belief in self and unflinching faith in ‘Karma’ like ‘Rama of Ramayana’ so that he can face the challenges and pursue the goal with limited resources. Religious philosophy helps the people in developing traits useful in life. Holy books like the Ramayana not just deals with spirituality but management principles hidden in it help an individual to develop entrepreneurship skills and role effectiveness. Primarily, Ramayana is a story and pursuit of the Ramayana does not automatically get translated into entrepreneurship qualities as background was quite different than today’s business scenario. However, Rama, a role-model of Gyan-yog and Karm-yog, can be compared with an entrepreneur who started from scraps like entrepreneur but by linking of his goals with social values and following highest standard of ethics, he could make strategic alliances with Sugriva and Vibheeshana and created Ram and Company and inducted less skilled, less equipped but well dedicated Vanar in army and fought against Ravana (the greatest demon) having well equipped army, to make the earth free from devils and liberate Sita and save the dignity of women (social cause). Principles hidden in the Ramayana show holistic vision and, if followed, by an entrepreneur will help him to establish a successful business model.This article is a modest attempt of exploring attributes of Ram and principles/ methodology adopted by him in his fight against Ravana understood through interpretation of stanzas/ verses mentioned in Ramcharit Manas and correlate them with formation of strategy, goal orientation, strategic alliance, change management etc. ideally required by entrepreneurs to establish and grow his business in modern day competitive scenario.

The term “coffee palace” was primarily used in Australia to describe the temperance hotels that were built in the last decades of the 19th century, although there are references to the term also being used to a lesser extent in the United Kingdom (Denby 174). Built in response to the worldwide temperance movement, which reached its pinnacle in the 1880s in Australia, coffee palaces were hotels that did not serve alcohol. This was a unique time in Australia’s architectural development as the economic boom fuelled by the gold rush in the 1850s, and the demand for ostentatious display that gathered momentum during the following years, afforded the use of richly ornamental High Victorian architecture and resulted in very majestic structures; hence the term “palace” (Freeland 121). The often multi-storied coffee palaces were found in every capital city as well as regional areas such as Geelong and Broken Hill, and locales as remote as Maria Island on the east coast of Tasmania. Presented as upholding family values and discouraging drunkenness, the coffee palaces were most popular in seaside resorts such as Barwon Heads in Victoria, where they catered to families. Coffee palaces were also constructed on a grand scale to provide accommodation for international and interstate visitors attending the international exhibitions held in Sydney (1879) and Melbourne (1880 and 1888). While the temperance movement lasted well over 100 years, the life of coffee palaces was relatively short-lived. Nevertheless, coffee palaces were very much part of Australia’s cultural landscape. In this article, I examine the rise and demise of coffee palaces associated with the temperance movement and argue that coffee palaces established in the name of abstinence were modelled on the coffee houses that spread throughout Europe and North America in the 17th and 18th centuries during the Enlightenment—a time when the human mind could be said to have been liberated from inebriation and the dogmatic state of ignorance. The Temperance Movement At a time when newspapers are full of lurid stories about binge-drinking and the alleged ill-effects of the liberalisation of licensing laws, as well as concerns over the growing trend of marketing easy-to-drink products (such as the so-called “alcopops”) to teenagers, it is difficult to think of a period when the total suppression of the alcohol trade was seriously debated in Australia. The cause of temperance has almost completely vanished from view, yet for well over a century—from 1830 to the outbreak of the Second World War—the control or even total abolition of the liquor trade was a major political issue—one that split the country, brought thousands onto the streets in demonstrations, and influenced the outcome of elections. Between 1911 and 1925 referenda to either limit or prohibit the sale of alcohol were held in most States. While moves to bring about abolition failed, Fitzgerald notes that almost one in three Australian voters expressed their support for prohibition of alcohol in their State (145). Today, the temperance movement’s platform has largely been forgotten, killed off by the practical example of the United States, where prohibition of the legal sale of alcohol served only to hand control of the liquor traffic to organised crime. Coffee Houses and the Enlightenment Although tea has long been considered the beverage of sobriety, it was coffee that came to be regarded as the very antithesis of alcohol. When the first coffee house opened in London in the early 1650s, customers were bewildered by this strange new drink from the Middle East—hot, bitter, and black as soot. But those who tried coffee were, reports Ellis, soon won over, and coffee houses were opened across London, Oxford, and Cambridge and, in the following decades, Europe and North America. Tea, equally exotic, entered the English market slightly later than coffee (in 1664), but was more expensive and remained a rarity long after coffee had become ubiquitous in London (Ellis 123-24). The impact of the introduction of coffee into Europe during the seventeenth century was particularly noticeable since the most common beverages of the time, even at breakfast, were weak “small beer” and wine. Both were safer to drink than water, which was liable to be contaminated. Coffee, like beer, was made using boiled water and, therefore, provided a new and safe alternative to alcoholic drinks. There was also the added benefit that those who drank coffee instead of alcohol began the day alert rather than mildly inebriated (Standage 135). It was also thought that coffee had a stimulating effect upon the “nervous system,” so much so that the French called coffee une boisson intellectuelle (an intellectual beverage), because of its stimulating effect on the brain (Muskett 71). In Oxford, the British called their coffee houses “penny universities,” a penny then being the price of a cup of coffee (Standage 158). Coffee houses were, moreover, more than places that sold coffee. Unlike other institutions of the period, rank and birth had no place (Ellis 59). The coffee house became the centre of urban life, creating a distinctive social culture by treating all customers as equals. Egalitarianism, however, did not extend to women—at least not in London. Around its egalitarian (but male) tables, merchants discussed and conducted business, writers and poets held discussions, scientists demonstrated experiments, and philosophers deliberated ideas and reforms. For the price of a cup (or “dish” as it was then known) of coffee, a man could read the latest pamphlets and newsletters, chat with other patrons, strike business deals, keep up with the latest political gossip, find out what other people thought of a new book, or take part in literary or philosophical discussions. Like today’s Internet, Twitter, and Facebook, Europe’s coffee houses functioned as an information network where ideas circulated and spread from coffee house to coffee house. In this way, drinking coffee in the coffee house became a metaphor for people getting together to share ideas in a sober environment, a concept that remains today. According to Standage, this information network fuelled the Enlightenment (133), prompting an explosion of creativity. Coffee houses provided an entirely new environment for political, financial, scientific, and literary change, as people gathered, discussed, and debated issues within their walls. Entrepreneurs and scientists teamed up to form companies to exploit new inventions and discoveries in manufacturing and mining, paving the way for the Industrial Revolution (Standage 163). The stock market and insurance companies also had their birth in the coffee house. As a result, coffee was seen to be the epitome of modernity and progress and, as such, was the ideal beverage for the Age of Reason. By the 19th century, however, the era of coffee houses had passed. Most of them had evolved into exclusive men’s clubs, each geared towards a certain segment of society. Tea was now more affordable and fashionable, and teahouses, which drew clientele from both sexes, began to grow in popularity. Tea, however, had always been Australia’s most popular non-alcoholic drink. Tea (and coffee) along with other alien plants had been part of the cargo unloaded onto Australian shores with the First Fleet in 1788. Coffee, mainly from Brazil and Jamaica, remained a constant import but was taxed more heavily than tea and was, therefore, more expensive. Furthermore, tea was much easier to make than coffee. To brew tea, all that is needed is to add boiling water, coffee, in contrast, required roasting, grinding and brewing. According to Symons, until the 1930s, Australians were the largest consumers of tea in the world (19). In spite of this, and as coffee, since its introduction into Europe, was regarded as the antidote to alcohol, the temperance movement established coffee palaces. In the early 1870s in Britain, the temperance movement had revived the coffee house to provide an alternative to the gin taverns that were so attractive to the working classes of the Industrial Age (Clarke 5). Unlike the earlier coffee house, this revived incarnation provided accommodation and was open to men, women and children. “Cheap and wholesome food,” was available as well as reading rooms supplied with newspapers and periodicals, and games and smoking rooms (Clarke 20). In Australia, coffee palaces did not seek the working classes, as clientele: at least in the cities they were largely for the nouveau riche. Coffee Palaces The discovery of gold in 1851 changed the direction of the Australian economy. An investment boom followed, with an influx of foreign funds and English banks lending freely to colonial speculators. By the 1880s, the manufacturing and construction sectors of the economy boomed and land prices were highly inflated. Governments shared in the wealth and ploughed money into urban infrastructure, particularly railways. Spurred on by these positive economic conditions and the newly extended inter-colonial rail network, international exhibitions were held in both Sydney and Melbourne. To celebrate modern technology and design in an industrial age, international exhibitions were phenomena that had spread throughout Europe and much of the world from the mid-19th century. According to Davison, exhibitions were “integral to the culture of nineteenth century industrialising societies” (158). In particular, these exhibitions provided the colonies with an opportunity to demonstrate to the world their economic power and achievements in the sciences, the arts and education, as well as to promote their commerce and industry. Massive purpose-built buildings were constructed to house the exhibition halls. In Sydney, the Garden Palace was erected in the Botanic Gardens for the 1879 Exhibition (it burnt down in 1882). In Melbourne, the Royal Exhibition Building, now a World Heritage site, was built in the Carlton Gardens for the 1880 Exhibition and extended for the 1888 Centennial Exhibition. Accommodation was required for the some one million interstate and international visitors who were to pass through the gates of the Garden Palace in Sydney. To meet this need, the temperance movement, keen to provide alternative accommodation to licensed hotels, backed the establishment of Sydney’s coffee palaces. The Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company was formed in 1878 to operate and manage a number of coffee palaces constructed during the 1870s. These were designed to compete with hotels by “offering all the ordinary advantages of those establishments without the allurements of the drink” (Murdoch). Coffee palaces were much more than ordinary hotels—they were often multi-purpose or mixed-use buildings that included a large number of rooms for accommodation as well as ballrooms and other leisure facilities to attract people away from pubs. As the Australian Town and Country Journal reveals, their services included the supply of affordable, wholesome food, either in the form of regular meals or occasional refreshments, cooked in kitchens fitted with the latest in culinary accoutrements. These “culinary temples” also provided smoking rooms, chess and billiard rooms, and rooms where people could read books, periodicals and all the local and national papers for free (121). Similar to the coffee houses of the Enlightenment, the coffee palaces brought businessmen, artists, writers, engineers, and scientists attending the exhibitions together to eat and drink (non-alcoholic), socialise and conduct business. The Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace located in York Street in Sydney produced a practical guide for potential investors and businessmen titled International Exhibition Visitors Pocket Guide to Sydney. It included information on the location of government departments, educational institutions, hospitals, charitable organisations, and embassies, as well as a list of the tariffs on goods from food to opium (1–17). Women, particularly the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) were a formidable force in the temperance movement (intemperance was generally regarded as a male problem and, more specifically, a husband problem). Murdoch argues, however, that much of the success of the push to establish coffee palaces was due to male politicians with business interests, such as the one-time Victorian premiere James Munro. Considered a stern, moral church-going leader, Munro expanded the temperance movement into a fanatical force with extraordinary power, which is perhaps why the temperance movement had its greatest following in Victoria (Murdoch). Several prestigious hotels were constructed to provide accommodation for visitors to the international exhibitions in Melbourne. Munro was responsible for building many of the city’s coffee palaces, including the Victoria (1880) and the Federal Coffee Palace (1888) in Collins Street. After establishing the Grand Coffee Palace Company, Munro took over the Grand Hotel (now the Windsor) in 1886. Munro expanded the hotel to accommodate some of the two million visitors who were to attend the Centenary Exhibition, renamed it the Grand Coffee Palace, and ceremoniously burnt its liquor licence at the official opening (Murdoch). By 1888 there were more than 50 coffee palaces in the city of Melbourne alone and Munro held thousands of shares in coffee palaces, including those in Geelong and Broken Hill. With its opening planned to commemorate the centenary of the founding of Australia and the 1888 International Exhibition, the construction of the Federal Coffee Palace, one of the largest hotels in Australia, was perhaps the greatest monument to the temperance movement. Designed in the French Renaissance style, the façade was embellished with statues, griffins and Venus in a chariot drawn by four seahorses. The building was crowned with an iron-framed domed tower. New passenger elevators—first demonstrated at the Sydney Exhibition—allowed the building to soar to seven storeys. According to the Federal Coffee Palace Visitor’s Guide, which was presented to every visitor, there were three lifts for passengers and others for luggage. Bedrooms were located on the top five floors, while the stately ground and first floors contained majestic dining, lounge, sitting, smoking, writing, and billiard rooms. There were electric service bells, gaslights, and kitchens “fitted with the most approved inventions for aiding proficients [sic] in the culinary arts,” while the luxury brand Pears soap was used in the lavatories and bathrooms (16–17). In 1891, a spectacular financial crash brought the economic boom to an abrupt end. The British economy was in crisis and to meet the predicament, English banks withdrew their funds in Australia. There was a wholesale collapse of building companies, mortgage banks and other financial institutions during 1891 and 1892 and much of the banking system was halted during 1893 (Attard). Meanwhile, however, while the eastern States were in the economic doldrums, gold was discovered in 1892 at Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie in Western Australia and, within two years, the west of the continent was transformed. As gold poured back to the capital city of Perth, the long dormant settlement hurriedly caught up and began to emulate the rest of Australia, including the construction of ornately detailed coffee palaces (Freeman 130). By 1904, Perth had 20 coffee palaces. When the No. 2 Coffee Palace opened in Pitt Street, Sydney, in 1880, the Australian Town and Country Journal reported that coffee palaces were “not only fashionable, but appear to have acquired a permanent footing in Sydney” (121). The coffee palace era, however, was relatively short-lived. Driven more by reformist and economic zeal than by good business sense, many were in financial trouble when the 1890’s Depression hit. Leading figures in the temperance movement were also involved in land speculation and building societies and when these schemes collapsed, many, including Munro, were financially ruined. Many of the palaces closed or were forced to apply for liquor licences in order to stay afloat. Others developed another life after the temperance movement’s influence waned and the coffee palace fad faded, and many were later demolished to make way for more modern buildings. The Federal was licensed in 1923 and traded as the Federal Hotel until its demolition in 1973. The Victoria, however, did not succumb to a liquor licence until 1967. The Sydney Coffee Palace in Woolloomooloo became the Sydney Eye Hospital and, more recently, smart apartments. Some fine examples still survive as reminders of Australia’s social and cultural heritage. The Windsor in Melbourne’s Spring Street and the Broken Hill Hotel, a massive three-story iconic pub in the outback now called simply “The Palace,” are some examples. Tea remained the beverage of choice in Australia until the 1950s when the lifting of government controls on the importation of coffee and the influence of American foodways coincided with the arrival of espresso-loving immigrants. As Australians were introduced to the espresso machine, the short black, the cappuccino, and the café latte and (reminiscent of the Enlightenment), the post-war malaise was shed in favour of the energy and vigour of modernist thought and creativity, fuelled in at least a small part by caffeine and the emergent café culture (Teffer). Although the temperance movement’s attempt to provide an alternative to the ubiquitous pubs failed, coffee has now outstripped the consumption of tea and today’s café culture ensures that wherever coffee is consumed, there is the possibility of a continuation of the Enlightenment’s lively discussions, exchange of news, and dissemination of ideas and information in a sober environment. References Attard, Bernard. “The Economic History of Australia from 1788: An Introduction.” EH.net Encyclopedia. 5 Feb. (2012) ‹http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/attard.australia›. Blainey, Anna. “The Prohibition and Total Abstinence Movement in Australia 1880–1910.” Food, Power and Community: Essays in the History of Food and Drink. Ed. Robert Dare. Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1999. 142–52. Boyce, Francis Bertie. “Shall I Vote for No License?” An address delivered at the Convention of the Parramatta Branch of New South Wales Alliance, 3 September 1906. 3rd ed. Parramatta: New South Wales Alliance, 1907. Clarke, James Freeman. Coffee Houses and Coffee Palaces in England. Boston: George H. Ellis, 1882. “Coffee Palace, No. 2.” Australian Town and Country Journal. 17 Jul. 1880: 121. Davison, Graeme. “Festivals of Nationhood: The International Exhibitions.” Australian Cultural History. Eds. S. L. Goldberg and F. B. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. 158–77. Denby, Elaine. Grand Hotels: Reality and Illusion. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Ellis, Markman. The Coffee House: A Cultural History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004. Federal Coffee Palace. The Federal Coffee Palace Visitors’ Guide to Melbourne, Its Suburbs, and Other Parts of the Colony of Victoria: Views of the Principal Public and Commercial Buildings in Melbourne, With a Bird’s Eye View of the City; and History of the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880, etc. Melbourne: Federal Coffee House Company, 1888. Fitzgerald, Ross, and Trevor Jordan. Under the Influence: A History of Alcohol in Australia. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2009. Freeland, John. The Australian Pub. Melbourne: Sun Books, 1977. Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace. International Exhibition Visitors Pocket Guide to Sydney, Restaurant and Temperance Hotel. Sydney: Johnson’s Temperance Coffee Palace, 1879. Mitchell, Ann M. “Munro, James (1832–1908).” Australian Dictionary of Biography. Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National U, 2006-12. 5 Feb. 2012 ‹http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/munro-james-4271/text6905›. Murdoch, Sally. “Coffee Palaces.” Encyclopaedia of Melbourne. Eds. Andrew Brown-May and Shurlee Swain. 5 Feb. 2012 ‹http://www.emelbourne.net.au/biogs/EM00371b.htm›. Muskett, Philip E. The Art of Living in Australia. New South Wales: Kangaroo Press, 1987. Standage, Tom. A History of the World in 6 Glasses. New York: Walker & Company, 2005. Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company Limited. Memorandum of Association of the Sydney Coffee Palace Hotel Company, Ltd. Sydney: Samuel Edward Lees, 1879. Symons, Michael. One Continuous Picnic: A Gastronomic History of Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2007. Teffer, Nicola. Coffee Customs. Exhibition Catalogue. Sydney: Customs House, 2005.

Introduction Japan has long been cited as a major source of cute (kawaii) culture as it has spread around the world, as encapsulated in Christine R. Yano’s phrase ‘Pink Globalization’. This essay charts recent developments in Japanese society through the cute character Rilakkuma, a character produced by San-X (a competitor to Sanrio, which produces the famed Hello Kitty). His name means ‘relaxed bear’, and Rilakkuma and friends are featured in comics, games and other products, called kyarakutā shōhin (also kyarakutā guzzu, which both mean ‘character goods’). Rilakkuma is pictured relaxing, sleeping, eating sweets, and listening to music; he is not only lazy, but he is also unproductive in socio-economic terms. Yet, he is never censured for this lifestyle. He provides visual pleasure to those who buy these goods, but more importantly, Rilakkuma’s story charitably portrays a lifestyle that is fully consumptive with very little, if any, productivity. Rilakkuma’s reified consumption is certainly in line with many earlier analyses of shōjo (young girl) culture in Japan, where consumerism is considered ‘detached from the productive economy of heterosexual reproduction’ (Treat, 281) and valued as an end in itself. Young girl culture in Japan has been both critiqued and celebrated in in opposition to the economic productivity as well as the emotional emptiness and weakening social prestige of the salaried man (Roberson and Suzuki, 9-10). In recent years, ideal masculinity has been further critiqued with the rise of the sōshokukei danshi (‘grass-eating men’) image: today’s Japanese male youth appear to have no appetite for the ‘meat’ associated with heteronormative, competitively capitalistic male roles (Steger 2013). That is not to say all gender roles have vanished; instead, social and economic precarity has created a space for young people to subvert them. Whether by design or by accident, Rilakkuma has come to represent a Japanese consumer maintaining some standard of emotional equilibrium in the face of the instability that followed the Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in early 2011. A Relaxed Bear in a Precarious Japan Certainly much has been written about the ‘lost decade(s)’ in Japan, or the unraveling of the Japanese postwar miracle since the early 1990s in a variety of unsettling ways. The burst of the ‘bubble economy’ in 1991 led to a period of low or no economic growth, uncertain employment conditions and deflation. Because of Japan’s relative wealth and mature economic system, this was seen a gradual process that Mark Driscoll calls a shift from the ‘so-called Japan Inc. of the 1980s’ to ‘“Japan Shrink” of the 2010s and 2020s’ (165). The Japanese economy was further troubled by the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, and then the Tōhoku disasters. These events have contributed to Japan’s state of ambivalence, as viewed by both its citizens and by external observers. Despite its relative wealth, the nation continues to struggle with deflation (and its corresponding stagnation of wages), a deepening chasm between the two-tier employment system of permanent and casual work, and a deepening public mistrust of corporate and governing authorities. Some of this story is not ‘new’; dual employment practices have existed throughout Japan’s postwar history. What has changed, however, is the attitudes of casual workers; it is now thought to be much more difficult, if not impossible, to shift from low paid, insecure casual labour to permanent, secure positions. The overall unemployment rate remains low precisely because the number of temporary and part time workers has increased, as much as one third of all workers in 2012 (The Japan Times). The Japanese government now concedes that ‘the balance of working conditions between regular and non-regular workers have therefore become important issues’ (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare); many see this is not only a distinction between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’, but also of a generational shift of those who achieved secure positions before the ‘lost decade’, and those who came after. Economic, political, environmental and social insecurity have given rise to a certain level public malaise, not conducive to a robust consumer culture. Enter Rilakkuma: he, like many other cute characters in Japan, entices the consumer to feel good about spending – or perhaps, to feel okay about spending? – in this precarious time of underemployment and uncertainty about the future. ‘Cute’ Characters: Attracting as Well as Attractive Cute (‘kawaii’) culture in Japan is not just aesthetic; it includes ‘a turn to emotion and even sentimentality, in some of the least likely places’ (Yano, 7). Cute kyarakutā are not just sentimentally attractive; they are more precisely attracting images which are used to sell these character goods: toys, household objects, clothing and stationery. Occhi writes that many kyarakutā are the result of an ‘anthropomorphization’ of objects or creatures which ‘guide the user towards specific [consumer] behaviors’ (78). While kyarakutā would be created first to sell a product, in the end, the character’s popularity at times can eclipse the product’s value, and the character thus becomes ‘pure product’, as in the case of Hello Kitty (Yano, 10). Most characters, however, merely function as ‘specific representatives of a product or service rendered mentally “sticky” through narratives, wordplay and other specialized aspects of their design’ (Occhi, 86). Miller refers to this phenomenon as ‘Japan’s zoomorphic urge’, and argues that etiquette guides and public service posters, which frequently use cute and cuddly animals in the place of humans, is done to ‘render […] potentially dangerous or sensitive topics as safe and acceptable’ (69). Cuteness instrumentally turns away from negative aspects of society, whether it is the demonstration of etiquette rules in public, or the portrayal of an underemployed or unemployed person watching TV at home, as in Rilakkuma. Thus we see a revitalization of the cute zeitgeist in Japanese consumerism in products such as the Rilakkuma franchise, produced by San-X, a company that produces and distributes ‘stationary [sic], sundry goods, merchandises [sic], and paper products with original design.’ (San-X Net). Who Is Rilakkuma? According to the company’s ‘fan’ books, written in response to the popularity of Rilakkuma’s character goods (Nakazawa), the background story of Rilakkuma is as follows: one day, a smallish bear found its way unexplained into the apartment of a Japanese OL (office lady) named Kaoru. He spends his time ‘being of no use to Kaoru, and is actually a pest by lying around all day doing nothing… his main concerns are meals and snacks. He seems to hate the summer [heat].’ Other activities include watching television, listening to music, taking long baths, and tossing balls of paper into the rubbish bin (Nakazawa, 4). His comrades are Korilakkuma (loosely translated as ‘Little Rilakkuma’) and Kiiroitori (simply, ‘Yellow Bird’). Korilakkuma is a smaller and paler version of Rilakkuma; like her friend, she appears in Kaoru’s apartment for no reason. She is described as liking to pull pranks (itazuradaisuki) and is comparatively more energetic (genki) than Rilakkuma; her main activities are imitating Rilakkuma and looking for someone with whom to play (6). Lastly, Kiiroitori is a small yellow bird resembling a chick, and seems to be the only character of the three who has any ‘right’ to reside in Kaoru’s apartment. Kiiroitori was a pet bird residing in cage before the appearance of these two bears, but after Rilakkuma and Korilakkuma set themselves up in her small apartment, Kiiroitori was liberated from his cage and flies in the faces of lazy Rilakkuma and mischievous Korilakkuma (7). Kiiroitori likes tidiness, and is frequently cleaning up after the lazy bears, and he can be short tempered about this (ibid). Kiiroitori’s interests include the charming but rather thrifty ‘finding spare change while cleaning up’ and ‘bear climbing’, which is enjoyed primarily for its annoyance to the bears (ibid). Fig. 1: Korilakkuma, Rilakkuma and Kiiroitori, in 10-year anniversary attire (photo by author). This narrative behind these character goods is yet another aspect of their commodification (in other words, their management, distribution and copyright protection). The information presented ­– the minute details of the characters’ existence, illustrated with cute drawings and calligraphy – enriches the consumer process by deepening the consumers’ interaction with the product. How does the story become as attractive as the cute character? One of the striking characteristics of the ‘official’ Rilakkuma discourse is the sense of ‘ikinari yattekita’ (things happening ‘out of the blue’; Nakazawa 22), or ‘naru yō ni narimasu’ (‘whatever will be will be’; 23) reasoning behind the narrative. Buyers want to know how and why these cute characters come into being, but there is no answer. To some extent, this vagueness reflects the reality of authorship: the characters were first conceptualized by a designer at San-X named Kondō Aki, who left the company soon after Rilakkuma’s debut in 2003 (Akibako). But this ‘out of the blue’ quality of the characters strikes a chord in many consumers’ view of their own lives: why are we here? what are we doing, and why do we do it? The existence of these characters and the reasons for their traits and preferences are inexplicable. There is no reason why or how Rilakkuma came to be – instead, readers are told that to just relax, ‘go with the flow’, and ‘what can be done today can always be done tomorrow’. Procrastination would normally be considered meiwaku, or bothersome to others who depend on you. In Productive Japan, this behavior is not valued. In Precarious Japan, however, underemployment and nonproductivity takes the pressure away from individuals to judge this behavior as negative. Procrastination shifts from meiwaku to normality, and to be transformed into kawaii culture, accepted and even celebrated as such. Rilakkuma is not the first Japanese pop cultural character to rub up against the hyper productive, gambaru (fight!) attitude associated with previous generations, with their associated tropes of the juken jikoku (exam preparation hell) for students, or the karōshi (death from overwork) salaried worker. An early example of this would be Chibi Marukochan (‘Little Maruko’), a comic character created in 1986 but whose popularity peaked in the 1990s. Maruko is an endearing but flawed primary school student who is cute and amusing, but also annoying and short tempered (Sakura). Flawed characters were frequently featured in Japanese popular culture, but Maruko was one of the first featured as heroine, not a jester-like sidekick. As an early example of Japanese cute, subversive characters, Maruko was often annoying and lazy, but she at least aspired to traits such as doing well in school and being a good daughter in her extended family. Rilakkuma, perhaps, demonstrates the extension of this cute but subversive hero/ine: when the stakes are lower (or at their lowest), so is the need for stress and anxiety. Taking it easy is the best option. Rilakkuma’s ‘charm point’ (chāmu pointo, which describes one’s personal appeal), is his transgressive cuteness, and this has paid off for San-X over the years in successful sales of his comic books as well as a variety of products (see fig. 2). Fig. 2: An example of some of the goods for sale in early 2014: a fleecy blanket, a 3d puzzle, note pads and stickers, decorative toggles for a school bag or purse, comic and ‘fan’ books, and a toy car (photo by the author). Over the decade between 2003 and 2013, San X has produced 51 volumes of Rilakkuma comics (Tonozuka, 37 – 42) and over 20 different series of stuffed animals (43 – 45); plus cushions, tote bags, tableware, stationery, and variety goods such as toilet paper holders, umbrellas and contact lens cases (46 – 52). While visiting the Rilakkuma themed shop in Tokyo Station in October 2013, a newly featured and popular product was the Rilakkuma ‘onesie’, a unisex and multipurpose outfit for adults. These products’ diversity are created to meet the consumer desires of Rilakkuma’s significant following in Japan; in a small-scale study of Japanese university students, researchers found that Rilakkuma was the number one nominated ‘favorite character’ (Nosu and Tanaka, 535). Furthermore, students claimed that the attractiveness of favorite characters were judged not just on their appearance, but also due to specific characteristics: ‘characters that are always idle, relaxed, stress-free’ and those ‘that have unusual behavior or stray from the right path’ (ibid) were cited as especially attractive/attracting. Just like Rilakkuma, these researchers found that young Japanese people – the demographic perhaps most troubled by an insecure economic future – are attracted to ‘characters that have flaws in some ways and are not merely cute’ (536). Where to, Rilakkuma? Miller, in her discussion of Japanese animal characters in a variety of cute cultural settings writes Non-human animals emerge as useful metaphors for humans, yet […] it is this aesthetic load rather than the lesson or the ideology behind the image that often becomes the center of our attention. […] However, I think it is useful to separate our analysis of zoomorphic images as vehicles for cuteness from their other possible uses and possible utility in many areas of culture (70). Similarly, we need to look beyond cute, and see what Miller terms as ‘the lesson’ behind the ‘aesthetic load’: here, how cuteness disguises social malaise and eases the shift from ‘Japan Inc.’ to ‘Japan Shrink’. When particular goods are ‘tied’ to other products, the message behind the ‘aesthetic load’ are complicated and deepened. Rilakkuma’s recent commercial (in)activity has been characterized by a variety of ‘tai uppu’ (tie ups), or promotional links between the Rilakkuma image and other similarly aligned products. Traditionally, tie ups in Japan have been most successful when formed between products that were associated with similar audiences and similar aesthetic preferences. We have seen tie ups, for example, between Hello Kitty and McDonald’s (targeting youthful fast food customers) since 1999 (Yano, 129). In ‘Japan Shrink’s’ competitive consumer market, tie ups are becoming more strategic, and all the more interesting. One of the troubled markets in Japan, as elsewhere, is the music industry. Shrinking expendable income coupled with a variety of downloading practices means the traditional popular music industry (primarily in the form of CDs) is in decline. In 2009, Rilakkuma began a co-badged campaign with Tower Records Japan – after all, listening to music is one of Rilakkuma’s listed favourite past times. TRJ was then independent from its failed US counterpart, and a major figure in the music retail scene despite disappointing CD sales since the late 1990s (Stevens, 85). To stir up consumer interest, TRJ offered objects, such as small dolls, towels and shopping bags, festooned with Rilakkuma images and phrases such as ‘Rilakkuma loves Tower Records’ and ‘Relaxed Tour 2012’ (Tonozuka, 72 – 73). Rilakkuma, in a familiar pose lying back with his arms crossed behind his head, but surrounded by musical notes and the phrase ‘No Music, No Life’ (72), presents compact image of the consumer zeitgeist of the day: one’s ikigai (reason for living) is clearly contingent on personal enjoyment, despite Japan’s music industry woes. Rilakkuma also enjoys a close relationship with the ubiquitous convenience store Lawson, which has over 11,000 individual stores throughout Japan and hundreds more overseas (Lawson, Corporate Information). Japanese konbini (the Japanese term for convenience stores), unlike their North American or Australian counterparts, enjoy a higher consumer image in terms of the quality and variety of their products, thus symbolize a certain relaxed lifestyle, as per Merry I. White’s description of the ‘no hands housewife’ breezing through the evening meal preparations thanks to ready made dishes purchased at konbini (72). Japanese convenience stores sell a variety of products, but sweets (Rilakkuma’s favourite) take up a large proportion of shelf space in many stores. The most current ‘Rilakkuma x Lawson campaign’ was undertaken between September and November 2013. During this period, customers earned points to receive a free teacup; certainly Rilakkuma’s cuteness motivated consumers to visit the store to get the prize. All was not well with this tie up, however; complaints about cracked teacups resulted in an external investigation. Finding no causal relationship between construction and fault, Lawson still apologized and offered to exchange any of the approximately 1.73 million cups with an alternate prize for any consumers who so wished (Lawson, An Apology). The alternate prize was still cute in its pink colouring and kawaii character pattern, but it was a larger and much sturdier commuter type mug. Here we see that while Rilakkuma is relaxed, he is still aware of corporate Japan’s increasing sense of corporate accountability and public health. One last tie up demonstrates an unusual alliance between the Rilakkuma franchise and other cultural icons. 2013 marked the ten-year anniversary of Rilakkuma and friends, and this was marked by several prominent campaigns. In Kyoto, we saw Rilakkuma and friends adorning o-mamori (religious amulets) at the famed Kinkakuji (Golden Pavilion), a major temple in Kyoto (see fig. 3a). The ‘languid dream’ of the lazy bear is a double-edged symbol, contrasting with the disciplined practice of Buddhism and complying with a Zen-like dream state of the beauty of the grounds. Another ten-year anniversary campaign was the tie up between Rilakkuma and the 50 year anniversary of JR’s Yamanote Line, the ‘city loop’ in Tokyo. Fig. 3a: Kiiroitori sits atop Rilakkuma with Korilakkuma by their side at the Golden Pavillion, Kyoto. The top caption reads: ‘Relaxed bear, Languid at the Golden Pavilion; Languid Dream Travelogue’Fig. 3b: a key chain made to celebrate Rilakkuma’s appointment to the JR Line; still lazy, Rilakkuma lies on his side but wears a conductor’s cap. This tie up was certainly a coup, for the Yamanote Line is a significant part of 13 million Tokyo residents’ lives, as well as a visible fixture in the cultural landscape since the early postwar period. The Yamanote, with its distinctive light green coloring (uguisuiro, which translates literally to ‘nightingale [bird] colour’) has its own aesthetic: as one of the first modern train lines in the capital, it runs through all the major leisure districts and is featured in many popular songs and even has its own drinking game. This nostalgia for the past, coupled with the masculine, super-efficient former national railway’s system is thus juxtaposed with the lazy, feminized teddy bear (Rilakkuma is male, but his domain is feminine), linking a longing for the past with gendered images of production and consumption in the present. In figure 3b, we see Rilakkuma riding the Yamanote on his own terms (lying on his side, propped up by one elbow – a pose we would never see a JR employee take in public). This cheeky cuteness increases the iconic train’s appeal to its everyday consumers, for despite its efficiency, this line is severely overcrowded during peak hours and suffers from user malaise with respect to etiquette and safety issues. Life in contemporary Japan is no longer the bright, shiny ‘bubble’ of the 1980s. Japan is wrestling with internal and external demons: the nuclear crisis, the lagging economy, deteriorating relations with China, and a generation of young people who have never experienced the optimism of their parents’ generation. Dreamlike, Japan’s denizens move through the contours of their daily lives much as they have in the past, for major social structures remain for the most part in tact; instead, it is the vision of the future that has altered. In this environment, we can argue that kawaii aesthetics are all the more important, for if we are uncomfortable thinking about negative or depressing topics such as industries in decline, questionable consumer safety standards, and overcrowded trains, a cute bear can make it much more ‘bear’-able.ReferencesDriscoll, Mark. “Debt and Denunciation in Post-Bubble Japan: On the Two Freeters.” Cultural Critique 65 (2007): 164-187. Kondō Aki - akibako. “Profile [of Designer Aki Kondō].” 6 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.akibako.jp/profile/›. Lawson. “Kigyō Jōhō: Kaisha Gaiyō [Corporate Information: Company Overview].” Feb. 2013. 10 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.lawson.co.jp/company/corporate/about.html/›. Lawson. “Owabi to Oshirase: Rōson aki no rilakkuma fea keihin ‘rilakkuma tei magu’ hason no osore [An Apology and Announcement: Lawson’s Autumn Rilakkuma Fair Giveaway ‘Rilakkuma Tea Mug’ Concern for Damage.” 2 Dec. 2013. 10 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.lawson.co.jp/emergency/detail/detail_84331.html›. Miller, Laura. “Japan’s Zoomorphic Urge.” ASIANetwork Exchange XVII.2 (2010): 69-82. Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. “Employment Security.” 10 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.mhlw.go.jp/english/policy/employ-labour/employment-security/dl/employment_security_bureau.pdf›. Nakazawa Kumiko, ed. Rirakkuma Daradara Fuan Bukku [Relaxed Bear Leisurely Fan Book]. Tokyo: Kabushikigaisha Shufutoseikatsu. 2008. Nosu, Kiyoshi, and Mai Tanaka. “Factors That Contribute to Japanese University Students’ Evaluations of the Attractiveness of Characters.” IEEJ Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Engineering 8.5 (2013): 535–537. Occhi, Debra J. “Consuming Kyara ‘Characters’: Anthropomorphization and Marketing in Contemporary Japan.” Comparative Culture 15 (2010): 78–87. Roberson, James E., and Nobue Suzuki, “Introduction”, in J. Roberson and N. Suzuki, eds., Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Japan: Dislocating the Salaryman Doxa. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. 1-19. Sakura, Momoko. Chibi Marukochan 1 [Little Maruko, vol. 1]. Tokyo: Shūeisha, 1987 [1990]. San-X Net. “Company Info.” 10 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.san-x.jp/COMPANY_INFO.html›. Steger, Brigitte. “Negotiating Gendered Space on Japanese Commuter Trains.” ejcjs 13.3 (2013). 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/ejcjs/vol13/iss3/steger.html› Stevens, Carolyn S. Japanese Popular Music: Culture, Authenticity and Power. London: Routledge, 2008. The Japan Times. “Nonregulars at Record 35.2% of Workforce.” 22 Feb. 2012. 6 Feb. 2014 ‹http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2012/02/22/news/nonregulars-at-record-35-2-of-workforce/#.UvMb-kKSzeM›. Tonozuka Ikuo, ed. Rirakkuma Tsuzuki Daradara Fan Book [Relaxed Bear Leisurely Fan Book, Continued]. Tokyo: Kabushikigaisha Shufutoseikatsu, 2013. Treat, John Whittier. “Yoshimoto Banana’s Kitchen, or The Cultural Logic of Japanese Consumerism.” In L. Skov and B. Moeran, eds., Women, Media and Consumption in Japan, Surrey: Curzon, 1995. 274-298. White, Merry I. “Ladies Who Lunch: Young Women and the Domestic Fallacy in Japan.” In K. Cwiertka and B. Walraven, eds., Asian Food: The Global and the Local. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001. 63-75. Yano, Christine R. Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.

Western images of Japan tell a seemingly incongruous story of love, sex and marriage – one full of contradictions and conflicting moral codes. We sometimes hear intriguing stories about the unique sexual culture of Japan – from vending machines that dispense soiled schoolgirl panties (Gerster 143), erotic manga (Ito 70; Newitz 2) to automated love hotels (Kersten 387) available for the discreet quickie. These Western portrayals seem to focus primarily on the unusual and quirky side of Japan’s culture constructing this modern Asian culture as simultaneously traditional and seemingly liberated. But what happens, when Japanese love goes global – when exotic others (Westerners) enter the picture? This article is shaped by an understanding of a new world space where cultural products and national images are becoming increasingly globalised, while at the same time more localised and “fragmented into contestatory enclaves of difference, coalition and resistance” (Wilson, 1). It examines ‘the local’, briefly exploring the racial and gender ideologies that pattern relationships between Western and Japanese adults living in Japan focussing on the unique perspective of Western women living and working in provincial Japan. Our research is based on four month’s ethnographic field work carried out within a small provincial Japanese city (which was home to 130 native English speakers, most of whom are employed as English language teachers) and interviews with 12 key participants. Japanese colloquialisms like sebun-irebun (seven eleven), burasagarizoku (arm hangers) and yellow cabs (women as easy to hail as taxis – by foreigners) are used to denote the sexual availability of some Japanese women (Kelskey, Flirting with the Foreign 178). Western women in this study have also invented a colloquialism to allude to sexual availability, with the term ‘zero to hero’ used to describe many Western men who, upon arrival in Japan, find themselves highly sought after by some Japanese women as prospective partners. Western women’s social appeal in the local heterosexual community, on the other hand, is in direct contrast to their male equivalents. A greater social distance exists between Japanese males and Western females, who report finding little genuine opportunity to date local males. Letting the c(h)at out of the bag While living and socialising with English language teachers we became privy to women’s conversation about interracial gender issues within Japan. Western women’s reflections about gender issues within Japan have, so far, been given little or no public voice. This is due, in part, to these women’s cultural and gender isolation while living in Japan, and a general reluctance to publicly voice their opinions, combined with issues about how much it is ‘politically correct’ to say. This reticence can be attributed to a genuine fear of being misconstrued as envious, either of their male colleagues’ newfound social status or Japanese women’s attractiveness. It may also be that, by voicing these observations about interracial gender relationships in Japan, these women will publicly position themselves as powerless and thus lose any voice they do have. Western women who arrive in Japan with expectations of living active (heterosexual) sex lives often find themselves left out in the cold (My Nippon), and while many of their male colleagues are busy pursuing and being pursued by Japanese women their own social interaction with Japanese males is often restricted to awkward conversations with seemingly wary, shy or aloof Japanese men or crude suggestive conversations at the hands of drunken Japanese males. Some women experience their sense of self-esteem, which relies partly on sexual identity and a sense of attractiveness, plummets in these circumstances. Clarissa, a 24-year-old Australian who spent a few months waiting for her partner to join her in Japan, noticed this happening to her. She was interviewed a week after her partner arrived in Japan. I noticed that a while ago I was feeling unattractive because nobody does anything to indicate desire or attractiveness but as soon as they get drunk they can’t get enough of you…. Sober they wouldn’t do anything but when they are drunk … they crack onto you like any Western guy. Participants in the study have proffered thoughtful explanations for this lack of Japanese male/Western female connection, other than in the comparatively uninhibited space of being ‘alcohol affected’. The reasons given include the independent personalities of those Western women who choose to move to Japan, patriarchal attitudes towards women in Japan and a general lack of communication due to cultural or language difficulties. A lot of the women who come over here are very strong and independent and they are feared [by Japanese men] the moment they get off the plane….We didn’t come over here because we are timid and shy and looking for men. Toni (above) also makes clear that her own Western expectations for romantic relationships may exclude her from having relationships with many Japanese males of less than fluent English speaking skills. I’m a talker and I like to talk about ideas and books and I would find it very difficult to have…. a more intense relationship with a person that I couldn’t communicate with on that level. Western notions of romance and marriage, particularly Western women’s expectations concerning sex and romance, involve demonstration of warmth and affection, as well as a meeting of minds or in-depth conversation. Lack of a shared language and different expectations of romantic liaisons and love are some of the factors that can combine to create cross-cultural distance and misunderstanding between Western women and Japanese men. Zero to heroes Japanese women often seek Western men living in this transnational borderland as an alternative to Japanese boyfriends and husbands (Kelskey, Japanese Women's Diaspora). Western women in this study used the term ‘zero to hero’ to depict sought-after Western men, specifically those Western males who misuse this rise in status and behave badly in Japan. These men, as reported, are greatly over-represented in Japan when compared to their respective home communities. Above average-looking European guy, with above average intelligence seeks above average-looking Japanese lady who can cook a little. (Tokyo classifieds) Open discussion about the appeal of Western men to Japanese women seems to elicit critical reactions on either side of the racial and gender divide. For instance online chat discussions about interracial gender issues in Japan evidences the fiercely defensive position many Western men take when confronted with this notion. (see Aldwinckle a, Aldwinkle b, Aldwinkle c). It is clear, therefore, that this phenomenon is not limited to our research location. Women participants in this particular study detailed many examples of ‘zero to heroes’ behaving badly including: overrated opinion of themselves; insulting and degrading behaviour towards women in public – particularly Japanese women; inability to work cooperatively with women superiors in the workplace; sexual liaisons outside of monogamous relationships and in some cases complicated webs of infidelity. You know one guy’s left his wife, his Japanese wife. I didn’t even realize he was married because he had a Japanese girlfriend. I thought he was playing up on his Japanese girlfriend when I saw him with someone else, but he was actually playing up on both his wife and his girlfriend…. I mean the guys are behaving in ways that they wouldn’t get away with in their own countries. So the women from those countries are, of course, appalled (Marie). Japanese women’s desire for the company of Western males seems based on essentialised notions of the Western male as being more gentle, romantic and egalitarian than Japanese males. Analysis by Creighton, along with our own observations, indicates that there is ‘prevalent use of foreigners, particularly white foreigners, or gaijin, in Japanese advertising (135)’, constructing a discourse of the ‘desirable other’. Western images and ideals are also communicated through media texts (particularly Japanese women’s magazines) and promote ideals like individuality, leisure, international sophistication and sexual expression. It is clear from this research and other studies (Kelskey, Japanese Women's Diaspora) that Japanese women (living in Japan) perceive Western men as being more affectionate, kind and egalitarian than Japanese males. However, the notion of a caring and romantic Western male does not seem to be based in the reality of the situation as described by in situ Western females. Here the zero to hero construction of Western masculinity holds sway. Western females in this transnational borderland portray many of their male counterparts as general losers. One participant explained the phenomenon thus: I think that consciously or subconsciously the reason a lot of these men come over here is because they can’t really find a relationship at home. [She explains further] somebody [Western male] told me that I remind them of everything that they are not back in their own country. Gerster describes the attraction Japanese women have for the West (America in particular) as a ‘fatal attraction’ because most of these women will not realize their desire to marry their Western boyfriends or lovers (146-148). These women’s desire for the West (which is accomplishable and articulated through a Western partner) seems doomed from the start and it is questionable as to whether these relationships fulfil the aspirations of many of these women. Nevertheless, some Japanese women and Western men are more aware of this and are relatively explicit about their own desires. Japanese cute girl seeking native speakers [native English speakers] who don’t lie, never betray, are funny and handsome. If you are a man like that, try me. (Tokyo classifieds) American, 33, from California looking for Japanese girl, 20s, for having fun together. No marriage-minded girls please. Japanese ok. (Tokyo classifieds) Conclusion The Japanese national desire to be viewed as progressive and modern is, as with most societies, closely aligned with material commodities, particularly Western commodities. This means that within Japan “Western images probably have more advantage over indigenous ones” (Gerster 165) particularly for Japanese women. The local assumptions and generalisations about the Western men and women living and teaching in this transnational borderland are seemingly constructed by essentialised understandings of Western masculinity and femininity and differentiating these with Japanese notions of masculinity and femininity. However, as Kelsky (Japanese Women's Diaspora) and the participants in this study suggest, those Japanese women (who desire the West) may find their expectations do not match the realities of dating Western males in Japan since many Western men do not seem to live up to this essentialized view of the Western male as a romantic and egalitarian male partner who is ready to commit to marriage. Works Cited Aldwinckle, Dave. ‘Gender Issues in Japan, Part one: The loneliness of the long-distance runner (Publication of Exerts from Postings on Issho Mailing List)’ Arudou Debito/Dave Aldwinckle's Activists’ Page (meaning information for people concerned with social issues who want to help make life better for everyone in Japan). 1998. http://www.debito.org/genderissues.html 21.02 2001. ----. ‘Gender Issues in Japan, Part two: greatest hits and apologia (Publication of Exerts from Postings on Issho Mailing List)’ Arudou Debito/Dave Aldwinckle's Activists’ Page (meaning information for people concerned with social issues who want to help make life better for everyone in Japan). 1998. http://www.debito.org/genderissuestwo.html 21.02 2001. ----. ‘Gender Issues in Japan Part three: my comeuppance (Publication of Exerts from Postings on Issho Mailing List)’ Arudou Debito/Dave Aldwinckle's Activists’ Page (meaning information for people concerned with social issues who want to help make life better for everyone in Japan). 1998. http://www.debito.org/genderissuesthree.... 21.02 2001. Creighton, Millie R. ‘Imaging the Other in Japanese Advertising Campaigns’. Occidentalism: Images of the West. Ed. James G. Carrier. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Gerster, Robin. Legless in Ginza: Orientating Japan. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1999. Ito., Kinko. ‘The World of Japanese Ladies' Comics: From Romantic Fantasy to Lustful Perversion’. Journal of Popular Culture 36.1 (2002): 68--86. ‘Japan Lovers Sex Life in Japan? Really!’. My Nippon E-zine . 2001. http://www.mynippon.com/index.htm. 28.04 2001. Kelsky, Karen. ‘Intimate Ideologies: Transnational Theory and Japan's "Yellow Cabs"’. Public Culture 6 (1994): 465-78. ----. ‘Flirting with the Foreign: Interracial Sex in Japan's "International" Age’. Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imagery. Eds. Rob Wilson and Winmal Dissanayake. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. 173 - 92. ----. ‘Japanese Women's Diaspora: An Interview’. Intersections 4 (2000): http://wwwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersecti... . 26.02 2002 Kersten., Joachim. ‘Culture, Masculinities and Violence against Women. (Masculinities, Social Relations and Crime)’. British Journal of Criminology, Summer 36.3 (1996): 381-96. ‘Men looking for women’. Tokyo Metropolis (2002) http://www.metropolis.co.jp/tokyo/curren... 11.10.2002 Newitz, Annalee. "Magicial Girls and Atomic Bomb Sperm: Japanese Animation in America." Film quarterly 49.1 (1995): 2-15. Wilson, Rob, and Wimal Dissanayake. ‘Introduction: Tracking the Global/Local’. Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imagery. Eds. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. 1-18. ‘Women looking for men’. Metropolis. (2002) http://www.metropolis.co.jp/tokyo/curren... 11.10.2002 Links http://www.debito.org/genderissues.html http://www.metropolis.co.jp/tokyo/current/classifieds/13.03_personals.asp http://www.metropolis.co.jp/tokyo/current/classifieds/13.02_personals.asp http://www.elle.co.jp/home/index2.php3 http://wwwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersections/ http://www3.tky.3web.ne.jp/~edjacob/hotels.html http://www.dnp.co.jp/museum/nmp/nmp_i/articles/manga/manga2-1.html http://www.debito.org/genderissuesthree.html http://www.sshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersections/ http://www.mynippon.com/index.htm http://www.debito.org/genderissuestwo.html Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Holloway, Donell and Holloway, David. "Zero to hero" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/zerotohero.php>. APA Style Holloway, D. & Holloway, D., (2002, Nov 20). Zero to hero. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/zerotohero.html

In the age of digital transformations of images, communications, and storytelling, Marshall McLuhan's insight that "the medium is the message" can be augmented with the corollary that the media is the mix. Digital forms of narrative are not only characterized by their mixed, hybrid forms and content, but their recombinations 1 draw the spectator into the mix in unforeseen ways. By mixing varying degrees of non-linearity and interactivity in what are ultimately animations, digital narratives create new kinds of digital spectatorship. The examples I'll explore here are three films, Conceiving Ada, Gamer, and Time Code. In different yet interconnected ways, each privileges the mix of media over content, or rather, foregrounds the mix as content. These digital narratives divert the reader/spectator/ participant from the traditional ways of making meaning--or at least sense--of narrative. One way to illuminate the examples is to explore how they mix linearity and interactivity. In teaching The Theory and Practice of Digital Narrative, my students and I developed a model for analyzing how different works create new modes of storytelling, and fresh relations of looking at and within the frame.2 Extending some of the terms that Janet Murray develops in Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, the diagram posits an x axis of linearity and a y axis of agency.3 Click here for an animated version of this graph. The linearity axis spans narratives from most linear (one plot line that progresses chronologically through time and space to one outcome through a series of cause and effect occurrences represented from a singular point of view) to non-linear (narratives that could be circular, rhizome-shaped, achronological, synchronic, multiple plotlines, multiple points of view, multidimensional).4 The agency axis spans media that call for very little active participation from the reader/spectator/listener to media that demands a high level of interaction. Of course, all "reading" is in some way active, both in the physical acts of seeing and turning pages/clicking a mouse 5 and in comprehending, imagining, remembering, and making meaning. Nevertheless, there is a distinction between page-turning and making choices in a hypermedia work, and Murray uses the term agency to suggest an "active creation of belief" (as opposed to Coleridge's "willing suspension of belief"). Digital environments require that belief be created and reinforced; as William Gibson posited in Neuromancer, the imagined place of cyberspace is a "consensual hallucination," a social agreement to act as if the places in cyberspace exist. The willing creation of belief is a social agreement that relies on a like-minded community. The more self-reflexive and unconventional the narrative, the more it calls for the will to believe. These examples of digital cinema "interpellate," or hail, their spectators as willing agents in the common project of the creation of belief. The subjectivity that these films seek to create for their viewers is one of being an active, technologically-savvy spectator. Instead of encouraging participation in, to use Guy Debord's phrase, the society of the spectacle, these digital narratives perform a Brechtian function in a distinctly technological manner that derives from the mix of media that is digital cinema. The term "digital cinema" has acquired many meanings, ranging from movies shot on digital video in a manner we associate with film (i.e.: single camera) to digital exhibition of media in digitally-equipped movie theaters and streaming video on the web. Lev Manovich defines digital cinema as "a particular case of animation which uses live action footage as one of its many elements."6 Manovich's historical argument suggests commonalities between the earliest moving images and current developments in digital media; animation was marginalized in the development of cinema, and although some of its techniques were adopted by the avant garde, only now animation returns at the very center of digital cinema.7 Lynn Hershman Leeson's film Conceiving Ada explores digital media in both form and content. In the film Emmy, a contemporary computer software engineer, uses technology to make contact with Ada Lovelace, who invented the first computer language in Victorian England. The narrative moves between Emmy in the present day and Ada in the past as Emmy figures out how to send a software agent into the past to retrieve information. Although the plot doesn't really make sense scientifically, it resonates emotionally; despite the 150 years separating their lives, Emmy and Ada face some of the same issues as women working with technology. Instead of building sets, Leeson developed a technique of blending live action footage shot against a blue screen with digitized photographs of Victorian inns. As she explains in the technical notes of the DVD of the film (and also on the Conceiving Ada website): I felt it important to use the technology Ada pioneered. Virtual sets and digital sound . . . provided environments in which she moves freely through time, becomes liberated and, ultimately, moves into visibility. The actors and filmmaker collaborated in what amounts to a consensual hallucination: On the set, these images were maneuvered through several computers where mattes were added and images were put into perspective or enlarged. They were then laid onto digital videotape while the actors were performing. Actors could reference their location through a monitor that showed them their "virtual" environment. . . . The immediacy of shooting live action while simultaneously manipulating digitized backgrounds in real time was, remarkably, exhilarating. By mixing past and present, fact and fiction, personal and professional, digital and analog, live action and animation, Conceiving Ada tells its powerful story in both form and content. Although it is not immediately obvious that the sets are virtual rather than actual, much of the story takes place in front of and inside Emmy's computer equipment. There are many shots of Emmy gazing into the computer, trying to make her programs work, and when she does make contact with Ada, she can see her memories and talk with her on the computer screen. The film frame often encompasses the computer screen, so we too see the graphic interfaces Emmy designs and animates. By mixing some of the techniques of video art with film style and the malleability of the digital image, Leeson extends her trailblazing career in many directions at once in a work that is a mix about mix. A representation of intense digital interactivity, Conceiving Ada's heroines, creators, and spectators use technology, and specifically digital imaging technology, to create agency. Like Conceiving Ada, Time Code is also an example of digital cinema that calls attention to the digital techniques used in its production, and enlists its spectators as accomplices in creating the narrative. Time Code is itself the product of improvisation, and uses digital technology to capture "real time." Director Mike Figgis divides the screen into four frames; each quadrant contains a continuous 90-minute take of an unscripted, improvised performance, all shot simultaneously with four Sony Dvcam DSR-130s; the film was blocked out on music paper. Figgis describes his movie as a "black comedy about a 90-minute slice of life in Hollywood," and it takes filmmaking as one of its subjects along with jealousy, infidelity, and a fin-de-siecle philosophical and artistic exhaustion. The audio mix of the theatrical release of the film shifts its emphasis between the quadrants, thus directing the spectator's attention to a certain quadrant. Choosing to focus on a quadrant is a kind of spectator-editing. Looking at the entire frame means seeing a new kind of animation, created by multiple screens, encompassing multiple points of view. (See Time Code clip here.) The film folds in on itself self-reflexively. The plot centers around the intersecting lives of four characters involved personally and/or professionally with Red Mullet, Inc., a movie studio (which is the real-life name of Figgis's production company; see www.red-mullet.com), and becomes increasingly Brechtian as the movie builds to the climactic scene in which a hot young independent filmmaker pitches a movie that, like the one we are watching, splits the screen and follows the interactions between four characters. In what could be taken as a manifesto for digital cinema that counters the "chastity" of DOGME 95 with the passionate embrace of technology, the filmmaker announces, "Montage has created a fake reality. . . . Technology has arrived, digital video has arrived, and is demanding new expressions, new sensations. . . . It's time to say again: Art, Technology: a new union." She shows the studio executives storyboards of how four cameras will follow four characters, who are really four aspects of the same character at different points in their lives. But the filmmaker's passionate and theoretical speech is undercut by the context of black comedy that infuses the film: artistic praxis clashes with business practice, and all the plotlines peak as Stellan Skarsgard's Alex bursts into laughter and exclaims, "This is the most pretentious crap I've ever heard. . . . Do you think anybody around this table has a clue about what you're talking about?" Figgis assumes his audience does, that Bauhaus, Soviet montage, and Guy Debord are not as foreign to his spectators as they are to the executives; the filmmakers both within and outside the frames show their theoretical orientation. Time Code is the first major work of digital cinema. It creates a new kind of animation based on subjectivity and point of view, and calls for an active creation of belief from the spectator-editor who takes in and ultimately creates the narrative of the film. The DVD extends the spectator's agency even further. Among its special features is a documentary about how the film was shot 15 times, all four cameras operating simultaneously around the actors' improvisation. Figgis chose the fifteenth version for the theatrical release, but also includes the first version on the DVD. Because the making of the film, and how it uses digital technology, is so central to the spectator's experience, the director's commentary and interviews with the cast reinforce the spectator as an active creator of belief and meaning in the film. Moreover, by including a special audio mixing feature, the DVD gives the medium a new level of interactivity. Using the remote control of a DVD player, the spectator/participant can switch between the audio of the different quadrants. Because the audio is a major aspect of directing the spectator's attention (in addition to visual elements such as movement and stasis), being able to make choices in the audio mix is, to use the music metaphor that the film is based on conceptually, to become the conductor of the film.8 The medium is the mix. Like Time Code and Conceiving Ada, the new French film Gamer is also a particularly digital mix. Gamer moves between live action and digital environments as its main character Tony gets the idea for, designs, and then is swindled out of a computer game. The first time the film environment switches to the game environment is when the hero is in a car chase and his car morphs into a game graphic of a car. The shift between a reality created by conventional film style and the unconventional use of game graphics style reveals the main character's subjectivity, for his reality (and other characters' as well) are constructed through their interaction in the playing and making of games. Gamer is aesthetically and viscerally ambitious in the range of live action and computer graphic interfaces it moves between. The adrenalized state of game-playing mixes with a fictionalized account of game design. Gamer succeeds in creating an immersive text about two differently immersive mediums, film and computer games. When the film depicts how live action can be made digital, and both shows and denies the indexicality of the digital image, it explores the nature of digital cinema in a way that is complementary to the projects of Conceiving Ada and Time Code. In addition to fostering new relations of looking, these digital narratives make forays into nonlinearity. Conceiving Ada and Gamer both have discursive plots that revise the conventions of the linear plot, moving between nested narrative frames in time, space, and subjectivity. Time Code is in one way relentlessly linear, but its synchronic depiction of multiple physical and emotional points of view ruptures the cinematic conventions of time and space constructed by the dominant style of continuity editing. Taken separately, these three films hover around the center point of my diagram, raising the issues of agency and linearity that will continue to be at the center of digital narrative. Taken together the films offer a model of digital transformation that points the way to what is bound to be a medium that increasingly involves its audience in thinking about and then participating in increasingly immersive, nonlinear, and interactive experiences. Notes 1. In the “renew” issue of M/C, David Marshall suggests that one of the areas Cultural Studies can look to is how the culture industries that produce “recombinant culture,” make efforts “to incorporate new technologies into different forms in order to reconstitute audiences in ways that in their distinctiveness produce value that is exchangeable as capital.” This essay is part of a larger work that attempts to open up some of the avenues suggested by Marshall. P. David Marshall. "Renewing Cultural Studies." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.6 (2000). [22 February 2001] . 2. This diagram is a work in progress. My students and I have had much discussion about what to term the bottom of the agency axis. “Passive” seems too simple, yet other terms we’ve come up with such as structured, controlled, limited, voyeuristic, or (my favorite) enslaved don’t seem to work. Special thanks to my students Elliott Davis, Tom Mannino, and John O’Connell, for such discussions. 3. Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, MIT Press, 1999, esp. 128. 4. For an interesting discussion and diagramming of story shapes, see Katherine Phelps, “Story Shapes for Digital Media.” [3/7/01] < http://www.glasswings.com.au/modern/shapes/>. Steven Johnson’s assertion that the hyperlink is the “first significant new form of punctuation to emerge in centuries” is an intriguing one for thinking about the connections possible in hypermedia. (Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate (San Francisco: HarperEdge, 1997), 110-111). 6. Lev Manovich, “What Is Digital Cinema?” http://jupiter.ucsd.edu/~manovich/text/digital-cinema.html 7. In a footnote, Manovich makes an interesting point on avant-garde strategies such as collage, painting on film, combining print with animation and live action footage, and combining many images in a single frame: “what used to be exceptions for traditional cinema became the normal, intended techniques of digital filmmaking, embedded in technology design itself.” Innovative forays into the mix of digital media like my examples illuminate not only the emergence of exceptional techniques but also of innovative narrative and spectatorial strategies. 8. Figgis is using the quadrant method once again in a new film, Hotel, which recently finished production in Florence. During the filming, there was a brilliant site that every day had a new page with the four-quadrant split. In addition to quicktimes of footage of the shoot and the actors in the hotel where the film is set, there were some of the cleverest animations I have ever seen on the web. Unfortunately the site shut down after the shoot finished, but it will be up again in May, most likely at www.filmfour.com/hotel, but check www.red-mullet.com as well.

Introduction The term monster might have its roots in the Latin word monere (to warn), but it has since evolved to have various symbolic meanings, from a terrifying mythical creature to a person of extreme cruelty. No matter the flexibility in use, the term is mostly meant to be derogatory (Asma). As Gilmore puts it, monsters “embody all that is dangerous and horrible in the human imagination” (1). However, it may be argued that monsters sometimes perform the much-needed work of defining and policing our norms (Mittman and Hensel). Since their archetype is predisposed to transgressing boundaries of human integrity (Gilmore), they help establish deviation between human and in-human. Their cognition and action are considered ‘other’ (Kearney) and a means with which people can understand what is right and wrong, and what is divergent from appropriate ways of being. The term monster need not even refer to the werewolves, ogres, vampires, zombies and the like that strike fear in audiences through their ‘immoral, heinous or unjust’ appearance or behaviours. Rather, the term monster can be, and has been, readily applied as a metaphor to describe the unthinkable, unethical, and brutal actions of human beings (Beville 5). Inadvertently, “through their bodies, words, and deeds, monsters show us ourselves” (Mittman and Hensel 2), or what we consider monstrous about ourselves. Therefore, humans acting in ways that deviate from societal norms and standards can be viewed as monstrous. This is evident in the representations of public relations practitioners in media offerings. In the practice of public relations, ethical standards are advocated as the norm, and deviating from them considered unprofessional (Fawkes), and as we contend: monstrous. However, the practice has long suffered a negative stereotypical perception of being deceptive, and with public relations roles receiving less screen time than shows and films about lawyers, accountants, teachers and the like, these few derogatory depictions can distort how audiences view the occupation (Johnston). Depictions of professions (lawyers, cops, journalists, etc.) tend to be cliché, but our contention is that fewer depictions of public relations practitioners on screen further limit the possibility for diverse depictions. The media can have a socialising impact and can influence audiences to view the content they consume as a reflection of the real world around them (Chandler). Television, in particular, with its capacity to prompt heuristic processing in audiences (Shurm), has messages that can be easily decoded by people of various literacies as they become immersed in the viewing experiences (Gerbner and Gross). These messages gain potency because, despite being set in fictional worlds, they can be understood as reflective of the world and audiences’ experiences of it (Gerbner and Gross). Tsetsura, Bentley, and Newcomb add that popular stories recounted in the media have authoritative power and can offer patterns of meaning that shape individual perceptions. Admittedly, as Stuart Hall suggests, media offerings can be encoded with ideologies and representations that are considered appropriate according to the dominant elite, but these may not necessarily be decoded as preferred meanings. In other words, those exposed to stories of monstrous public relations practitioners can agree with such a position, oppose this viewpoint, or remain neutral, but this is dependent on individual experiences. Without other frames of reference, it could be that viewers of negative portrayals of public relations accept the encoded representation that inevitably does a disservice to the profession. When the representations of the field of public relations suggest, inaccurately, that the industry is dominated by men (Johnston), and women practitioners are shown as slick dressers who control and care little about ethics (Dennison), the distortions can adversely impact on the identities of public relations practitioners and on how they are collectively viewed (Tsetsura et al.). Public relations practitioners view this portrayal as the ‘other’ and tend to distance the ideal self from it, continuing to be stuck in the dichotomy of saints and sinners (Fawkes). Our observation of television offerings such as Scandal, Flack, Call My Agent!, Absolutely Fabulous, Sex and the City, You’re the Worst, and Emily in Paris reveals how television programmes continue to perpetuate the negative stereotypes about public relations practice, where practitioners are anything but ethical—therefore monstrous. The characters, mostly well-groomed women, are shown as debased, liars and cheaters who will subvert ethical standards for personal and professional gain. Portrayals of Public Relations Practitioners in Television and Media According to Miller, the eight archetypical traits identified in media representations of public relations practitioners are: ditzy, obsequious, cynical, manipulative, money-minded, isolated, accomplished, or unfulfilled. In later research, Yoon and Black found that television representations of public relations tended to suggest that people in these roles were heartless, manipulative bullies, while Lambert and White contend that the depiction of the profession has improved to be more positive, but nonetheless continues to do a disservice to the practice by presenting female workers, especially, as “shallow but loveable” (18). We too find that public relations practitioners continue to be portrayed as morally ambiguous characters who are willing to break ethical codes of conduct to suit the needs of their clients. We discuss three themes prevalent as popular tropes in television programmes that characterise public relations practitioners as monstrous. To Be or Not to Be a Slick and Skilful Liar? Most television programmes present public relations practitioners as slick and skilful liars, who are shown as well-groomed and authoritative, convinced that they are lying only to protect their clients. In fact, in most cases the characters are shown to not only believe but also advocate to their juniors that ‘a little bit of lying’ is almost necessary to maintain client relationships and ensure campaign success. For example, in the British drama Flack, the main character of Robyn (played by Anna Paquin) is heard advising her prodigy “just assume we are lying to everyone”. The programmes also feature characters who are in dilemma about the monstrous expectations from their roles, struggling to accept that that they engage in deception as part of their jobs. However, most of them are presented as somewhat of an ugly duckling or the modest character in the programme, who is not always rational or in an explicit position of power. For example, Emily from Emily in Paris (played by Lily Collins), while working as a social media manager, regularly questions the approaches taken by the firm she works for. Her boss Sylvie Grateux (played by Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu), who embodies the status quo, is constantly disapproving of Emily’s lack of sophisticated self-presentation, among other aspects. In the episode ‘Faux Amis’, Sylvie quips “it’s not you personally. It’s everything you stand for. You’re the enemy of luxury because luxury is defined by sophistication and taste, not emilyinparis”. Similarly, in the first episode of Call My Agent!, Samuel Kerr (played by Alain Rimoux), the head of a film publicity firm, solves the conundrum faced by his anxious junior Gabriel (played by Grégory Montel) by suggesting that he lie to his client about the real reason why she lost the film. When a modestly dressed Gabriel questions how he can lie to someone he cares for, Samuel, towering over him in an impeccable suit and a confident demeanour, advises “who said anything about lying? Don’t lie. Simply don’t tell her the truth”. However, the subtext here is that the lie is to protect the client from unnecessary hurt and in doing so nurtures the client relationship. So, it lets the audience decide the morality of lying here. It may be argued that moral ambiguity may not necessarily be monstrous. Such grey characters are often crafted because they allow audiences to relate more readily to themselves by encouraging what Hawkins refers to as mental play. Audiences are less interested in the black and white of morality and veer towards shows such as Call My Agent! where storylines hone in on the need to do bad for the greater good. In these ways, public relations practitioners still transgress moral standards but are less likely to be considered monstrous because the impact and effect on others is utilitarian in nature. It is also interesting to note that in these programmes physical appearance is made to play a crucial role in showcasing the power and prestige of the senior public relations practitioner. This focus on attire can tend to further perpetuate unfavourable stereotypes about public relations practitioners being high income earners (Grandien) who are styled with branded apparel but lacking in substance and morals (Fröhlich and Peters). Promiscuous Women The urge to attract audiences to a female character can also lead to developing and cementing unfavourable stereotypes of public relations practitioners as uninhibited women who live on blurred lines between personal and professional. These characters are not portrayed as inherently bad, but instead are found to indulge in lives of excess. In her definition of the monstrous, Arumugam suggests that excess and insatiable appetites direct the monster’s behaviour, and Kearney outlines that this uncontainable excess is what signals the difference between humans and others. Such excess is readily identifiable in the character of Patsy Stone (played by Joanna Lumley) in Absolutely Fabulous. She is an alcoholic, regularly uses recreational drugs, is highly promiscuous, and chain-smokes throughout the series. She is depicted as prone to acting deceptively to maintain her vices. In Flack, Robyn is shown as regularly snorting cocaine and having sex with her clients. Those reviewing the show highlight how it will attract those interested in “its dark, acidic sense of humour” (Greene) while others condemn it because it emphasises the “depraved publicist” trope (Knibbs) and call it “one of the worst TV shows ever made” even though it is trying to highlight concerns raised in the MeToo movement about how men need to respect women (McGurk). Female characters such as Robyn, with her willingness to question why a client has not tried to sleep with her, appear to undermine the empowerment of the movement rather than support it, and continue to maintain the archetypes that those working in the field of public relations abhor. Similarly, Samantha Jones (played by Kim Cattrell) of Sex and the City is portrayed as sexually liberated, and in one episode another character describes Samantha’s vagina as “the hottest spot in town: it’s always open”. In many ways Samantha’s sexual behaviour reflects a post-feminist narrative of empowerment, agency, and choice, but it could also be read as a product of being a public relations practitioner frequenting parties and bars as she rubs shoulders with clients, celebrities, and high-profile businesspeople. To this end, Patsy, Samantha, and Robyn glamourise public relations and paint it as simply an extension of their liberated and promiscuous selves, with little care for any expectation of professionalism or work ethic. This is also in stark contrast to the reality, where women often tend to occupy technical roles that see much of their time spent in doing the hard yards of publicity and promotion (Krugler). Making Others Err Public relations practitioners are not just shown as being morally ambiguous themselves, but often quite adept at making others do deceitful acts on their behalf, thus nonchalantly oppressing others to get their way. For example, although lauded for elevating an African-American woman to the lead role despite the show maintaining misrepresentations of race (Lambert), the main character of Olivia Pope (played by Kerry Washington) in the television programme Scandal regularly subverts the law for her clients despite considering herself one of the “good guys” and wearing a “white hat”. Over the course of seven seasons, Olivia Pope is found to rig elections, plant listening devices in political figures’ offices, bribe, threaten, and conduct an affair with the President. In some cases, she calls on the services of her colleague Huck to literally, and figuratively, get rid of the barriers in the way of protecting her clients. For example, in season one’s episode Crash and Burn she asks Huck to torture a suspect for information about a dead client. Her willingness to request such actions of her friend and colleague, regardless of perceived good motivations, reinforces Mittman’s categorisation that monsters are identified by their effect and impact on others. Here, the impact includes the torturing of a suspect and the revisiting of psychological trauma by Huck’s character. Huck struggles to overcome his past as a killer and spends much of the show trying to curb his monstrous tendencies which are often brought on by PR woman Olivia’s requests. Although she is sometimes striving for justice, Olivia’s desire for results can lead her to act monstrously, which inadvertently contributes to the racist and sexist ideologies that have long been associated with monsters and perceptions of the Other. Across time and space, certain ethnic groups, such as those of African descent, have been associated with the demonic (Cohen). Similarly, all that is feminine often needs to be discarded as the monster to conform to the patriarchal order of society (Creed). Therefore, Olivia Pope’s monstrous behaviour not only does a disservice to representations of public relations practitioners, but also inadvertently perpetuates negative and inaccurate stereotypes about women of African American descent. Striving to be Ethical The majority of public relations practitioners are encouraged, and in some cases expected, to conform to ethical guidelines to practice and gain respect, admiration, and in-group status. In New Zealand, those who opt to become members of the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand (PRINZ) are required to abide by the association’s code of ethics. The code stipulates that members are bound to act in ways that serve public interests by ensuring they are honest, disclose conflict of interests, follow the law, act with professionalism, ensure openness and privacy are maintained, and uphold values of loyalty, fairness, and independence (PRINZ). Similarly, the Global Alliance of Public Relations and Communication Management that binds practitioners together identifies nine guiding principles that are to be adhered to to be recognised as acting ethically. These include obeying laws, working in the public’s interest, ensuring freedom of speech and assembly, acting with integrity, and upholding privacy in sensitive matters (to name a few). These governing principles are designed to maintain ethical practice in the field. Of course, the trouble is that not all who claim to practice public relations become members of the local or global governing bodies. This implies that professional associations like PRINZ are not able to enforce ethics across the board. In New Zealand alone, public relations consultants have had to offer financial reparations for acting in defamatory ways online (Fisher), or have been alleged to have bribed an assault victim to prevent the person giving evidence in a court case (Hurley). Some academics have accused the industry of being engaged in organised lying (Peacock), but these are not common, nor are these moral transgressors accepted into ethical bodies that afford practitioners authenticity and legitimacy. In most cases, public relations practitioners view their role as acting as the moral conscience of the organisations they support (Schauster, Neill, Ferrucci, and Tandoc). Furthermore, they rated better than the average adult when it came to solving ethical dilemmas through moral reasoning (Schuaster et al.). Additionally, training of practitioners through guidance of mentors has continued to contribute to the improved ethical ratings of public relations. What these findings suggest is that the monsters of public relations portrayed on our television screens are exaggerations that are not reflective of most of the practice. Women of Substance, But Not Necessarily Power Exploring the role of women in public relations, Topic, Cunha, Reigstad, Jele-Sanchez, and Moreno found that female practitioners were subordinated to their male counterparts but were found to be more inclined to practice two-way communication, offer balanced perspectives, opt to negotiate, and build relationships through cooperation. The competitiveness, independence, and status identified in popular media portrayals were found to be exhibited more by male practitioners, despite there being more women in the public relations industry than men. As Fitch argues, popular culture continues to suggest that men dominate public relations, and their preferred characteristics end up being those elements that permeate the media messages, regardless of instances where the lead character is a woman or the fact that feminist values of “loyalty, ethics, morality, [and] fairness” are advocated by female practitioners in real life (Vardeman-Winter and Place 333). Additionally, even though public relations is a feminised field, female practitioners struggle to break the glass ceiling, with male practitioners dominating executive positions and out-earning women (Pompper). Interestingly, in public relations, power is not just limited due to gender but also area of practice. In her ethnographic study of the New Zealand practice, Sissons found that practitioners who worked in consultancies were relatively powerless vis-à-vis their clients, and often this asymmetry negatively affected the practitioner’s decision-making. This implies that in stark contrast to the immoral, glamourous, and authoritative depiction of public relations women in television programmes, in reality they are mired by the struggles of a gendered occupation. Accordingly, they are not in fact in a position to have monstrous power over and impact on others. Therefore, one of the only elements the shows seem to capture and emphasise is that public relations is an occupation that specialises in image management; but what these shows contribute to is an ideology that women are expected to look and carry themselves in particular ways, ultimately constructing aesthetic standards that can diminish women’s power and self-esteem. Conclusion Miller’s archetypes may be over twenty years old, but the trend towards obsequious, manipulative, and cynical television characters remains. Although there have been identifiable shifts to loveable, yet shallow, public relations practitioners, such as Alexis Rose on Schitt’s Creek, the appeal of monstrous public relations practitioners remains. As Cohen puts it, monsters reveal to audiences “what a member of that society can become when those same dictates are rejected, when the authority of leaders or customs disintegrates and the subordination of individual to hierarchy is lost” (68). In other words, audiences enjoy watching the stories of metaphorical monsters because they exhibit the behaviours that are expected to be repressed in human beings; they depict what happens when the social norms of society are disturbed (Levina and Bui). At the very least, these media representations can act, much as monster narratives do, as a cautionary tale on how not to think and act to remain accepted as part of the in-group rather than being perceived as the Other. As Mittman and Hensel argue, society can learn much from monsters because monsters exist within human beings. According to Cohen, they offer meaning about the world and can teach audiences so they can learn, in this case, how to be better. Although the representations of public relations in television can offer insights into roles that are usually most effective when they are invisible (Chorazy and Harrington), the continued negative stereotypes of public relations practitioners can adversely impact on the industry if people are unaware of the practices of the occupation, because lacking a reference point limits audiences’ opportunities to critically evaluate the media representations. This will certainly harm the occupation by perpetuating existing negative stereotypes of charming and immoral practitioners, and perhaps add to its struggles with gendered identity and professional legitimacy. References Absolutely Fabulous. Created by Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French. 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'Shut up, Graeme; I want to see those two rooting.'-- Description by a spectator of her own thoughts during Bulldog Front, Underground Productions, Cement Box Theatre, Brisbane, June 1999. A split scene in a small theatre, with a transverse stage faced from both sides by audiences. On a raised platform, two co-workers from a recruitment firm hired to sell forced-labour camps for the unemployed to the Australian public extend their awkward flirtation to a slow, gentle sexual encounter. Separated by several metres and a small patch of light, their shaven-headed supervisor stares down a gun barrel wielded by a former employee who has sold the firm's secrets to a competitor, then returned to negotiate terms of blackmail regarding their new contract. The scenes, observed and reported on by two other employees (as characters and as actors) from the space of the audience, end simultaneously. As the sounds of heterosexual coitus reach a (relatively) subdued climax, the former employee, a young man utterly unprepared for the reaction his threat receives, falls through the window of the office as he writhes away from the supervisor's angry tirade. Is this exploitative? If so, of whom and in what way? From March to June of this year, my co-workers and I on the Bulldog Front project at the University of Queensland attempted to realise the political potential of a physically-oriented rehearsal style. The mode of operation of the show -- the way it was rehearsed and performed, as well as the mode of its reception (for the audience only sees the 'product', one of the thorns in the side of 'experimental' praxis the world over) -- concentrated almost entirely upon the labour of the actors to develop and realise the operation of political forces through physical action. The politicisation of bodily desire within this framework was not an avowed intention at the beginning on the process, neither textually nor in the conception of the action by the creative team. However, the role of discourses regarding desire asserted themselves repeatedly in the course of realising the action -- and the interesting aspect is how easily, in comparison to methods of work we had experienced previously, this process allowed us -- in fact, forced us -- to address the social implications of specifically sexual desire within a textual matrix which often actively marginalised it. The scene in question did not arise, for instance, because of some misguided wish on the part of the producers to include a 'sex scene'. Indeed, the scene took place in low light, with clothes remaining in place - the action was obviously mimed, although the actor's bodies were in full contact. The violence in the other part of the split scene, by way of comparison, took on several sexualised manifestations, including the obviously phallic weapon and the grabbing of the employee's crotch while he cowered on a table. Contextually, the play's action up to that point had attempted to diversify the largely homosocial contact of the office and street in question in terms of the manifestation of male sexuality. The male co-worker in the 'sex' scene, Anthony, was engaging in intercourse with the newly-employed daughter of the company's owner. Throughout the play, Anthony's sometimes overtly sexual attitude to his work -- 'straight to bed on both of 'em,' he claims of his ability to derive (non-sexual) favours from the employees of a prospective 'victim' -- engaged in a dialogue with his attitudes towards his own sexual relations. The character of Teara, his co-participant, was by contrast desexualised in the office context -- or so it might have seemed in the text. An examination of the play reveals that other factors -- notably the fact that it's her first day back after working in Europe for three years -- mediate this verbal marginalisation. But to what extent can her later sacrifice of the relationship that develops between them -- and, indeed, of Anthony's life -- be read into her actions with regard to the staged encounter, particularly because she plays pursuer far more than pursued (Anthony, it seems, being far from competent in this area)? Is she sublimating her father-murder (her wish to take over the company) into physical 'conquest' of Anthony, who seems the perfect candidate according to the arrayed forces within the company (or the society)? Does this masculinised reading of her actions rob her of female psycho-identity? Does the anecdotal evidence of female audience members saying they enjoyed this scene more than any of the others have any relevance to the question of exploitation? Do any of these questions matter? What place, it may be asked, does desire have in the creation of a theatre of politics? It has, I would argue, everything to do with it. The question of exploitation or misrepresentation is not only a real one, it is anything but a side issue. This is not a question derived from guilt, either male or Catholic in my case, but from a wish to challenge the mode of storytelling without compromising the story I wish to tell, which must involve an ongoing inquiry as to what exactly -- and where exactly -- that story is. 'Desire' in this context should be read as that contact between actors which can be sexualised in terms of the discourses of the body -- and the reason why I state that 'desire was not the point' is that there was less of that in this fairly passionate production than I, for one, had expected. However, no opportunity for inquiry into this sexualisation had to be avoided, simply because the methodology of rehearsal (for a reference point, look to Thomas Richards's At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions) allowed the physicalisation of impulses which did not have to necessarily engage directly with the social situation as experienced by the actor. Most productions of my experience, it must be noted, begin with the actor -- usually her or his 'mind', in the form of seated and abstracted discussion about the possiblity of the concrete event of the text. From such seeds, many stunted representations and discursive effects of erotic and thanotic desire have sprung -- it is not an accident that displays of passion in Hamlet, the tragedy most self-consciously elevated by theatre cognoscenti, are ones of frustation. This frustation is doubtless a familiar one to many Western actors, precisely because the terms of their theatre are not constructed from the inside to even acknowledge, much less codify or liberate, desire. The address of such issues in 'psychological' terms usually ends up translating various social codes which have been assimilated by the actor regarding her/his own sexuality into the action of the play -- or more often, into the process of rehearsal, where they are often challenged by the actor for 'personal reasons' or eliminated by the producers for the 'public safety'. This is not to say that all productions which do not include a cornucopia of sexual acts, or even suggestions thereof, are concessions of artistic dignity or political commitment. The subject of this article cannot, for reasons of space, be about even the barest generalities regarding the topic of realising sexual desire -- even simply heterosexual desire, as if there were anything simple about it -- on the stage or between actors. The question remains one, then, of: did we -- that is to say, as writer/director, did I -- exploit the performers as sexual beings, either deliberately or through failing to satisfactorily address the issues of desire's representation in the production? Did I, while juxtaposing consensual heterosexual intercourse with sadomasochistic homoeros, merely read the desire of the female character into a phallocentric mode of discourse? Or is the question that I would prefer to ask (and the answer to that is emphatically 'yes'): Was the scene staged simply in order to excite the desire of the paying customer to see heterosexual intercourse? I can claim, and to my mind rightly, that the answer is 'no', and I'm off the hook -- I can tell myself I am not a pornographer. But take the word 'simply' out of the sentence, and we're back to square one, because something else was obviously going on. The question of whether or not the contexual devices employed in this scene justified the staged manifestations of desire is one for the individual audience member. The point of this article is to explain my thinking about the scene; it is also to explain how, to my mind, the approach to the actor's craft is a vital and near-neglected area of contestation with regard to how desire begins to be staged, and how modifications of the performer's act by the director impact upon the physicalisation of -- among other things -- heterosexual desire. The performance which seeks to address social forces in its approach to the action, as well as the dramatic elements of the action itself, must continually ask such questions without forgetting that a performance is not a lecture (and if every fibre is infused with the spirit of inquiry, it doesn't have to be). This is the promise of a performance approach to political theatre that doesn't just base itself in intellectual analysis. References Thomas Richards. At Work with Grotowski on Physical Actions. London: Routledge, 1995. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Marcel Dorney. "Don't Lean on the Window: Desire's Presence and Representation in Political Drama." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.5 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/window.php>. Chicago style: Marcel Dorney, "Don't Lean on the Window: Desire's Presence and Representation in Political Drama," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 5 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/window.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Marcel Dorney. (1999) Don't lean on the window: desire's presence and representation in political drama. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9907/window.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction The counterculture that arose during the 1960s and 1970s left lasting social and political reverberations in developed nations. This was a time of increasing affluence and liberalisation which opened up remarkable political opportunities for social change. Within this context, an array of new social movements were a vital ingredient of the ferment that saw existing norms challenged and the establishment of new rights for many oppressed groups. An expanding arena of concerns included the environmental damage caused by 200 years of industrial capitalism. This article examines one aspect of a current environment movement in Australia, the anti-Coal Seam Gas (CSG) movement, and the part played by participants. In particular, the focus is upon one action that emerged during the recent Bentley Blockade, which was a regional mobilisation against proposed unconventional gas mining (UGM) near Lismore, NSW. Over the course of the blockade, the conventional ritual of waving at passers-by was transformed into a mechanism for garnering broad community support. Arguably, this was a crucial factor in the eventual outcome. In this case, we contend that the wave, rather than a countercultural artefact being appropriated by the mainstream, represents an everyday behaviour that builds social solidarity, which is subverted to become an effective part of the repertoire of the movement. At a more general level, this article examines how counterculture and mainstream interact via the subversion of “ordinary” citizens and the role of certain cultural understandings for that purpose. We will begin by examining the nature of the counterculture and its relationship to social movements before discussing the character of the anti-CSG movement in general and the Bentley Blockade in particular, using the personal experience of one of the writers. We will then be able to explore our thesis in detail and make some concluding remarks. The Counterculture and Social Movements In this article, we follow Cox’s understanding of the counterculture as a kind of meta-movement within which specific social movements are situated. For Cox (105), the counterculture that flourished during the 1960s and 1970s was an overarching movement in which existing social relations—in particular the family—were rejected by a younger generation, who succeeded in effectively fusing previously separate political and cultural spheres of dissent into one. Cox (103-04) points out that the precondition for such a phenomenon is “free space”—conditions under which counter-hegemonic activity can occur—for example, being liberated from the constraints of working to subsist, something which the unprecedented prosperity of the post WWII years allowed. Hence, in the 1960s and 1970s, as the counterculture emerged, a wave of activism arose in the western world which later came to be referred to as new social movements. These included the civil rights movement, women’s liberation, pacifism and the anti-nuclear and environment movements. The new movements rejected established power and organisational structures and tended, some scholars argued, to cross class lines, basing their claims on non-material issues. Della Porta and Diani claim this wave of movements is characterised by: a critical ideology in relation to modernism and progress; decentralized and participatory organizational structures; defense of interpersonal solidarity against the great bureaucracies; and the reclamation of autonomous spaces, rather than material advantages. (9) This depiction clearly announces the countercultural nature of the new social movements. As Carter (91) avers, these movements attempted to bypass the state and instead mobilise civil society, employing a range of innovative tactics and strategies—the repertoire of action—which may involve breaking laws. It should be noted that over time, some of these movements did shift towards accommodation of existing power structures and became more reformist in nature, to the point of forming political parties in the case of the Greens. However, inasmuch as the counterculture represented a merging of distinctively non-mainstream ways of life with the practice of actively challenging social arrangements at a political level (Cox 18–19; Grossberg 15–18;), the tactic of mobilising civil society to join social movements demonstrates in fact a reverse direction: large numbers of people are transfigured in radical ways by their involvement in social movements. One important principle underlying much of the repertoire of action of these new movements was non-violence. Again, this signals countercultural norms of the period. As Sharp (583–86) wrote at the time, non-violence is crucial in that it denies the aggressor their rationale for violent repression. This principle is founded on the liberal notion, whose legacy goes back to Locke, that the legitimacy of the government rests upon the consent of the governed—that is, the people can withdraw their consent (Locke in Ball & Dagger 92). Ghandi also relied upon this idea when formulating his non-violent approach to conflict, satyagraha (Sharp 83–84). Thus an idea that upholds the modern state is adopted by the counterculture in order to undermine it (the state), again demonstrating an instance of counterflow from the mainstream. Non-violence does not mean non-resistance. In fact, it usually involves non-compliance with a government or other authority and when practised in large numbers, can be very effective, as Ghandi and those in the civil rights movement showed. The result will be either that the government enters into negotiation with the protestors, or they can engage in violence to suppress them, which generally alienates the wider population, leading to a loss of support (Finley & Soifer 104–105). Tarrow (88) makes the important point that the less threatening an action, the harder it is to repress. As a result, democratic states have generally modified their response towards the “strategic weapon of nonviolent protest and even moved towards accommodation and recognition of this tactic as legitimate” (Tarrow 172). Nevertheless, the potential for state violence remains, and the freedom to protest is proscribed by various laws. One of the key figures to emerge from the new social movements that formed an integral part of the counterculture was Bill Moyer, who, in conjunction with colleagues produced a seminal text for theorising and organising social movements (Moyer et al.). Many contemporary social movements have been significantly influenced by Moyer’s Movement Action Plan (MAP), which describes not only key theoretical concepts but is also a practical guide to movement building and achieving aims. Moyer’s model was utilised in training the Northern Rivers community in the anti-CSG movement in conjunction with the non-violent direct action (NVDA) model developed by the North-East Forest Alliance (NEFA) that resisted logging in the forests of north-eastern NSW during the late 1980s and 1990s (Ricketts 138–40). Indeed, the Northern Rivers region of NSW—dubbed the Rainbow Region—is celebrated, as a “‘meeting place’ of countercultures and for the articulation of social and environmental ideals that challenge mainstream practice” (Ward and van Vuuren 63). As Bible (6–7) outlines, the Northern Rivers’ place in countercultural history is cemented by the holding of the Aquarius Festival in Nimbin in 1973 and the consequent decision of many attendees to stay on and settle in the region. They formed new kinds of communities based on an alternative ethics that eschewed a consumerist, individualist agenda in favour of modes of existence that emphasised living in harmony with the environment. The Terania Creek campaign of the late 1970s made the region famous for its environmental activism, when the new settlers resisted the logging of Nightcap National Park using nonviolent methods (Bible 5). It was also instrumental in developing an array of ingenious actions that were used in subsequent campaigns such as the Franklin Dam blockade in Tasmania in the early 1980s (Kelly 116). Indeed, many of these earlier activists were key figures in the anti-CSG movement that has developed in the Rainbow Region over the last few years. The Anti-CSG Movement Despite opposition to other forms of UGM, such as tight sands and shale oil extraction techniques, the term anti-CSG is used here, as it still seems to attract wide recognition. Unconventional gas extraction usually involves a process called fracking, which is the injection at high pressure of water, sand and a number of highly toxic chemicals underground to release the gas that is trapped in rock formations. Among the risks attributed to fracking are contamination of aquifers, air pollution from fugitive emissions and exposure to radioactive particles with resultant threats to human and animal health, as well as an increased risk of earthquakes (Ellsworth; Hand 13; Sovacool 254–260). Additionally, the vast amount of water that is extracted in the fracking process is saline and may contain residues of the fracking chemicals, heavy metals and radioactive matter. This produced water must either be stored or treated (Howarth 273–73; Sovacool 255). Further, there is potential for accidents and incidents and there are many reports—particularly in the United States where the practice is well established—of adverse events such as compressors exploding, leaks and spills, and water from taps catching fire (Sovacool 255–257). Despite an abundance of anecdotal evidence, until recently authorities and academics believed there was not enough “rigorous evidence” to make a definitive judgment of harm to animal and human health as a result of fracking (Mitka 2135). For example, in Australia, the Queensland Government was unable to find a clear link between fracking and health complaints in the Tara gasfield (Thompson 56), even though it is known that there are fugitive emissions from these gasfields (Tait et al. 3099-103). It is within this context that grassroots opposition to UGM began in Australia. The largest and most sustained challenge has come from the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, where a company called Metgasco has been attempting to engage in UGM for a number of years. Stiff community opposition has developed over this time, with activists training, co-ordinating and organising using the principles of Moyer’s MAP and NEFA’s NVDA. Numerous community and affinity groups opposing UGM sprang up including the Lock the Gate Alliance (LTG), a grassroots organisation opposing coal and gas mining, which formed in 2010 (Lock the Gate Alliance online). The movement put up sustained resistance to Metgasco’s attempts to establish wells at Glenugie, near Grafton and Doubtful Creek, near Kyogle in 2012 and 2013, despite the use of a substantial police presence at both locations. In the event, neither site was used for production despite exploratory wells being sunk (ABC News; Dobney). Metgasco announced it would be withdrawing its operations following new Federal and State government regulations at the time of the Doubtful Creek blockade. However it returned to the fray with a formal announcement in February 2014 (Metgasco), that it would drill at Bentley, 12 kilometres west of Lismore. It was widely believed this would occur with a view to production on an industrial scale should initial exploration prove fruitful. The Bentley Blockade It was known well before the formal announcement that Metgasco planned to drill at Bentley and community actions such as flash mobs, media releases and planning meetings were part of the build-up to direct action at the site. One of the authors of this article was actively involved in the movement and participated in a variety of these actions. By the end of January 2014 it was decided to hold an ongoing vigil at the site, which was still entirely undeveloped. Participants, including one author, volunteered for four-hour shifts which began at 5 a.m. each day and before long, were lasting into the night. The purpose of a vigil is to bear witness, maintain a presence and express a point of view. It thus accords well with the principle of non-violence. Eventually the site mushroomed into a tent village with three gates being blockaded. The main gate, Gate A, sprouted a variety of poles, tripods and other installations together with colourful tents and shelters, peopled by protesters on a 24-hour basis. The vigils persisted on all three gates for the duration of the blockade. As the number of blockaders swelled, popular support grew, lending weight to the notion that countercultural ideas and practices were spreading throughout the community. In response, Metgasco called on the State Government to provide police to coincide with the arrival of equipment. It was rumoured that 200 police would be drafted to defend the site in late April. When alerts were sent out to the community warning of imminent police action, an estimated crowd of 2000 people attended in the early hours of the morning and the police called off their operation (Feliu). As the weeks wore on, training was stepped up, attendees were educated in non-violent resistance and protestors willing to act as police liaison persons were placed on a rotating roster. In May, the State Government was preparing to send up to 800 police and the Riot Squad to break the blockade (NSW Hansard in Buckingham). Local farmers (now a part of the movement) and activist leaders had gone to Sydney in an effort to find a political solution in order to avoid what threatened to be a clash that would involve police violence. A confluence of events, such as: the sudden resignation of the Premier; revelations via the Independent Commission against Corruption about nefarious dealings and undue influence of the coal industry upon the government; a radio interview with locals by a popular broadcaster in Sydney; and the reputed hesitation of the police themselves in engaging with a group of possibly 7,000 to 10,000 protestors, resulted in the Office for Coal Seam Gas suspending Metgasco’s drilling licence on 15 May (NSW Department of Resources & Energy). The grounds were that the company had not adequately fulfilled its obligations to consult with the community. At the date of writing, the suspension still holds. The Wave The repertoire of contention at the Bentley Blockade was expansive, comprising most of the standard actions and strategies developed in earlier environmental struggles. These included direct blocking tactics in addition to the use of more carnivalesque actions like music and theatre, as well as the use of various media to reach a broader public. Non-violence was at the core of all actions, but we would tentatively suggest that Bentley may have provided a novel addition to the repertoire, stemming originally from the vigil, which brought the first protestors to the site. At the beginning of the vigil, which was initially held near the entrance to the proposed drilling site atop a cutting, occupants of passing vehicles below would demonstrate their support by sounding their horns and/or waving to the vigil-keepers, who at first were few in number. There was a precedent for this behaviour in the campaign leading up to the blockade. Activist groups such as the Knitting Nannas against Gas had encouraged vehicles to show support by sounding their horns. So when the motorists tooted spontaneously at Bentley, we waved back. Occupants of other vehicles would show disapproval by means of rude gestures and/or yelling and we would wave to them as well. After some weeks, as a presence began to be established at the site, it became routine for vigil keepers to smile and wave at all passing vehicles. This often elicited a positive response. After the first mass call-out discussed above, a number of us migrated to another gate, where numbers were much sparser and there was a perceived need for a greater presence. At this point, the participating writer had begun to act as a police liaison person, but the practice of waving routinely was continued. Those protecting this gate usually included protestors ready to block access, the police liaison person, a legal observer, vigil-keepers and a passing parade of visitors. Because this location was directly on the road, it was possible to see the drivers of vehicles and make eye contact more easily. Certain vehicles became familiar, passing at regular times, on the way to work or school, for example. As time passed, most of those protecting the gate also joined the waving ritual to the point where it became like a game to try to prise a signal of acknowledgement from the passing motorists, or even to win over a disapprover. Police vehicles, some of which passed at set intervals, were included in this game. Mostly they waved cheerfully. There were some we never managed to win over, but waving and making direct eye contact with regular motorists over time created a sense of community and an acknowledgement of the work we were doing, as they increasingly responded in kind. Motorists could hardly feel threatened when they encountered smiling, waving protestors. By including the disapprovers, we acted inclusively and our determined good humour seemed to de-escalate demonstrated hostility. Locals who did not want drilling to go ahead but who were nevertheless unwilling to join a direct action were thus able to participate in the resistance in a way that may have felt safe for them. Some of them even stopped and visited the site, voicing their support. Standing on the side of the road and waving to passers-by may seem peripheral to the “real” action, even trivial. But we would argue it is a valuable adjunct to a blockade (which is situated near a road) when one of the strategies of the overall campaign is to win popular backing. Hence waving, whilst not a completely new part of the repertoire, constitutes what Tilly (41–45) would call innovation at the margins, something he asserts is necessary to maintain the effectiveness and vitality of contentious action. In this case, it is arguable that the sheer size of community support probably helped to concentrate the minds of the state government politicians in Sydney, particularly as they contemplated initiating a massive, taxpayer-funded police action against the people for the benefit of a commercial operation. Waving is a symbolic gesture indicating acknowledgement and goodwill. It fits well within a repertoire based on the principle of non-violence. Moreover, it is a conventional social norm and everyday behaviour that is so innocuous that it is difficult to see how it could be suppressed by police or other authorities. Therein lies its subversiveness. For in communicating our common humanity in a spirit of friendliness, we drew attention to the fact that we were without rancour and tacitly invited others to join us and to explore our concerns. In this way, the counterculture drew upon a mainstream custom to develop and extend upon a new form of dissent. This constitutes a reversal of the more usual phenomenon of countercultural artefacts—such as “hippie clothing”—being appropriated or co-opted by the prevailing culture (see Reading). But it also fits with the more general phenomenon that we have argued was occurring; that of enticing ordinary residents into joining together in countercultural activity, via the pathway of a social movement. Conclusion The anti-CSG movement in the Northern Rivers was developed and organised by countercultural participants of previous contentious challenges. It was highly effective in building popular support whilst at the same time forging a loose coalition of various activist groups. We have surveyed one practice—the wave—that evolved out of mainstream culture over the course of the Bentley Blockade and suggested it may come to be seen as part of the repertoire of actions that can be beneficially employed under suitable conditions. Waving to passers-by invites them to become part of the movement in a non-threatening and inclusive way. It thus envelops supporters and non-supporters alike, and its very innocuousness makes it difficult to suppress. We have argued that this instance can be referenced to a similar reverse movement at a broader level—that of co-opting liberal notions and involving the general populace in new practices and activities that undermine the status quo. The ability of the counterculture in general and environment movements in particular to innovate in the quest to challenge and change what it perceives as damaging or unethical practices demonstrates its ingenuity and spirit. This movement is testament to its dynamic nature. References ABC News. Metgasco Has No CSG Extraction Plans for Glenugie. 2013. 30 July 2014 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-01-22/metgasco-says-no-csg-extraction-planned-for-glenugie/4477652›. Bible, Vanessa. 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Dobney, Chris. “Drill Rig Heads to Doubtful Creek.” Echo Netdaily Feb. 2013. 30 July 2014 ‹http://www.echo.net.au/2013/02/drill-rig-heads-to-doubtful-creek/›. Ellsworth, William. “Injection-Induced Earthquakes”. Science 341.6142 (2013). DOI: 10.1126/science.1225942. 10 July 2014 ‹http://www.sciencemag.org.ezproxy.scu.edu.au/content/341/6142/1225942.full?sid=b4679ca5-0992-4ad3-aa3e-1ac6356f10da›. Feliu, Luis. “Battle for Bentley: 2,000 Protectors on Site.” Echo Netdaily Mar. 2013. 4 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.echo.net.au/2014/03/battle-bentley-2000-protectors-site/›. Finley, Mary Lou, and Steven Soifer. “Social Movement Theories and Map.” Doing Democracy: The MAP Model for Organizing Social Movements. Eds. Bill Moyer, Johann McAllister, Mary Lou Finley, and Steven Soifer. Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2001. Grossberg, Lawrence. “Some Preliminary Conjunctural Thoughts on Countercultures”. Journal of Gender and Power 1.1 (2014). Hand, Eric. “Injection Wells Blamed in Oklahoma Earthquakes.” Science 345.6192 (2014): 13–14. Howarth, Terry. “Should Fracking Stop?” Nature 477 (2011): 271–73. Kelly, Russell. “The Mediated Forest: Who Speaks for the Trees?” Belonging in the Rainbow Region: Cultural Perspectives on the NSW North Coast. Ed. Helen Wilson. Lismore: Southern Cross UP, 2003. 101–20. Lock the Gate Alliance. 2014. 15 July 2014 ‹http://www.lockthegate.org.au/history›. Locke, John. “Toleration and Government.” Ideals and Ideologies: A Reader. Eds. Terence Ball & Richard Dagger. New York: Pearson Longman, 2004 (1823). 79–93. Metgasco. Rosella E01 Environment Approval Received 2104. 4 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.metgasco.com.au/asx-announcements/rosella-e01-environment-approval-received›. Mitka, Mike. “Rigorous Evidence Slim for Determining Health Risks from Natural Gas Fracking.” The Journal of the American Medical Association 307.20 (2012): 2135–36. Moyer, Bill. “The Movement Action Plan.” Doing Democracy: The MAP Model for Organizing Social Movements. Eds. Bill Moyer, Johann McAllister, Mary Lou Finley, and Steven Soifer. Gabriola Island, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2001. NSW Department of Resources & Energy. “Metgasco Drilling Approval Suspended.” Media Release, 15 May 2014. 30 July 2014 ‹http://www.resourcesandenergy.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0005/516749/Metgasco-Drilling-Approval-Suspended.pdf›. Reading, Tracey. “Hip versus Square: 1960s Advertising and Clothing Industries and the Counterculture”. Research Papers 2013. 15 July 2014 ‹http://opensuic.lib.siu.edu/gs_rp/396›. Ricketts, Aiden. “The North East Forest Alliance’s Old-Growth Forest Campaign.” Belonging in the Rainbow Region: Cultural Perspectives on the NSW North Coast. Ed. Helen Wilson. Lismore: Southern Cross UP. 2003. 121–148. Sharp, Gene. The Politics of Nonviolent Action: Power and Struggle. Boston, Mass.: Porter Sargent, 1973. Sovacool, Benjamin K. “Cornucopia or Curse? Reviewing the Costs and Benefits of Shale Gas Hydraulic Fracturing (Fracking).” Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews (2014): 249–64. Tait, Douglas, Isaac Santos, Damien Maher, Tyler Cyronak, and Rachael Davis. “Enrichment of Radon and Carbon Dioxide in the Open Atmosphere of an Australian Coal Seam Gas Field.” Environmental Science & Technology 47 (2013): 3099–3104. Tarrow, Sidney. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics. 3rd ed. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011. Thompson, Chuck. “The Fracking Feud.” Medicus 53.8 (2013): 56–57. Tilly, Charles. Regimes and Repertoires. Chicago: UCP, 2006. Ward, Susan, and Kitty van Vuuren. “Belonging to the Rainbow Region: Place, Local Media, and the Construction of Civil and Moral Identities Strategic to Climate Change Adaptability.” Environmental Communication 7.1 (2013): 63–79.

Literature—at least serious literature—is something that we work at. This is especially true within the academy. Literature departments are places where workers labour over texts carefully extracting and sharing meanings, for which they receive monetary reward. Specialised languages are developed to describe professional concerns. Over the last thirty years, the productions of mass culture, once regarded as too slight to warrant laborious explication, have been admitted to the academic workroom. Gothic studies—the specialist area that treats fearful and horrifying texts —has embraced the growing acceptability of devoting academic effort to texts that would once have fallen outside of the remit of “serious” study. In the seventies, when Gothic studies was just beginning to establish itself, there was a perception that the Gothic was “merely a literature of surfaces and sensations”, and that any Gothic of substantial literary worth had transcended the genre (Thompson 1). Early specialists in the field noted this prejudice; David Punter wrote of the genre’s “difficulty in establishing respectable credentials” (403), while Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick hoped her work would “make it easier for the reader of ‘respectable’ nineteenth-century novels to write ‘Gothic’ in the margin” (4). Gothic studies has gathered a modicum of this longed-for respectability for the texts it treats by deploying the methodologies used within literature departments. This has yielded readings that are largely congruous with readings of other sorts of literature; the Gothic text tells us things about ourselves and the world we inhabit, about power, culture and history. Yet the Gothic remains a production of popular culture as much as it is of the valorised literary field. I do not wish to argue for a reintroduction of the great divide described by Andreas Huyssen, but instead to suggest that we have missed something important about the ways in which popular Gothics—and perhaps other sorts of popular text—function. What if the popular Gothic were not a type of work, but a kind of play? How might this change the way we read these texts? Johan Huizinga noted that “play is not ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’ life. It is rather a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own. Every child knows perfectly well he is ‘only pretending’, or that it was ‘only for fun’” (8). If the Gothic sometimes offers playful texts, then those texts might direct readers not primarily towards the real, but away from it, at least for a limited time. This might help to account for the wicked spectacle offered by Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out, and in particular, its presentation of the black mass. The black mass is the parody of the Christian mass thought to be performed by witches and diabolists. Although it has doubtless been performed on rare occasions since the Middle Ages, the first black mass for which we have substantial documentary evidence was celebrated in Hampstead on Boxing Day 1918, by Montague Summers; it is a satisfying coincidence that Summers was one of the Gothic’s earliest scholars. We have record of Summer’s mass because it was watched by a non-participant, Anatole James, who was “bored to tears” as Summers recited tracts of Latin and practiced homosexual acts with a youth named Sullivan while James looked on (Medway 382-3). Summers claimed to be a Catholic priest, although there is some doubt as to the legitimacy of his ordination. The black mass ought to be officiated by a Catholic clergyman so the host may be transubstantiated before it is blasphemed. In doing so, the mass de-emphasises interpretive meaning and is an assault on the body of Christ rather than a mutilation of the symbol of Christ’s love and sacrifice. Thus, it is not conceived of primarily as a representational act but as actual violence. Nevertheless, Summers’ black mass seems like an elaborate form of sexual play more than spiritual warfare; by asking an acquaintance to observe the mass, Summers formulated the ritual as an erotic performance. The black mass was a favourite trope of the English Gothic of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out features an extended presentation of the mass; it was first published in 1934, but had achieved a kind of genre-specific canonicity by the nineteen-sixties, so that many Gothics produced and consumed in the sixties and seventies featured depictions of the black mass that drew from Wheatley’s original. Like Summers, Wheatley’s mass emphasised licentious sexual practice and, significantly, featured a voyeur or voyeurs watching the performance. Where James only wished Summers’ mass would end, Wheatley and his followers presented the mass as requiring interruption before it reaches a climax. This version of the mass recurs in most of Wheatley’s black magic novels, but it also appears in paperback romances, such as Susan Howatch’s 1973 The Devil on Lammas Night; it is reimagined in the literate and genuinely eerie short stories of Robert Aickman, which are just now thankfully coming back into print; it appears twice in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books. Nor was the black mass confined to the written Gothic, appearing in films of the period too; The Kiss of the Vampire (1963), The Witches (1966), Satan’s Skin, aka Blood on Satan’s Claw (1970), The Wicker Man (1973), and The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1974) all feature celebrations of the Sabbat, as, of course do the filmed adaptations of Wheatley’s novels, The Devil Rides Out (1967) and To the Devil a Daughter (1975). More than just a key trope, the black mass was a procedure characteristic of the English Gothic of the sixties; narratives were structured so as to lead towards its performance. All of the texts mentioned above repeat narrative and trope, but more importantly, they loosely repeat experience, both for readers and the characters depicted. While Summers’ black mass apparently made for tiresome viewing, textual representations of the black mass typically embrace the pageant and sensuality of the Catholic mass it perverts, involving music, incense and spectacle. Often animalistic sex, bestiality, infanticide or human sacrifice are staged, and are intended to fascinate rather than bore. Although far from canonical in a literary sense, by 1969 Wheatley was an institution. He had sold 27 million books worldwide and around 70 percent of those had been within the British market. All of his 55 books were in print. A new Wheatley in hardcover would typically sell 30,000 copies, and paperback sales of his back catalogue stood at more than a million books a year. While Wheatley wrote thrillers in a range of different subgenres, at the end of the sixties it was his ‘black magic’ stories that were far and away the most popular. While moderately successful when first published, they developed their most substantial audience in the sixties. When The Satanist was published in paperback in 1966, it sold more than 100,000 copies in the first ten days. By 1973, five of these eight black magic titles had sold more than a million copies. The first of these was The Devil Rides Out which, although originally published in 1934, by 1973, helped by the Hammer film of 1967, had sold more than one and a half million copies, making it the most successful of the group (“Pooter”; Hedman and Alexandersson 20, 73). Wheatley’s black magic stories provide a good example of the way that texts persist and accumulate influence in a genre field, gaining genre-specific canonicity. Wheatley’s apparent influence on Gothic texts and films that followed, coupled with the sheer number of his books sold, indicate that he occupied a central position in the field, and that his approach to the genre became, for a time, a defining one. Wheatley’s black magic stories apparently developed a new readership in the sixties. The black mass perhaps became legible as a salacious, nightmarish version of some imaginary hippy gathering. While Wheatley’s Satanists are villainous, there is a vaguely progressive air about them; they listen to unconventional music, dance in the nude, participate in unconventional sexual practice, and glut themselves on various intoxicants. This, after all, was the age of Hair, Oh! Calcutta! and Oz magazine, “an era of personal liberation, in the view of some critics, one of moral anarchy” (Morgan 149). Without suggesting that the Satanists represent hippies there is a contextual relevancy available to later readers that would have been missing in the thirties. The sexual zeitgeist would have allowed later readers to pornographically and pleasurably imagine the liberated sexuality of the era without having to approve of it. Wheatley’s work has since become deeply, embarrassingly unfashionable. The books are racist, sexist, homophobic and committed to a basically fascistic vision of an imperial England, all of which will repel most casual readers. Nor do his works provide an especially good venue for academic criticism; all surface, they do not reward the labour of careful, deep reading. The Devil Rides Out narrates the story of a group of friends locked in a battle with the wicked Satanist Mocata, “a pot-bellied, bald headed person of about sixty, with large, protuberant, fishy eyes, limp hands, and a most unattractive lisp” (11), based, apparently, on the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley (Ellis 145-6). Mocata hopes to start a conflict on the scale of the Great War by performing the appropriate devilish rituals. Led by the aged yet spry Duke de Richleau and garrulous American Rex van Ryn, the friends combat Mocata in three substantial set pieces, including their attempt to disrupt the black mass as it is performed in a secluded field in Wiltshire. The Devil Rides Out is a ripping story. Wheatley’s narrative is urgent, and his simple prose suggests that the book is meant to be read quickly. Likewise, Wheatley’s protagonists do not experience in any real way the crises and collapses that so frequently trouble characters who struggle against the forces of darkness in Gothic narratives. Even when de Richlieu’s courage fails as he observes the Wiltshire Sabbat, this failure is temporary; Rex simply treats him as if he has been physically wounded, and the Duke soon rallies. The Devil Rides Out is remarkably free of trauma and its sequelæ. The morbid psychological states which often interest the twentieth century Gothic are excluded here in favour of the kind of emotional fortitude found in adventure stories. The effect is remarkable. Wheatley retains a cheerful tone even as he depicts the appalling, and potentially repellent representations become entertainments. Wheatley describes in remarkable detail the actions that his protagonists witness from their hidden vantage point. If the Gothic reader looks forward to gleeful blasphemy, then this is amply provided, in the sort of sardonic style that Lewis’ The Monk manages so well. A cross is half stomped into matchwood and inverted in the ground, the Christian host is profaned in a way too dreadful to be narrated, and the Duke informs us that the satanic priests are eating “a stillborn baby or perhaps some unfortunate child that they have stolen and murdered”. Rex is chilled by the sound of a human skull rattling around in their cauldron (117-20). The mass offers a special quality of experience, distinct from the everyday texture of life represented in the text. Ostensibly waiting for their chance to liberate their friend Simon from the action, the Duke and Rex are voyeurs, and readers participate in this voyeurism too. The narrative focus shifts from Rex and de Richlieu’s observation of the mass, to the wayward medium Tanith’s independent, bespelled arrival at the ritual site, before returning to the two men. This arrangement allows Wheatley to extend his description of the gathering, reiterating the same events from different characters’ perspectives. This would be unusual if the text were simply a thriller, and relied on the ongoing release of new information to maintain narrative interest. Instead, readers have the opportunity to “view” the salacious activity of the Satanists a second time. This repetition delays the climactic action of the scene, where the Duke and Rex rescue Simon by driving a car into the midst of the ritual. Moreover, the repetition suggests that the “thrill” on offer is not necessarily related to plot —it offers us nothing new —but instead to simply seeing the rite performed. Tanith, although conveyed to the mass by some dark power, is delayed and she too becomes a part of the mass’ audience. She saw the Satanists… tumbling upon each other in the disgusting nudity of their ritual dance. Old Madame D’Urfé, huge-buttocked and swollen, prancing by some satanic power with all the vigour of a young girl who had only just reached maturity; the Babu, dark-skinned, fleshy, hideous; the American woman, scraggy, lean-flanked and hag-like with empty, hanging breasts; the Eurasian, waving the severed stump of his arm in the air as he gavotted beside the unwieldy figure of the Irish bard, whose paunch stood out like the grotesque belly of a Chinese god. (132) The reader will remember that Madame D’Urfé is French, and that the cultists are dancing before the Goat of Mendes, who masquerades as Malagasy, earlier described by de Richlieu as “a ‘bad black’ if ever I saw one” (11). The human body is obsessively and grotesquely racialized; Wheatley is simultaneously at his most politically vile and aesthetically Goya-like. The physically grotesque meshes with the crudely sexual and racist. The Irishman is typed as a “bard” and somehow acquires a second racial classification, the Indian is horrible seemingly because of his race, and Madame D’Urfé is repulsive because her sexuality is framed as inappropriate to her age. The dancing crone is defined in terms of a younger, presumably sexually appealing, woman; even as she is denigrated, the reader is presented with a contrary image. As the sexuality of the Satanists is excoriated, titillation is offered. Readers may take whatever pleasure they like from the representations while simultaneously condemning them, or even affecting revulsion. A binary opposition is set up between de Richlieu’s company, who are cultured and moneyed, and the Satanists, who might masquerade as civilised, but reveal their savagery at the Sabbat. Their race becomes a further symptom of their lack of civilised qualities. The Duke complains to Rex that “there is little difference between this modern Satanism and Voodoo… We might almost be witnessing some heathen ceremony in an African jungle!” (115). The Satanists become “a trampling mass of bestial animal figures” dancing to music where, “Instead of melody, it was a harsh, discordant jumble of notes and broken chords which beat into the head with a horrible nerve-racking intensity and set the teeth continually on edge” (121). Music and melody are cultural constructions as much as they are mathematical ones. The breakdown of music suggests a breakdown of culture, more specifically, of Western cultural norms. The Satanists feast, with no “knives, forks, spoons or glasses”, but instead drink straight from bottles and eat using their hands (118). This is hardly transgression on the scale of devouring an infant, but emphasises that Satanism is understood to represent the antithesis of civilization, specifically, of a conservative Englishness. Bad table manners are always a sign of wickedness. This sort of reading is useful in that it describes the prejudices and politics of the text. It allows us to see the black mass as meaningful and places it within a wider discursive tradition making sense of a grotesque dance that combines a variety of almost arbitrary transgressive actions, staged in a Wiltshire field. This style of reading seems to confirm the approach to genre text that Fredric Jameson has espoused (117-9), which understands the text as reinforcing a hegemonic worldview within its readership. This is the kind of reading the academy often works to produce; it recognises the mass as standing for something more than the simple fact of its performance, and develops a coherent account of what the mass represents. The labour of reading discerns the work the text does out in the world. Yet despite the good sense and political necessity of this approach, my suggestion is that these observations are secondary to the primary function of the text because they cannot account for the reading experience offered by the Sabbat and the rest of the text. Regardless of text’s prejudices, The Devil Rides Out is not a book about race. It is a book about Satanists. As Jo Walton has observed, competent genre readers effortlessly grasp this kind of distinction, prioritising certain readings and elements of the text over others (33-5). Failing to account for the reading strategy presumed by author and audience risks overemphasising what is less significant in a text while missing more important elements. Crucially, a reading that emphasises the political implications of the Sabbat attributes meaning to the ritual; yet the ritual’s ability to hold meaning is not what is most important about it. By attributing meaning to the Sabbat, we miss the fact of the Sabbat itself; it has become a metaphor rather than a thing unto itself, a demonstration of racist politics rather than one of the central necessities of a black magic story. Seligman, Weller, Puett and Simon claim that ritual is usually read as having a social purpose or a cultural meaning, but that these readings presume that ritual is interested in presenting the world truthfully, as it is. Seligman and his co-authors take exception to this, arguing that ritual does not represent society or culture as they are and that ritual is “a subjunctive—the creation of an order as if it were truly the case” (20). Rather than simply reflecting history, society and culture, ritual responds to the disappointment of the real; the farmer performs a rite to “ensure” the bounty of the harvest not because the rite symbolises the true order of things, but as a consolation because sometimes the harvest fails. Interestingly, the Duke’s analysis of the Satanists’ motivations closely accords with Seligman et al.’s understanding of the need for ritual to console our anxieties and disappointments. For the cultists, the mass is “a release of all their pent-up emotions, and suppressed complexes, engendered by brooding over imagined injustice, lust for power, bitter hatred of rivals in love or some other type of success or good fortune” (121). The Satanists perform the mass as a response to the disappointment of the participant’s lives; they are ugly, uncivil outsiders and according to the Duke, “probably epileptics… nearly all… abnormal” (121). The mass allows them to feel, at least for a limited time, as if they are genuinely powerful, people who ought to be feared rather than despised, able to command the interest and favour of their infernal lord, to receive sexual attention despite their uncomeliness. Seligman et al. go on to argue ritual “must be understood as inherently nondiscursive—semantic content is far secondary to subjunctive creation.” Ritual “cannot be analysed as a coherent system of beliefs” (26). If this is so, we cannot expect the black mass to necessarily say anything coherent about Satanism, let alone racism. In fact, The Devil Rides Out tends not to focus on the meaning of the black mass, but on its performance. The perceivable facts of the mass are given, often in instructional detail, but any sense of what they might stand for remains unexplicated in the text. Indeed, taken individually, it is hard to make sense or meaning out of each of the Sabbat’s components. Why must a skull rattle around a cauldron? Why must a child be killed and eaten? If communion forms the most significant part of the Christian mass, we could presume that the desecration of the host might be the most meaningful part of the rite, but given the extensive description accorded the mass as a whole, the parody of communion is dealt with surprisingly quickly, receiving only three sentences. The Duke describes the act as “the most appalling sacrilege”, but it is left at that as the celebrants stomp the host into the ground (120). The action itself is emphasised over anything it might mean. Most of Wheatley’s readers will, I think, be untroubled by this. As Pierre Bourdieu noted, “the regularities inherent in an arbitrary condition… tend to appear as necessary, even natural, since they are the basis of the schemes of perception and appreciation through which they are apprehended” (53-4). Rather than stretching towards an interpretation of the Sabbat, readers simply accept it a necessary condition of a “black magic story”. While the genre and its tropes are constructed, they tend to appear as “natural” to readers. The Satanists perform the black mass because that is what Satanists do. The representation does not even have to be compelling in literary terms; it simply has to be a “proper” black mass. Richard Schechner argues that, when we are concerned with ritual, “Propriety”, that is, seeing the ritual properly executed, “is more important than artistry in the Euro-American sense” (178). Rather than describing the meaning of the ritual, Wheatley prefers to linger over the Satanist’s actions, their gluttonous feasting and dancing, their nudity. Again, these are actions that hold sensual qualities for their performers that exceed the simply discursive. Through their ritual behaviour they enter into atavistic and ecstatic states beyond everyday human consciousness. They are “hardly human… Their brains are diseased and their mentality is that of the hags and the warlocks of the middle ages…” and are “governed apparently by a desire to throw themselves back into a state of bestiality…” (117-8). They finally reach a state of “maniacal exaltation” and participate in an “intoxicated nightmare” (135). While the mass is being celebrated, the Satanists become an undifferentiated mass, their everyday identities and individuality subsumed into the subjunctive world created by the ritual. Simon, a willing participant, becomes lost amongst them, his individual identity given over to the collective, subjunctive state created by the group. Rex and the Duke are outside of this subjunctive world, expressing revulsion, but voyeuristically looking on; they retain their individual identities. Tanith is caught between the role played by Simon, and the one played by the Duke and Rex, as she risks shifting from observer to participant, her journey to the Sabbat being driven on by “evil powers” (135). These three relationships to the Sabbat suggest some of the strategies available to its readers. Like Rex and the Duke, we seem to observe the black mass as voyeurs, and still have the option of disapproving of it, but like Simon, the act of continuing to read means that we are participating in the representation of this perversity. Having committed to reading a “black magic story”, the reader’s procession towards the black mass is inevitable, as with Tanith’s procession towards it. Yet, just as Tanith is compelled towards it, readers are allowed to experience the Sabbat without necessarily having to see themselves as wanting to experience it. This facilitates a ludic, undiscursive reading experience; readers are not encouraged to seriously reflect on what the Sabbat means or why it might be a source of vicarious pleasure. They do not have to take responsibility for it. As much as the Satanists create a subjunctive world for their own ends, readers are creating a similar world for themselves to participate in. The mass—an incoherent jumble of sex and violence—becomes an imaginative refuge from the everyday world which is too regulated, chaste and well-behaved. Despite having substantial precedent in folklore and Gothic literature (see Medway), the black mass as it is represented in The Devil Rides Out is largely an invention. The rituals performed by occultists like Crowley were never understood by their participants as being black masses, and it was not until the foundation of the Church of Satan in San Francisco in the later nineteen-sixties that it seems the black mass was performed with the regularity or uniformity characteristic of ritual. Instead, its celebration was limited to eccentrics and dabblers like Summers. Thus, as an imaginary ritual, the black mass can be whatever its writers and readers need it to be, providing the opportunity to stage those actions and experiences required by the kind of text in which it appears. Because it is the product of the requirements of the text, it becomes a venue in which those things crucial to the text are staged; forbidden sexual congress, macabre ceremony, violence, the appearance of intoxicating and noisome scents, weird violet lights, blue candle flames and the goat itself. As we observe the Sabbat, the subjunctive of the ritual aligns with the subjunctive of the text itself; the same ‘as if’ is experienced by both the represented worshippers and the readers. The black mass offers an analogue for the black magic story, providing, almost in digest form, the images and experiences associated with the genre at the time. Seligman et al. distinguish between modes that they term the sincere and the ritualistic. Sincerity describes an approach to reading the world that emphasises the individual subject, authenticity, and the need to get at “real” thought and feeling. Ritual, on the other hand, prefers community, convention and performance. The “sincere mode of behavior seeks to replace the ‘mere convention’ of ritual with a genuine and thoughtful state of internal conviction” (103). Where the sincere is meaningful, the ritualistic is practically oriented. In The Devil Rides Out, the black mass, a largely unreal practice, must be regarded as insincere. More important than any “meaning” we might extract from the rite is the simple fact of participation. The individuality and agency of the participants is apparently diminished in the mass, and their regular sense of themselves is recovered only as the Duke and Rex desperately drive the Duke’s Hispano into the ritual so as to halt it. The car’s lights dispel the subjunctive darkness and reduce the unified group to a gathering of confused individuals, breaking the spell of naughtily enabling darkness. Just as the meaningful aspect of the mass is de-emphasised for ritual participants, for readers, self and discursive ability are de-emphasised in favour of an immersive, involving reading experience; we keep reading the mass without pausing to really consider the mass itself. It would reduce our pleasure in and engagement with the text to do so; the mass would be revealed as obnoxious, unpleasant and nonsensical. When we read the black mass we tend to put our day-to-day values, both moral and aesthetic, to one side, bracketing our sincere individuality in favour of participation in the text. If there is little point in trying to interpret Wheatley’s black mass due to its weakly discursive nature, then this raises questions of how to approach the text. Simply, the “work” of interpretation seems unnecessary; Wheatley’s black mass asks to be regarded as a form of play. Simply, The Devil Rides Out is a venue for a particular kind of readerly play, apart from the more substantial, sincere concerns that occupy most literary criticism. As Huizinga argued that, “Play is distinct from ‘ordinary’ life both as to locality and duration… [A significant] characteristic of play [is] its secludedness, its limitedness” (9). Likewise, by seeing the mass as a kind of play, we can understand why, despite the provocative and transgressive acts it represents, it is not especially harrowing as a reading experience. Play “lies outside the antithesis of wisdom and folly, and equally outside those of truth and falsehood, good and evil…. The valuations of vice and virtue do not apply...” (Huizinga 6). The mass might well offer barbarism and infanticide, but it does not offer these to its readers “seriously”. The subjunctive created by the black mass for its participants on the page is approximately equivalent to the subjunctive Wheatley’s text proposes to his readers. The Sabbat offers a tawdry, intoxicated vision, full of strange performances, weird lights, queer music and druggy incenses, a darkened carnival apart from the real that is, despite its apparent transgressive qualities and wretchedness, “only playing”. References Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Ellis, Bill. Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media. Lexington: The UP of Kentucky, 2000. Hedman, Iwan, and Jan Alexandersson. Four Decades with Dennis Wheatley. DAST Dossier 1. Köping 1973. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1986. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Routledge, 1989. Huizinga, J. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. International Library of Sociology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949. Medway, Gareth J. The Lure of the Sinister: The Unnatural History of Satanism. New York: New York UP, 2001. “Pooter.” The Times 19 August 1969: 19. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. London: Longman, 1980. Schechner, Richard. Performance Theory. Revised and Expanded ed. New York: Routledge, 1988. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. 1980. New York: Methuen, 1986. Seligman, Adam B, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett and Bennett Simon. Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Thompson, G.R. Introduction. “Romanticism and the Gothic Imagination.” The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism. Ed. G.R. Thompson. Pullman: Washington State UP, 1974. 1-10. Wheatley, Dennis. The Devil Rides Out. 1934. London: Mandarin, 1996.

Did you see the videos where the cat jumps in the box, attacks the printer or tries to leap from the snowy car? As the availability and popularity of watching videos on the Internet has risen rapidly in the last decade, so has the prevalence of cat videos. Although the cuteness of YouTube videos of cats might make them appear frivolous, in fact there is a significant irony at their heart: online cat videos enable corporate surveillance of viewers, yet viewers seem just as oblivious to this as the cats featured in the videos. Towards this end, I consider the distinguishing features of contemporary cat videos, focusing particularly on their narrative structure and mode of observation. I compare cat videos with the “Aesthetic of Astonishment” of early cinema and with dog videos, to explore the nexus of a spectatorship of thrills and feline performance. In particular, I highlight a unique characteristic of these videos: the cats’ unselfconsciousness. This, I argue, is rare in a consumer culture dominated by surveillance, where we are constantly aware of the potential for being watched. The unselfconsciousness of cats in online videos offers viewers two key pleasures: to imagine the possibility of freedom from surveillance, and to experience the power of administering surveillance as unproblematic. Ultimately, however, cat videos enable viewers to facilitate our own surveillance, and we do so with the gleeful abandon of a kitten jumping in a tissue box What Distinguishes Cat Videos? Cat videos have become so popular, that they generate millions of views on YouTube, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis now holds an annual Internet Cat Video Festival. If you are not already a fan of the genre, the Walker’s promotional videos for the festival (2013 and 2012) provide an entertaining introduction to the celebrities (Lil Bub, Grumpy Cat, and Henri), canon (dancing cats, surprised cat, and cat falling off counter), culture and commodities of online cat videos, despite repositioning them into a public exhibition context. Cats are often said to dominate the internet (Hepola), despite the surprise of Internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee. Domestic cats are currently the most popular pet in the world (Driscoll), however they are already outnumbered by smartphones. Cats have played various roles in our societies, cultures and imaginations since their domestication some 8-10,000 years ago (Driscoll). A potent social and cultural symbol in mythology, art and popular culture, the historical and cultural significance of cats is complex, shifting and often contradictory. They have made their way across geographic, cultural and class boundaries, and been associated with the sacred and the occult, femininity and fertility, monstrosity and domesticity (Driscoll, Rogers). Cats are figured as both inscrutable and bounteously polysemic. Current representations of cats, including these videos, seem to emphasise their sociability with humans, association with domestic space, independence and aloofness, and intelligence and secretiveness. I am interested in what distinguishes the pleasures of cat videos from other manifestations of cats in folklore and popular culture such as maneki-neko and fictional cats. Even within Internet culture, I’m focusing on live action cat videos, rather than lolcats, animated cats, or dog videos, though these are useful points of contrast. The Walker’s cat video primer also introduces us to the popular discourses accounting for the widespread appeal of these videos: cats have global reach beyond language, audiences can project their own thoughts and feelings onto cats, cats are cute, and they make people feel good. These discourses circulate in popular conversation, and are promoted by YouTube itself. These suggestions do not seem to account for the specific pleasures of cat videos, beyond the predominance of cats in culture more broadly. The cat videos popular on the Internet tend to feature several key characteristics. They are generated by users, shot on a mobile device such as a phone, and set in a domestic environment. They employ an observational mode, which Bill Nichols has described as a noninterventionist type of documentary film associated with traditions of direct cinema and cinema verite, where form and style yields to the profilmic event. In the spirit of their observational mode, cat videos feature minimal sound and language, negligible editing and short duration. As Leah Shafer notes, cat videos record, “’live’ events, they are mostly shot by ‘amateurs’ with access to emerging technologies, and they dramatize the familiar.” For example, the one-minute video Cat vs Printer comprises a single, hand-held shot observing the cat, and the action is underlined by the printer’s beep and the sounds created by the cat’s movements. The patterned wallpaper suggests a domestic location, and the presence of the cat itself symbolises domesticity. These features typically combine to produce impressions of universality, intimacy and spontaneity – impressions commonly labelled ‘cute’. The cat’s cuteness is also embodied in its confusion and surprise at the printer’s movements: it is a simpleton, and we can laugh at its lack of understanding of the basic appurtenances of the modern world. Cat videos present minimalist narratives, focused on an instant of spectacle. A typical cat video establishes a state of calm, then suddenly disrupts it. The cat is usually the active agent of change, though chance also frequently plays a significant role. The pervasiveness of this structure means that viewers familiar with the form may even anticipate a serendipitous event. The disruption prompts a surprising or comic effect for the viewer, and this is a key part of the video’s pleasure. For example, in Cat vs Printer, the establishing scenario is the cat intently watching the printer, a presumably quotidian scene, which escalates when the cat begins to smack the moving paper. The narrative climaxes in the final two seconds of the video, when the cat strikes the paper so hard that the printer tray bounces, and the surprised cat falls off its stool. The video ends abruptly. This disruption also takes the viewer by surprise (at least it does the first time you watch it). The terse ending, and lack of resolution or denouement, encourages the viewer to replay the video. The minimal narrative effectively builds expectation for a moment of surprise. These characteristics of style and form typify a popular body of work, though there is variation, and the millions of cat videos on YouTube might be best accounted for by various subgenres. The most popular cat videos seem to have the most sudden and striking disruptions as well as the most abrupt endings. They seem the most dramatic and spontaneous. There are also thousands of cat videos with minor disruptions, and some with brazenly staged events. Increasingly, there is obvious use of postproduction techniques, including editing and music. A growing preponderance of compilations attests to the videos’ “spreadability” (Jenkins, Ford, and Green). The conventional formal structure of these videos effectively homogenises the cat, as if there is a single cat performing in millions of videos. Indeed, YouTube comments often suggest a likeness between the cat represented in the video and the commenter’s own cat. In this sense, the cuteness so readily identified has an homogenising effect. It also has the effect of distinguishing cats as a species from other animals, as it confounds common conceptions of all (other) animals as fundamentally alike in their essential difference from the human (animal). Cat videos are often appreciated for what they reveal about cats in general, rather than for each cat’s individuality. In this way, cat videos symbolise a generic feline cuteness, rather than identify a particular cat as cute. The cats of YouTube act “as an allegory for all the cats of the earth, the felines that traverse myths and religions, literature and fables” (Derrida 374). Each cat swiping objects off shelves, stealing the bed of a dog, leaping onto a kitchen bench is the paradigmatic cat, the species exemplar. Mode of Spectatorship, Mode of Performance: Cat Videos, Film History and Dog Videos Cat videos share some common features with early cinema. In his analysis of the “Aesthetic of Astonishment,” which dominated films until about 1904, film historian Tom Gunning argues that the short, single shot films of this era are characterised by exciting audience curiosity and fulfilling it with visual shocks and thrills. It is easy to see how this might describe the experience of watching Cat vs Printer or Thomas Edison’s Electrocution of an Elephant from 1903. The thrill of revelation at the end of Cat vs Printer is more significant than the minimal narrative it completes, and the most popular videos seem to heighten this shock. Further, like a rainy afternoon spent clicking the play button on a sequence of YouTube’s suggested videos, these early short films were also viewed in variety format as a series of attractions. Indeed, as Leah Shafer notes, some of these early films even featured cats, such as Professor Welton’s Boxing Cats from 1894. Each film offered a moment of spectacle, which thrilled the modern viewer. Gunning argues that these early films are distinguished by a particular relationship between spectator and film. They display blatant exhibitionism, and address their viewer directly. This highlights the thrill of disruption: “The directness of this act of display allows an emphasis on the thrill itself – the immediate reaction of the viewer” (Gunning “Astonishment” 122). This is produced both within the staging of the film itself as players look directly at the camera, and by the mode of exhibition, where a showman primes the audience verbally for a moment of revelation. Importantly, Gunning argues that this mode of spectatorship differs from how viewers watch narrative films, which later came to dominate our film and television screens: “These early films explicitly acknowledge their spectator, seeming to reach outwards and confront. Contemplative absorption is impossible here” (“Astonishment” 123). Gunning’s emphasis on a particular mode of spectatorship is significant for our understanding of pet videos. His description of early cinema has numerous similarities with cat videos, to be sure, but seems to describe more precisely the mode of spectatorship engendered by typical dog videos. Dog videos are also popular online, and are marked by a mode of performance, where the dogs seem to present self-consciously for the camera. Dogs often appear to look at the camera directly, although they are probably actually reading the eyes of the camera operator. One of the most popular dog videos, Ultimate dog tease, features a dog who appears to look into the camera and engage in conversation with the camera operator. It has the same domestic setting, mobile camera and short duration as the typical cat video, but, unlike the cat attacking the printer, this dog is clearly aware of being watched. Like the exhibitionistic “Cinema of Attractions,” it is marked by “the recurring look at the camera by [canine] actors. This action which is later perceived as spoiling the realistic illusion of the cinema, is here undertaken with brio, establishing contact with the audience” (Gunning “Attractions” 64). Dog videos frequently feature dogs performing on command, such as the countless iterations of dogs fetching beverages from refrigerators, or at least behaving predictably, such as dogs jumping in the bath. Indeed, the scenario often seems to be set up, whereas cat videos more often seem to be captured fortuitously. The humour of dog videos often comes from the very predictability of their behaviour, such as repeatedly fetching or rolling in mud. In an ultimate performance of self-consciousness, dogs even seem to act out guilt and shame for their observers. Similarly, baby videos are also popular online and were popular in early cinema, and babies also tend to look at the camera directly, showing that they are aware of bring watched. This emphasis on exhibitionism and modes of spectatorship helps us hone in on the uniqueness of cat videos. Unlike the dogs of YouTube, cats typically seem unaware of their observers; they refuse to look at the camera and “display their visibility” (Gunning “Attractions,” 64). This fits with popular discourses of cats as independent and aloof, untrainable and untameable. Cat videos employ a unique mode of observation: we observe the cat, who is unencumbered by our scrutiny. Feline Performance in a World of Pervasive Surveillance This is an aesthetic of surveillance without inhibition, which heightens the impressions of immediacy and authenticity. The very existence of so many cat videos online is a consequence of camera ubiquity, where video cameras have become integrated with common communications devices. Thousands of cameras are constantly ready to capture these quotidian scenes, and feed the massive economy of user-generated content. Cat videos are obviously created and distributed by humans, a purposeful labour to produce entertainment for viewers. Cat videos are never simply a feline performance, but a performance of human interaction with the cat. The human act of observation is an active engagement with the other. Further, the act of recording is a performance of wielding the camera, and often also through image or voice. The cat video is a companion performance, which is part of an ongoing relationship between that human and that other animal. It carries strong associations with regimes of epistemological power and physical domination through histories of visual study, mastery and colonisation. The activity of the human creator seems to contrast with the behaviour of the cat in these videos, who appears unaware of being watched. The cats’ apparent uninhibited behaviour gives the viewer the illusion of voyeuristically catching a glimpse of a self-sufficient world. It carries connotations of authenticity, as the appearance of interaction and intervention is minimised, like the ideal of ‘fly on the wall’ documentary (Nichols). This lack of self-consciousness and sense of authenticity are key to their reception as ‘cute’ videos. Interestingly, one of the reasons that audiences may find this mode of observation so accessible and engaging, is because it heeds the conventions of the fourth wall in the dominant style of fiction film and television, which presents an hermetically sealed diegesis. This unselfconscious performance of cats in online videos is key, because it embodies a complex relationship with the surveillance that dominates contemporary culture. David Lyon describes surveillance as “any focused attention to personal details for the purposes of influence, management, or control” (“Everyday” 1) and Mark Andrejevic defines monitoring as “the collection of information, with or without the knowledge of users, that has actual or speculative economic value” (“Enclosure” 297). We live in an environment where social control is based on information, collected and crunched by governments, corporations, our peers, and ourselves. The rampancy of surveillance has increased in recent decades in a number of ways. Firstly, technological advances have made the recording, sorting and analysis of data more readily available. Although we might be particularly aware of the gaze of the camera when we stand in line at the supermarket checkout or have an iPhone pointed at our face, many surveillance technologies are hidden points of data collection, which track our grocery purchases, text messages to family and online viewing. Surveillance is increasingly mediated through digital technologies. Secondly, surveillance data is becoming increasingly privatised and monetised, so there is strengthening market demand for consumer information. Finally, surveillance was once associated chiefly with institutions of the state, or with corporations, but the process is increasingly “lateral,” involving peer-to-peer surveillance and self-surveillance in the realms of leisure and domestic life (Andrejevic “Enclosure,” 301). Cat videos occupy a fascinating position within this context of pervasive surveillance, and offer complex thrills for audiences. The Unselfconscious Pleasures of Cat Videos Unselfconsciousness of feline performance in cat videos invites contradictory pleasures. Firstly, cat videos offer viewers the fantasy of escaping surveillance. The disciplinary effect of surveillance means that we modify our behaviour based on a presumption of constant observation; we are managed and manipulated as much by ourselves as we are by others. This discipline is the defining condition of industrial society, as described by Foucault. In an age of traffic cameras, Big Brother, CCTV, the selfie pout, and Google Glass, modern subjects are oppressed by the weight of observation to constantly manage their personal performance. Unselfconsciousness is associated with privacy, intimacy, naivety and, increasingly, with impossibility. By allowing us to project onto the experience of their protagonists, cat videos invite us to imagine a world where we are not constantly aware of being watched, of being under surveillance by both human beings and technology. This projection is enabled by discourse, which constructs cats as independent and aloof, a libertarian ideal. It provides the potential for liberation from technologized social surveillance, and from the concomitant self-discipline of our docile bodies. The uninhibited performance of cats in online videos offers viewers the prospect that it is possible to live without the gaze of surveillance. Through cat videos, we celebrate the untameable. Cats model a liberated uninhibitedness viewers can only desire. The apparent unselfconsciousness of feline performance is analogous to Derrida’s conception of animal nakedness: the nudity of animals is significant, because it is a key feature which distinguishes them from humans, but at the same time there is no sense of the concept of nakedness outside of human culture. Similarly, a performance uninhibited by observation seems beyond humans in contemporary culture, and implies a freedom from social expectations, but there is also little suggestion that cats would act differently if they knew they were observed. We interpret cats’ independence as natural, and take pleasure in cats’ naturalness. This lack of inhibition is cute in the sense that it is attractive to the viewer, but also in the sense that it is naïve to imagine a world beyond surveillance, a freedom from being watched. Secondly, we take pleasure in the power of observing another. Surveillance is based on asymmetrical regimes of power, and the position of observer, recorder, collator is usually more powerful than the subject of their gaze. We enjoy the pleasure of wielding the unequal gaze, whether we hit the “record” button ourselves or just the “play” button. In this way, we celebrate our capacity to contain the cat, who has historically proven conceptually uncontainable. Yet, the cats’ unselfconsciousness means we can absolve ourselves of their exploitation. Looking back at the observer, or the camera, is often interpreted as a confrontational move. Cats in videos do not confront their viewer, do not resist the gaze thrown on them. They accept the role of subject without protest; they perform cuteness without resistance. We internalise the strategies of surveillance so deeply that we emulate its practices in our intimate relationships with domestic animals. Cats do not glare back at us, accusingly, as dogs do, to remind us we are exerting power over them. The lack of inhibition of cats in online videos means that we can exercise the power of surveillance without confronting the oppression this implies. Cat videos offer the illusion of watching the other without disturbing it, brandishing the weapon without acknowledging the violence of its impact. There is a logical tension between these dual pleasures of cat videos: we want to escape surveillance, while exerting it. The Work of Cat Videos in ‘Liquid Surveillance’ These contradictory pleasures in fact speak to the complicated nature of surveillance in the era of “produsage,” when the value chain of media has transformed along with traditional roles of production and consumption (Bruns). Christian Fuchs argues that the contemporary media environment has complicated the dynamics of surveillance, and blurred the lines between subject and object (304). We both create and consume cat videos; we are commodified as audience and sold on as data. YouTube is the most popular site for sharing cat videos, and a subsidiary of Google, the world’s most visited website and a company which makes billions of dollars from gathering, collating, storing, assessing, and trading our data. While we watch cat videos on YouTube, they are also harvesting information about our every click, collating it with our other online behaviour, targeting ads at us based on our specific profile, and also selling this data on to others. YouTube is, in fact, a key tool of what David Lyon calls “liquid surveillance” after the work of Zygmunt Bauman, because it participates in the reduction of millions of bodies into data circulating at the service of consumer society (Lyon “Liquid”). Your views of cats purring and pouncing are counted and monetised, you are profiled and targeted for further consumption. YouTube did not create the imbalance of power implied by these mechanisms of surveillance, but it is instrumental in automating, amplifying, and extending this power (Andrejevic “Lateral,” 396). Zygmunt Bauman argues that in consumer society we are increasingly seduced to willingly subject ourselves to surveillance (Lyon “Liquid”), and who better than the cute kitty to seduce us? Our increasingly active role in “produsage” media platforms such as YouTube enables us to perform what Andrejevic calls “the work of being watched” (“Work”). When we upload, play, view, like and comment on cat videos, we facilitate our own surveillance. We watch cat videos for the contradictory pleasures they offer us, as we navigate and negotiate the overwhelming surveillance of consumer society. Cat videos remind us of the perpetual possibility of observation, and suggest the prospect of escaping it. ReferencesAndrejevic, Mark. “The Work of Being Watched: Interactive Media and the Exploitation of Self-Disclosure.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19.2 (2002): 230-248. Andrejevic, Mark. “The Discipline of Watching: Detection, Risk, and Lateral Surveillance.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 23.5 (2006): 391-407. Andrejevic, Mark. “Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure.” The Communication Review 10.4 (2007): 295-317. Berners-Lee, Tim. “Ask Me Anything.” Reddit, 12 March 2014. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2091d4/i_am_tim_bernerslee_i_invented_the_www_25_years/cg0wpma›. Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Project MUSE, 4 Mar. 2014. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://muse.jhu.edu/›. Driscoll, Carlos A., et al. "The Taming of the Cat." Scientific American 300.6 (2009): 68-75. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House, 1995. Fuchs, Christian. “Web 2.0, Prosumption, and Surveillance.” Surveillance & Society 8.3 (2011): 288-309. Gunning, Tom. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the Incredulous Spectator.” Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film. Ed. Linda Williams. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1995. 114-133. Gunning, Tom. "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde." Wide Angle 8.3-4 (1986): 63-70. Hepola, Sarah. “The Internet Is Made of Kittens.” Salon, 11 Feb 2009. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.salon.com/2009/02/10/cat_internet/›. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Network Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2013. Lyon, David. “Liquid Surveillance: The Contribution of Zygmunt Bauman to Surveillance Studies.” International Political Sociology 4 (2010): 325–338 Lyon, David. “Surveillance, Power and Everyday Life.” In Robin Mansell et al., eds., Oxford Handbook of Information and Communication Technologies. Oxford: Oxford Handbooks, 2007. 449-472. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.sscqueens.org/sites/default/files/oxford_handbook.pdf›. Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Rogers, Katharine. The Cat and the Human Imagination: Feline Images from Bast to Garfield. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Shafer, Leah. “I Can Haz an Internet Aesthetic?!? LOLCats and the Digital Marketplace.” Paper presented at the Northeast Popular/American Culture Association Conference, St. John Fisher College, Rochester, New York, 2012. 5 Mar. 2014 ‹http://fisherpub.sjfc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1094&context=nepca›.

Introduction Many examinations of magic and witchcraft in film and television focus on the gender dynamics depicted and what these can reveal about attitudes to women and power in the eras in which they were made. For example, Campbell, in Cheerfully Empowered: The Witch-Wife in Twentieth Century Literature, Television and Film draws from scholarship such as Greene's Bell, Book and Camera, Gibson's Witchcraft Myths in American Culture, and Murphy's The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture to suggest connections between witch-wife narratives and societal responses to feminism. Campbell explores both the allure and fear of powerful women, who are often tamed (or partially tamed) by marriage in these stories. These perspectives provide important insights into cultural imaginings of witches, and this paper aims to use anthropological perspectives to further analyse rituals, spells, and cosmologies of screen stories of magic and witchcraft, asking how these narratives have engaged with witchcraft trials, symbols of women as witches, and rituals and myths invoking goddesses. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a television series that ran for seven seasons (1997-2003), focusses on a young woman, The Slayer, who vanquishes vampires. As Abbott (1) explains, the vampires in seasons one and two are ruled by a particularly old and powerful vampire, The Master, and use prophetic language and ancient rituals. When Buffy kills The Master, the vampiric threat evolves with the character of Spike, a much younger vampire who kills The Master's successor, The Anointed One, calling for “a little less ritual and a little more fun” ('School Hard'). This scene is important to Abbott's thesis that what makes Buffy the Vampire Slayer such an effective television program is that the evil that she battles is not a product of an ancient world but the product of the real world itself. Buffy has used the past four years to painstakingly dismantle and rebuild the conventions of the vampire genre and work toward gradually disembedding the vampire/slayer dichotomy from religious ritual and superstition … what we describe as ‘evil’ is a natural product of the modern world. (Abbott 5) While distinguishing the series from earlier books and films is important, I suggest that, nonetheless, ritual and magic remain central to numerous plots in the series. Moreover, Child argues that Buffy the Vampire Slayer disrupts the male gaze of classical Hollywood films as theorised by Mulvey, not only by making the central action hero a young woman, but by offering rich, complex, and developmental narrative arcs for other characters such as Willow: a quiet fellow student at Buffy's school who initially uses her research skills with books, computers, and science to help the group. Willow’s access to knowledge about magic through Buffy's Watcher, Giles, and his library, together with her growing experience fighting with demons, leads her to teach herself witchcraft, and she and her growing magical powers, including the ability to conjure Greek goddesses such as Hecate and Diana, become central to multiple storylines in the series (Krzywinska). Corcoran, who explores teen witches in American popular culture in some depth, reflects on Willow's changes and developments in the context of problematic 'post-feminist' films of 1990s. Corcoran suggests these films offer viewers tropes of empowerment in the form of the 'makeover' of witch characters, who transform, but often in individualised ways that elude more fundamental questions of societal structures of race, class, and gender. Offering one of the most fluid and hybrid examples, Willow not only embraces magic as a conduit for power and self-expression but, as the seasons progress, she occupies a host of identificatory categories. Moving from shy high school 'geek' to trainee witch, from empowered sorceress to dark avenger, Willow regularly makes herself over in accordance with her fluctuating selfhood (Corcoran). Corcoran also notes how Willow's character brings together skills in both science and witchcraft in ways that echo world views of early modern Europe. This connects her apparently distinct selves and, I suggest, also demonstrates how the show engages with magic as real within its internal cosmology. Fairy Tale Witches This liberating, fluid, and transformative depiction of witches is not, however, the only one. Early in season one, the show reflects tropes of witchcraft found in fairy tale and fantasy films such as Snow White and The Wizard of Oz. Both films are deeply ambivalent in their portraits of fascinating powerful witches, who are, however, also defined by being old, ugly, and/or deeply jealous of and threatening towards younger women (Zipes). The episode “Witch” reproduces these patriarchal rivalries, as the witch of the episode title is the mother of a classmate of Buffy, called Amy, who has used magic to swap bodies with her daughter in an attempt to recapture her lost glory as a famous cheerleader. There are debates around the symbolism of witches and crones, especially those in fairytales, and whether they can be re-purposed. For example, Rountree in 'The New Witch of the West' and Embracing the Witch and the Goddess has conducted interviews and participant observation with feminist witches in New Zealand who use both goddess and witch symbols in their ritual practice and feminist understandings of themselves and society. By embracing both the witch and the goddess, feminist witches disrupt what they regard as false divisions and dichotomies between these symbols and the pressures of the divided self that they argue have been imposed upon women by patriarchy. In these conceptions, the crone is not only a negative symbol, but can be re-evaluated as one of three aspects of the goddess (maiden, mother, and crone), depicting the cycles of all life and also enabling women to embrace the darker aspects of their own natures and emotions (Greenwood; Rountree 'New Witch'; Walker). Witch Trials That said, Germaine, examining witches in folk horror films such as The Witch and The Wicker Man, advises caution about witch images. Drawing from Hutton's The Witch, she explores grotesque images of the witch from the early modern witch trials, arguing that horror cinema can subvert older ideas about witches, but it also reveals their continued power. Indeed, horror cinema has forged the witch into a deeply ambiguous figure that proves problematic for feminism and its project to subvert or otherwise destabilize misogynist symbols. (Germaine 22) Purkiss's examination of early modern witchcraft trials in The Witch in History also questions many assumptions about the period. Contrary to Rountree's 'The New Witch of the West' (222), Purkiss argues that there is no evidence to suggest that healing and midwifery were central concerns of witch hunters, nor were those accused of witchcraft in this period regarded as particularly sexually liberated or lesbian. Moreover, the famous Malleus Maleficarum, a text that is “still the main source for the view that witch-hunting was woman-hunting” was, in fact, disdained by many early modern authorities (Purkiss 7-8). Rather, rivalries and social tensions in communities combined with broader societal politics to generate accusations: a picture that is more in line with Stewart and Strathern's cross-cultural study, Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors and Gossip, of the relationship between witchcraft and gossip. In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Gingerbread”, Amy has matured and has begun to engage with magic herself, as has Willow. The witch trial of the episode is not, however, triggered by this, but is rather initiated by Buffy and her mother finding the bodies of two dead children. Buffy's mother Joyce quickly escalates from understandable concern to a full-on assault on magical practice and knowledge as she founds MOO (Mothers Opposed to the Occult), who raid school lockers, confiscate books from the school library, and eventually try to burn them and Buffy, Willow, and Amy. The episode evokes fairy tales because the 'big bad' is a monster who disguises itself as Hansel and Gretel. As Giles explains, fairy tales can sometimes be real, and in this case, the monster feeds a community its worst fears and thrives off the hatred and chaos that ensues. However, his references to European Wicca covens are somewhat misleading. Hutton, in The Triumph of the Moon, explains that Wicca was founded in the 1950s in England by Gerald Gardner, and claims it to be a continuation of older pagan witch traditions that have largely been discredited. The episode therefore tries to combine a comment on the irrationality and dangers of witch hunts while also suggesting that (within the cosmology of the show) magic is real. Buffy's confrontation with her mother illustrates this. Furious about the confiscation of the library's occult collection, Buffy argues that without the knowledge they contain, young people are not more protected, but rather rendered defenceless, arguing that “maybe next time the world gets sucked into hell, I won't be able to stop it because the anti-hell-sucking book isn't on the approved reading list!” Thus, she simultaneously makes a general point about knowledge as a defence against the evils of the world, while also emphasising how magic is not merely symbolic for her and her friends, but a real, practical, problem and a combatant tool. Spells Spells take considerable skill and practice to master as they are linked to strong emotions but also need mental focus and clarity. Willow's learning curve as a witch is an important illustrator of this principle, as her spells do not always do what she had intended, or rather, she is not always wise to her own intentions. These ideas are also found in anthropological examples (Greenwood). Malinowski, an anthropologist of the Trobriand Islands, theorised that spells and magical objects have their origins in gestures and words that express the emotional states and intentions of the spellcaster. Over time, these became refined and codified in a society, becoming traditional spells that can amplify, focus, and direct the magician's will (Malinowski). In the episode “Witch”, Giles demonstrates the relationship between spells and intention as, casting a spell to reverse Amy's mother's switching of their bodies, he shouts in a commanding voice 'Release!' Willow also hones skills of concentration and directing her will through the practice of pencil floating, a seemingly small magical technique that nonetheless saves her life when she is captured by enemies and narrowly escapes being bitten by a vampire by floating a pencil and staking him with it in the episode “Choices”. The pencil is also used in another episode to illustrate the importance of focus and emotional balance. Willow explains to Buffy that she is honing these skills as she gently spins a pencil in the air, but as the conversation turns to Faith (a rogue Slayer who has hurt Willow's friends), she is distracted and the pencil spins wildly out of control before flying into a tree (“Dopplegangland”). In another example, Willow tries to conjure lights that will guide her out of difficulty in a haunted house, but, unable to make up her mind about where the lights should take her, she is plagued by them multiplying and spinning in multiple directions like a swarm of insects, thereby acting as an illustrator of her refracted metal state (“Fear Itself”). The series also explores the often comical consequences when love spells are cast with unclear motives. In the episode “Bewitched Bothered and Bewildered”, Buffy's friend Xander persuades Amy to cast a love spell on Cordelia who has just broken up with him. Amy warns him that for love spells, the intention should be pure, and is worried that Xander only wants revenge on Cordelia. Predictably, the spell goes wrong, as Cordelia is immune to Xander but every other woman that comes into proximity with him is overcome with obsession for him. Fleeing hordes of women, Xander and Cordelia have the space to talk, and impressed with his efforts to try to win her back, Cordelia rekindles the relationship, defying her traditional friendship circle. In this way, the spell both does not and does work, perhaps because, although Xander thinks he wants Cordelia to be enchanted, in fact what he really wants is her genuine affection and respect. Another example of spells going amiss is in the episode “Something Blue”, when Willow responds to a break-up by reverting to magic. Despondent over her boyfriend Oz leaving town, she wants to accelerate her grieving process and heal more quickly, and casts a spell to have her will be done in order to try to make that happen. The spell, however, does not work as expected but manifests her words about other things when she speaks with passion, rendering Giles blind when she says he does not see (meaning he does not understand her plight), and in another instance of the literal interpretation of Willow’s word choices causes Buffy and the vampire Spike to stop fighting, fall in love, and become an engaged couple. The episode therefore suggests the power of words to manifest unconscious intentions. Words may also, in the Buffyverse, have power in themselves. Overbey and Preston-Matto explore the power of words in the series, using the episode “Superstar” in which Xander speaks some Latin words in front of an open book that responds by spontaneously bursting into flames. They argue that the materiality of language in Buffy the Vampire Slayer [means that] words and utterances have palpable power and their rules must be respected if they are to be wielded as weapons in the fight against evil. (Overbey and Preston Matto 73) However, in drawing upon Searle's Speech Acts they emphasise the relationship between speech acts and meaning, but there are also examples that the sounds in themselves are efficacious, even if the speaker does not understand them – for example, when Willow tries to do the ritual to restore Angel’s soul to him and explains to Oz that it does not matter if he understands the related chant as long as he says it (“Becoming part 2”). The idea that words in themselves have power is also present in the work of Stoller, an ethnographer and magical apprentice to Songhay sorcerers living in the Republic of Niger. He documents a complex and very personal engagement with magic that he found fascinating but dangerous, giving him new powers but also subjecting him to magical attacks (Stoller and Olkes). This experience helped to cultivate his interest in the often under-reported sensuous aspects of anthropology, including the power of sound in spells, which he argues has an energy that goes beyond what the word represents. Moreover, skilled magicians can 'hear' things happening to the subtle essence of a person during rituals (Stoller). Seeing Other Realities Sight is also key to numerous magical practices. Greenwood, for example, has done participant observation with UK witches, including training in the arts of visualisation. Linked to general health benefits of meditation and imaginative play, such practices are also thought to connect adepts to 'other worlds' and their associated powers (Greenwood). Later seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer also depict skills in meditation and concentration, such as in the episode “No Place Like Home”, in which Buffy, worried about her sick mother, uses a spell supposedly created by a French sixteenth-century sorcerer called 'pull the curtain back' to try to see if her mother’s illness is caused by a spell. She uses incense and a ritual circle of sand to put herself into a trance and in that altered state of consciousness sees that her sister, Dawn, was not born to her mother, but has been placed into her family by magic. In another example, in the episode “Who are You?”, Willow has begun a relationship with fellow witch Tara and wants to introduce her to Buffy. However, the rogue Slayer, Faith, has escaped and switched bodies with Buffy, and Tara realises that something is wrong. She suggests doing a spell with Willow to investigate by seeing beyond the physical world and travelling to the nether realm using astral projection. This rather beautiful scene has been interpreted as a symbolic depiction of their sexual relationship (Gibson), but it is also suggesting that, within the context of the series, alternate dimensions, and spells to transport practitioners there, are not purely symbolic. Conclusion The idea that magic, monsters, and demons in the series Buffy the Vampire Slayer act to some extent as metaphors for the challenges that young people face growing up in America is well known (Little). While this is certainly true, at least some of the multiple examples of magic in the series have clear resemblances to witchcraft in numerous social worlds. This depth is potentially exciting for viewers, but it also makes the show's more negative and ambiguous tropes more troubling. Willow and Tara's relationship can be interpreted as showing their independence and rejection of patriarchy, but Willow identifying as lesbian later in the series obscures her earlier relationships with men and her potential identification as bi-sexual, suggesting a need on the part of the show's writers to “contain her metamorphic selfhood” (Corcoran 158-159). Moreover, the identity of lesbians as witches in a vampire narrative is fraught with potentially homophobic associations and stereotypes (Wilts), and one of the few positive depictions of a lesbian relationship on television was ruined by the brutal murder of the Tara character and Willow's subsequent out-of-control magical rampage, bringing the storyline back in line with murderous clichés (Wilts; Gibson). Furthermore, storylines where Willow cannot control her powers, or they are seen as an addiction to evil, make an uncomfortable comment on women and power more generally: a point which Corcoran highlights in relation to Nancy's story in The Craft. Ultimately, representations of magic and witchcraft are representations of power, and this makes them highly significant for societal understandings of power relations, particularly given the complex relationships between witch-hunting and misogyny. The symbols of woman-as-witch have been re-appropriated by fans of witch narratives and feminists, and perhaps most intriguingly, by people who regard magical power as not only symbolic power but as a way to tap into subtle forces and other worlds. Buffy the Vampire Slayer offers something to all of these groups, but all too often reverts to patriarchal tropes. Audiences (some of whom may be magicians) await what film and television witches come next. 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Introduction Lillian Ng was born in Singapore and lived in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom before migrating to Australia with her daughter and Ah Mah Yin Jie (“Ah Mahs are a special group of people who took a vow to remain unmarried … [so they] could stick together as a group and make a living together” (Yu 118)). Ng studied classical Chinese at home, then went to an English school and later on studied Medicine. Her first book, Silver Sister (1994), was short-listed for the inaugural Angus & Robertson/Bookworld Prize in 1993 and won the Human Rights Award in 1995. Ng defines herself as a “Chinese living in Australia” (Yu 115). Food, flesh and meat are recurrent topics in Lillian Ng´s second novel Swallowing Clouds, published in 1997. These topics are related to desire and can be used as a synecdoche (a metaphor that describes part/whole relations) of the human body: food is needed to survive and pleasure can be obtained from other people´s bodies. This paper focuses on one type of meat and animal, pork and the pig, and on the relation between the two main characters, Syn and Zhu Zhiyee. Syn, the main character in the novel, is a Shanghainese student studying English in Sydney who becomes stranded after the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 1989. As she stops receiving money from her mother and fears repression if she goes back to China, she begins to work in a Chinese butcher shop, owned by Zhu Zhiyee, which brings her English lessons to a standstill. Syn and Zhu Zhiyee soon begin a two-year love affair, despite the fact that Zhu Zhiyee is married to KarLeng and has three daughters. The novel is structured as a prologue and four days, each of which has a different setting and temporal location. The prologue introduces the story of an adulterous woman who was punished to be drowned in a pig´s basket in the HuanPu River in the summer of 1918. As learnt later on, Syn is the reincarnation of this woman, whose purpose in life is to take revenge on men by taking their money. The four days, from the 4th to the 7th of June 1994, mark the duration of a trip to Beijing and Shanghai that Syn takes as member of an Australian expedition in order to visit her mother with the security of an Australian passport. During these four days, the reader learns about different Chinese landmarks, such as the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, the Ming Tomb and the Summer Palace, as well as some cultural events, such as a Chinese opera and eating typical foods like Peking duck. However, the bulk of the plot of the book deals with the sexual relationship, erotic games and fantasies of Syn and Zhu Zhiyee in the period between 1989 and 1992, as well as Syn´s final revenge in January 1993. Pigs The fact that Zhu Zhiyee is a butcher allows Lillian Ng to include references to pigs and pork throughout the novel. Some of them refer to the everyday work of a butcher shop, as the following examples illustrate: “Come in and help me with the carcass,” he [Zhu Zhiyee] pointed to a small suckling pig hung on a peg. Syn hesitated, not knowing how to handle the situation. “Take the whole pig with the peg,” he commanded (11).Under dazzling fluorescent tubes and bright spotlights, trays of red meat, pork chops and lamb cutlets sparkled like jewels … The trays edged with red cellophane frills and green underlay breathed vitality and colour into the slabs of pork ribs and fillets (15).Buckets of pig´s blood with a skim of froth took their place on the floor; gelled ones, like sliced cubes of large agate, sat in tin trays labelled in Chinese. More discreetly hidden were the gonads and penises of goats, bulls and pigs. (16)These examples are representative of Syn and Zhu Zhiyee´s relationship. The first quotation deals with their interaction: most of the time Zhu Zhiyee orders Syn how to act, either in the shop or in bed. The second extract describes the meat’s “vitality” and this is the quality of Syn's skin that mesmerised Zhu when he met her: “he was excited, electrified by the sight of her unblemished, translucent skin, unlined, smooth as silk. The glow of the warmth of human skin” (13). Moreover, the lights seem to completely illuminate the pieces of meat and this is the way Zhu Zhiyee leers at Syn´s body, as it can be read in the following extract: “he turned again to fix his gaze on Syn, which pierced and penetrated her head, her brain, eyes, permeated her whole body, seeped into her secret places and crevices” (14). The third excerpt introduces the sexual organs of some of the animals, which are sold to some customers for a high price. Meat is also sexualised by Zhu Zhiyee´s actions, such as his pinching the bottoms of chickens and comparing them with “sacrificial virgins”: “chickens, shamelessly stripped and trussed, hung by their necks, naked in their pimply white skin, seemed like sacrificial virgins. Syn often caught Zhu pinching their fleshy bottoms, while wrapping and serving them to the housewives” (15-16). Zhu also makes comments relating food with sex while he is having lunch next to Syn, which could be considered sexual harassment. All these extracts exemplify the relationship between Syn and Zhu Zhiyee: the orders, the looks and the implicit sexuality in the quotidian activities in the butcher´s shop. There are also a range of other expressions that include similes with the word `pig´ in Ng´s novel. One of the most recurrent is comparing the left arm and hand of Zhu Zhiyee´s mother with a “pig´s trotter”. Zhu Zhiyee´s mother is known as ZhuMa and Syn is very fond of her, as ZhuMa accepts her and likes her more than her own daughter-in-law. The comparison of ZhuMa´s arm and hand with a trotter may be explained by the fact that ZhuMa´s arm is swollen but also by the loving representation of pigs in Chinese culture. As Seung-Og Kim explains in his article “Burials, Pigs, and Political Prestige in Neolithic China”: In both Melanesia and Asia, pigs are viewed as a symbolic representation of human beings (Allen 1976: 42; Healey 1985; Rappaport 1967: 58; Roscoe 1989: 223-26). Piglets are treated as pets and receive a great deal of loving attention, and they in turn express affection for their human “parents.” They also share some physiological features with human beings, being omnivorous and highly reproductive (though humans do not usually have multiple litters) and similar internal anatomy (Roscoe 1989: 225). In short, pigs not only have a symbiotic relationship with humans biologically but also are of great importance symbolically (121). Consequently, pigs are held in high esteem, taken care of and loved. Therefore, comparing a part of a human´s body, such as an arm or a hand, for example, to a part of a pig´s body such as a pig´s trotter is not negative, but has positive connotations. Some descriptions of ZhuMa´s arm and hand can be read in the following excerpts: “As ZhuMa handed her the plate of cookies Syn saw her left arm, swollen like a pig´s trotter” (97); “Syn was horrified, and yet somewhat intrigued by this woman without a breast, with a pig´s trotter arm and a tummy like a chessboard” (99), “mimicking the act of writing with her pig-trotter hand” (99), and ZhuMa was praising the excellence of the opera, the singing, acting, the costumes, and the elaborate props, waving excitedly with her pig trotter arm and pointing with her stubby fingers while she talked. (170) Moreover, the expression “pig´s trotters” is also used as an example of the erotic fetishism with bound feet, as it can be seen in the following passage, which will be discussed below: I [Zhu Zhiyee] adore feet which are slender… they seem so soft, like pig´s trotters, so cute and loving, they play tricks on your mind. Imagine feeling them in bed under your blankets—soft cottonwool lumps, plump and cuddly, makes you want to stroke them like your lover´s hands … this was how the bound feet appealed to men, the erotic sensation when balanced on shoulders, clutched in palms, strung to the seat of a garden swing … no matter how ugly a woman is, her tiny elegant feet would win her many admirers (224).Besides writing about pigs and pork as part of the daily work of the butcher shop and using the expression “pig´s trotter”, “pig” is also linked to money in two sentences in the book. On the one hand, it is used to calculate a price and draw attention to the large amount it represents: “The blouse was very expensive—three hundred dollars, the total takings from selling a pig. Two pigs if he purchased two blouses” (197). On the other, it works as an adjective in the expression “piggy-bank”, the money box in the form of a pig, an animal that represents abundance and happiness in the Chinese culture: “She borrowed money from her neighbours, who emptied pieces of silver from their piggy-banks, their life savings”(54). Finally, the most frequent porcine expression in Ng´s Swallowing Clouds makes reference to being drowned in a pig´s basket, which represents 19 of the 33 references to pigs or pork that appear in the novel. The first three references appear in the prologue (ix, x, xii), where the reader learns the story of the last woman who was killed by drowning in a pig´s basket as a punishment for her adultery. After this, two references recount a soothsayer´s explanation to Syn about her nightmares and the fact that she is the reincarnation of that lady (67, 155); three references are made by Syn when she explains this story to Zhu Zhiyee and to her companion on the trip to Beijing and Shanghai (28, 154, 248); one refers to a feeling Syn has during sexual intercourse with Zhu Zhiyee (94); and one when the pig basket is compared to a cricket box, a wicker or wooden box used to carry or keep crickets in a house and listen to them singing (73). Furthermore, Syn reflects on the fact of drowning (65, 114, 115, 171, 172, 173, 197, 296) and compares her previous death with that of Concubine Pearl, the favourite of Emperor Guanxu, who was killed by order of his aunt, the Empress Dowager Cixi (76-77). The punishment of drowning in a pig´s basket can thus be understood as retribution for a transgression: a woman having an extra-marital relationship, going against the establishment and the boundaries of the authorised. Both the woman who is drowned in a pig´s basket in 1918 and Syn have extra-marital affairs and break society’s rules. However, the consequences are different: the concubine dies and Syn, her reincarnation, takes revenge. Desire, Transgression and Eroticism Xavier Pons writes about desire, repression, freedom and transgression in his book Messengers of Eros: Representations of Sex in Australian Writing (2009). In this text, he explains that desire can be understood as a positive or as a negative feeling. On the one hand, by experiencing desire, a person feels alive and has joy de vivre, and if that person is desired in return, then, the feelings of being accepted and happiness are also involved (13). On the other hand, desire is often repressed, as it may be considered evil, anarchic, an enemy of reason and an alienation from consciousness (14). According to Pons: Sometimes repression, in the form of censorship, comes from the outside—from society at large, or from particular social groups—because of desire´s subversive nature, because it is a force which, given a free rein, would threaten the higher purpose which a given society assigns to other (and usually ideological) forces … Repression may also come from the inside, via the internalization of censorship … desire is sometimes feared by the individual as a force alien to his/her true self which would leave him/her vulnerable to rejection or domination, and would result in loss of freedom (14).Consequently, when talking about sexual desire, the two main concepts to be dealt with are freedom and transgression. As Pons makes clear, “the desiring subject can be taken advantage of, manipulated like a puppet [as h]is or her freedom is in this sense limited by the experience of desire” (15). While some practices may be considered abusive, such as bondage or sado-masochism, they may be deliberately and freely chosen by the partners involved. In this case, these practices represent “an encounter between equals: dominance is no more than make-believe, and a certain amount of freedom (as much as is compatible with giving oneself up to one´s fantasies) is maintained throughout” (24). Consequently, the perception of freedom changes with each person and situation. What is transgressive depends on the norms in every culture and, as these evolve, so do the forms of transgression (Pons 43). Examples of transgressions can be: firstly, the separation of sex from love, adultery or female and male homosexuality, which happen with the free will of the partners; or, secondly, paedophilia, incest or bestiality, which imply abuse. Going against society’s norms involves taking risks, such as being discovered and exiled from society or feeling isolated as a result of a feeling of difference. As the norms change according to culture, time and person, an individual may transgress the rules and feel liberated, but later on do the same thing and feel alienated. As Pons declares, “transgressing the rules does not always lead to liberation or happiness—transgression can turn into a trap and turn out to be simply another kind of alienation” (46). In Swallowing Clouds, Zhu Zhiyee transgresses the social norms of his time by having an affair with Syn: firstly, because it is extra-marital, he and his wife, KarLeng, are Catholic and fidelity is one of the promises made when getting married; and, secondly, because he is Syn´s boss and his comments and ways of flirting with her could be considered sexual harassment. For two years, the affair is an escape from Zhu Zhiyee´s daily worries and stress and a liberation and fulfillment of his sexual desires. However, he introduces Syn to his mother and his sisters, who accept her and like her more than his wife. He feels trapped, though, when KarLeng guesses and threatens him with divorce. He cannot accept this as it would mean loss of face in their neighbourhood and society, and so he decides to abandon Syn. Syn´s transgression becomes a trap for her as Zhu, his mother and his sisters have become her only connection with the outside world in Australia and this alienates her from both the country she lives in and the people she knows. However, Syn´s transgression also turns into a trap for Zhu Zhiyee because she will not sign the documents to give him the house back and every month she sends proof of their affair to KarLeng in order to cause disruption in their household. This exposure could be compared with the humiliation suffered by the concubine when she was paraded in a pig´s basket before she was drowned in the HuangPu River. Furthermore, the reader does not know whether KarLeng finally divorces Zhu Zhiyee, which would be his drowning and loss of face and dishonour in front of society, but can imagine the humiliation, shame and disgrace KarLeng makes him feel every month. Pons also depicts eroticism as a form of transgression. In fact, erotic relations are a power game, and seduction can be a very effective weapon. As such, women can use seduction to obtain power and threaten the patriarchal order, which imposes on them patterns of behaviour, language and codes to follow. However, men also use seduction to get their own benefits, especially in political and social contexts. “Power has often been described as the ultimate aphrodisiac” (Pons 32) and this can be seen in many of the sexual games between Syn and Zhu Zhiyee in Swallowing Clouds, where Zhu Zhiyee is the active partner and Syn becomes little more than an object that gives pleasure. A clear reference to erotic fetishism is embedded in the above-mentioned quote on bound feet, which are compared to pig´s trotters. In fact, bound feet were so important in China in the millennia between the Song Dynasty (960-1276) and the early 20th century that “it was impossible to find a husband” (Holman) without them: “As women’s bound feet and shoes became the essence of feminine beauty, a fanatical aesthetic and sexual mystique developed around them. The bound foot was understood to be the most intimate and erotic part of the female anatomy, and wives, consorts and prostitutes were chosen solely on the size and shape of their feet” (Holman). Bound feet are associated in Ng’s novel with pig´s trotters and are described as “cute and loving … soft cottonwool lumps, plump and cuddly, [that] makes you want to stroke them like your lover´s hands” (224). This approach towards bound feet and, by extension, towards pig´s trotters, can be related to the fond feelings Melanesian and Asian cultures have towards piglets, which “are treated as pets and receive a great deal of loving attention” (Kim 121). Consequently, the bound feet can be considered a synecdoche for the fond feelings piglets inspire. Food and Sex The fact that Zhu Zhiyee is a butcher and works with different types of meat, including pork, that he chops it, sells it and gives cooking advice, is not gratuitous in the novel. He is used to being in close proximity to meat and death and seeing Syn’s pale skin through which he can trace her veins excites him. Her flesh is alive and represents, therefore, the opposite of meat. He wants to seduce her, which is human hunting, and he wants to study her, to enjoy her body, which can be compared to animals looking at their prey and deciding where to start eating from. Zhu´s desire for Syn seems destructive and dangerous. In the novel, bodies have a price: dead animals are paid for and eaten and their role is the satiation of human hunger. But humans, who are also animals, have a price as well: flesh is paid for, in the form of prostitution or being a mistress, and its aim is satiation of human sex. Generally speaking, sex in the novel is compared to food either in a direct or an indirect way, and making love is constantly compared to cooking, the preparation of food and eating (as in Pons 303). Many passages in Swallowing Clouds have cannibalistic connotations, all of these being used as metaphors for Zhu Zhiyee’s desire for Syn. As mentioned before, desire can be positive (as it makes a person feel alive) or negative (as a form of internal or social censorship). For Zhu Zhiyee, desire is positive and similar to a drug he is addicted to. For example, when Zhu and Syn make delivery rounds in an old Mazda van, he plays the recordings he made the previous night when they were having sex and tries to guess when each moan happened. Sex and Literature Pons explains that “to write about sex … is to address a host of issues—social, psychological and literary—which together pretty much define a culture” (6). Lillian Ng´s Swallowing Clouds addresses a series of issues. The first of these could be termed ‘the social’: Syn´s situation after the Tiananmen Massacre; her adulterous relationship with her boss and being treated and considered his mistress; the rapes in Inner Mongolia; different reasons for having an abortion; various forms of abuse, even by a mother of her mentally handicapped daughter; the loss of face; betrayal; and revenge. The second issue is the ‘psychological’, with the power relations and strategies used between different characters, psychological abuse, physical abuse, humiliation, and dependency. The third is the ‘literary’, as when the constant use of metaphors with Chinese cultural references becomes farcical, as Tseen Khoo notes in her article “Selling Sexotica” (2000: 164). Khoo explains that, “in the push for Swallowing Clouds to be many types of novels at once: [that is, erotica, touristic narrative and popular], it fails to be any one particularly successfully” (171). Swallowing Clouds is disturbing, full of stereotypes, and with repeated metaphors, and does not have a clear readership and, as Khoo states: “The explicit and implicit strategies behind the novel embody the enduring perceptions of what exotic, multicultural writing involves—sensationalism, voyeuristic pleasures, and a seemingly deliberate lack of rooted-ness in the Australian socioscape (172). Furthermore, Swallowing Clouds has also been defined as “oriental grunge, mostly because of the progression throughout the narrative from one gritty, exoticised sexual encounter to another” (Khoo 169-70).Other novels which have been described as “grunge” are Edward Berridge´s Lives of the Saints (1995), Justine Ettler´s The River Ophelia (1995), Linda Jaivin´s Eat Me (1995), Andrew McGahan´s Praise (1992) and 1988 (1995), Claire Mendes´ Drift Street (1995) or Christos Tsiolkas´ Loaded (1995) (Michael C). The word “grunge” has clear connotations with “dirtiness”—a further use of pig, but one that is not common in the novel. The vocabulary used during the sexual intercourse and games between Syn and Zhu Zhiyee is, however, coarse, and “the association of sex with coarseness is extremely common” (Pons 344). Pons states that “writing about sex is an attempt to overcome [the barriers of being ashamed of some human bodily functions], regarded as unnecessarily constrictive, and this is what makes it by nature transgressive, controversial” (344-45). Ng´s use of vocabulary in this novel is definitely controversial, indeed, so much so that it has been defined as banal or even farcical (Khoo 169-70).ConclusionThis paper has analysed the use of the words and expressions: “pig”, “pork” and “drowning in a pig’s basket” in Lillian Ng´s Swallowing Clouds. Moreover, the punishment of drowning in a pig’s basket has served as a means to study the topics of desire, transgression and eroticism, in relation to an analysis of the characters of Syn and Zhu Zhiyee, and their relationship. This discussion of various terminology relating to “pig” has also led to the study of the relationship between food and sex, and sex and literature, in this novel. Consequently, this paper has analysed the use of the term “pig” and has used it as a springboard for the analysis of some aspects of the novel together with different theoretical definitions and concepts. Acknowledgements A version of this paper was given at the International Congress Food for Thought, hosted by the Australian Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona in February 2010. References Allen, Bryan J. Information Flow and Innovation Diffusion in the East Sepic District, Papua New Guinea. PhD diss. Australian National University, Australia. 1976. Berridge, Edward. Lives of the Saints. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 1995. C., Michael. “Toward a sound theory of Australian Grunge fiction.” [Weblog entry] Eurhythmania. 5 Mar. 2008. 4 Oct. 2010 http://eurhythmania.blogspot.com/2008/03/toward-sound-theory-of-australian.html. Ettler, Justine. The River Ophelia. Sydney: Picador, 1995. Healey, Christopher J. “Pigs, Cassowaries, and the Gift of the Flesh: A Symbolic Triad in Maring Cosmology.” Ethnology 24 (1985): 153-65. Holman, Jeanine. “Bound Feet.” Bound Feet: The History of a Curious, Erotic Custom. Ed. Joseph Rupp 2010. 11 Aug. 2010. http://www.josephrupp.com/history.html. Jaivin, Linda. Eat Me. Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 1995. Khoo, Tseen. “Selling Sexotica: Oriental Grunge and Suburbia in Lillian Ngs’ Swallowing Clouds.” Diaspora: Negotiating Asian-Australian. Ed. Helen Gilbert, Tseen Khoo, and Jaqueline Lo. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2000. 164-72. Khoo, Tseen; Danau Tanu, and Tien. "Re: Of pigs and porks” 5-9 Aug. 1997. Asian- Australian Discussion List Digest numbers 1447-1450. Apr. 2010 . Kim, Seung-Og. “Burials, Pigs, and Political Prestige in Neolithic China.” Current Anthopology 35.2 (Apr. 1994): 119-141. McGahan, Andrew. Praise. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992. McGahan, Andrew. 1988. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1995. Mendes, Clare. Drift Street. Pymble: HarperCollins, 1995. Ng, Lillian. Swallowing Clouds. Ringwood: Penguin Books Australia,1997. Pons, Xavier. Messengers of Eros. Representations of Sex in Australian Writing. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Rappaport, Roy. Pigs for the Ancestors. New Have: Yale UP, 1967. Roscoe, Paul B. “The Pig and the Long Yam: The Expansion of the Sepik Cultural Complex”. Ethnology 28 (1989): 219-31. Tsiolkas, Christos. Loaded. Sydney: Vintage, 1995. Yu, Ouyang. “An Interview with Lillian Ng.” Otherland Literary Journal 7, Bastard Moon. Essays on Chinese-Australian Writing (July 2001): 111-24.

Introduction In March 2020, many societal functions came to a standstill due to the worldwide spread of Covid-19. Due to the rules set by public healthcare authorities that aimed at “social distancing” to prevent the spread of the virus, the emphasis on domesticity was heightened during the pandemic. As people were forced to spend more time in the home environment, more time was allowed for household pursuits and local activities, such as crafts and home repair (Morse, Fine, and Friedlander). While there has been a rising interest in craft-making as the medium of expression for the past few decades (e.g., Peach), crafts seem to have undergone a serious breakthrough during the global pandemic crisis. In recent studies, crafting has been noted for its usefulness in providing a dimension of comfort and security in a time of instability and isolation (Rixhon), eventually becoming a much-needed conceptual shelter from the threat of the virus (Martin). Sewing seems to have assumed a significant role early in the pandemic, when craft-makers began to mitigate the spread of the virus by using their own sewing machines and material stashes to make masks for their families and friends; some also donated masks to hospital workers and others in need (Martindale, Armstead, and McKinney). While other forms of crafts were also widely practiced (e.g., Jones; Stalp, Covid-19 Global Quilt; Wenzel), face-mask sewing has been at the core of pandemic craft research, highlighting the role of home-based hobby crafting as a means of social survival that contributed to people's agency and feelings of productivity and usefulness during the outbreak of coronavirus (Hahn and Bhaduri; Hustvedt and Liang; Martindale, Armstead, and McKinney; Richards and Perreault; Schnittka). This article analyses two craft hashtags on Instagram from March 2020 to December 2021, which offer a perspective on shifts in pandemic crafts in a linguistically localised crafting community. The hashtags crop up in the Finnish-speaking craft culture, defining pandemic crafts as “Covid craft”, #koronakäsityö, and “Covid crafts”, #koronakäsityöt. By definition, the Finnish word “käsityö” (which derives from the words “käsi”, hand, and “työ”, work) is a broad concept for all handiwork: it is not tied to any specific craft technique, but rather affirms work made by hand, or with tools that are held in hands. In addition, the concept of “käsityö” has no intended emphasis in regard of the phase of the project, or craft techniques or materials being used: it translates as an entity including both the idea of the product that is going to be made during the process of crafting, the embodied craft know-how of the making of the product, and the product itself (Kojonkoski-Rännäli 31; also Ihatsu). However, as is also disclosed in this study, the “käsityö” seems to have a connotation of craft work traditionally made by the persons assumed female by society or other people, and thus, findings may build on domesticity related to textile crafting (see Kouhia, Unraveling, 8, 17). The research questions driving this research are: (1) what kind of crafts were made, and how were these crafts contextualised during the pandemic; and (2) how was domesticity reflected in the pandemic crafting? The analysis explains how hobby crafts appeared as reactive pastimes, and how pandemic crafting set a debate on the implementation of alternative futures, interlinked with postfeminist forms of domesticity. As a result, it is shown that home-based hobby crafting was not only capable of upholding a sense of response and recovery for the makers during the pandemic, but also developing and bringing forth new trends within the maker culture. Domestic Crafting in the Digital Age In the Western narrative, crafts have been traditionally considered as generative quotidian activities positioned in the domestic space (Hardy; Thompson). In its history, domestic crafting has been practiced within a range of morals spanning from early conceptions of conspicuous leisure as an “unproductive expenditure of time” (Veblen 45) and 1950s feminine virtues like “thrift, practical creativity, and attention to appearance” (McLean 259) to today’s subversive, expressive Do-It-Yourself (DIY) along with the emergence of Third Wave Feminism that has powers to “resist capitalist materialism tendencies” (Stalp, Girls, 264). Often discussed in relation to femininity and unpaid labour—that include nuanced arguments of female subordination, sexuality, and housewifery (MacDonald 47; Parker 2–3; Turney 9)—contemporary crafting is seen not only to fall in the habitual expectations of domesticity, but also to have the capability to subvert and resist them. Indeed, while crafts such as knitting, sewing, and crocheting claimed their status as recreational leisure activities already in the late twentieth century with the changes related to construction of contemporary femininity (Groeneveld 264; Turney 2), there are still many issues and inequalities related to home-based hobby crafting. Predominantly, contemporary home crafts seem to be somewhat challenged by the lack of alternatives to the gendering of the domestic sphere (see Ceuterick). While home crafts are no longer social or economic domestic necessities and not practised by all or exclusively by women, home crafts still “continue to be perceived as a middle-class activity, a distraction and leisure pursuit for ‘ladies’ with time and means” (Hackney 170). While home-based hobby crafts cover many forms of making, ethical and social concerns that offer alternative and countercultural ways of living and consuming have become increasingly visible in contemporary crafting. Today’s hobby crafts operate within structures of everyday life and underpin plurality, complexity, and richness of amateur experience (Knott 124). Contemporary hobby crafting is also boosted by the revitalisation of old skills and the entrenchment of a home culture that utilises "retro cultures" (Hunt and Phillipov), and the increased interest of young adults in DIY culture (Kouhia, Unraveling; Stannard and Sanders). Almost a decade ago, Hunt and Phillipov put forward a discussion of the regained popularity of old-fashioned “Nanna Style” home practices. They noticed that young, activist makers praised these grandmotherly practices as “simultaneously nostalgic and politically progressive choices”, calling in countercultural politics of gender and consumption, and confusing the seemingly conservative lines “between imagined utopias of domesticity and the economic and environmental realities of contemporary consumer culture” (Hunt and Phillipov). Paired with ethical consumption, this promoted liberated postfeminist domesticity, a refusal of the capitalist structures of consumption, and a move away from binaries between the masculine and the feminine. Again, a return to domestic activities such as cooking, cleaning, and crafting was witnessed during the Covid-19 pandemic, with people inscribing the domestic chores as postfeminist choices rather than oppression (Ceuterick) and participating in the production of meaning as a “redomesticated woman” (Negra 16, cited in Palomeque Recio). Methodology Today, social media resources provide a fundamental theoretical lens used by the researchers with powers to function both as an enabler and a driver of innovation (Bhimani, Mention, and Barlatier). Social media channels allow people to derive value from self-generated content, promoting interpersonal connectedness with the sharing of details of the daily lives of the individuals (Nabity-Grover, Cheung, and Thatcher) with social support, referability, and potential correspondence enclosed from around cyberspace (Hajli). The article is based on qualitative social media research on Instagram, with aims to study the perpetual interest in hobby crafts during the pandemic. The study leans on the research paradigm known as ‘netnography’, which is a qualitative research methodology based on collecting, adapting, reflecting, and interacting with online traces with “a cultural focus on understanding the data derived from social media data” (Kozinets 6). Social media data consisting of 361 posts have been derived from Instagram’s #koronakäsityö and #koronakäsityöt hashtag feeds, and interpreted from the viewpoint of the content of the images and the context of their production (see Yang 17). The data collection took place from March 2020 to December 2021. I have followed the stream of posts using Instagram’s follow function from the position of a craft researcher and serious hobbyist (see Stebbins; Kouhia, Unraveling) from spring 2020, when the first Covid craft publications were published. Since then, the posts have been visible in the image stream of my own Instagram account, which has given me a preliminary view of the content of the publications. The data collection was ceased in December 2021 due to the decrease of posted content. All posts are connected to the Finnish craft culture through the hashtags used as descriptions of “käsityö”, and they are approached as forms of self-disclosure of Covid-era hobby crafting (see Nabity-Grover, Cheung, and Thatcher). The posts were collected at several points during the research period and were manually extracted to Excel tables with the post content data (date and week of publication, account name of the publisher, number of images, captions and hashtags). The data were analysed using qualitative approaches to Instagram data (Yang 19), with main emphasis on the posts’ visual material (Rose) analysed with a qualitative content analysis approach (see Hsieh and Shannon). The data were first charted and thematised by 1) the type and technique of craft presented (e.g., knitting, macramé, yarn balls, etc.), and 2) the display of the craft maker (age, gender, presentation in the post in relation or with the craft), and subsequently, evaluated by 3) looking at the production of domesticity in the posts (presentation and description of the domestic space). I have tried to ensure the validity of research with consistency and trust value (see Noble and Smith), making my research decisions clear and transparent, and viewing the experiences that may have resulted in methodological bias. However, given the multiple realities of qualitative research ontology, research validity needs to be framed within complex social and cultural rationales, and paired with the aim of “maintaining cohesion between the study’s aim, design and methods” (Noble and Smith 35). Considering the ethics of using social media data, all posts considered as the data of this study have been published on public Instagram accounts, and their reporting adheres to anonymous indirect quoting and image manipulation. Pandemic Domestic Crafting on Instagram Pandemic crafting consisted of many kinds of crafts. During the long review period, Covid crafts centred strikingly around textile-making: the most outstanding crafting techniques were knitting, crocheting, and sewing (table 1). Other kinds of textile crafts, like macramé, weaving, fabric printing and painting, embroidery, and clothing repair, were also displayed, yet with minor emphasis in comparison to yarn craft techniques and sewing. Some images presented textile handicraft tools, materials and machines, such as balls of yarn, beads, needles, and sewing machines. Only a few images contained artisanship with hard materials, with these few photos including multimaterial jewellery, boat carving, repairing a terrace, and building a wooden wall behind an outdoor mailbox. Table 1. The kinds of crafts posted on Instagram during the pandemic: a summary based on #koronakäsityö and #koronakäsityöt. Regarding the phase of the crafting project, most images concentrated on depicting completed, finished craft products. In addition to woollen socks, knitwear, macrame works, and clothes, everyday handicrafts endemic to the period, such as sewn masks and crocheted mask holders, were also portrayed as Corona crafts. Besides the kinds of crafts made, it is also important to look at the shifts in Covid-related craft content. Indeed, mask sewing posts and links to news on the positive role of crafting in times of crisis started to crop up in social media platforms already in the early phase of the pandemic (Kouhia, Online); in parallel, related social media hashtags emerged to identify the content. The first images of Covid crafts were posted on Instagram in late March 2020. These images were captioned with momentary descriptions of the disruption the habituated everyday routines, but also granted more time to crafts. As social-distancing weeks passed, Covid crafting quickly evolved in accordance with the first wave of the virus infection, eventually rising to its peak in April 2020. In parallel to the easing of the Covid outbreak in the summer of 2020, Covid crafting and posts diminished. As the situation became worse again in the autumn with the rise of the second wave of the virus, Covid crafting increased, and recurred until the spring of 2021. Towards the end of 2021, spontaneous Corona craft publications became irregular. Pandemic crafts seemed to be recurrently contextualised with the continual transformation of materiality within the domestic space. Craft-makers described having drawn inspiration from their old craft material stashes and returned to projects that had been left untouched and unfinished for one reason or another for months, years, and sometimes even decades. Makers—most of them likely falling, based on popularity of textile hobby crafts in Finland (see Pöllänen) and the interviews conducted among the publishers of the Covid craft-related posts, in the social categories of white, middle-aged, mostly urban able-bodied anticipated women—described having felt there was more time for crafting, and due to the restricted domestic space, an embodied and infinite push of being ecological and using the resources that they had at hand. In this sense, craft-makers not only showed abilities and resilience to react to the changing situation, but also unfolded crafting as an expression and a form of self-disclosure, with powers to make visible the value of care of the environment as a contribution to societal wellbeing. All in all, experiences of crafting as a self-chosen, self-maintained privilege seemed to afford a sense of flexibility. Further, this facilitated the reframing of the increased domestic activities as postfeminist choices and crafting as care for the home and family, as discussed in the following data excerpt: Thanks to Covid, I’ve had an excuse to take up the sewing machine and play with fabrics. I had completely forgotten how fun it is to design clothes, the process has really taken me out. Especially, if one wants more special children’s clothes, they will cost you like several bags of toilet paper = which is as much as hell, if you don’t make the clothes yourself. Also works as a pretty good motivator though 😂💪 (#koronakäsityöt Instagram post from April 2020) As the posts mainly cover textile crafting, feminine domesticity with the symbolised oppressive feminine social ideals of good mothering and housewifery are embedded in the narrative through at-home managerialism, like taking care of the household and maintaining children’s clothing. Indeed, the care of the family was repeatedly addressed in craft posts, with descriptions of mothers making clothes for their children—sometimes at the request of the kids, and but most often as daily chores of wearing and caring. For some craft-makers, textile crafting seemed to offer a passage to continue the mundane, domesticated policies that were already established at home; in other words, those who had been already keen on textile hobby crafting were suddenly offered more time for their beloved leisure practice. In addition, there were also new makers entering the field of crafting, who started practicing leisure crafts for the first time, or those who returned to their once-lost hobby. However, argumentation that framed Covid crafting tended to embrace craft-making as a conscious decision to live up to the images of femininity it may entail, and not particularly having the resources to transform the entrenched roles and figures it might provoke. Also, Covid crafting managed to also disclose a view of the intimate, framing the at-home private space and decorating it with the feminised imperatives of thriftiness, laboriousness, and austerity (see Bramall). Indeed, crafts seemed to be confined to the household space, which itself has been inherently political during the pandemic (e.g., Martin), and framed as distinctively individual choices to demonstrate the morale of staying at home and taking active ownership of the domestic space. Sometimes crafts were lined up in a space of their usage, like hanging macramé baskets and shawls placed on a sofa (fig. 1), though occupying the domestic space conveniently and adaptively, but without a deep questioning or consideration of the traditional binary oppositions between private and public spaces or home labour subscribing to anticipated masculinity or femininity. Rather, crafts seemed to be taken up as individual affirmative choices—not as household necessities, but as activities promoting the self-worth and personage of the makers and nurturing a sense of purpose and care in the lockdown homes. Fig. 1. Square crochet blanket occupying the domestic space. The image is manipulated by the author for the purposes of publication. Although crafts were purposefully placed on display in the posts, the main point was not in aesthetics based on strong image manipulation or the use of heavy filters, but rather showing off the permeability of the domestic space with the experiences of craft-makers living with a strong sense of satisfaction gained from crafting. Indeed, crafting itself can be interpreted as a resource contributing to the sense of perseverance and tenacity, giving a purpose for social survival in times of crisis: crafting was not cancelled, while almost everything else was paused. Discussion The pandemic had profound implications for the lives of millions of people, not only by compromising healthcare and economies, but also by reframing and revolutionising the meanings and values of moment-to-moment lifestyle choices and activities taking place at home. People were forced to re-engage in the practices of home and household during the pandemic, which changed their daily rhythm and transformed practices of the domestic space, further offering to revolutionise notions of domestic labour and care (Ceuterick). During the pandemic, domestic hobby crafting seemed to emerge as a phenomenon to influence social and cultural change, also providing makers with the experiences of usefulness to mitigate the changing circumstances. In line with the previous studies, this study implied that when contextualised within the frame of postmodern freedom, hobby crafts result in unique expressions that can sustain reflexivity, self-maintenance, and resilience (Kenning; Pöllänen), and reclaim a status as a public and social activity (Turney; Mayne). Within a study of 27 older adults practicing mask-sewing during the pandemic, Schnittka identified crafting to help other people to manage chaotic times, also contributing to makers' feelings of value, worthiness and purpose and their sense of control (225). Hahn and Bhaduri recognise similar habits in their study of mask-making behaviour, detailing that self-fulfilment and wellbeing as the most important reason for making masks, and financial motivation leaving behind other morals (307). Similar results can be also drawn based on this study; most importantly, the value of crafting as a flexible, self-sustained performance in the boundaries between the intimate and the shared. In this study, attention was drawn to hobby crafting intended for sharing online and situated in a linguistically localised cultural niche in a particular time frame. Thus, the study witnessed the rise and fall of “Covid-crafts” on Instagram through the analysis of two coronavirus-related craft hashtags that emerged in the Finnish-speaking crafting community. Although using linguistically and culturally situated data may limit the study, it also offers a view of crafting as a social and cultural phenomenon. In the future, more research needs to be undertaken on crafting regarding various geographic, political, cultural, and socio-economic venues, so that the nuanced and complex negotiations of domesticity could be examined and understood more thoroughly. Nevertheless, like the study by Martindale, Armstead, and McKinney, which reviewed publicly displayed face-mask sewing posts hashtagged with #sewingmasks and #sewingfacemask posted on Instagram in March 2020 (205), this study revealed that craft-makers were keen to share and exchange ideas and information online. In this study, Covid crafting seemed to be undertaken far from a complex choice—it was rather taken as a self-sustained, satisfactory leisure activity that aimed to maintain a sense of purpose rather than critique. Still, even the seemingly uncritical craft practice set to operate an inherently political act that made use of the changed resources in the family and household. Indeed, it can be concluded that in this time of crisis, crafting offered to raise a sense of wellbeing and individual identity of the maker, providing people with a means of reacting and being responsive to the changes of the world. 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Fig. 1: Photo by Miguel Orós, from unsplash.comFeminism has stalled at the bedroom door. In the post-#metoo era, more than ever, we need intimate civil rights in our relationships to counter the worrisome prevailing trends: Intimate partner violence. Interpersonal abuse. Date rape. Sexual harassment. Online harassment. Bullying. Rage. Sexual Assault. Abusive relationships. Revenge porn. There’s a lot of damage done when we get up close and personal. In the 21st century, we have come far in terms of equality and respect between the genders, so there’s a lot to celebrate. We also note that the Australian government has stepped in recently with the theme ‘Keeping Australians safe and secure’, by pledging $78 million to combat domestic violence, much of which takes place behind closed doors (Morrison 2019). Herein lies the issue: while governments legislate to protect victims of domestic violence — out of the public eye, private behaviours cannot be closely monitored, and the lack of social enforcement of these laws threatens the safety of intimate relationships. Rather, individuals are left to their own devices. We outline here a guideline for intimate civility, an individually-embraced code of conduct that could guide interpersonal dynamics within the intimate space of relationships. Civility does not traditionally ‘belong’ in our most intimate relationships. Rather, it’s been presumed, even idealised, that intimacy in our personal lives transcends the need for public values to govern relationships between/among men and women (i.e., that romantic love is all you need). Civility developed as a public, gendered concept. Historically, a man’s home – and indeed, his partner – became his dominion, promoting hegemonic constructions of masculinity, and values that reflect competition, conquest, entitlement and ownership. Moreover, intimate relationships located in the private domain can also be considered for/by both men and women a retreat, a bastion against, or excluded from the controls and demands of the public or ‘polis’ - thus from the public requirement for civility, further enabling its breakdown. The feminist political theorist Carole Pateman situated this historical separation as an inheritance of Hegel’s double dilemma: first, a class division between civil society and the state (between the economic man/woman, or private enterprise and public power) and second, a patriarchal division between the private family (and intimate relationships) and civil society/the state. The private location, she argues, is “an association constituted by ties of love, blood … subjection and particularity” rather than the public sphere, “an association of free and equal individuals” (225). In Hegel’s dilemma, personal liberty is a dualism, only constructed in relation to a governed, public (patriarchal) state. Alternately, Carter depicts civility as a shared moral good, where civility arises not only because of concern over consequences, but also demonstrates our intrinsic moral obligation to respect people in general. This approach subsequently challenges our freedom to carry out private, uncivil acts within a truly civil society.Challenges to Gender EthicsHow can we respond to this challenge in gender ethics? Intimate civility is a term coined by Elizabeth Reid Boyd and Abigail Bray. It came out of their discussions proposing “a new poetics of romance” which called for rewritten codes of interpersonal conduct, an “entente cordiale; a cordial truce to end the sex wars”. Reid Boyd and Bray go further:Politeness is personal and political. We reclaim courtesy as applied sexual and social ethics, an interpersonal, intimate ethics, respectful and tolerant of difference. Gender ethics must be addressed, for they have global social and cultural ramifications that we should not underestimate. (xx)As researchers, we started to explore the idea of intimate civility in interpersonal violence, developing an analysis using social construction and attachment theory simultaneously. In defining the term, we soon realised the concept had wider applications that could change how we think about our most intimate relationships – and how we behave in them. Conceptualising intimate civility involves imagining rights and responsibilities within the private sphere, whether or not loving, familial and natural. Intimate civility can operate through an individually embraced code of conduct to guide interpersonal dynamics within the intimate space of relationships.Gringart, Grobbelaar, and Bender explored the concept of intimate civility by investigating women’s perspectives on what may harmonise their intimate relationships. Women’s most basic desires included safety, equality and respect in the bedroom. In other words, intimate civility is an enactment of human-rights, the embodiment of regard for another human being, insofar as it is a form of ensuring physical and mental integrity, life, safety and protection of all beings. Thus, if intimate civility existed as a core facet of each individual’s self-concept, the manifestation of intimate partner violence ideally would not occur. Rage, from an intimate civility perspective, rips through any civil response and generates misconduct towards another. When we hold respect for others as equal moral beings, civility is key to contain conflicts, which prevents the escalation of disagreements into rage. Intimate civility proposes that civility becomes the baseline behaviour that would be reciprocated between two individuals within the private domain of intimate relationships. Following this notion, intimate civility is the foremost casualty in many relationships characterised by intimate partner violence. The current criminalisation of intimate partner violence leaves unexplored the previously privatised property of the relational – including the inheritance of centuries of control of women’s bodies and sexuality – and how far, in this domain, notions of civility might liberate and/or oppress. The feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray argues that these kinds of ‘sexuate rights’ must apply to both men and women and the reality of their needs and desires. Equality, she argued, could not be achieved without a rewriting of the rights and obligations of each sex, qua different, in social rights and obligations (Yan).Synonyms for intimacy include, amongst others, closeness, attachment, togetherness, warmth, mutual affection, familiarity and privacy. Indirectly, sexual relations are also often synonymous with intimate relationships. However, sex is not intimacy, as both sex and intimacy both exist without the other. Bowlby proposed that throughout our lives we are attentive to the responsiveness and the availability of those that we are attached to, and suggested that “intimate attachments to other human beings are the hub around which a person’s life revolves, not only when he is an infant or a toddler, but throughout his adolescence and his years of maturity as well, and on into old age” (442). Although love is not by nature reciprocal, in intimacy we seek reciprocity – to love one another at the same time in a shared form of commitment. Kierkegaard hypothesised that genuine love is witnessed by one continuing to love another after their death as it obviates any doubt that the beloved was loved and was not merely instrumental (Soble).Intimate Civility as a Starting PointCivility includes qualities such as trust, duty, morality, sacrifice, self-restraint, respect, and fairness; a common standard allowing individuals to work, live and associate together. Intimacy encourages caring, loyalty, empathy, honesty, and self-knowledge. Thus, intimate civility should begin with those closest to us; being civil in our most intimate relationships. It advocates the genuine use of terms of endearment, not terms of abuse. We can only develop qualities such as morality and empathy, crucial for intimate relationships, if we have experienced secure, intimate relationships. Individuals reared in homes devoid of intimate civility will be challenged to identify and promote the interest or wellbeing of their intimate counterparts, and have to seek outside help to learn these skills: it is a learnt behaviour, both at an interpersonal and societal level. Individuals whose parents were insensitive to their childhood needs, and were unable to perceive, interpret and respond appropriately to their subtle communications, signals, wishes and mood will be flailing in this interpersonal skill (Holmes and Slade). Similarly, the individual’s inclusion in a civil society will only be achieved if their surrounding environment promotes and values virtues such as compassion, fairness and cooperation. This may be a challenging task. We envisage intimate civility as a starting point. It provides a focus to discuss and explore civil rights, obligations and responsibilities, between and among women and men in their personal relationships. As stated above, intimate civility begins with one's relationship with oneself and the closest relationships in the home, and hopefully reaches outwards to all kinds of relationships, including same sex, transgender, and other roles within non-specific gender assignment. Therefore, exploring the concept of intimate civility has applications in personal therapy, family counselling centres and relationship counselling environments, or schools in sexual education, or in universities promoting student safety. For example, the 2019 “Change the Course” report was recently released to augment Universities Australia’s 2016 campaign that raised awareness on sexual assault on campus. While it is still under development, we envision that intimate civility decalogue outlined here could become a checklist to assist in promoting awareness regarding abuse of power and gender roles. A recent example of cultural reframing of gender and power in intimate relationships is the Australian Government’s 2018 Respect campaign against gender violence. These recent campaigns promote awareness that intimate civility is integrated with a more functional society.These campaigns, as the images demonstrate, aim at quantifying connections between interactions on an intimate scale in individual lives, and their impacts in shaping civil society in the arena of gender violence. They highlight the elasticity of the bonds between intimate life and civil society and our collective responsibility as citizens for reworking both the gendered and personal civility. Fig. 2: Photo by Tyler Nix: Hands Spelling Out LOVE, from unsplash.comThe Decalogue of Intimate Civility Overall, police reports of domestic violence are heavily skewed towards male on female, but this is not always the case. The Australian government recently reported that “1 in 6 Australian women and 1 in 16 men have been subjected, since the age of 15, to physical and/or sexual violence by a current or previous cohabiting partner” (Australian Institutes of Health and Welfare). Rather than reiterating the numbers, we envisage the decalogue (below) as a checklist of concepts designed to discuss and explore rights, obligations and responsibilities, between and among both partners in their intimate relationships. As such, this decalogue forms a basis for conversation. Intimate civility involves a relationship with these ten qualities, with ourselves, and each other.1) Intimate civility is personal and political. Conceptualising intimate civility involves imagining rights and responsibilities within the private sphere. It is not an impingement on individual liberty or privacy but a guarantor of it. Civil society requires us not to defend private infringements of inter-personal respect. Private behaviours are both intimate in their performance and the springboard for social norms. In Geoffrey Rush’s recent defamation case his defence relied not on denying claims he repeatedly touched his fellow actor’s genitalia during their stage performance in a specific scene, despite her requests to him that he stop, but rather on how newspaper reporting of her statements made him out to be a “sexual pervert”, reflecting the complex link between this ‘private’ interaction between two people and its very public exposé (Wells). 2) Intimate civility is an enactment of a civil right, insofar as it is a form of ensuring physical and mental integrity, life, safety and protection. Intimate civility should begin with those closest to us. An example of this ethic at work is the widening scope of criminalisation of intimate partner abuse to include all forms of abusive interactions between people. Stalking and the pre-cursors to physical violence such as controlling behaviours, online bullying or any actions used to instil fear or insecurity in a partner, are accorded legal sanctions. 3) Intimate civility is polite. Politeness is more than manners. It relates to our public codes of conduct, to behaviours and laws befitting every civilian of the ‘polis’. It includes the many acts of politeness that are required behind closed doors and the recognition that this is the place from which public civility emerges. For example, the modern parent may hope that what they sanction as “polite” behaviour between siblings at home might then become generalised by the child into their public habits and later moral expectations as adults. In an ideal society, the micro-politics of family life become the blueprint for moral development for adult expectations about personal conduct in intimate and public life.4) Intimate civility is equitable. It follows Luce Irigaray’s call for ‘sexuate rights’ designed to apply to men and women and the reality of their needs and desires, in a rewriting of the social rights and obligations of each sex (Yan and Irigaray). Intimate civility extends this notion of rights to include all those involved in personal relations. This principle is alive within systemic family therapy which assumes that while not all members of the family system are always able to exert equal impacts or influence, they each in principle are interdependent participants influencing the system as a whole (Dallos and Draper). 5) Intimate civility is dialectical. The separation of intimacy and civility in Western society and thought is itself a dualism that rests upon other dualisms: public/private, constructed/natural, male/female, rational/emotional, civil/criminal, individual/social, victim/oppressor. Romantic love is not a natural state or concept, and does not help us to develop safe governance in the world of intimate relationships. Instead, we envisage intimate civility – and our relationships – as dynamic, dialectical, discursive and interactive, above and beyond dualism. Just as individuals do not assume that consent for sexual activity negotiated in one partnership under a set of particular conditions, is consent to sexual activity in all partnerships in any conditions. So, dialectics of intimate civility raises the expectation that what occurs in interpersonal relationships is worked out incrementally, between people over time and particular to their situation and experiences. 6) Intimate civility is humane. It can be situated in what Julia Kristeva refers to as the new humanism, emerging (and much needed) today. “This new humanism, interaction with others – all the others – socially marginalised, racially discriminated, politically, sexually, biologically or psychically persecuted others” (Kristeva, 2016: 64) is only possible if we immerse ourselves in the imaginary, in the experience of ‘the other’. Intimate civility takes on a global meaning when human rights action groups such as Amnesty International address the concerns of individuals to make a social difference. Such organisations develop globally-based digital platforms for interested individuals to become active about shared social concerns, understanding that the new humanism ethic works within and between individuals and can be harnessed for change.7) Intimate civility is empathic. It invites us to create not-yet-said, not-yet-imagined relationships. The creative space for intimate civility is not bound by gender, race or sexuality – only by our imaginations. “The great instrument of moral good is the imagination,” wrote the poet Shelley in 1840. Moral imagination (Reid Boyd) helps us to create better ways of being. It is a form of empathy that encourages us to be kinder and more loving to ourselves and each other, when we imagine how others might feel. The use of empathic imagination for real world relational benefits is common in traditional therapeutic practices, such as mindfulness, that encourages those struggling with self compassion to imagine the presence of a kind friend or ally to support them at times of hardship. 8) Intimate civility is respectful. Intimate civility is the foremost casualty in many relationships characterised by forms of abuse and intimate partner violence. “Respect”, wrote Simone Weil, “is due to the human being as such, and is not a matter of degree” (171). In the intimate civility ethic this quality of respect accorded as a right of beings is mutual, including ourselves with the other. When respect is eroded, much is lost. Respect arises from empathy through attuned listening. The RESPECT! Campaign originating from the Futures without Violence organisation assumes healthy relationships begin with listening between people. They promote the understanding that the core foundation of human wellbeing is relational, requiring inter-personal understanding and respect.9) Intimate civility is a form of highest regard. When we regard another we truly see them. To hold someone in high regard is to esteem them, to hold them above others, not putting them on a pedestal, or insisting they are superior, but to value them for who they are. To be esteemed for our interior, for our character, rather than what we display or what we own. It connects with the humanistic psychological concept of unconditional positive regard. The highest regard holds each other in arms and in mind. It is to see/look at, to have consideration for, and to pay attention to, recently epitomised by the campaign against human trafficking, “Can You See Me?” (Human Trafficking), whose purpose is to foster public awareness of the non-verbal signs and signals between individuals that indicate human trafficking may be taking place. In essence, teaching communal awareness towards the victimisation of individuals. 10) Intimate civility is intergenerational. We can only develop qualities such as morality and empathy, crucial for intimate relationships, if we have experienced (or imagined) intimate relationships where these qualities exist. Individuals reared in homes devoid of intimate civility could be challenged to identify and promote the interest or wellbeing of their intimate counterparts; it is a learnt behaviour, both at an interpersonal and societal level. Childhood developmental trauma research (Spinazzola and Ford) reminds us that the interaction of experiences, relational interactions, contexts and even our genetic amkeup makes individuals both vulnerable to repeating the behaviour of past generations. However, treatment of the condition and surrounding individuals with people in their intimate world who have different life experiences and personal histories, i.e., those who have acquired respectful relationship habits, can have a positive impact on the individuals’ capacity to change their learned negative behaviours. In conclusion, the work on intimate civility as a potential concept to alleviate rage in human relationships has hardly begun. The decalogue provides a checklist that indicates the necessity of ‘intersectionality’ — where the concepts of intimate civility connect to many points within the public/private and personal/political domains. Any analysis of intimacy must reach further than prepositions tied to social construction and attachment theory (Fonagy), to include current understandings of trauma and inter-generational violence and the way these influence people’s ability to act in healthy and balanced interpersonal relationships. While not condoning violent acts, locating the challenges to intimate civility on both personal and societal levels may leverage a compassionate view of those caught up in interpersonal violence. The human condition demands that we continue the struggle to meet the challenges of intimate civility in our personal actions with others as well as the need to replicate civil behaviour throughout all societies. ReferencesBowlby, John. Attachment and Loss. Vol. 3. New York: Basic Books, 1980.Carter, Stephen. Civility: Manners, Morals and the Etiquette of Democracy. New York: Basic Books, 1998.Dallos, Rudi, and Ros Draper. An Introduction to Family Therapy: Systemic Theory and Practice. 2nd ed. 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