Articles de revues sur le sujet « Prostitution – Rome – History »

Although prostitutes and courtesans flourished in most Renaissance Italian cities, little research has documented the presence of such women outside of the major centers of Rome, Florence, and Venice. This study focuses on the spaces occupied by the prostitutes of Ferrara in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Spatially controlled both by legislation and by common practices, prostitutes navigated in a circumscribed world riven by conflict and competing interests. Neither the modalities of these spatial practices nor the houses and structures the women used or inhabited have received scholarly attention. The article includes previously unknown information about the establishment, location, and operation of the city's public brothels, about spatial control, and about the ways in which the city was structured to restrict women believed to be unruly.

This article analyzes testimony about forced prostitution voiced in New York City's Court of General Sessions from 1908 to 1915. During these years, the problem of coercive prostitution—commonly called “white slavery”—received an unprecedented amount of attention from journalists, politicians, and antivice activists. Drawing from verbatim transcripts of compulsory-prostitution trials, our research examines the relationship between cultural narratives and courtroom storytelling. We show how the white slavery narrative in popular culture oriented prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, and jurors in prostitution trials. Extending the account of social control in the sociological literature on antivice activism, our analysis shows that the prosecution of forced prostitution was not simply a top-down exercise of juridical power. Using insights from conversation analysis and cultural history, an examination of compulsory-prostitution cases reveals a quadripartite storytelling process where judges and jurors—with different orientations to the white slavery narrative—played a constitutive role in how the defense and prosecution argued their cases.

This study seeks to assess the nature and extent of childhood emotional abuse among adult women in a residential prostitution-exiting program. Regression analyses were conducted to assess the unique role of childhood emotional abuse in the prediction of age of entry into prostitution. Childhood emotional abuse, a history of running away during childhood, and participating in survival-based exchanges of sex were significantly associated with the commercial sexual exploitation of girls younger than age 18, while childhood emotional abuse contributed to predicting a younger age of entry. Results are discussed regarding policy, prevention, and future research.

The study of prostitution in Indonesia is dominated by economic, legal, social and health studies. Psychological studies related to the dynamics of intimacy are still limited and mostly conducted in the context of sexual and reproductive health, namely the use of condoms. Intimacy in this article refers to closeness, attachment, and comfort that are psychologically important for prostitutes to manage in order to maintain a personal relationship with clients. The purpose of this article is to describe intimacy in the world of prostitution. Through literature studies and by limiting the study on female prostitutes, this article discusses the definition of prostitution, its history in Indonesia, the role of intimacy in prostitution, the boundaries of intimate relationships, and the link between intimacy and condom use. Two discourses, intimacy as part of sexual relations and intimacy as a form of embeddedness in an economic context are used to understand the boundary line between intimacy as a commercial relationship and intimacy as a non-commercial relationship. This article is expected to contribute to the psychological, legal, and health aspects of prostitution.

Abstract This article addresses the relationship between civic prostitution and the concept of ‘gute Policey’ in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It takes as its object of discussion a series of so-called Frauenhausordnungen (brothel ordinances or brothel rules) from the cities of Nuremberg, Nördlingen, Strasbourg, Constance and Ulm. Previous discussions have characterized Frauenhausordnungen from these cities as members of a coherent genre of regulations, a grouping which this article contests. By placing the creation of new brothel regulations in these cities in the larger context of the emergence of ‘gute Policey’ as a crucial category within domestic administration, the article seeks to expose civic authorities’ moral ambiguities about the role of prostitution in society, which originated well before the Reformation, often seen as the key factor in the vanishing of public prostitution from the urban landscape in the early modern era.

In an earlier article inIrish Historical Studiesthe present author argued that the beginnings of the Irish Free State’s campaign against venereal disease were caught up in a politics of prostitution that mobilised nationalist, republican and post-colonial sentiments, revolving around the struggle between military and civilian authority, and invoking the moral arbitration of the Catholic church. Susannah Riordan’s recent response has clarified the administrative history of interdepartmental inquiries into the threat posed by venereal diseases, setting concerns over the role of prostitution in propagating disease within the context of the wider public health programme. She properly identifies inquiry references to ‘prophylaxis’ with chemical disinfection following exposure to infection, and rightly separates the report filed by Major Donal Carroll, the army’s chief sanitary officer, from that of Dr Robert Percy McDonnell, Medical Inspector of the Department of Local Government and Public Health.

This secondary analysis study investigated HIV sexual and drug-use risk in drug-dependent pregnant patients over the first month postrandomization to reinforcement-based treatment (RBT) () or usual care (UC) (). Analysis of primary outcomes had indicated that RBT participants spent significantly longer time in treatment and recovery housing than UC participants. The present study examined the ability of 9 risk markers—age, race, estimated gestational age at treatment entry, lifetime substance abuse treatment episodes, history of prostitution charges, history of serious depression, current heroin injection status, current housing status, and current partner substance use—to predict changes in HIV risks. Sexual risk declined for participant subgroups with prostitution-charge histories and unstable housing. Drug-use risk declined for heroin injectors and nondepressed participants. A relationship was found between number of lifetime drug treatment episodes and sexual and drug-use risk. The role of risk markers in the response of drug-dependent pregnant women to drug treatment require attention.

This article explores the relationship between the photographic regimentation of sex workers and ideas of modernity in Porfirian Oaxaca City, Mexico. In particular, it examines the development of the commercial sex trade and how it played an integral role in the construction of the mutually defining discourses and practices of tradition and modernity. Following an examination of the era's reigning medical-legal notions of crime, deviance, and race and the city government's attempts to define and regulate the trade, the article focuses on different ways in which city officials and female sex workers utilized photographs in registries of prostitution among other elements of the capital's regulatory apparatus to harness dominant notions of modernity for their own separate ends.

Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci first coined the term “hegemony” and also elaborated on cultural hegemony. It is a common perception that cultural powers and organisations are hegemonic-centred, resulting in a network of invisible powers. Hegemonic power processes are an integral part of daily social and cultural practices that help to perpetuate power relations. The repercussions of hegemony can be seen in various aspects of society, such as caste, class, ethnicity, occupation, gender, tradition, etc. This paper enlightens on the gendered hegemonic cultural practice of prostitution (sex work) as a traditional institution in the Bedia community. The intensive fieldwork in Habla hamlet, a sub-village of Luhari village (village assembly) of the Bedia community in Sagar district in Madhya Pradesh, India, was conducted to reveal the hegemonic practices in the community. Forty people aged between 50 to 60 years have been interviewed for this study. Twenty females and twenty males were selected for data collection, and observations had been made in the hamlet to understand hegemony through social institutions. Moreover, we have found that the male members are alert to the preservation of the purity and chastity of their wives but compelled their sisters and daughters, with the support of social institutions, to remain unmarried and take up prostitution (sex work). In particular, Bedias' hegemonic traditional cultural behaviour plays an essential role in the continuation of discrimination against Bedia women. Additionally, we explore the mechanism of this hegemonic power through the role of gender, patriarchy, false consciousness, emotions, power of common sense, ideology, and history, which have been responsible for the victimisation of Bedia women for a long time.

In 2015, Amnesty International joined over 200 sex worker organisations in the call for nations to decriminalise sex work. Despite this, only two jurisdictions in the world, New Zealand and New South Wales (NSW; Australia), have adopted this approach. This article examines the role that sex worker activists played in sex work law reform in NSW through their representative organisation, the Australian Prostitutes Collective (APC). The APC produced and submitted groundbreaking research to the Select Committee of the NSW Legislative Assembly on Prostitution (1983–1986) whose recommendations laid the foundation for the decriminalisation of sex work in NSW. This article contributes to a developing history of the contribution of sex worker activism to law reform. It explores why it is so important that sex worker voices are included in the process of reform, and how meaningful consultation with sex workers helped shape and invoke a radical policy and legal transformation.

AbstractRecent scholarship on the social history of health and medicine in colonial India has moved beyond enclavist or hegemonic aspects of imperial medicine and has rather focused on the role of Indian intermediaries and the fractured nature of colonial hegemony. Drawing inspiration from this scholarship, the article highlights the significance of the Indian subordinates in the lock hospital system in the nineteenth century Madras Presidency. This study focuses on a class of Indian subordinates called the “gomastah”, who were employed to detect clandestine prostitution in Madras to control the spread of venereal disease. It also underlines the role of other native and non-native subordinates such as Dhais, Chowdranies and Matrons, the ways in which they became indispensable for the smoother operation of the Contagious Diseases Act and the lock hospitals on a day-to-day basis. By emphasising how Indian subordinates were able to bring in caste biases within colonial governmentality, adding another layer to the colonial prejudices and xenophobia against the native population, it underlines the fact that there was not a one-way appropriation or facilitation of the coloniser’s knowledge or biases by the colonised intermediaries. Rather, it argues for an interaction between them, and highlights the complexities of caste hierarchies and prejudice within the everyday colonial governmentality. Moreover, the article focuses on the consequent chaos and inherent power struggle between different factions of colonial staff.

After a drought of more than a decade, a substantial group of recent works has begun revisiting Weimar gender history. The fields of Weimar and Nazi gender history have been closely linked since the field was defined thirty years ago by the appearance of the anthologyWhen Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany. Following a flurry of pioneering work in the 1980s and early 1990s, few new monographs were dedicated to investigating the questions posed in that formative moment of gender history. Kathleen Canning, the current main commentator on Weimar gender historiography, in an essay first published shortly before the works under review, found that up to that point the ‘gender scholarship on the high-stakes histories of Weimar and Nazi Germany has not fundamentally challenged categories or temporalities’. Weimar gender, meanwhile, has been intensively analysed in the fields of cultural, film, and literary studies. The six books discussed in this essay reverse these trends, picking up on the central question of how gender contributed to the end of the Weimar Republic and the rise to power of National Socialism. In addition, four of the books concentrate solely on reconstructing the dynamics of gender relations during the Weimar period itself in their discussions of prostitution, abortion and representations of femininity and masculinity. Is emerging gender scholarship now shaping larger questions of German early twentieth-century history? How are new scholars revising our view of the role of gender in this tumultuous time?

This article won the Women's History Scotland Leah Leneman essay prize for 2014 This article examines some of the many ways in which women interacted with the Reformed Kirk of Scotland between 1613 and 1660, as recorded in the Canongate Kirk Session disciplinary records, focusing on cases that reveal the negotiation for control over women's bodies, their dignity, and their performances of gender and sexuality. These include the kirk session's prosecution of illicit sexuality, such as fornication, adultery, and prostitution; its protection, albeit limited, in cases of sexual assault; and its role as mediator in wet-nursing cases, and leniency towards wet-nursing fornication penitents. The article then examines the limits of the kirk session's powers in controlling its parishioners. It argues that the relationship between the kirk session and female parishioners was multifaceted, contradictory, and shifting. The kirk was a powerful social force in Canongate, but women were also active agents in the system of repentance, absolution and control in seventeenth-century Scotland.

The great migration from the tsarist empire, sparked by the assassination of Alexander II, in 1881, saw two to three million east European Jews re-settling in the great cities of the Atlantic world before the First World War. Often discriminated against in labour markets, and socially marginalized in new environments, Russo-Polish males either persisted in, or resorted to, organized crime centred on the illicit sale of alcohol, professional gambling, and prostitution to survive. Atlantic states, however, were reluctant to employ Jews as uniformed police or detectives in their fight against syndicated crime. In order to overcome the challenge of ethnicized crime, law-enforcement agencies, like nineteenth-century tsarist administrations before them, employed informers. Jewish informers who, unbeknown to police handlers, were sometimes also psychopaths in an era before the condition was clinically identified, were used to infiltrate underworld structures. By nature, informing offered a short-term, unstable, existence fraught with unintended consequences for police and spies alike – thereby encouraging extraordinary geographical mobility amongst informers. Orthodox histories of law-enforcement agencies tend to focus on structural changes in police forces but a re-examination of the role of informers in organized crime should allow for the development of more subtle insights into the evolution of policing as a dynamic, interactive, social process.

An evaluation of peer-education projects with sex workers, men who have sex with men and marginalized adolescents, was introduced in a remote region of Brazil. The context of varied limits of predictability made it difficult to conduct inquiry. To go beyond available epidemiological surveys and questionnaires on sexual behavior, a self-evaluation aimed at increasing pragmatic knowledge about prevention in a challenging socio-political context. During five-months, a participatory-action research explored participant observation; individual and collective exchanges with users, peer-educators, coordinators, administrators, politicians and regional health professionals. Collective understanding of peer-education in prostitution zones underlines the reality of unforeseen social repercussions and confluence/divergence of multiple actors' perspectives. It identifies meaningful dimensions at a community-level, such as the collective history and dangerous working conditions. Nurses face complex struggles and negotiations over multiple actors in their practice. This study suggests that nurses have a role to play in the conceptualization of participatory evaluation. It also underlines the threats to their physical and social safety, which they might share with peer-educators.

ABSTRACTThis article surveys the wave of new historical and political-science literature exploring humanitarianism and the ‘pre-history’ of human rights in the long nineteenth century, noting the presentist assumptions underpinning much of this literature. On the one hand, histories of humanitarianism have focused on the origins of present-day humanitarian concerns, paying particular attention to the anti-slavery movement. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of this literature has explored Anglo-American (and usually Protestant) humanitarianism to the exclusion of the humanitarian campaigns and ideologies of other nations and faith traditions. A more properly historical approach is required, which would pay greater attention to the fusion of religious and secular traditions of activism, to the particular role of women in constituting these traditions, and to the different national contexts in which they bore fruit. Such an approach would also expand our understanding of ‘humanitarian’ activity to incorporate causes with less obvious present-day relevance, such as the temperance movement and Josephine Butler's campaign against the state regulation of prostitution. It would certainly prompt deeper reflection on the contingency of humanitarianism as a topic of historical inquiry, at least as currently constructed.

Purpose The paper aims to explore the road to independence of the less-fortunate women in early Hong Kong society and their means in passing of wealth after death. In the 1970s, about 400 Chinese wills from the 1840s to the 1940s were dug up on a construction site in Hong Kong. One-fourth of these were from women who had held a substantial amount of property. How they obtained this property intrigued us because, at that time, women were seen as subordinate to men and excluded from the labor market. Why they had wills led to further questions about Hong Kong society of that time and the role of women in it. Design/methodology/approach The analysis of this paper is based on archival data gathered from the Hong Kong Public Records Office. These data include 98 women’s wills filed from the 1840s to the 1940s and a 500-page government investigation report on the prostitution industry released in 1879. The former recorded valuable information of brief testators’ family and personal life history, amount of assets, and profolio of investment, etc. The latter included testimonials of brothel keepers and prostitutes and their life stories and the background of legalizing prostitution in early Hong Kong. Apart from basic quantitative analysis on women’s marital status, number of properties, nature of wills and number of brothels, qualitative analysis is directed to review the testator’s life of self-reliance, wealth accumulation and reasons of using wills for arranging wealth transmission after death. Findings In this paper, the authors found that because the colonial government declared prostitution legal, and only women could obtain employment by becoming prostitutes or brothel keepers, they earned their own livelihood, saved money and finally became independent. However, because these professions were not seen as “decent”, and these women were excluded from the formal marriage system, intestacy could cause problems for them. Through their socio-business connections, they became familiar with the Western concept of testate inheritance. So, they tended to use wills – a legal document by which a person assigns someone to distribute his or her property according to his or her wishes after his or her death – to assign their property. Research limitations/implications Because only archival data are chosen for analysis, the research results may lack generalizability. Follow-up researches to examine whether the studied women acquired their wealth through their own work or simply as gifts from others are required. Originality/value This paper explores the understudied women’s life and method of estate passing after death in the early Hong Kong society. It fills the academic gap of women’s contribution to Hong Kong’s success and enriches our understanding on the important factors that could attribute women’s real independence.

The article examines one of the most striking speeches of the Demosthenes corps, which was often quoted by ancient authors: LIX “Against Neaira,” conventionally believed to be authored by Apollodorus. Although this speech, as well as the trial where it was presented, has repeatedly become the subject of historiographic commentary and discussion, not a single specialized work has been devoted to it in Russian. The trial against Neaira and her partner Stephanos is of interest not only because it is the only surviving case on charges of illegal acquisition of Athenian citizenship, and the plaintiff ’s speech allows us to reconstruct a number of important aspects of legal proceedings in Athens (litigants’ behavior, arguments, witnesses, evidence, etc.). The prosecutor also reveals certain unappealing aspects of the daily life of Greek society in terms of attitudes to women, prostitution and pedophilia. The speaker divides women into three categories: wife, concubine (παλλακή) and hetaera. Neaira successfully handled the roles of hetaera and concubine. It is unknown whether Apollodorus had managed to impose on her the role of a legal wife — the one that would put Neaira at risk of being sold into slavery. Despite the weakness of the prosecution’s arguments and evidence, Apollodorus, who skillfully used the concept of polis rules, family identity and religious values, as well as dikastes’ prejudices, could have become the winner. However, presenting sufficiently convincing counter- arguments and testimonies may not have been difficult for Stephanos, although, perhaps, an appeal to the mercy and pity of the judges would have been a more efficient way to achieve his goal.

IntroductionBipolar disorder is a serious psychiatric condition based on depressive, manic, and mixed phases. Bipolar disorder has been usually divided into type I (manic phases and depressive phases) and type II (hypomanic and depressive phases). Furthermore, subsequent classifications have been developed based on subtypes complexity.ObjectivesA case of a 52-year-old man is presented. The patient had suffered depressive symptoms and self-destructive ideation. He had sold his house to pay for drugs and prostitution, even though he was in quarantine for COVID-19. The patient had a history of depressive episodes with milder manic episodes which had been treated with antidepressants.MethodsAnalytical and imaging tests were performed without findings. Mood stabilizing treatment was started based on lithium salts. He became perplexed and suspicious of the medication. Auditory hallucinations appeared congruent with the mood and he began to think that his relatives were dead; the patient started to communicate via telephone with actors. A treatment based on olanzapine 30mg/d was started.ResultsThe clinic was resolved with antipsychotic treatment. The diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder has been made in youth; however, some patients symptoms could be camouflaged and allow a functional life. Depressive episodes could present with psychotic symptoms and predispose more to suicide attempts than manic phases.ConclusionsThe early-stage diagnosis should play a key role on bipolar disorder control. More public and clinic efforts are needed to prevent non-easily distinguishable cases which could derived on serious social and health problems.DisclosureNo significant relationships.

AbstractThis article examines Cuba's long process of gradual emancipation (from 1868–1886) and the continual states of bondage that categorize the afterlife of Cuban slavery. The article addresses deferred freedom, re-enslavement, and maintenance of legal states of bondage in the midst of “freedom.” It contends with the legacy of the casta system, the contradictions within the Moret Law of 1870, which “half-freed” children but not their mothers, and it analyzes the struggle for full emancipation after US occupation, with the thwarted attempt of forming the Partido Independiente de Color to enfranchise populations of color. The article argues that the desire to control the labor of racialized populations, and in particular the labor of black and indigenous women and children, unified Cuban and US slaveholders determined to detain emancipation; and provides an analysis of the re-enslavement of US free people of color at the end of the nineteenth century, kidnapped and brought to the Cuba as a method of bolstering slavery. The article draws on the scholarship of Saidiya Hartman and Shona Jackson to provide an assessment of the afterlife of Cuban slavery, the invisibility of indigenous labor, the hypervisibility of African labor in the Caribbean deployed to maintain white supremacy, and it critiques the humanizing narrative of labor as a means for freedom in order to address the ways in which, for racialized populations in Cuba, wage labor would emerge as a tool of oppression. The article raises an inquiry into the historiography on Cuban slavery to provide a critique of the invisibility of indigenous and African women and children. It also considers the role and place of sexual exchanges/prostitution utilized to obtain freedom and to finance self-manumission, alongside the powerful narratives of the social and sexual deviancy of black women that circulated within nineteenth-century Cuba.

Introducción: Este artículo propone una aproximación socio-etnográfica a aquellos grupos de la circulación migratoria rumana que quedan relegados “al margen” y ubicados estratégica y simbólicamente “al otro lado”, esto es, al margen de la ley, la sociedad y fuera del foco de atención de las ciencias sociales. Así, nos detendremos en las brigadas, formaciones de jóvenes que organizan sus actividades en torno a los delitos contra la propiedad y la práctica de la prostitución trasnacionales; y los clanes romaníes, grupos con vínculo familiar que desempeñan actividades como la recogida y venta de chatarra, las tareas agrícolas de temporada o la mendicidad.Método: El enfoque biográfico se sustenta en la etnografía “multi-situada” (España/Rumanía), dando especial relieve a la construcción de contextos de convivencia e intimidad con los actores. Estos se hallan agrupados en diferentes núcleos familiares procedentes de las regiones de Valaquia, Moldavia y Transilvania, y que hoy participan de una experiencia migratoria trans-nacional.Resultados: Se trata de una investigación iniciada en 2013 y que se encuentra en curso, por lo que los resultados son provisionales. En el caso de la minoría romaní se observa una notable discriminación por parte de los Estados, que produce una injustificada alarma social. En relación con el delito y la prostitución trans-nacionales, las políticas de control social tienden al pánico moral y se concentran en grupos delictivos de baja intensidad, buscando la permanente legitimación en una lucha simbólica (e ineficaz) frente a los fantasmas del “crimen organizado”.Discusión: El paradigma de la victimización criminalizadora contribuye a ahondar en el proceso de estigmatización de estas poblaciones, cuya esperanza emancipadora pasa necesariamente por des-afiliarse de los discursos dominantes. No obstante, evidenciar el carácter heterogéneo de las migraciones rumanas no debe llevarnos a ignorar la influencia de las estructuras socio-políticas ni el peso de la historia. Introduction: This article proposes a socio-ethnographic approach to those groups of the Romanian migratory movement that are reduced to living "on the Margins" and strategically and symbolically located "on the other side", that is, outside the law, society and the attention of the social sciences. Therefore, we will focus on the brigadas, youth groups that organise their activities around property crime and transnational prostitution; and the Roma clans, groups with family ties that survive through the collection and sale of scrap, seasonal agriculture or begging.Method: The biographical approach is based on the "Multi-sited" Ethnography (Spain / Romania), with special emphasis on the building of close and personal relationships with the participants. These are grouped in different family nuclei originated from the regions of Valaquia, Moldavia and Transilvania, and that today participate in a trans-national migratory experience.Results: This research was initiated in 2013 and is still in progress, so the results are provisional. In the case of the Roma minority, there is a considerable discrimination on the part of the state, which feeds an unjustified social alarm. In relation to trans-national crime and prostitution, the social control policies are driven by moral panic and concentrate on low-intensity criminal groups, seeking a permanent legitimisation of a symbolic (and ineffective) struggle against the ghosts of "organised crime".Discussion: The paradigm of criminalising victimisation contributes to deepening the process of stigmatisation of these populations, whose emancipatory hope requires an escape from the dominant discourses. However, illustrating the diversity of the Romanian migrations should not lead us to ignore the influence of socio-political structures or the weight of history.

Abstract The seven years’ war (1912 - 1918) and epidemics of infectious diseases, led to a great loss of lives and medical corps of Serbia. As already stated, venereal and skin diseases were spreading in the postwar period that can be seen from medical reports of dermatovenereology institutions. They contain appropriate pathologies and some specific conditions under which they developed. In dermatovenereal pathology, venereal diseases were still dominating. In the outpatientClinic for Skin and Venereal Diseases, 10.000 patients were examined during the period from 1919 to 1921, venereal diseases accounted for 73.13%, whereas skin diseases accounted for 26.87% of all established diagnoses. A similar distribution existed at the territory of Serbia (Belgrade excluded) in 1931: venereal diseases accounted for 73.4%, and skin diseases for 26.6%; moreover, in Belgrade, the situation was even more drastic: venereal diseases accounted for 84.7%, and skin diseases for 15.3%. However, in the student population, the distribution was reversed: 43% and 57%, respectively. In regard to venereal diseases, in the series from 1919 to 1921, non-endemic syphilis was the most common disease, if serologically positive cases (latent syphilis) were added up to the clinically manifested cases. In the same series of patients, syphilis was staged as follows: syphilis I in 10%, syphilis II in 29.3%, syphilis III in 1.7%, tabes dorsalis in 0.8%, and latent syphilis in 56% of patients. In regions with endemic syphilis, from 1921 to 1925, the distribution was as follows: syphilis I in 4%, syphilis II in 49.8%, syphilis III in 18.3%, hereditary syphilis in 1.3%, and latent syphilis in 26.5% of patients. In patients suffering from gonorrhea, balanitis was found in 4.5%, and arthritis in 0.43% of cases. Generally, spreading of prostitution had a significant role, and its abolition was an important preventive action. In regard to skin diseases, in the above-mentioned series of patients, treated at the Outpatient Clinic for Skin andVenereal Diseases (1919 - 1921), scabies was the commonest skin disease (26.7%), eczemas were the second most common (21.8%), followed by pyococcal diseases (20.4%), while fungal diseases (4.5%) and skin tuberculosis (1.9%) were considerably less frequent. This is the final report about the foundation of modern dermatovenereology in Serbia.

The main criteria of social differentiation of women in the first state formations of the Middle Ages have been studied. The influence of religion on the formation of understanding of the place and role of women in society has been shown. Peculiarities of marriage and family relations in ancient Mesopotamia have been considered. The factors determining the social hierarchy of women in the ancient civilizations of the Biennial have been determined and analyzed. The causes of temple and street mass prostitution have been clarified. Features of the position of female slaves have been described. The work is based on the principle of historicism. When studying primary sources, comparative legal, hermeneutic methods and systematic analysis were used. The anthropological method was used when revealing the worldview of the people of that time and their values, the gender method was used when studying the status of women in the state institutions of the Middle Ages. It was concluded that the social position of women in ancient Mesopotamia was not unambiguous. Religion influenced a person's worldview, the understanding of the nature of a woman, her place and role in society. The rite of “sacred marriage” was one of the significant religious rituals, which encouraged the reproduction of similar sacred acts in worldly life, and became the ideological basis of the activity of the priests of Mezhyrechya. On the basis of the analysis of the legislation of the state institutions of the time, the purpose of marriage was determined, that is the birth and upbringing of children who were to inherit and multiply the family property and perform the necessary sacred rites, which were to help the dead in the afterlife. The inability to have children became the reason for divorce, as a rule, at the husband's will. The wife also had the right to initiate the divorce process in the municipal court, but under certain circumstances specifically defined by law. The most influential in society were the high priestesses – entum and naditum, who were related by blood to the famous families of Mesopotamia. They had wealth, broad socio-economic rights and the greatest social protection. Prostitutes and slaves were the least protected. It is noted that the origins of modern problems of gender inequality can be seen in the distant past, in the ancient world, in particular in Mesopotamia, which had a significant impact on European civilization. Women's History The Biennial provides grounds for asserting that solving the problems of gender inequality is not possible only by changing the legislation. A comprehensive approach is necessary, which would take into account such components as religion, culture, law, economy, psychology, etc.

The aim of the presentation is to present preventive measures and preventive measures being taken by the Polish Police in the area of domestic violence, using the feature films e.g. Pręgi and Plac Zbawicela. In this article, the following issues will be shown: existence of domestic violence with its psychological, emotional, social and religious determinants and long-term consequences for the victim as well. It is also appropriate to discuss socio-psychological context of violence. Firstly, we will show the sustainability of pathological conditions of the situations. Secondly, we will consider reasons for lack of defence activities. At the very end we will present negation attitudes and behaviour of the offender and the factors causing enslavement of the victims (affection and dependency in terms of social functioning in family, marriage or in concubinage). In order to present the whole problem included in the title of this presentation, we ought to point the regulations and the legal basis for all actions that have to eliminate this phenomenon (the Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Criminal Code, the Law on prevention of domestic violence, the procedure NK). The practical part of the discussed issues will be the analysis of specific forms of violence: threats punishable with art.190 of the Penal Code, stalking with art. 190a of the Penal Code, coercion with art.191 of the Penal Code, domestic violence with art. 207 of the Penal Code, pimping of art. 204 of the Penal Code, paedophilia and pornography presenting people with Article minors. 200 of the Penal Code, the Penal Code 200a, 200b of the Penal Code, trafficking in human beings (so called – Abdomen for rent) and human organs; trafficking for prostitution. Another issue there will be linguistic and rhetorical analysis of prophylactic actions regarding to its stylistics e.g. an visual imagery, comparisons and a paraphrase. As far as working tools are concerned, it should be stressed that beyond the previously parsed spoken word, it is reasonable to discuss the role of the merits of a multimedia presentation, as also to analyze and highlight the role of the feature film. It is worth stating that films graphically and emotionally relate to the presented issues using the depicted history and the ensuing timeless content. What is more, they help to enhance the acquisition and consolidation of the meeting’s theme and they enable to sensitize on identical pathological phenomena that occur in the real environment of each of the participants. The last but not least is the fact that films encourage to protect themselves and others and they teach how to maximize the effectiveness of preventive actions. At the very end, there is a place for the conclusions that follow our analysis of forms and methods of work in crime prevention in domestic violence. First of all, they will give opportunities for a better impact on the recipient as well as they will help to improve further action in this regard.

Jean-Paul Sartre and Badr Shakir al-Sayyabe are among the most prominent writers that critiqued the destructive role of capitalism and the patriarchal power system in the period of the Post-World War II crisis. Divided into three chapters, the present study examines two of the most eminent literary works in the history of the Western and Eastern societies in the fifties of the last decade: Jean Paul Sartre’s play : The Respectful Prostitute and Badr Shaker al-Sayyabe’s poem: The Blind Prostitute. Chapter one discusses the position of the prostitute in a patriarchal societies. Chapter two linguistically analyzes the prostitute’s behavior with men and evaluates the nature of a relationship when based on profit and loss. Such a relationship exposes the male dominance system on this social level through stigmatizing, marginalizing and depriving of her family establishing rights. Chapter Three sheds light on the prostitute’s ego and the other. In the two works, the society double standard is presented in dealing with status of a woman, rather than a man, as a prostitute, something that leads to uncover the individuality of such a character. Thus, and in addition to justly picturing prostitution as a human setback in all the western and Eastern societies, Sartre and al – Sayyab succeed in visualizing humanity decay within the perspective of the preceding decades. Résumé Jean-Paul Sartre et Badr Shakir al-Sayyabe font partie des écrivains qui ont contribué à travers leurs œuvres à critiquer le système capitaliste et la société masculine dans la période de l'après-guerre. En lisant les deux ouvrages, nous avons choisi comme sujet commun de cette étude d'analyser le statut de prostituée dans les sociétés orientale et occidentale au cours des années 1950 du siècle dernier. L'étude est divisée en trois chapitres : Le premier chapitre est basé sur la présentation du statut de la prostituée dans les communautés masculines des deux auteurs. Le deuxième chapitre analyse linguistiquement le comportement de la prostituée envers les hommes et la nature de la relation basée sur le principe du profit ou de la perte. Cette relation met d'abord en évidence la domination du système masculin sur cette partie social, le problème de la stigmatisation sociale, de la marginalisation et de la privation de son droit d'avoir et de fonder une famille. Le troisième chapitre traite la position de la prostituée entre le moi et l'autre. Dans les deux œuvres, le point de vue de la société semble être un double standard dans la condamnation de la femme comme prostituée plutôt que comme homme. Ce mécanisme nous amène à retrouver l'identité de la prostituée. Nous arrivons à conclure que le succès de Sartre et d'al-Sayyabe en présentant cette profession comme un échec humain pour les sociétés orientales et occidentales et la décadence de l'homme ou de la femme et en les dépeignant avec une perspective qui correspond aux crises du siècle dernier.

Abstract SYNTHESIS OF THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM FOR RESEARCH IN COMPARATIVE CRIMINOLOGY Introduction At the beginning of the development of the social sciences there was a considerable vogue for comparative research. A long period of empirical studies and almost total preoccupation with methodological problems followed. Once again, however, psychology, political science, sociology, and above all anthropology, have taken up the thread of this tradition, and the bibliography in these fields is becoming ever more abundant. The study of deviance, of various manifestations of criminality, and of social reaction against crime are, however, noticeably missing in the picture, even though there is nothing in the nature of criminology which precludes the development of comparative research. To many research workers in criminology, the time seemed ripe to take up the comparative tradition once again. Two imperatives were considered : the generalization of norms of deviance which are tied to the standard of living set by industrial civilization, thus putting the problem of criminality in a global light ; and, second, the development and standardization of methods of studying these phenomena, drawing on the experience of allied disciplines. The response of the participants in this Symposium and the results of their discussions were not unexpected. A consensus was arrived as to the problems it was thought important to study, and agreement was reached about the strategies of research to be undertaken. Priorities, however, were not established since too much depends on the availability of research teams, funds, etc. But the broad, overall look at the main problems in comparative criminology will, hopefully, open a new chapter in the history of crimino-logical research and in our continuing search for knowledge of man and society. The brief resume which follows should give the reader an idea of the extent of the problems tackled. The detailed proceedings of the Symposium will be published at a later date, in mimeographed form. Sectors of research proposed In a sense, this Symposium was prepared by all the participants. The organizers had requested that each person invited prepare a memorandum setting out the problems in comparative criminology which he considered to be most important. The compilation of their replies, reported to the plenary session at the opening of the Symposium, produced the following results : Summary of suggestions for research activities Note : In all that follows, it should be understood that all of these topics should be studied in a cross-cultural or international context. 1) Definitions and concepts : a) Social vs legal concept of deviance ; b) Distinction between political and criminal crimes ; c) The law : a moral imperative or a simple norm ; d) The concepts used in penal law : how adequate ? e.g. personality of criminal ; e) Who are the sinners in different cultures and at different times. 2) Procedures : a) Working concepts of criminal law and procedure ; b) Differentiating between factors relating to the liability-finding process and the sentencing process ; c) Behavioural manifestations of the administration of criminal justice ; d) Judicial decisions as related to the personality of the judges and of the accused ; e) Sentencing in the cross-national context (2 proposals) ; f) In developing countries, the gap between development of the legal apparatus and social behaviour ; g) Determination of liability ; h) The problem of definition and handling of dangerous offenders ; i) Decision-making by the sentencing judges, etc. (2 proposals) ; ;) Medical vs penal committals ; k) Law-enforcement, policing. 3) Personnel : a) Professionalization in career patterns ; b) Criteria for personnel selection ; c) Greater use of female personnel. 4) Causation. Situations related to criminality : a) How international relations and other external factors affect crime ; 6) Hierarchy of causes of crime ; c) Migrants. Minorities in general ; d) Relation to socio-economic development in different countries ; e) A biological approach to criminal subcultures, constitutional types, twin studies, etc. ; f) Cultural and social approach : norms of moral judgment, ideals presented to the young, etc. ; g) Effect of social change : crime in developing countries, etc. (6 proposals) ; h) Effects of mass media, rapid dissemination of patterns of deviant behaviour (2 proposals). 5) Varieties of crime and criminals : a) Traffic in drugs ; b) Prison riots ; c) Violence particularly in youth (7 proposals) ; d) Dangerousness ; e) Relation to the rights of man (including rights of deviants); f) Female crime (2 proposals) ; g) Prostitution ; i) The mentally ill offender ; ;) Cultural variations in types of crime ; k) Organized crime ; /) Use of firearms ; m) Gambling ; n) Victims and victimology. 6) Treatment : evaluation : a) Social re-adaptation of offenders ; b) Statistical research on corrections, with possible computerization of data ; c) Comparisons between prisons and other closed environments ; d) Extra-legal consequences of deprivation of liberty ; e) Rehabilitation in developing countries ; f ) Criteria for evaluation of programs of correction ; g) Biochemical treatment (2 proposals) ; i) Differential treatment of different types of offense. Evaluation ; /) Prisons as agencies of treatment ; k) Effects of different degrees of restriction of liberty ; /) Environments of correctional institutions ; m) Study of prison societies ; n) Crime as related to the total social system. 7) Research methodology : a) Publication of what is known regarding methodology ; b) Methods of research ; c) Culturally-comparable vs culturally-contrasting situations ; d) Development of a new clearer terminology to facilitate communication ; e) Actual social validity of the penal law. 8) Statistics : epidemiology : a) Need for comparable international statistics ; standardized criteria (3 proposals) ; b) Difficulties. Criminologists must collect the data themselves. 9) Training of research workers : Recruiting and training of « com-paratists ». 10) Machinery : Committee of co-ordination. Discussions The discussions at the Symposium were based on these suggestions, the main concentration falling on problems of manifestations of violence in the world today, the phenomenon of student contestation, and on human rights and the corresponding responsibilities attached thereto. Although the participants did not come to definite conclusions as to the respective merits of the problems submitted for consideration, they did discuss the conditions under which comparative studies of these problems should be approached, the techniques appropriate to obtaining valid results, and the limitations on this type or work. Four workshops were established and studied the various problems. The first tackled the problems of the definition of the criteria of « danger » represented by different type of criminals ; the problem of discovering whether the value system which underlies the Human Rights Declaration corresponds to the value system of today's youth; the problem of the treatment of criminals ; of female criminality ; and, finally, of violence in the form of individual and group manifestations. The second workshop devoted its main consideration to the revolt of youth and to organized crime, also proposing that an international instrument bank of documentation and information be established. The third workshop considered problems of theory : how the police and the public view the criminal ; the opportunity of making trans-cultural comparisons on such subjects as arrest, prison, etc. ; and the role of the media of information in the construction of value systems. The fourth workshop blazed a trail in the matter of methodology appropriate to research in comparative criminology. The period of discussions which followed the report of the four workshops gave rise to a confrontation between two schools of thought within the group of specialists. The question arose as to whether the problem of student contestation falls within the scope of the science of criminology. Several experts expressed the opinion that criminologists ought not to concern themselves with a question which really belongs in the realm of political science. On the other hand, the majority of the participants appeared to feel that the phenomenon of student contestation did indeed belong in the framework of criminological research. One of the experts in particular took it upon himself to be the spokesman of this school of thought. There are those, he said, who feel that criminology should confine itself and its research to known criminality, to hold-ups, rape, etc. However, one should not forget that penal law rests on political foundations, the legality of power, a certain moral consensus of the population. Today, it is exactly this « legitimate » authority that is being contested. Is it not to be expected, therefore, that criminology should show interest in all sociological phenomena which have legal and criminal implications ? Contestation and violence have consequences for the political foundations of penal law, and therefore are fit subjects for the research of the criminologist. International Centre {or Comparative Criminology The First International Symposium for Research in Comparative Criminology situated itself and its discussions within the framework and in the perspectives opened by the founding of the International Centre for Comparative Criminology. The Centre is sponsored jointly by the University of Montreal and the International Society for Criminology, with headquarters at the University of Montreal. As one of the participants emphasized, criminologists need a place to retreat from the daily struggle, to meditate, to seek out and propose instruments of research valid for the study of problems common to several societies. Viewing the facts as scientists, we are looking for operational concepts. Theoreticians and research workers will rough out the material and, hopefully, this will inspire conferences and symposiums of practitioners, jurists, sociologists, penologists, and other specialists. Above all, it will give common access to international experience, something which is lacking at present both at the level of documentation and of action. A bank of instruments of method- ology in the field of comparative criminology does not exist at the present time. The Centre will undertake to compile and analyse research methods used in scientific surveys, and it will establish such an instrument bank. It will also gather and analyse information pertaining to legislative reforms now in progress or being contemplated in the field of criminal justice. Through the use of computers, the Centre will be able to put these two projects into effect and make the results easily accessible to research workers, and to all those concerned in this field. The participants at the Symposium were given a view of the extent of the problems envisaged for research by the future Centre. It is hoped that this initiative will be of concrete use to research workers, private organizations, public services and governments at many levels, and in many countries.

Recent television programming in Italy has begun to focus on the themes of female friendship and girlhood, moving from a long history of traditionally male-centered narratives towards stories that privilege female subjectivity. This article analyzes this recent trend by looking at three different programs: the HBO/Rai adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels L’amica geniale; the Netflix production Baby, based on the 2013 Rome teen prostitution scandal; and the web series SKAM Italia, based on the international series that originated in Norway. Despite their apparent distinctions in terms of target audiences, genre, and style, all three shows place the friendship between adolescent girls as their primary narrative concern. Through analyses of each series, we can see how these representations employ similar tropes in their depictions of girlhood and friendship, such as the mirroring and doubling of the female protagonists; the presence of the love triangle; the configuration of female friendship in relation to gay male characters; and the suggestion of potential lesbian desire. This article meditates on the possible motivations for this newfound focus on female subjectivity as a potential strategy for marketing Italian television worldwide.

Abstract In the nineteenth century, when Italy was undergoing significant institutional and socio-economic changes, the bourgeoisie affirmed its principles of ‘respectability’. In this context, the spread of prostitution among the poorest and most disadvantaged classes of the South became a real obsession for bourgeois society. Through the study of primary sources relating to various health institutions, this paper aims to assess the role of the Opere Pie in the control and management of prostitution. It furthermore highlights the hybrid function of the re-education, assistance and segregation of those women who represented a danger to bourgeois morality and order. Finally, it sheds light on the living conditions and social environment of young prostitutes.

Prostitution clients’ attitudes toward gender equality are important indicators of how masculinity relates to the demand for commercial sexual services. Research on male client misogyny has been inconclusive, and few studies compare men in different markets. Using an online survey of 519 clients of sexual services, we examine whether male client attitudes toward gender role equality are related to the main methods customers used to access prostitution services (i.e., through print or online media vs. in-person contact). We found no differences among men in these markets in attitudes toward gender role equality in the workplace and home. This is in a context where all clients had more egalitarian attitudes toward women’s roles than the U.S. male population in the General Social Survey (GSS). However, clients in in-person markets were less supportive of affirmative action than in online markets in a context where all clients were less supportive compared to the national average. These findings point to need to rethink how masculinity and gender role attitudes affect patterns of male demand for paid sex.

This article engages with the field of social work's role in humanitarian and criminal legal responses to sex work in the United States over the last century. Our historical review reveals that, through interdisciplinary collaboration in the criminalization and rehabilitation of sex workers, social workers have contributed to the transformation of “prostitution” from an issue of sex workers’ rights to a psychological, criminal legal, and medical phenomenon. This has exacerbated the harm and stigma experienced by sex workers. In exploring social work interventions on sex work from the Progressive Era through the rise of neoliberalism, this article places its modern iteration, prostitution diversion programming, within the context of social work's carceral history with sex workers. We choose these periods not for their chronicity, but rather for the salient themes in these historical interventions that characterize modern diversion programming: power and control, punitive service provision, patriarchal rescue, and carceral feminism. To align with social work's mandate for social justice and client self-determination, this article offers policy and practice implications grounded in the decriminalization of sex work and divestment from the police and courts. Alternative service approaches spearheaded by sex workers are explored and placed within the context of labor, racial, gender, and immigration justice.

In spite of the fact that the term ‘sexology’ was popularized in the United States by Elizabeth Osgood Goodrich Willard and that the term ‘sexual science’—which is usually attributed to Iwan Bloch as ‘Sexualwissenschaft’—was actually coined by the American phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler in 1852, the archives of American sexology have received scant attention in the period prior to Alfred Kinsey. In my article, I explore the role of Transcendentalism and phrenology in the production and development of American sexology and sexual science. In particular, I argue that shifting the origins of sexology and sexual science away from Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Karl-Maria Kertbeny and the more familiar narratives of the German invention of sexuality furnishes a radically different account of early sexology and sexual science. Rather than the unevenly homophilic sympathies of early German activists, their American counterparts promote marital, reproductive, loving sex and vilify prostitution, polygamy, masturbation, contraception, sex for pleasure, and, if they think to mention it, sodomy. In addition to this less progressive story, however, I argue that early American sexologists provide the first theories of gender and help to provide a fuller description of the politics of sexology and sexual science.

Abstract In the 1920s, the Soviet Union was the site of the first state-led effort to reimagine domestic servants as workers. Yet this effort is absent from the global history of domestic service. Analysis of Soviet discourse on paid domestic labor, as well as cases of domestics challenging their employers in courts and arbitration, reveals that assumptions about class and gender informed the implementation of labor laws. While the employment of domestics did not constitute exploitation in the Marxist sense, the practice was widely viewed as petty-bourgeois in the early years after the revolution. As a result, domestic workers were very likely to win cases against their employers. By the mid-1920s, however, the state became aware of the role domestic workers played in freeing up the labor of their employers. The recognition of housework as socially useful labor led to the reimagining of domestic service as a practice compatible with socialism. Employers were no longer seen as exploiters by default, making it much harder for domestic workers to win cases against them. However, this shift did not change preferential treatment of domestics in cases involving access to housing, as Soviet courts feared that homeless women would inevitably turn to prostitution.

In the television series Sex and the City, there is a scene which illustrates a familiar contempt for suburban life as dull and boring. Implicit is the oppositional view that urban life by comparison, is the more exciting one. Charlotte (one of four women whose sexual and romantic relationships are the focus of the series), has spent time with her in-laws in an upper middle class suburban enclave, and is confessing to her three girl friends her fantasies and ultimate sexual encounter with her in-law's hunk of a gardener. She's racked with guilt over the incident, not least because she is married to the sexually non-performing Trey. At this point in the conversation, Samantha, whose voracious appetite for men is her hallmark, dismisses Charlotte's concerns with the retort: 'well honey really, what's the point of living in the suburbs if you can't fuck the gardener?' Ergo, a life of suburban mediocrity deserves some kind of compensation, preferably an exciting sexual antidote. Samantha's remark draws on a wealth of discourses which reinforce the opposition between the city and the suburbs, and the city and the country, where the city is the crucible for adventure, opportunity and sometimes danger. For these New York women, it is precisely excitement and the possibility of sex and romance that holds them to the metropolis. The association of sexual opportunity for women and the metropolis is something of a departure from earlier narratives of the city. Gender and sexual identity - through discourse, narrative, image and metaphor are inscribed in spatial landscapes, with a rich source to be found in articulations of the city. Inscriptions are contingent on social, economic and cultural forces which shift over time and place, often defining and redefining utopian and dystopian visions. The rise of the great nineteenth century European cities, for instance provoked both utopian and dystopian discourse. Industrialization, overcrowding and poverty were issues which provided representations of the city as menacing and deleterious (as represented in the writing of Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe), while the practice of the flaneur--a nineteenth century male who observed and chronicled the new cities of nineteenth century Europe--confirmed the metropolis as a storehouse of aesthetic and experiential delights. The contemporary zeitgeist is largely utopian, the postmodern city is desirable, uber-cool: sexy. Look at any advertising for inner city apartment living to confirm this. The city's erotic potential is characterized by one of the fundamental conditions of urban life: the close proximity in which we all live among strangers (see also Patton 1995). On a psychic, if not material level, this might provide opportunity for reinvention and renewal of self, for an individual freedom and expression denied to those living in smaller and closer communities. This is the attraction and romanticism of the city. The proximity of strangers gives urban life its erotic possibilities, the capacity for anonymity, that chance meetings with strangers, who we so often live and work among. Lawrence Knopp (1995) describes this aspect of city life as: a world of strangers, a particular life space with a logic and sexuality of its own. The city's sexuality is described as an eroticisation of many of the characteristic experiences of modern urban life: anonymity, voyeurism, exhibitionism, consumption, authority (and challenges to it), tactility, motion danger, power, navigation and restlessness. (151) I've been collecting metaphors of the city and these reveal the congruence between eros and the city. I have yet to find one that is masculine. For instance, journalist Harold Nicholson summing up three European cities used woman as metaphor: 'London is an old lady - Paris is a woman - But Berlin is a girl in a pullover, not much powder on her face' (Petro 1989, 21). Jean Baudrillard's description of Las Vegas as 'that great whore' is similarly feminized and sexualized, and metropolises like New York where aggressive advertisements are like 'wall to wall prostitution.' For Baudrillard, in New York, the plumes of smoke are reminiscent of 'girls wringing out their hair after bathing' (in Docker 1995, 106). Author and journalist John Birmingham described Sydney as 'a tart, loud and brash'. I should add to the list a straw poll of metaphors I conducted for Brisbane, my favourite being Brisbane as a 'middle aged woman in resort wear' (thanks to Maureen Burns for this contribution). But maybe, with the focus on urban development, she might be getting younger. For a (heterosexual) man the city can be alluring, dangerous and feminine. Eros, the city, femininity and danger all collide in the film noir genre, in films such as Roman Polanski's Chinatown, Lawrence Kasden's Body Heat, where beautiful femme fatales lead men astray, or further down the path of corruption. Woman as stranger is alluring and seductive for men, but for woman the chance encounter with a male stranger might signal caution and fear. For women, the dangers are clear: the threat of sexual danger, the chance encounter with a male whose intentions may not be benign. `Reclaim the Night' marches are testament to women's concerns about safety and access to public space, particularly at night. Although research shows that the overwhelming majority of assaults upon women occur in the home, by a person known to the woman, this sober fact does not prevent the cautionary strategies most women employ while out at night. Nor does it diminish the fear and limitations which are the reality of women's experience in public space, particularly at night. Historically, women's role in the public space of the city has been an ambivalent one. A number of analyses of women's role in the nineteenth century city identify the ways in which women in public space were managed and regulated by social and economic interests. Courted on the one hand as consumers for the new department stores and a burgeoning capitalist economy, women were also subject to strict codes of conduct, lest their virtue be in question. Judith Walkowitz in The City of Dreadful Delights examined the ways in which public discourse of danger in nineteenth century London, including the account of Jack the Ripper, as malevolent male stranger, function as a form of moral regulation for women in these newly created city spaces. Both Walkowitz and cultural historian Elizabeth Wilson argue that the metropolis of the nineteenth century, eroded the boundaries between private and public spheres and divisions of labour between men and women. A disquiet and concern over women entering these new public spaces manifested in a discourse of danger and morality, underpinned by the idea that women were at the mercy of their passions and required control and guidance. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Freud had something to say about this. He speculated that the condition of agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces, (which for Freud was an intrinsically female neurosis), was linked to a repressed inner desire to walk the streets, to be streetwalkers (Vidler 1993, 35). But times have changed: the contemporary postmodern city, is celebrated, promoted and regulated as one of diversity, inclusivity and liveablity. Access and amenity are the buzzwords of local and state government policy. In the postmodern city everyone ostensibly is made welcome and a plethora of infrastructure support different interests and lifestyles. Cafés culture has provided a social space for women in particular, previously denied wholesale access to that other Australian social space, the pub. Women's earning capacity means that many of their interests are represented culturally and socially and that they are more firmly inserted into the fabric of city life. Television series and sit-coms located in the city, where groups of friends sometimes live together; Friends, Seinfeld, Sex and the City reinforce the perception of city living as a place of opportunity and fun for younger women and men. Promotional literature is quick to exploit this image. A tourism brochure for the inner city Sydney (non!) suburb of Newtown, describes the attractions of the area: `some cities are cursed with suburbs, but Sydney's blessed with Newtown, a cosmopolitan neighbourhood.' As if Cabramatta, Fairfield or Parramatta, all outer suburban areas of Sydney, weren't cosmopolitan. A billboard in Brisbane's urban renewal area of Newstead, advertises apartment living as 'Urban living NOT suburban'. Drawing upon the rhetoric of opposition and expressing the familiar anti-suburban sentiment which for Australia, originated in the bohemian movement of the late nineteenth century (see also Kinnane 1998). This tradition probably reached its apotheosis with Barry Humphries in the 1960s whose comedic alter ego, Edna Everage signified everything that was despicable and mindless about suburbia. Edna's obsession with housing décor, cooking and recipes, social status and the minutiae of domesticity was portrayed with a venomous satire that depended upon a trivialization of traditional feminine competencies. Is there a connection between the anti- suburban tradition of cultural elites and the suburbs' close association with the domestic and feminine sphere of life? Patrick White in describing the mythical suburb of Sarsaparilla claimed it as 'a geographical hell ruled by female demons' (in Duruz 1994). American historian Lewis Mumford in his seminal work The City in History wrote that the suburbs are not 'merely a child centred environment: it is based on a childish view of the world which is sacrificed to the pleasure principle' (1961). Little wonder that today, younger women are fleeing the suburbs and flocking to the city, attracted by its possibility of adventure and eros. The other day I picked up my teenage daughter from her school to which she had returned after a five day camp in the bush. 'Aaaagh', she sighed with a sense of relief, as we approached our densely populated inner city suburb, 'buildings again… and not too many trees'. The following morning we were out in the lush and fecund Samford Valley, this time at her first soccer match for the season. As we drove further into the bush she yelled out, 'Oh no, not all these trees again!' Is this the response of a typical twenty- first century urban woman? References Docker, John. (1995) Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A cultural history. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Duruz, Jean. (1994) 'Romancing the Suburbs?' in Katherine Gibson and Sophie Watson (eds) Metropolis Now. Sydney, Pluto Press. Kinnane, Gary. (1998) 'Shopping at Last!:History, Fiction and the Anti-Suburban Tradition.' Australian Literary Studies: Writing the Everyday, Australian Literature and the Limits of Suburbia, 18. 4: 41-55. Knopp, Lawrence. (1995) 'Sexuality and Urban Space: a framework for analysis' in David Bell and Gill Valentine (eds) Mapping Desire. London, Routledge. Mumford, Lewis. (1961) The City in History, Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects. London, Penguin. Patton, Paul. (1995) 'Imaginary Cities' in Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson (eds) Postmodern Cities and Spaces. Cambridge, Blackwell Publishers. Petro, Patrice (1989) Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimer Germany. Princeton, Princeton University Press. Vidler, Anthony (1993) 'Bodies in Space/Subjects in the City: Psychopathologies of Modern Urbanism.' Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 5.3: 31-51. Walkowitz, Judith. (1992) City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in late Victorian London. Chicago, Chicago University Press. Watson, Sophie and Gibson, Katherine. (1995) Postmodern Cities and Spaces. Oxford, Basil Blackwell. Wilson, Elizabeth. (1991) The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, The Control of Disorder and Women. London: Virago. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Felton, Emma. "The City" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/eros.php>. Chicago Style Felton, Emma, "The City" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/eros.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Felton, Emma. (2002) The City. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/eros.php> ([your date of access]).

As a former teacher and current researcher, I have personally heard as well as read about many different reasons why homosexuality, bisexuality, and, more generally, sexuality other than heterosexuality should not be discussed in the classroom. There is the argument that sexuality is the domain of the parent, not the teacher, and about the numerous religions that do not condone homo/bisexuality. I have read about teachers’ sense of discomfort with discussing sexuality and sexual orientation. Most frequently, I have come up against the argument that students are not certain of their sexual orientation until adulthood, that teaching about the range of sexualities might confuse ‘impressionable’ adolescents and that there are ‘no gay students in my class’ so such education is unnecessary. Contrary to this last point, research with same-sex attracted (SSA) adolescents has shown that they are first aware of their attractions to members of the same sex as early as 10 years of age (D’Augelli, Pilkington, and Hershberger) and begin to feel concrete about their sexual orientation between the ages of 14 and 16 years old (Rosario, et al.). As far as numbers of young people who are attracted to members of the same sex, recent research using random samples of secondary-school aged students has placed percentages between 2.5% (Garofalo, et al.) and 6.3% (Smith, Lindsay, and Rosenthal). However, as Savin-Williams points out, ‘the vast majority of youths who will eventually identify themselves as lesbian, bisexual or gay seldom embrace this socially ostracized label during adolescence…’, leading to speculation that reported percentages of SSA young people are actually conservative estimates rather than true figures (Savin-Williams 262). To date, no research has shown that adolescents have become homosexual because they were exposed to homosexuality as a topic within the school curriculum. In fact, it is quite the opposite, with many SSA students coming to terms with their homo/bisexuality despite it being pathologised within the curriculum and punishable by sanctioned victimisation within the school environment. The fact that heterosexuality is ‘policed’ and reinforced with the school context is not surprising. In his History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Foucault writes about sexuality as a locus of social control and points out that throughout history individual’s sexual thoughts, beliefs, and, ultimately, actions have been impacted by socially constructed sexual norms. Educational sociologists have taken this idea into the classroom, viewing heterosexuality as a part of the ‘hidden curriculum’, the social norms that students learn without them being part of the formal lesson (Plummer). In this sense, heterosexuality becomes part of students’ unspoken and assumed identity in the classroom and, because of socially sanctioned homophobia/heterosexism, being heterosexual becomes a form of cultural and social capital. In line with some teachers’ reluctance to discuss homo/bisexuality in the classroom are their attitudes toward homosexuality. A number of studies have highlighted the homophobic attitudes of pre-service teachers, primary and secondary school teachers, and counsellor trainees as well as their reluctance and discomfort with discussing homo/bisexuality in the classroom (Sears; Warwick, Aggleton, and Douglas; Barrett and McWhirter; Cahill and Adams). These negative attitudes can manifest themselves in a variety of ways detrimental to SSA students, from simply avoiding homosexual topics or issues to discussing these issues or topics in a negative manner. Recent research with same-sex attracted secondary school students spoke to this trend. When asked about ways in which homosexuality was discussed in the classroom, three main points were consistently raised: sexuality which is not heterosexuality is presented in a reduced form (i.e., male homosexuality); homosexuality is pathologised as either a mental illness or a precursor to infection; and, teachers exhibited prejudice against non-heterosexual sexualities that would not be tolerated in the instance of a racial or gender issue (Ellis and High, 221-2). Research in this area has also investigated the attitudes of secondary school students toward homosexuality, with results showing high levels of homophobia and strict gender role beliefs (Van de Ven; Price; Smith; Hillier; Thurlow); however, recent research has shown some improvement in students’ attitudes (Smith, et al.). Knowing what we know about the ways in which homosexuality is presented within the school setting (or in many cases simply not presented), coupled with the attitudes of the school community members toward homosexuality and gender roles, as reflective of societal norms, it is not surprising these sentiments manifest themselves in the form of victimisation for SSA students and students who are perceived to be SSA. While the ‘hidden curriculum’ reinforces heterosexuality as a covert form of victimisation, overt forms of victimisation of SSA students occur with alarming regularity. Research has highlighted stories of SSA students’ experiences of verbal and physical abuse, property damage, and social isolation within the school setting with a common theme being a lack of intervention on the part of the adult school staff (Jordan, Vaughan, and Woodworth; Flowers and Buston; Kosciw and Cullen). A good deal of research has positioned SSA young people as ‘at-risk’, using data which places heterosexual-identifying adolescents as a ‘control group’ and citing elevated drug and alcohol use, suicide attempts/ideation, and risky sexual practices among the population of SSA young people. This type of research problematises the SSA young people themselves, rather than the environments which they are subject to and the harassment they may be experiencing therein. A far smaller body of research has examined correlates of victimisation for SSA students, the results being exactly what one would expect. At-school victimisation of SSA students has been positively correlated with general risk outcomes such as negative mental health effects (D’Augelli, Pilkington and Hershberger; Rivers), drug and alcohol abuse, and suicide attempts (Bontempo and D’Augelli). Smaller still is the body of research that examines school-related outcomes for SSA students. Victimisation of these students has been positively correlated with their frequency of missed school days as a result of personal safety fears (Bontempo and D’Augelli) as well as their reported academic outcomes and educational aspirations (Kosciw). In light of the body of literature on how SSA students experience the school environment, a logical path seems to emerge. Societal norms surrounding sexuality contribute to adult school staff members’ attitudes toward homosexuality. These norms, coupled with the palpable attitudes of staff, effect the overall tenor of the school environment toward homosexuality which, in turn, contributes to students’ attitudes toward homosexuality. The sentiments of students and staff undoubtedly have a significant impact on how or if sexuality is discussed within the classroom, victimisation of SSA students, and whether or not this victimisation is punished or ignored by staff members. Consequently, victimisation of SSA students has been found to be correlated with both general risk outcomes as well as decreased academic outcomes. Clearly there is cause for concern. If SSA students are more likely to report decreased school outcomes and higher risk behaviours the more they report being victimised within the school setting, then the solution seems rather obvious – protect SSA students from incidences of at-school victimisation. Without doing so, schools are allowing an inequitable school experience for SSA students and students who are perceived to be SSA as well as breaching their classroom duty of care. That said, adolescents cannot be told simply to stop ‘teasing gay kids’. Instead, a school culture must be created wherein homophobia is not tolerated, and heterosexism is recognised as such and the power it has over individual’s thoughts and actions is brought to light. Towards that end, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender topics, issues, and historical/prominent figures must be discussed in the classroom and the historical discrimination of SSA persons should be taught in the same way that racial/ethnic histories of discrimination are part of the curriculum. Through education, homophobia can begin to be viewed in the same way as racism and religious discrimination are viewed – as ignorant and entirely unacceptable. Perhaps this sounds like some gay utopian dream, but I believe that at a future date society will progress to this level and that education is fundamental to the process. By silencing sexualities, educators are marginalising and disenfranching a definite population of their SSA students, not to mention the effects this has on students who have SSA family members or friends. Teachers are uncomfortable discussing homosexuality in the classroom? I am uncomfortable with SSA students missing school because they are afraid, leaving school early because they do not feel that they belong, and reporting decreased marks and lowered aspirations for tertiary education. Silencing (homo)sexualities is a bad idea, not only for SSA persons but for any society which has illusions of being civilised, modernised, or unified. References Barrett, Kathleen, and Benedict McWhirter. “Counselor Trainees Perceptions of Clients Based on Client Sexual Orientation.” Counselor Education and Supervision 41.3 (2002): 219-30. Bontempo, Daniel, and Anthony D’Augelli. “Effects of at-School Vicitimization and Sexual Orientation on Lesbian, Gay, or Bisexual Youths’ Health Risk Behavior.” Journal of Adolescent Health 30 (2002): 364-74. Cahill, Betsy, and Eve Adams. “An Exploratory Study of Early Childhood Teachers’ Attitudes toward Gender Roles.” Sex Roles 36.7/8 (1997): 517-29. D’Augelli, Anthony, Neil Pilkington, and Scott Hershberger. “Incidence and Mental Health Impact of Sexual Orientation Victimization of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youths in High School.” School Psychology Quarterly 17.2 (2002): 148-160. Ellis, Viv, and Sue High. “Something More to Tell You: Gay, Lesbian or Bisexual Young People’s Experiences of Secondary Schooling.” British Educational Research Journal 30.2 (2004): 213-25. Flowers, Paul, and Kate Buston. “‘I Was Terrified of Being Different’: Exploring Gay Men’s Accounts of Growing Up in a Heterosexist Society.” Journal of Adolescence 24 (2001): 51-65. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Garofalo, Robert, et al. “The Association between Health Risk Behaviors and Sexual Orientation among a School-Based Sample of Adolescents.” Pediatrics 101.5 (1998): 895-903. Hillier, Lynne. “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Unsure: The Rural Eleven Percent.” Health in Difference: Proceedings of the First National Lesbian, Gay, Transgender and Bisexual Health Conference, 3-5 October 1996. Ed. Anthony Smith. Sydney: Australian Centre for Lesbian and Gay Research, 1997. 90-94. Jordan, K, J Vaughan, and K Woodworth. “I Will Survive: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youths’ Experience of High School.” School Experiences of Gay and Lesbian Youth: The Invisible Minority. Ed. M Harris. Binghamton: The Harrington Park Press, 1997. Kosciw, J. The 2003 National School Climate Survey: The School-Related Experiences of Our Nation’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth. New York: GLSEN, 2004. Kosciw, J, and M Cullen. The 2001 National School Climate Survey: The School-Related Experiences of Our Nation’s, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth. New York: GLSEN, 2002. Plummer, Ken. “Lesbian and Gay Youth in England.” Gay and Lesbian Youth. Ed. G Herdt. New York: Harrington Park Press, 1989. 195-216. Price, James. “High School Students’ Attitudes toward Homosexuality.” Journal of School Health 52 (1982): 469-74. Rivers, Ian. “Long-Term Consequences of Bullying.” Issues in Therapy with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Clients. Ed. Dominic Davies. Vol. 3. Pink Therapy. Buckingham: Open UP, 2000. 146-59. Rosario, Margaret, et al. “The Psychosexual Development of Urban Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Youths.” Journal of Sex Research 33.2 (1996): 113-26. Savin-Williams, Ritch. “Verbal and Physical Abuse as Stressors in the Lives of Lesbian, Gay Male, and Bisexual Youths: Associations with School Problems, Running Away, Substance Abuse, Prostitution and Suicide.” Journal of Counseling and Clinical Psychology 62.2 (1994): 261-9. Sears, James. “Educators, Homosexuality and Homosexual Students: Are Personal Feelings Related to Professional Beliefs?” Coming out of the Classroom Closet. Ed. K Harbeck. New York: Harrington Park Press, 1992. Smith, Anthony, Jo Lindsay, and Doreen A. Rosenthal. “Same-Sex Attraction, Drug Injection and Binge Drinking among Australian Adolescents.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health 23.6 (1999): 643-46. Smith, Anthony, Jo Lindsay, and Doreen A. Rosenthal. Secondary Students and Sexual Health 2002: Results of the 3rd National Survey of Australian Secondary Students, Hiv/Aids and Sexual Health. Melbourne: Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University, 2003. Smith, George. “”The Ideology of ‘Fag’: The School Experience of Gay Students.” The Sociological Quarterly 39.2 (1998): 309-35. Thurlow, Crispin. “Naming the ‘Outsider Within’: Homophobic Pejoratives and the Verbal Abuse of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual High-School Pupils.” Journal of Adolescence 24 (2001): 25-38. Van de Ven, Paul. “Comparisons among Homophobic Reactions of Undergraduates, High School Students, and Young Offenders.” Journal of Sex Research 31.2 (1994): 117-135. Warwick, Ian, Peter Aggleton, and Nicola Douglas. “Playing It Safe: Addressing the Emotional and Physical Health of Lesbian and Gay Pupils in the U.K.” Journal of Adolescence 24 (2001): 129-40. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mikulsky, Jacqueline. "Silencing (Homo)Sexualities in School ... A Very Bad Idea." M/C Journal 8.1 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/06-mikulsky.php>. APA Style Mikulsky, J. (Feb. 2005) "Silencing (Homo)Sexualities in School ... A Very Bad Idea," M/C Journal, 8(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0502/06-mikulsky.php>.

To sin by silence, when we should protest,Makes cowards out of men.— Ella Wheeler WilcoxProtest is culturally entwined in historical and juro-political realities and is a fundamental element of the exercise of individual and collective rights. As our title notes, while there are currently many ‘protests in progress’ around the world, there is also a great deal of ‘progress in protest’ in terms of what protests look like, their scale and number, how they are formed and conducted, their goals, how they can be studied, as well as the varying responses formed in relation to protest. The etymology of protest associates two important dynamics pertaining to the topic. Firstly, a protest is something that is put forward, forth, or toward the front (from the Latin pro); essentially, it is in one manner or another, made publically. Secondly, it suggests that a person or persons have beared witness (testis) and instead of remaining silent, have made a declaration or assertion (testari). In other words, someone has made public their disapproval or objection. The nine articles that comprise this issue of M/C Journal on ‘protest’ reminds us of these salient elements of protest. Each, in their own way, highlight the importance of not remaining silent when faced with an injustice or in order to promote social change. As Bill McKibben (7) outlines in his foreword to an excellent collection of protest documents, ‘voices of protest ... are often precisely what propels human civilisation forward and allows it to become unstuck’. However, not all forms of contemporary protest shares ideological or progressive aims. Here, we might consider the emergence of contentious formations such as the alt-right and antifa, what is considered ‘fake’ or ‘real’, and ongoing conflicts between notions of individual and collective rights and state sovereignty.This modest but insightful collection demonstrates the broad scope of this field of inquiry. This issue explores the intersections among social justice, identity and communications technology, as well as the convergences and divergences in the form, function and substance of protest. Through an analysis of protest’s relationship to media, the author’s highlight the possibilities of protest to effect social change. The issue begins with Lakota screenwriter and activist Floris White Bull’s (Floris Ptesáŋ Huŋká) discussion of the documentary AWAKE, a Dream from Standing Rock (2017) and the #NODAPL protest. The film, split into three parts, takes a poignant and quite personal look at the native-led peaceful resistance at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota in 2016. This protest involved tens of thousands of activists from all over the world who opposed the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) which was to transport fracked oil directly underneath the Missouri River and through sovereign Lakota land (see Image 1). However, the events at Standing Rock were not a single-issue protest and brought activists together over a range of interrelated issues including environmental protection, human rights, water security, community health and Native American sovereignty. The Water Protectors were also forced to contest racist and disparaging media representations. As such, Standing Rock remains a site of cultural exchange and learning. These protests are not historical, but instead, are an ongoing struggle. The film AWAKE is important as testimony to the injustices at Standing Rock. A short description of the film is first provided in order to provide some additional context to perspectives addressed in the film. From there, White Bull has been invited to respond to questions posed by the editors regarding the Standing Rock Protests and documentary films such as AWAKE. As an Indigenous person fighting for justice, White Bull reminds readers that ‘[t]he path forward is the same as it has always been – holding on to our goals, values and dignity with resilience’.Image 1: Dakota Access Pipeline Protesters, 2016. Photo credit: Indigenous Environmental Network.Cat Pausé and Sandra Grey use an example of fat shaming to investigate how media impacts body politics and determines who is enfranchised to voice public dissent. Media becomes a mechanism for policing and governing bodily norms and gendered identities. As well as outlining a brief history of feminist body activism, the authors draw on personal experience and interview material with activists to reflect on fat embodiment and politics. Also informed by intersectional approaches, their work alerts us to the diverse vectors by which injustice and oppression fall on some bodies differently as well as the diverse bodies assembled in any crowd.Greg Watson suggests that “[c]ontemporary societies are increasingly becoming sites in which it is more difficult for people to respectfully negotiate disagreements about human diversity”. Drawing on his experiences organising Human Libraries throughout Australia, Watson argues these spaces create opportunities for engaging with difference. In this sense Human Libraries can be considered sites which protest the micropublics’ “codes of civility” which produce everyday marginalisations of difference.Micropolitics and creative forms of protest are also central to Ella Cutler, Jacqueline Gothe, and Alexandra Crosby’s article. The author’s consider three design projects which seek to facilitate ethical communication with diverse communities. Drawing on Guy Julier’s tactics for activist design, each project demonstrates the value of slowing down in order to pay attention to experience. In this way, research through design offers a reflexive means for engaging social change.Research practices are also central to making visible community resistance. Anthony McCosker and Timothy Graham consider the role of social networking in urban protests through the campaign to save the iconic Melbourne music venue The Palace (see Image 2). Their article considers the value of social media data and analytics in relation to the court proceedings and trial processes. Given the centrality of social media to activist campaigns their reflections provide a timely evaluation of how data publics are constituted and their ongoing legacy.Image 2: Melbourne’s Palace Theatre before demolition. Photo Credit: Melbourne Heritage Action.For Marcelina Piotrowski pleasure is central to understanding data production and protest. She draws on a Deleuze and Guattarian framework in order to consider protests against oil pipelines in British Columbia. Importantly, through this theoretical framework of ‘data desires’, pleasure is not something owned by the individual subject but rather holds the potential to construct generative social collectivities. This is traced through three different practices: deliberation in online forums; citizen science and social media campaigns. This has important implications for understanding environmental issues and our own enfolding within them. Nadine Kozak takes a look at how Online Service Providers (OSPs) have historically used internet ‘blackouts’ in order to protest United States government regulations. Kozak points to protests against the Communications Decency Act (1996) which sought to regulate online pornographic material and the Stop Online Piracy Act (2011) which proposed increased federal government power to take action against online copyright infringement. Recently, the United States Congress recently passed the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), which hold OSPs liable for third-party content including advertising for prostitution. However, despite condemnation from the Department of Justice and trafficking victims, OSPs did not utilise blackouts as a means to protest these new measures. Kozak concludes that the decision to whether or not to utilise blackout protests is dependent on the interests of technology companies and large OSPs. It is evident that most especially since Donald Trump popularised the term, ‘fake news’ has taken a centre stage in discussions concerning media. In fact, the lines between what is fake and what is official have become blurred. Most recently, QAnon proponents have been attending Trump rallies and speeches giving further visibility to various conspiracy narratives stemming from online message boards (see Image 3). Marc Tuters, Emilija Jokubauskaitė, and Daniel Bach establishe a clear timeline of events in order to trace the origins of ‘#Pizzagate’; a 2016 conspiracy theory that falsely claimed that several U.S. restaurants and high-ranking officials of the Democratic Party were connected with human trafficking and an alleged child-sex ring. The authors investigate the affordances of 4chan to unpack how the site’s anonymity, rapid temporality and user collectivisation were instrumental in creating ‘bullshit’; a usage which the authors suggest is a “technical term for persuasive speech unconcerned with veracity”. This provides an understanding of how alt-right communities are assembled and motivated in a post-truth society. Image 3: QAnon proponents at Trump rally in Tampa, 31 July 2018. Photo credit: Kirby Wilson, Tampa Bay Times.Finally, Colin Salter analyses protests for animal rights as a lens to critique notions of national identity and belonging. Protests on whaling in the Southern Ocean (see Image 4) and live export trade from Australia continue to be highly contested political issues. Salter reflects on the ABC’s 2011 exposé into Australian live animal exports to Indonesia and the 2014 hearings at the International Court of Justice into Japanese whaling. Salter then traces the common elements between animal rights campaigns in order to demonstrate the manner in which the physical bodies of animals, their treatment, and the debate surrounding that treatment become sites for mapping cultural identity, nationhood, and sovereignty. Here, Salter suggests that such inquiry is useful for promoting broader consideration of efficacious approaches to animal advocacy and social change.Image 4: The ship Bob Barker, rammed by the Japanese whaling vessel Nishin Maru. Photo credit: Sea Shepherd Facebook Page. As indicated in the opening paragraphs, it is crucial for people committed to social justice to publically raise their voices in protest. As such, we would like to thank each of the authors for their important contributions to this issue on ‘protest’. In its own way, each contribution serves doubly as a form of protest and a means to understand the topic more clearly. There is solidarity evidenced in this issue. Taken as a whole, these articles attest to the importance of understanding protest and social change.ReferencesMcKibben, B. "Foreword." Voices of Protest: Documents of Courage and Dissent. Eds. Frank Lowenstein, Sheryl Lechner, and Erik Bruun. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2007. 7-8.Wilcox, E.W. "Protest." Poems of Problems. Chicago: W.B. Conkey Company, 1914.

I was born illegitimate. Born on an existential precipice. My unwed mother was 36 years old when she relinquished me. I was the fourth baby she was required to give away. After I emerged blood stained and blue tinged – abject, liminal – not only did the nurses refuse me my mother’s touch, I also lost the sound of her voice. Her smell. Her heart beat. Her taste. Her gaze. The silence was multi-sensory. When they told her I was dead, I also lost, within her memory and imagination, my life. I was adopted soon after but not told for over four decades. It was too shameful for even me to know. Imprinted at birth with a psychological ‘death’, I fell, as a Late Discovery Adoptee (LDA), into a socio-cultural and psychological abyss, frozen at birth at the bottom of a parturitive void from where, invisible within family, society, and self I was unable to form an undamaged sense of being.Throughout the 20th century (and for centuries before) this kind of ‘social abortion’ was the dominant script. An adoptee was regarded as a bastard, born of sin, the mother blamed, the father exonerated, and silence demanded (Lynch 28-74). My adoptive mother also sinned. She was infertile. But, in taking me on, she assumed the role of a womb worthy woman, good wife, and, in her case, reluctant mother (she secretly didn’t want children and was privately overwhelmed by the task). In this way, my mother, my adoptive mother, and myself are all the daughters of bereavement, all of us sacrificed on the altar of prejudice and fear that infertility, sex outside of marriage, and illegitimacy were unspeakable crimes for which a price must be paid and against which redemptive protection must be arranged. If, as Thomas Keneally (5) writes, “original sin is the mother fluid of history” then perhaps all three of us all lie in its abject waters. Grotevant, Dunbar, Kohler and Lash Esau (379) point out that adoption was used to ‘shield’ children from their illegitimacy, women from their ‘sexual indiscretions’, and adoptive parents from their infertility in the belief that “severing ties with birth family members would promote attachment between adopted children and parents”. For the adoptee in the closed record system, the socio/political/economic vortex that orchestrated their illegitimacy is born out of a deeply, self incriminating primal fear that reaches right back into the recesses of survival – the act of procreation is infested with easily transgressed life and death taboos within the ‘troop’ that require silence and the burial of many bodies (see Amanda Gardiner’s “Sex, Death and Desperation: Infanticide, Neonaticide, and Concealment of Birth in Colonial Western Australia” for a palpable, moving, and comprehensive exposition on the links between 'illegitimacy', the unmarried mother and child murder). As Nancy Verrier (24) states in Coming Home to Self, “what has to be understood is that separation trauma is an insidious experience, because, as a society, we fail to see this experience as a trauma”. Indeed, relinquishment/adoption for the baby and subsequent adult can be acutely and chronically painful. While I was never told the truth of my origins, of course, my body knew. It had been there. Sentient, aware, sane, sensually, organically articulate, it messaged me (and anyone who may have been interested) over the decades via the language of trauma, its lexicon and grammar cellular, hormonal, muscular (Howard & Crandall, 1-17; Pert, 72), the truth of my birth, of who I was an “unthought known” (Bollas 4). I have lived out my secret fatality in a miasmic nebula of what I know now to be the sequelae of adoption psychopathology: nausea, physical and psychological pain, agoraphobia, panic attacks, shame, internalised anger, depression, self-harm, genetic bewilderment, and generalised anxiety (Brodzinsky 25-47; Brodzinsky, Smith, & Brodzinsky 74; Kenny, Higgins, Soloff, & Sweid xiv; Levy-Shiff 97-98; Lifton 210-212; Verrier The Primal Wound 42-44; Wierzbicki 447-451) – including an all pervading sense of unreality experienced as dissociation (the experience of depersonalisation – where the self feels unreal – and derealisation – where the world feels unreal), disembodiment, and existential elision – all characteristics of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In these ways, my body intervened, acted out, groaned in answer to the social overlay, and from beyond “the dermal veil” tried to procure access, as Vicky Kirby (77) writes, to “the body’s opaque ocean depths” through its illnesses, its eloquent, and incessantly aching and silent verbosities deepened and made impossibly fraught because I was not told. The aim of this paper is to discuss one aspect of how my body tried to channel the trauma of my secret fatality and liminality: my pre-disclosure art work (the cellular memory of my trauma also expressed itself, pre-disclosure, through my writings – poetry, journal entries – and also through post-coital glossolalia, all discussed at length in my Honours research “Womb Tongues” and my Doctoral Dissertation “The Womb Artist – A Novel: Translating Pre-verbal Late Discovery Adoption Trauma into Narrative”). From the age of thirty onwards I spent twelve years in therapy where the cause of my childhood and adult psychopathology remained a mystery. During this time, my embodied grief and memories found their way into my art work, a series of 5’ x 3’ acrylic paintings, some of which I offer now for discussion (figures 1-4). These paintings map and express what my body knew but could not verbalise (without language to express my grief, my body found other ways to vent). They are symptom and sign of my pre-verbal adoption trauma, evidence that my body ‘knew’ and laboured ceaselessly and silently to find creative ways to express the incarcerated trauma. Post disclosure, I have used my paintings as artefacts to inform, underpin, and nourish the writing of a collection of poetry “Womb Tongues” and a literary novel/memoir “The Womb Artist” (TWA) in an ongoing autoethnographical, performative, and critical inquiry. My practice-led research as a now conscious and creative witness, fashions the recontextualisation of my ‘self’ into my ‘self’ and society, this time with cognisant and reparative knowledge and facilitates the translation of my body’s psychopathology and memory (explicit and implicit) into a healing testimony that explores the traumatised body as text and politicizes the issues surrounding LDAs (Riley 205). If I use these paintings as a memoirist, I use them second hand, after the fact, after they have served their initial purpose, as the tangible art works of a baby buried beneath a culture’s prejudice, shame, and judgement and the personal cries from the illegitimate body/self. I use them now to explore and explain my subclinical and subterranean life as a LDA.My pre-disclosure paintings (Figures 1-4) – filled with vaginal, fetal, uterine, and umbilical references – provide some kind of ‘evidence’ that my body knew what had happened to me as if, with the tenacity of a poltergeist, my ‘spectral self’ found ways to communicate. Not simply clues, but the body’s translation of the intra-psychic landscape, a pictorial and artistic séance into the world, as if my amygdala – as quasar and signal, homing device and history lesson (a measure, container, and memoir) – knew how to paint a snap shot or an x-ray of the psyche, of my cellular marrow memories (a term formulated from fellow LDA Sandy McCutcheon’s (76) memoir, The Magician’s Son when he says, “What I really wanted was the history of my marrow”). If, as Salveet Talwar suggests, “trauma is processed from the body up”, then for the LDA pre-discovery, non-verbal somatic signage is one’s ‘mother tongue’(25). Talwar writes, “non-verbal expressive therapies such as art, dance, music, poetry and drama all activate the sub-cortical regions of the brain and access pre-verbal memories” (26). In these paintings, eerily divinatory and pointed traumatic, memories are made visible and access, as Gussie Klorer (213) explains in regard to brain function and art therapy, the limbic (emotional) system and the prefrontal cortex in sensorimotor integration. In this way, as Marie Angel and Anna Gibbs (168) suggest, “the visual image may serve as a kind of transitional mode in thought”. Ruth Skilbeck in her paper First Things: Reflections on Single-lens Reflex Digital Photography with a Wide-angled Lens, also discusses (with reference to her photographic record and artistic expression of her mother’s death) what she calls the “dark matter” – what has been overlooked, “left out”, and/or is inexplicable (55) – and the idea of art work as the “transitional object” as “a means that some artists use, conceptually and yet also viscerally, in response to the extreme ‘separation anxiety’ of losing a loved one, to the void of the Unknown” (57). In my case, non-disclosure prevented my literacy and the evolution of the image into language, prevented me from fully understanding the coded messages left for me in my art work. However, each of my paintings is now, with the benefit of full disclosure, a powerful, penetrating, and comprehensible intra and extra sensory cry from the body in kinaesthetic translation (Lusebrink, 125; Klorer, 217). In Figure 1, ‘Embrace’, the reference to the umbilical is palpable, described in my novel “The Womb Artist” (184) this way; “two ropes tightly entwine as one, like a dark and dirty umbilical cord snaking its way across a nether world of smudged umbers”. There is an ‘abject’ void surrounding it. The cord sapped of its colour, its blood, nutrients – the baby starved of oxygen, breath; the LDA starved of words and conscious understanding. It has two parts entwined that may be seen in many ways (without wanting to reduce these to static binaries): mother/baby; conscious/unconscious; first person/third person; child/adult; semiotic/symbolic – numerous dualities could be spun from this embrace – but in terms of my novel and of the adoptive experience, it reeks of need, life and death, a text choking on the poetic while at the same time nourished by it; a text made ‘available’ to the reader while at the same narrowing, limiting, and obscuring the indefinable nature of pre-verbal trauma. Figure 1. Embrace. 1993. Acrylic on canvas.The painting ‘Womb Tongues’ (Figure 2) is perhaps the last (and, obviously, lasting) memory of the infinite inchoate universe within the womb, the umbilical this time wrapped around in a phallic/clitorial embrace as the baby-self emerges into the constrictions of a Foucauldian world, where the adoptive script smothers the ‘body’ encased beneath the ‘coils’ of Judeo-Christian prejudice and centuries old taboo. In this way, the reassigned adoptee is an acute example of power (authority) controlling and defining the self and what knowledge of the self may be allowed. The baby in this painting is now a suffocated clitoris, a bound subject, a phallic representation, a gagged ‘tongue’ in the shape of the personally absent (but socially imposing) omni-present and punitive patriarchy. Figure 2. Womb Tongues. 1997. Acrylic on canvas.‘Germination’ (Figure 3) depicts an umbilical again, but this time as emerging from a seething underworld and is present in TWA (174) this way, “a colony of night crawlers that writhe and slither on the canvas, moving as one, dozens of them as thin as a finger, as long as a dream”. The rhizomic nature of this painting (and Figure 4), becomes a heaving horde of psychosomatic and psychopathological influences and experiences, a multitude of closely packed, intense, and dendridic compulsions and symptoms, a mass of interconnected (and by nature of the silence and lie) subterranean knowledges that force the germination of a ‘ghost baby/child/adult’ indicated by the pale and ashen seedling that emerges above ground. The umbilical is ghosted, pale and devoid of life. It is in the air now, reaching up, as if in germination to a psychological photosynthesis. There is the knot and swarm within the unconscious; something has, in true alien fashion, been incubated and is now emerging. In some ways, these paintings are hardly cryptic.Figure 3. Germination.1993. Acrylic on canvas.In Figure 4 ‘The Birthing Tree’, the overt symbolism reaches ‘clairvoyant status’. This could be read as the family ‘tree’ with its four faces screaming out of the ‘branches’. Do these represent the four babies relinquished by our mother (the larger of these ‘beings’ as myself, giving birth to the illegitimate, silenced, and abject self)? Are we all depicted in anguish and as wraithlike, grotesquely simplified into pure affect? This illegitimate self is painted as gestating a ‘blue’ baby, near full-term in a meld of tree and ‘self’, a blue umbilical cord, again, devoid of blood, ghosted, lifeless and yet still living, once again suffocated by the representation of the umbilical in the ‘bowels’ of the self, the abject part of the body, where refuse is stored and eliminated: The duodenum of the damned. The Devil may be seen as Christopher Bollas’s “shadow of the object”, or the Jungian archetypal shadow, not simply a Judeo-Christian fear-based spectre and curmudgeon, but a site of unprocessed and, therefore, feared psychological material, material that must be brought to consciousness and integrated. Perhaps the Devil also is the antithesis to ‘God’ as mother. The hell of ‘not mother’, no mother, not the right mother, the reluctant adoptive mother – the Devil as icon for the rich underbelly of the psyche and apophatic to the adopted/artificial/socially scripted self.Figure 4. The Birthing Tree. 1995. Acrylic on canvas.These paintings ache with the trauma of my relinquishment and LDA experience. They ache with my body’s truth, where the cellular and psychological, flesh and blood and feeling, leak from my wounds in unspeakable confluence (the two genital lips as the site of relinquishment, my speaking lips that have been sealed through non-disclosure and shame, the psychological trauma as Verrier’s ‘primal wound’) just as I leaked from my mother (and society) at birth, as blood and muck, and ooze and pus and death (Grosz 195) only to be quickly and silently mopped up and cleansed through adoption and life-long secrecy. Where I, as translator, fluent in both silence and signs, disclose the baby’s trauma, asking for legitimacy. My experience as a LDA sets up an interesting experiment, one that allows an examination of the pre-verbal/pre-disclosure body as a fleshed and breathing Rosetta Stone, as an interface between the language of the body and of the verbalised, painted, and written text. As a constructed body, written upon and invented legally, socially, and psychologically, I am, in Hélène Cixous’s (“To Live the Orange” 83) words, “un-forgetting”, “un-silencing” and “unearthing” my ‘self’ – I am re-writing, re-inventing and, under public scrutiny, legitimising my ‘self’. I am a site of inquiry, discovery, extrapolation, and becoming (Metta 492; Poulus 475) and, as Grosz (vii) suggests, a body with “all the explanatory power” of the mind. I am, as I embroider myself and my LDA experience into literary and critical texts, authoring myself into existence, referencing with particular relevance Peter Carnochan’s (361) suggestion that “analysis...acts as midwife to the birth of being”. I am, as I swim forever amorphous, invisible, and unspoken in my mother’s womb, fashioning a shore, landscaping my mind against the constant wet, my chronic liminality (Rambo 629) providing social landfall for other LDAs and silenced minorities. As Catherine Lynch (3) writes regarding LDAs, “Through the creation of text and theory I can formulate an intimate space for a family of adoptive subjects I might never know via our participation in a new discourse in Australian academia.” I participate through my creative, self-reflexive, process fuelled (Durey 22), practice-led enquiry. I use the intimacy (and also universality and multiplicity) and illegitimacy of my body as an alterative text, as a site of academic and creative augmentation in the understanding of LDA issues. The relinquished and silenced baby and LDA adult needs a voice, a ‘body’, and a ‘tender’ place in the consciousness of society, as Helen Riley (“Confronting the Conspiracy of Silence” 11) suggests, “voice, validation, and vindication”. Judith Herman (3) argues that, “Survivors challenge us to reconnect fragments, to reconstruct history, to make meaning of their present symptoms in the light of past events”. I seek to use the example of my experience – as Judith Durey (31) suggests, in “support of evocative, creative modes of representation as valid forms of research in their own right” – to unfurl the whole, to give impetus and precedence for other researchers into adoption and advocate for future babies who may be bought, sold, arranged, and/or created by various means. The recent controversy over Gammy, the baby boy born with Down Syndrome in Thailand, highlights the urgent and moral need for legislation with regard to surrogacy (see Kajsa Ekis Ekman’s Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self for a comprehensive examination of surrogacy issues). Indeed, Catherine Lynch in her paper Doubting Adoption Legislation links the experiences of LDAs and the children of born of surrogacy, most effectively arguing that, “if the fate that closed record adoptees suffered was a misplaced solution to the question of what to do with children already conceived how can you justify the deliberate conception of a child with the intention even before its creation of cruelly removing that child from their mother?” (6). Cixous (xxii) confesses, “All I want is to illustrate, depict fragments, events of human life and death...each unique and yet at the same time exchangeable. Not the law, the exception”. I, too, am a fragment, an illustration (a painting), and, as every individual always is – paradoxically – a communal and, therefore, deeply recognisable and generally applicable minority and exception. In my illegitimacy, I am some kind of evidence. Evidence of cellular memory. Evidence of embodiment. Evidence that silenced illegitimacies will manifest in symptom and non-verbal narratives, that they will ooze out and await translation, verification, and witness. This paper is offered with reverence and with feminist intention, as a revenant mouthpiece for other LDAs, babies born of surrogacy, and donor assisted offspring (and, indeed, any) who are marginalised, silenced, and obscured. It is also intended to promote discussion in the psychological and psychoanalytic fields and, as Helen Riley (202-207) advocates regarding late discovery offspring, more research within the social sciences and the bio-medical field that may encourage legislators to better understand what the ‘best interests of the child’ are in terms of late discovery of origins and the complexity of adoption/conception practices available today. As I write now (and always) the umbilical from my paintings curve and writhe across my soul, twist and morph into the swollen and throbbing organ of tongues, my throat aching to utter, my hands ready to craft latent affect into language in translation of, and in obedience to, my body’s knowledges. It is the art of mute witness that reverses genesis, that keeps the umbilical fat and supple and full of blood, and allows my conscious conception and creation. Indeed, in the intersection of my theoretical, creative, psychological, and somatic praxis, the heat (read hot and messy, insightful and insistent signage) of my body’s knowledges perhaps intensifies – with a ripe bouquet – the inevitably ongoing odour/aroma of the reproductive world. ReferencesAngel, Maria, and Anna Gibbs. “On Moving and Being Moved: The Corporeality of Writing in Literary Fiction and New Media Art.” Literature and Sensation, eds. Anthony Uhlmann, Helen Groth, Paul Sheehan, and Stephan McLaren. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009: 162-172. Bollas, Christopher. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Brodzinsky, David. “Adjustment to Adoption: A Psychosocial Perspective.” Clinical Psychology Review 7 (1987): 25-47. doi: 10.1016/0272-7358(87)90003-1.Brodzinsky, David, Daniel Smith, and Anne Brodzinsky. Children’s Adjustment to Adoption: Developmental and Clinical Issues. 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Past Adoption Experiences: National Research Study on the Service Response to Past Adoption Practices. Research Report 21. Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2012.Kirby, Vicky. Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. Klorer, P. Gussie. “Expressive Therapy with Severely Maltreated Children: Neuroscience Contributions.” Journal of the American Art Therapy Association 22.4 (2005): 213-220. doi:10.1080/07421656.2005.10129523.Levy-Shiff, Rachel. “Psychological Adjustment of Adoptees in Adulthood: Family Environment and Adoption-Related Correlates. 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Introduction As the country with the fifth largest population in the world, Indonesia is a massive potential market for mobile technology adoption and development. Despite an annual per capita income of only $1,280 USD (World Bank), there are 63 million mobile phone users in Indonesia (Suhartono, sec. 1.7) and it is predicted to reach 80 million in 2007 (Jakarta Post 1). Mobile phones are not only a symbol of Indonesian modernity (Barendregt 5), but like other communication technology can become a platform through which to explore socio-political issues (Winner 28). In this article we explore the role mobile phone technology in contemporary forms of social, intimate, and sexual relationships in Indonesia. We argue that new forms of expression and relations are facilitated by the particular features of mobile technology. We discuss two cases from contemporary Indonesia: a mobile dating service (BEDD) and mobile phone pornography. For each case study, we first discuss the socio-political background in Indonesia, then describe the technological affordances of the mobile phone which facilitate dating and pornography, and finally give examples of how the mobile phone is effecting change in dating and pornographic practices. This study is placed at a time when social relations, intimacy, and sexuality in Indonesia have become central public issues. Since the end of the New Order whilst many people have embraced the new freedoms of reformasi and democratization, there is also a high degree of social anxiety, tension and uncertainty (Juliastuti 139-40). These social changes and desires have played out in the formations of new and exciting modes of creativity, solidarity, and sociality (Heryanto and Hadiz 262) and equally violence, terror and criminality (Heryanto and Hadiz 256). The diverse and plural nature of Indonesian society is alive with a myriad of people and activities, and it is into this diverse social body that the mobile phone has become a central and prominent feature of interaction. The focus of our study is dating and pornography as mediated by the mobile phone; however, we do not suggest that these are new experiences in Indonesia. Rather over the last decade social, intimate, and sexual relationships have all been undergoing change and their motivations can be traced to a variety of sources including the factors of globalization, democratization and modernization. Throughout Asia “new media have become a crucial site for constituting new Asian sexual identities and communities” (Berry, Martin, and Yue 13) as people are connecting through new communication technologies. In this article we suggest that mobile phone technology opens new possibilities and introduces new channels, dynamics, and intensities of social interaction. Mobile phones are particularly powerful communication tools because of their mobility, accessibility, and convergence (Ling 16-19; Ito 14-15; Katz and Aakhus 303). These characteristics of mobile phones do not in and of themselves bring about any particular changes in dating and pornography, but they may facilitate changes already underway (Barendegt 7-9; Barker 9). Mobile Dating Background The majority of Indonesians in the 1960s and 1970s had arranged marriages (Smith-Hefner 443). Education reform during the 70s and 80s encouraged more women to attain an education which in turn led to the delaying of marriage and the changing of courtship practices (Smith-Hefner 450). “Compared to previous generations, [younger Indonesians] are freer to mix with the opposite sex and to choose their own marriage,” (Utomo 225). Modern courtship in Java is characterized by “self-initiated romance” and dating (Smith-Hefner 451). Mobile technology is beginning to play a role in initiating romance between young Indonesians. Technology One mobile matching or dating service available in Indonesia is called BEDD (www.bedd.com). BEDD is a free software for mobile phones in which users fill out a profile about themselves and can meet BEDD members who are within 20-30 feet using a Bluetooth connection on their mobile devices. BEDD members’ phones automatically exchange profile information so that users can easily meet new people who match their profile requests. BEDD calls itself mobile social networking community; “BEDD is a new Bluetooth enabled mobile social medium that allows people to meet, interact and communicate in a new way by letting their mobile phones do all the work as they go throughout their day.” As part of a larger project on mobile social networking (Humphreys 6), a field study was conducted of BEDD users in Jakarta, Indonesia and Singapore (where BEDD is based) in early 2006. In-depth interviews and open-ended user surveys were conducted with users, BEDD’s CEO and strategic partners in order to understand the social uses and effects BEDD. The majority of BEDD members (which topped 100,000 in January 2006) are in Indonesia thanks to a partnership with Nokia where BEDD came pre-installed on several phone models. In management interviews, both BEDD and Nokia explained that they partnered because both companies want to help “build community”. They felt that Bluetooth technology such as BEDD could be used to help youth meet new people and keep in touch with old friends. Examples One of BEDD’s functions is to help lower barriers to social interaction in public spaces. By sharing profile information and allowing for free text messaging, BEDD can facilitate conversations between BEDD members. According to users, mediating the initial conversation also helps to alleviate social anxiety, which often accompanies meeting new people. While social mingling and hanging out between Jakarta teenagers is a relatively common practice, one user said that BEDD provides a new and fun way to meet and flirt. In a society that must balance between an “idealized morality” and an increasingly sexualized popular culture (Utomo 226), BEDD provides a modern mode of self-initiated matchmaking. While BEDD was originally intended to aid in the matchmaking process of dating, it has been appropriated into everyday life in Indonesia because of its interpretive flexibility (Pinch & Bjiker 27). Though BEDD is certainly used to meet “beautiful girls” (according to one Indonesian male user), it is also commonly used to text message old friends. One member said he uses BEDD to text his friends in class when the lecture gets boring. BEDD appears to be a helpful modern communication tool when people are physically proximate but cannot easily talk to one another. BEDD can become a covert way to exchange messages with people nearby for free. Another potential explanation for BEDD’s increasing popularity is its ability to allow users to have private conversations in public space. Bennett notes that courtship in private spaces is seen as dangerous because it may lead to sexual impropriety (154). Dating and courtship in public spaces are seen as safer, particularly for conserving the reputation young Indonesian women. Therefore Bluetooth connections via mobile technologies can be a tool to make private social connections between young men and women “safer”. Bluetooth communication via mobile phones has also become prevalent in more conservative Muslim societies (Sullivan, par. 7; Braude, par. 3). There are, however, safety concerns about meeting strangers in public spaces. When asked, “What advice would you give a first time BEDD user?” one respondent answered, “harus bisa mnilai seseorang krn itu sangat penting, kita mnilai seseorang bukan cuma dari luarnya” (translated: be careful in evaluating (new) people, and don’t ever judge the book by its cover”). Nevertheless, only one person participating in this study mentioned this concern. To some degree meeting someone in a public may be safer than meeting someone in an online environment. Not only are there other people around in public spaces to physically observe, but co-location means there may be some accountability for how BEDD members present themselves. The development and adoption of matchmaking services such as BEDD suggests that the role of the mobile phone in Indonesia is not just to communicate with friends and family but to act as a modern social networking tool as well. For young Indonesians BEDD can facilitate the transfer of social information so as to encourage the development of new social ties. That said, there is still debate about exactly whom BEDD is connecting and for what purposes. On one hand, BEDD could help build community in Indonesia. One the other hand, because of its privacy it could become a tool for more promiscuous activities (Bennett 154-5). There are user profiles to suggest that people are using BEDD for both purposes. For example, note what four young women in Jakarta wrote in the BEDD profiles: Personal Description Looking For I am a good prayer, recite the holy book, love saving (money), love cycling… and a bit narcist. Meaning of life Ordinary gurl, good student, single, Owen lover, and the rest is up to you to judge. Phrenz ?! Peace?! Wondeful life! I am talkative, have no patience but so sweet. I am so girly, narcist, shy and love cute guys. Check my fs (Friendster) account if you’re so curious. Well, I am just an ordinary girl tho. Anybody who wants to know me. A boy friend would be welcomed. Play Station addict—can’t live without it! I am a rebel, love rock, love hiphop, naughty, if you want proof dial 081********* phrenz n cute guyz As these profiles suggest, the technology can be used to send different kinds of messages. The mobile phone and the BEDD software merely facilitate the process of social exchange, but what Indonesians use it for is up to them. Thus BEDD and the mobile phone become tools through which Indonesians can explore their identities. BEDD can be used in a variety of social and communicative contexts to allow users to explore their modern, social freedoms. Mobile Pornography Background Mobile phone pornography builds on a long tradition of pornography and sexually explicit material in Indonesia through the use of a new technology for an old art and product. Indonesia has a rich sexual history with a documented and prevalent sex industry (Suryakusuma 115). Lesmana suggests that the country has a tenuous pornographic industry prone to censorship and nationalist politics intent on its destruction. Since the end of the New Order and opening of press freedoms there has been a proliferation in published material including a mushrooming of tabloids, men’s magazines such as FHM, Maxim and Playboy, which are often regarded as pornographic. This is attributed to the decline of the power of the bureaucracy and government and the new role of capital in the formation of culture (Chua 16). There is a parallel pornography industry, however, that is more amateur, local, and homemade (Barker 6). It is into this range of material that mobile phone pornography falls. Amongst the myriad forms of pornography and sexually explicit material available in Indonesia, the mobile phone in recent years has emerged as a new platform for production, distribution, and consumption. This section will not deal with the ethics of representation nor engage with the debate about definitions and the rights and wrongs of pornography. Instead what will be shown is how the mobile phone can be and has been used as an instrument/medium for the production and consumption of pornography within contemporary social relationships. Technology There are several technological features of the mobile phone that make pornography possible. As has already been noted the mobile phone has had a large adoption rate in Indonesia, and increasingly these phones come equipped with cameras and the ability to send data via MMS and Bluetooth. Coupled with the mobility of the phone, the convergence of technology in the mobile phone makes it possible for pornography to be produced and consumed in a different way than what has been possible before. It is only recently that the mobile phone has been marketed as a video camera with the release of the Nokia N90; however, quality and recording time are severely limited. Still, the mobile phone is a convenient and at-hand tool for the production and consumption of individually made, local, and non-professional pieces of porn, sex and sexuality. It is impossible to know how many such films are in circulation. A number of websites that offer these films for downloads host between 50 and 100 clips in .3gp file format, with probably more in actual circulation. At the very least, this is a tenfold increase in number compared to the recent emergence of non-professional VCD films (Barker 3). This must in part be attributed to the advantages that the mobile phone has over standard video cameras including cost, mobility, convergence, and the absence of intervening data processing and disc production. Examples There are various examples of mobile pornography in Indonesia. These range from the pornographic text message sent between lovers to the mobile phone video of explicit sexual acts (Barendregt 14-5). The mobile phone affords privacy for the production and exchange of pornographic messages and media. Because mobile devices are individually owned, however, pornographic material found on mobile phones can be directly tied to the individual owners. For example, police in Kotabaru inspected the phones of high school students in search of pornographic materials and arrested those individuals on whose phones it was found (Barendregt 18). Mobile phone pornography became a national political issue in 2006 when an explicit one-minute clip of a singer and an Indonesian politician became public. Videoed in 2004, the clip shows Maria Eva, a 27 year-old dangdut singer (see Browne, 25-6) and Yahya Zaini, a married 42 year-old who was head of religious affairs for the Golkar political party. Their three-year affair ended in 2005, but the film did not become public until 2006. It spread like wildfire between phones and across the internet, however, and put an otherwise secret relationship into the limelight. These types of affairs and relationships were common knowledge to people through gossip, exposes such as Jakarta Undercover (Emka 93-108) and stories in tabloids; yet this culture of adultery and prostitution continued and remained anonymous because of bureaucratic control of evidence and information (Suryakusuma 115). In this case, however, the filming of Maria Eva once public proves the identities of those involved and their infidelity. As a result of the scandal it was further revealed that Maria Eva had been forced by Yayha Zaini and his wife to have an abortion, deepening the moral crisis. Yahya Zaini later resigned as his party’s head of Religious Affairs (Asmarani, sec. 1-2), due to what was called the country’s “first real sex scandal” (Naughton, par. 2). As these examples show, there are definite risks and consequences involved in the production of mobile pornography. Even messages/media that are meant to be shared between two consenting individuals can eventually make their way into the public mobile realm and have serious consequences for those involved. Mobile video and photography does, however, represent a potential new check on the Indonesian bureaucratic elite which has not been previously available by other means such as a watchdog media. “The role of the press as a control mechanism is practically nonexistent [in Jakarta], which in effect protects corruption, nepotism, financial manipulation, social injustice, and repression, as well as the murky sexual life of the bureaucratic power elite,” (Suryakusuma 117). Thus while originally a mobile video may have been created for personal pleasure, through its mass dissemination via new media it can become a means of sousveillance (Mann, Nolan and Wellman 332-3) whereby the control of surveillance is flipped to reveal the often hidden abuses of power by officials. Whilst the debates over pornography in Indonesia tend to focus on the moral aspects of it, the broader social impacts of technology on relationships are often ignored. Issues related to power relations or even media as cultural expression are often disregarded as moral judgments cast a heavy shadow over discussions of locally produced Indonesian mobile pornography. It is possible to move beyond the moral critique of pornographic media to explore the social significance of its proliferation as a cultural product. Conclusion In these two case studies we have tried to show how the mobile phone in Indonesia has become a mode of interaction but also a platform through which to explore other current issues and debates related to dating, sexuality and media. Since 1998 and the fall of the New Order, Indonesia has been struggling with blending old and new, a desire of change and nostalgia for past, and popular desire for a “New Indonesia” (Heryanto, sec. Post-1998). Cultural products within Indonesia have played an important role in exploring these issues. The mobile phone in Indonesia is not just a technology, but also a product in and through which these desires are played out. Changes in dating and pornography practices have been occurring in Indonesia for some time. As people use mobile technology to produce, communicate, and consume, the device becomes intricately related to identity struggle and cultural production within Indonesia. It is important to keep in mind, however, that while mobile technology adoption within Indonesia is growing, it is still limited to a particular subset of the population. As has been previously observed (Barendregt 3), it is wealthier, young people in urban areas who are most intensely involved in mobile technology. As handset prices decrease and availability in rural areas increases, however, no longer will mobile technology be so demographically confined in Indonesia. The convergent technology of the mobile phone opens many possibilities for creative adoption and usage. As a communication device it allows for the creation, sharing, and viewing of messages. Therefore, the technology itself facilitates social connections and networking. As demonstrated in the cases of dating and pornography, the mobile phone is both a tool for meeting new people and disseminating sexual messages/media because it is a networked technology. The mobile phone is not fundamentally changing dating and pornography practices, but it is accelerating social and cultural trends already underway in Indonesia by facilitating the exchange and dissemination of messages and media. As these case studies show, what kinds of messages Indonesians choose to create and share are up to them. The same device can be used for relatively innocuous behavior as well as more controversial behavior. With increased adoption in Indonesia, the mobile will continue to be a lens through which to further explore modern socio-political issues. 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This article explores how fat women protesting challenges norms of womanhood, the place of women in society, and who has the power to have their say in public spaces. We use the term fat as a political reclamation; Fat Studies scholars and fat activists prefer the term fat, over the normative term “overweight” and the pathologising term “obese/obesity” (Lee and Pausé para 3). Who is and who isn’t fat, we suggest, is best left to self-determination, although it is generally accepted by fat activists that the term is most appropriately adopted by individuals who are unable to buy clothes in any store they choose. Using a tweet from conservative commentator Ann Coulter as a leaping-off point, we examine the narratives around women in the public sphere and explore how fat bodies might transgress further the norms set by society. The public representations of women in politics and protest are then are set in the context of ‘activist wisdom’ (Maddison and Scalmer) from two sides of the globe. Activist wisdom gives preference to the lived knowledge and experience of activists as tools to understand social movements. It seeks to draw theoretical implications from the practical actions of those on the ground. In centring the experiences of ourselves and other activists, we hope to expand existing understandings of body politics, gender, and political power in this piece. It is important in researching social movements to look both at the representations of protest and protestors in all forms of media as this is the ‘public face’ of movements, but also to examine the reflections of the individuals who collectively put their weight behind bringing social change.A few days after the 45th President of the United States was elected, people around the world spilled into the streets and participated in protests; precursors to the Women’s March which would take place the following January. Pictures of such marches were shared via social media, demonstrating the worldwide protest against the racism, misogyny, and overall oppressiveness, of the newly elected leader. Not everyone was supportive of these protests though; one such conservative commentator, Ann Coulter, shared this tweet: Image1: A tweet from Ann Coulter; the tweet contains a picture of a group of protestors, holding signs protesting Trump, white supremacy, and for the rights of immigrants. In front of the group, holding a megaphone is a woman. Below the picture, the text reads, “Without fat girls, there would be no protests”.Coulter continued on with two more tweets, sharing pictures of other girls protesting and suggesting that the protestors needed a diet programme. Kivan Bay (“Without Fat Girls”) suggested that perhaps Coulter was implying that skinny girls do not have time to protest because they are too busy doing skinny girl things, like buying jackets or trying on sweaters. Or perhaps Coulter was arguing that fat girls are too visible, too loud, and too big, to be taken seriously in their protests. These tweets provide a point of illustration for how fat women protesting challenge norms of womanhood, the place of women in society, and who has the power to have their say in public spaces While Coulter’s tweet was most likely intended as a hostile personal attack on political grounds, we find it useful in its foregrounding of gender, bodies and protest which we consider in this article, beginning with a review of fat girls’ role in social justice movements.Across the world, we can point to fat women who engage in activism related to body politics and more. Australian fat filmmaker and activist Kelli Jean Drinkwater makes documentaries, such as Aquaporko! and Nothing to Lose, that queer fat embodiment and confronts body norms. Newly elected Ontario MPP Jill Andrew has been fighting for equal rights for queer people and fat people in Canada for decades. Nigerian Latasha Ngwube founded About That Curvy Life, Africa’s leading body positive and empowerment site, and has organised plus-size fashion show events at Heineken Lagos Fashion and Design Week in Nigeria in 2016 and the Glitz Africa Fashion Week in Ghana in 2017. Fat women have been putting their bodies on the line for the rights of others to live, work, and love. American Heather Heyer was protesting the hate that white nationalists represent and the danger they posed to her friends, family, and neighbours when she died at a rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina in late 2017 (Caron). When Heyer was killed by one of those white nationalists, they declared that she was fat, and therefore her body size was lauded loudly as justification for her death (Bay, “How Nazis Use”; Spangler).Fat women protesting is not new. For example, the Fat Underground was a group of “radical fat feminist women”, who split off from the more conservative NAAFA (National Association to Aid Fat Americans) in the 1970s (Simic 18). The group educated the public about weight science, harassed weight-loss companies, and disrupted academic seminars on obesity. The Fat Underground made their first public appearance at a Women’s Equality Day in Los Angeles, taking over the stage at the public event to accuse the medical profession of murdering Cass Elliot, the lead singer of the folk music group, The Mamas and the Papas (Dean and Buss). In 1973, the Fat Underground produced the Fat Liberation Manifesto. This Manifesto began by declaring that they believed “that fat people are full entitled to human respect and recognition” (Freespirit and Aldebaran 341).Women have long been disavowed, or discouraged, from participating in the public sphere (Ginzberg; van Acker) or seen as “intruders or outsiders to the tough world of politics” (van Acker 118). The feminist slogan the personal is political was intended to shed light on the role that women needed to play in the public spheres of education, employment, and government (Caha 22). Across the world, the acceptance of women within the public sphere has been varied due to cultural, political, and religious, preferences and restrictions (Agenda Feminist Media Collective). Limited acceptance of women in the public sphere has historically been granted by those ‘anointed’ by a male family member or patron (Fountaine 47).Anti-feminists are quick to disavow women being in public spaces, preferring to assign them the role as helpmeet to male political elite. As Schlafly (in Rowland 30) notes: “A Positive Woman cannot defeat a man in a wrestling or boxing match, but she can motivate him, inspire him, encourage him, teach him, restrain him, reward him, and have power over him that he can never achieve over her with all his muscle.” This idea of women working behind the scenes has been very strong in New Zealand where the ‘sternly worded’ letter is favoured over street protest. An acceptable route for women’s activism was working within existing political institutions (Grey), with activity being ‘hidden’ inside government offices such as the Ministry of Women’s Affairs (Schuster, 23). But women’s movement organisations that engage in even the mildest form of disruptive protest are decried (Grey; van Acker).One way women have been accepted into public space is as the moral guardians or change agents of the entire political realm (Bliss; Ginzberg; van Acker; Ledwith). From the early suffrage movements both political actors and media representations highlighted women were more principled and conciliatory than men, and in many cases had a moral compass based on restraint. Cartoons showed women in the suffrage movement ‘sweeping up’ and ‘cleaning house’ (Sheppard 123). Groups like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union were celebrated for protesting against the demon drink and anti-pornography campaigners like Patricia Bartlett were seen as acceptable voices of moral reason (Moynihan). And as Cunnison and Stageman (in Ledwith 193) note, women bring a “culture of femininity to trade unions … an alternative culture, derived from the particularity of their lives as women and experiences of caring and subordination”. This role of moral guardian often derived from women as ‘mothers’, responsible for the physical and moral well-being of the nation.The body itself has been a sight of protest for women including fights for bodily autonomy in their medical decisions, reproductive justice, and to live lives free from physical and sexual abuse, have long been met with criticisms of being unladylike or inappropriate. Early examples decried in NZ include the women’s clothing movement which formed part of the suffrage movement. In the second half of the 20th century it was the freedom trash can protests that started the myth of ‘women burning their bras’ which defied acceptable feminine norms (Sawer and Grey). Recent examples of women protesting for body rights include #MeToo and Time’s Up. Both movements protest the lack of bodily autonomy women can assert when men believe they are entitled to women’s bodies for their entertainment, enjoyment, and pleasure. And both movements have received considerable backlash by those who suggest it is a witch hunt that might ensnare otherwise innocent men, or those who are worried that the real victims are white men who are being left behind (see Garber; Haussegger). Women who advocate for bodily autonomy, including access to contraception and abortion, are often held up as morally irresponsible. As Archdeacon Bullock (cited in Smyth 55) asserted, “A woman should pay for her fun.”Many individuals believe that the stigma and discrimination fat people face are the consequences they sow from their own behaviours (Crandall 892); that fat people are fat because they have made poor decisions, being too indulgent with food and too lazy to exercise (Crandall 883). Therefore, fat people, like women, should have to pay for their fun. Fat women find themselves at this intersection, and are often judged more harshly for their weight than fat men (Tiggemann and Rothblum). Examining Coulter’s tweet with this perspective in mind, it can easily be read as an attempt to put fat girl protestors back into their place. It can also be read as a warning. Don’t go making too much noise or you may be labelled as fat. Presenting troublesome women as fat has a long history within political art and depictions. Marianne (the symbol of the French Republic) was depicted as fat and ugly; she also reinforced an anti-suffragist position (Chenut 441). These images are effective because of our societal views on fatness (Kyrölä). Fatness is undesirable, unworthy of love and attention, and a representation of poor character, lack of willpower, and an absence of discipline (Murray 14; Pausé, “Rebel Heart” para 1).Fat women who protest transgress rules around body size, gender norms, and the appropriate place for women in society. Take as an example the experiences of one of the authors of this piece, Sandra Grey, who was thrust in to political limelight nationally with the Campaign for MMP (Grey and Fitzsimmons) and when elected as the President of the New Zealand Tertiary Education Union in 2011. Sandra is a trade union activist who breaches too many norms set for the “good woman protestor,” as well as the norms for being a “good fat woman”. She looms large on a stage – literally – and holds enough power in public protest to make a crowd of 7,000 people “jump to left”, chant, sing, and march. In response, some perceive Sandra less as a tactical and strategic leader of the union movement, and more as the “jolly fat woman” who entertains, MCs, and leads public events. Though even in this role, she has been criticised for being too loud, too much, too big.These criticisms are loudest when Sandra is alongside other fat female bodies. When posting on social media photos with fellow trade union members the comments often note the need of the group to “go on a diet”. The collective fatness also brings comments about “not wanting to fuck any of that group of fat cows”. There is something politically and socially dangerous about fat women en masse. This was behind the responses to Sandra’s first public appearance as the President of TEU when one of the male union members remarked “Clearly you have to be a fat dyke to run this union.” The four top elected and appointed positions in the TEU have been women for eight years now and both their fatness and perceived sexuality present as a threat in a once male-dominated space. Even when not numerically dominant, unions are public spaces dominated by a “masculine culture … underpinned by the undervaluation of ‘women’s worth’ and notions of womanhood ‘defined in domesticity’” (Cockburn in Kirton 273-4). Sandra’s experiences in public space show that the derision and methods of putting fat girls back in their place varies dependent on whether the challenge to power is posed by a single fat body with positional power and a group of fat bodies with collective power.Fat Girls Are the FutureOn the other side of the world, Tara Vilhjálmsdóttir is protesting to change the law in Iceland. Tara believes that fat people should be protected against discrimination in public and private settings. Using social media such as Facebook and Instagram, Tara takes her message, and her activism, to her thousands of followers (Keller, 434; Pausé, “Rebel Heart”). And through mainstream media, she pushes back on fatphobia rhetoric and applies pressure on the government to classify weight as a protected status under the law.After a lifetime of living “under the oppression of diet culture,” Tara began her activism in 2010 (Vilhjálmsdóttir). She had suffered real harm from diet culture, developing an eating disorder as a teen and being told through her treatment for it that her fears as a fat woman – that she had no future, that fat people experienced discrimination and stigma – were unfounded. But Tara’s lived experiences demonstrated fat stigma and discrimination were real.In 2012, she co-founded the Icelandic Association for Body Respect, which promotes body positivity and fights weight stigma in Iceland. The group uses a mixture of real life and online tools; organising petitions, running campaigns against the Icelandic version of The Biggest Loser, and campaigning for weight to be a protected class in the Icelandic constitution. The Association has increased the visibility of the dangers of diet culture and the harm of fat stigma. They laid the groundwork that led to changing the human rights policy for the city of Reykjavík; fat people cannot be discriminated against in employment settings within government jobs. As the city is one of the largest employers in the country, this was a large step forward for fat rights.Tara does receive her fair share of hate messages; she’s shared that she’s amazed at the lengths people will go to misunderstand what she is saying (Vilhjálmsdóttir). “This isn’t about hurt feelings; I’m not insulted [by fat stigma]. It’s about [fat stigma] affecting the livelihood of fat people and the structural discrimination they face” (Vilhjálmsdóttir). She collects the hateful comments she receives online through screenshots and shares them in an album on her page. She believes it is important to keep a repository to demonstrate to others that the hatred towards fat people is real. But the hate she receives only fuels her work more. As does the encouragement she receives from people, both in Iceland and abroad. And she is not alone; fat activists across the world are using Web 2.0 tools to change the conversation around fatness and demand civil rights for fat people (Pausé, “Rebel Heart”; Pausé, “Live to Tell").Using Web 2.0 tools as a way to protest and engage in activism is an example of oppositional technologics; a “political praxis of resistance being woven into low-tech, amateur, hybrid, alternative subcultural feminist networks” (Garrison 151). Fat activists use social media to engage in anti-assimilationist activism and build communities of practice online in ways that would not be possible in real life (Pausé, “Express Yourself” 1). This is especially useful for those whose protests sit at the intersections of oppressions (Keller 435; Pausé, “Rebel Heart” para 19). Online protests have the ability to travel the globe quickly, providing opportunities for connections between protests and spreading protests across the globe, such as SlutWalks in 2011-2012 (Schuster 19). And online spaces open up unlimited venues for women to participate more freely in protest than other forms (Harris 479; Schuster 16; Garrison 162).Whether online or offline, women are represented as dangerous in the political sphere when they act without male champions breaching norms of femininity, when their involvement challenges the role of woman as moral guardians, and when they make the body the site of protest. Women must ‘do politics’ politely, with utmost control, and of course caringly; that is they must play their ‘designated roles’. Whether or not you fit the gendered norms of political life affects how your protest is perceived through the media (van Acker). Coulter’s tweet loudly proclaimed that the fat ‘girls’ protesting the election of the 45th President of the United States were unworthy, out of control, and not worthy of attention (ironic, then, as her tweet caused considerable conversation about protest, fatness, and the reasons not to like the President-Elect). 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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. 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