Articles de revues sur le sujet « United Brethren Missionary Society »

Abstract This paper explores the influence of Pietism on the radical evangelical Christian movement known as the Open Brethren movement. In the 1830s, Anthony Norris Groves (1795–1853) met with German Lutheran missionary Karl Rhenius in India and praised his methods, which included support for indigenous Christian leaders and the independent churches that they led. Karl Gützlaff promoted similar methods in China and influenced wealthy London Brethren to found the China Evangelization Society (CES) in 1850. The CES founders also took the Moravians as a model, noting that a single congregation had launched a global missionary movement that had perpetuated itself from generation to generation. Although they had no formal relationship with the Moravian United Brethren, the Open Brethren knew of their work and that of Pietist institutions like the Francke Foundations both through personal contacts and publications. This paper utilizes the concept of “ensampling” to analyze the ways that Open Brethren founders modeled their work on practices that Pietist missionaries and philanthropists had developed in the long eighteenth century.

In the last century friendly "societies" offered men a form of insurance by the establishment of common funds from which payments could be made to members in time of sickness or other troubles; they also offered convivial activity and good fellowship at meetings. The United Albany Brethren Benefit Society was a Grahamstown example of these societies. It was founded by British settlers in 1828, and came to occupy a special position in the city and surrounding areas as one of the earliest local institutions and one closely identified with the history of Grahamstown and the Albany settlement. Skilled artisans made up the bulk of the membership, though some went on to positions of considerable importance. The Society survived all the problems of the 19th century but seems to have succumbed finally to the upheavals of the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902.

Abstract This paper examines an 1853 map of Yorubaland that reflects the evangelisation discourse of the American Southern Baptist Convention. Starting from 1845, the SBC began an evangelical drive towards the ‘saving’ of Africans in West Africa as a form of self-compensation in their attempt to prove that they were not against ‘Black Africans’ in the United States. Yet there were geographical notions of distinguishing Africans to be converted but these views of the white Southern Baptist brethren were reframed owing to field experiences of the missionary-explorer in the early 1850s. Drawing on a critical cartographic approach, this article argues that this map was culturally constructed. This study explores the map construction within the contexts of evangelical zeal, the preconceived geographical theories of West Africa, and exploratory accounts of Thomas Bowen. Consequently, the article reveals the interconnectedness of the church, the missionary-explorer, African informants and the mapmaker in geographical knowledge production. As a result, the study concludes that an ideological perspective reflects in cartographic knowledge presented on the map.

For several decades, agency has been a central concept in the historical study of Christian missions, yet it remains more frequently invoked than analyzed. This article explores the formulation of evangelical protestant beliefs about human agency in the context of efforts to evangelize the world. It does so by examining the fraught relationship between a Sierra Leonean Christian missionary named Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce and the United Brethren in Christ, an American denomination that first championed and later disfellowshipped him. Wilberforce experienced a fleeting American celebrity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, largely because his story could be told to promote competing interpretations of African agency. This article details the temporal and spatial components of evangelical conceptions of heathenism and human agency, their use by Wilberforce, and their collision with notions of human nature grounded in scientific racism. It draws on private and public interpretations of Wilberforce's story, including his dramatic fall from favor among his evangelical supporters, to argue that historical constructions of agency informed and were shaped by missionary activity. The recovery of Wilberforce's story, and of the debates that swirled around him, advances a new way of studying the relationship between agency and Christian missions.

ABSTRACT This article argues that the missionary language of the Women’s Parent Mite Missionary Society of the African Methodist Episcopal Church was cast in familial and kinship nomenclature that eschewed the evil of racial hierarchy. Although routine missionary vernacular about heathen Africa and its need for Christianization and civilization appeared in the rhetoric of AME women, they more deeply expressed a diasporic consciousness that obligated Black people on both sides of the Atlantic to resist Euro-American hegemony. The capacious embrace of the WPMMS for Black women—whether in the United States, the Caribbean, or Africa—actualized their vision for maternal and sisterly interaction in contrast to the racial condescension prevalent among white women in their respective American and European missionary groups.

Based on his personal experiences in North Sumatra, the writer offers in this article some insightful ideas in doing mission and being missionary crossculturally. First of all, every missionary should realise himself as guest in any mission field. What is important for a guest is just learning to know the local people and their cultural values. As a Divine Word Missionary, the writer underlines the legacy of St. Arnold Janssen, the founder of the Society of the Divine Word, namely interculturity. Internally, members of the Society are united from various ethnic groups, languages, and cultures into a fertile and dynamic community. Externally, everybody has been trained and conditioned to be able to adjust himself into any new cultural milieu. Involve in mission such as in North Sumatra, every new missionary is expected to open himself to the Batak culture. To be a good missionary among the Batak, then, one must know quite well the Batak cultural values and speak their language. There is no other strategy for being a good missionary, namely a good preacher, than to first of all be a good learner, a good disciple. That is what exactly means an intercultural person.

In this article, the ecumenical heritage of the United Congregational Church of Southern Africa is described by the General Secretary of that church. The early history of the UCCSA, related to the London Missionary Society, created a sense of self-awareness that led to the unification of racially divided congregational churches during 1967. This set the ground for the active involvement of the UCCSA in the political liberation processes in Southern Africa. In addition, the UCCSA 's continued exploration of further ecumenical endeavours is traced. The covenental theology of the UCCSA forms a unifying thread throughout these processes.

Since the beginning of Anglican missionary activity in the southwest Pacific in the mid-nineteenth century, fifteen European missionaries and at least seven Pacific Islanders have died violently in the course of their work. In that same region, comprising island Melanesia and New Guinea, Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, and the London Missionary Society [L.M.S.] have each had their honour roll of martyrs. Three of these have achieved a measure of fame outside the Pacific and their own denomination: John Williams of the L.M.S., killed at Erromanga in Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides) in 1839; James Chalmers, also of the L.M.S., killed in New Guinea in 1901; and John Coleridge Patteson, Missionary Bishop of Melanesia and head of the Melanesian Mission, killed in 1871. Patteson has been the subject of more than fifteen biographies (several of them in German and Dutch), in addition to essays in collections on English missionary heroes, scholarly articles, and pamphlets for popular consumption. In Anglican churches in England, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and elsewhere he is commemorated as missionary hero in memorial tablets and stained-glass windows.

This paper considers the origins and development of Mindolo Mission of the London Mission Society in Zambia. First, the factors that led to the formation of the mission are analyzed. Second, the paper traces the shifts in ownership of Mindolo Mission and the negotiations to attain church union and increased ecumenism resulting in the foundation of the Church of Central Africa in Rhodesia (CCAR), United Church of Central Africa in Rhodesia (UCCAR), the formation of Mindolo Ecumenical Foundation (MEF) and the United Church of Zambia (UCZ). Third, the present paper discusses the ownership of the mission land. The paper concludes that Mindolo Mission is an offspring of the ecumenical movement and the churches who were the forerunners of the UCZ and the MEF.

Stanley Hauerwas has been noted for his theology of missionary “witness.” However, his theology is not uncontroversial. Of late, it is argued that his theology of witness does not often, or sufficiently, attend to the nature and complexity of belief for those people who live in contemporary, Western society. Part of this complexity, as highlighted by various sociologists and theologians, is that religion has become individualized and privatized. These are serious challenges to the church’s engagement with contemporary society, which Hauerwas does not always seem to adequately address. It will be the purpose of this article, however, to attempt to overcome this lacuna in Hauerwas’s theology, and explore if, and how, his theology might serve as a response to some of the specific challenges arising out of the growing trend towards “privatized religion” in the United States. This will be accomplished by bringing into dialogue Hauerwas’s later work on witness, with some of the sociological insights provided by Charles Taylor and Robert Wuthnow. It will be argued that Hauerwas’s theology of witness, though incomplete, does provide insights that might be helpful to the church in her missionary efforts in the United States.

The history of Christianity in Africa contains selected information reflecting patriarchal preoccupations. Historians have often downplayed the contributions of significant women, both European and indigenous African. The names of some significant women are given without details of their contribution to the growth of Christianity in Africa. This article considers the contributions of Peggy Hiscock to the growth of Christianity in Zambia. Hiscock was a White missionary who was sent to serve in Zambia by the Methodist Church in Britain. She was the first woman to have been ordained in the United Church of Zambia. Hiscock established the Order of Diaconal Ministry and founded a school for the training of deaconesses in the United Church of Zambia. This article argues that although the nineteenth- and twentieth-century missionary movement in Africa is associated with patriarchy and European imperialism, there were European women missionaries who resisted imperialism and patriarchy both in the Church and society.

In May 2015, Pope Francis published Laudato si’, and since then Jesuits throughout the world are seeking to respond to the encyclical. In the United States, however, much of the responses came from the twenty-eight Jesuit colleges and universities. Despite these efforts, tremendous work and challenges await the Jesuits communities in the United States. This essay describes and evaluates the American Jesuits’ efforts prior to and in response to Pope Francis’s call for an integral ecology. Furthermore, it recommends an integral ecology examen to help the Society of Jesus move from comfortable participation in injustice to hope-filled missionary vigor.

Abstract Inspired by Norget, Napolitano, and Mayblin’s suggestion that anthropologists attend more closely to the mechanisms of Catholicism’s worldwide spread, this article juxtaposes two organizations—the Holy Childhood Association and Unbound—to explore “paganism,” conversion, and its legacy among U.S. laypeople. In the process, it makes two major points. The first concerns the recourse to “culture” as a rhetorical and ideational hinge connecting the singularity of Christian universalism and new valuations of local multiplicity. The second focuses on the U.S. Catholic relationship to institutional structures of missionary work, which they both associate with positive attributes of a vibrant society, while also being much more critical than their Protestant counterparts of their own Church’s role abroad. It ends by noting how Unbound and its supporters contend with ongoing inequalities by cultivating an imagined global parity where Catholic people choose to send their “gifts” to each other.

ABSTRACTIn the 1830s, among those associated with the Tractarian revival in England and also among certain figures in the (then) Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States (PECUSA), the idea of the ‘missionary bishop’ was propagated, which presented the bishop as a pioneer evangelist as the apostles were understood to be in New Testament times and saw the planting of the Church as necessarily including a bishop from the beginning for the ‘full integrity’ of the Church to be present. This view of the bishop as the ‘foundation stone’ was not held by the Evangelicals of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), who saw the bishop by contrast as the ‘crown’ or coping stone of the young churches. Two main protagonists were the High Churchman, Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, and the honorary secretary and missionary strategist, Henry Venn. The party, led by C.F. Mackenzie as Bishop and mounted by the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) in 1861 to the tribes near Lake Nyassa, was the outworking of this Tractarian ideal.

AbstractIn 1935 the Church Missionary Society established a station at Salara, in the western part of the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. The station received considerable financial support from the colonial administration, as well as from donors in the United Kingdom, but it was strikingly unsuccessful in its attempts to create a local Christian community, and in the early 1950s the station was abandoned by the CMS. This paper explores the circumstances of this failure, and suggests that missionary work in Salara was undermined by the missionaries' ambivalent attitudes to tradition and modernity. These attitudes derived partly from engagement with colonial officials who were chronically uncertain as to the proper policy to pursue in the Nuba Mountains, and partly from a wider uncertainty in mission attitudes that had come to emphasize the need for a distinctly African form of Christianity but yet remained profoundly suspicious of the reliability of African Christians.

Ukraine is a country of freedom of beliefs and beliefs. The Constitution of the country (Article 35) provides its citizens with not only the right to profess any religion, but also the freedom of religious activity, prohibits the binding of any one of the religions by recognizing it as a state. In the civil society of Ukraine, each of its citizens is sovereign. In accordance with the Law on Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations (Article 3), he is free to accept or change his religion of his choice. Every citizen has the right to express and freely distribute his religious beliefs. "No one can set obligatory beliefs and outlooks. No coercion is allowed in determining a citizen's attitude to religion ..., to participation or non-participation in worship, religious rites and ceremonies, teaching religion. " Thus, by proclaiming the right to freedom of religion, freedom of religion, the Ukrainian state, if it considers itself to be democratic and claims to join such a united Europe, is obliged to create conditions for the functioning of different religions in its territory.

AbstractThe Union Ibo Bible was more or less the Bible for the Igbo people of southern Nigeria from 1909 to 1970. The creation of Thomas Dennis of the Church Missionary Society and his co-workers, it has been, since its first conception in 1905, a source of ongoing controversy: the development and unification of the Igbo language was at stake. This article re-examines the history of this Bible, its conception, translation and early reception, and argues that the source of its shortcomings lies deeper than the method of translation or the contemporary Igbo desire to learn English. The Union Bible is the product of the missionary conception, fleshed out by a comparison with the Yoruba, of a single Igbo people speaking a single language. The failure of that translation is the result of the premise consequent to this conception of the Igbo, namely that the Igbo language was ready to be 'united'.

This study looks to explain, using archival material from the Presbyterian Historical Society and the Egyptian National Archives, the fascinating presence of a temperance movement in late 19th and early 20th century Egypt, a Muslim-majority country. It looks at how the Egyptian temperance movement grew out of two separate traditions, Anglo-American and Islamic temperance. These traditions were divided by demographics and ideology, but came to be united in their goals, structures, and efficaciousness. Although both failed to enact meaningful legislation, they are excellent examples of the interaction between Anglo-American evangelicalism and the modern Muslim missionary movement.

This article describes a case study of humor created in the course of immigrant assimilation, specifically regarding the jokes (n = 150) told by Eastern European oldtimers at the expense of well-bred German Jews (Yekkes) who migrated to Palestine/Israel beginning in the mid-1930s. A taxonomy divides the corpus into jokes lampooning rigidity, exaggerated deference to authority, difficulty in language acquisition, and alienation from the new society. The jokes carry a dual message of welcome to our egalitarian nation, but please note that we, and our norms, were here first. The ethnic superiority implicit in the latter part of the message turns the tables on two earlier encounters-in Germany and the United States-in which Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland were denigrated for “embarrassing” their relatively wellestablished German brethren. The Yekke jokes analyzed in this article arose from a third encounter in Palestine/Israel, where, this time, the Eastern Europeans arrived earlier, as Zionist pioneers. The jokes, it is argued, constitute a kind of “revenge.”

In recent years historians have emphasized the centrality of women to religious life, especially among the older Protestant denominations in the northeastern section of the United States. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, women and girls were usually the majority of attenders at prayer meetings and Sunday services, made up the bulk of converts at revivals and provided the greatest number of candidates for church membership. They were also great fund raisers not only for their own congregations, but for a network of inter-denominational missionary agencies which sprang up during the first two decades of the nineteenth century and helped to impress a more evangelical character upon American society. As Nancy Cott has argued, ministers may have seen this work as part of woman's appropriate and subordinate “sphere,” but for the women themselves “evangelical religion nourished the formation of a female community that served…as both a resource and a resort outside the family.”

Poverty alleviation has been discussed extensively in economics and other disciplines. While theology has not been left out of thediscourse, there has been little emphasis on the perspective of theological anthropology concerning poverty alleviation. Thispaper explores Deuteronomy’s philanthropic posture towards the poor from the perspective of theological anthropology and howsuch an anthropology is applied through the practice of tithing in the United Missionary Church of Africa (UMCA) in Nigeria. Thepaper adopts the Kantian understanding of poverty and uses contextual analysis to interpret relevant biblical texts. Data fromfocused group discussions conducted in selected churches of UMCA, Ilorin, were also analysed. It was found that though thebook of Deuteronomy is the ocentric, its narrative is intensely concerned with the liberation of humans, especially the weak in society. It was also established that UMCA models its practice of care for the poor on the tenets of the book of Deuteronomy;however, the church must also motivate its poor to aspire towards self-reliance. The paper concludes that tithing is a caritativemeasure that could be adopted towards effective poverty alleviation in UMCA.

An attempt has been made to characterize the peculiarities of sodalities of Our Lady in the context of the Society of Jesus social activities in Galicia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is noted that the Sodality of Our Lady is a religious society of laypeople united by a certain professional or social affiliation, each of these congregations had its own statutes and was under the guidance of church authority. It was found that sodalities of Our Lady are the most common type of spiritual associations founded and cared for by the Jesuits, and the establishment of religious societies is a special part of the missionary work of the Society of Jesus. It is emphasized that the Jesuits not only founded sodalities but also led and constantly cared for their development. Based on the statutes and contemporary periodicals, the essence and purpose of creating these religious congregations in Galicia have been analyzed. Special attention is given to the role of sodalities of Our Lady as a Catholic response to contemporary social issues and demands, particularly as an alternative to socialist movements. It is clarified that these congregations had a specificity as they not only engaged their members in certain religious practices within the Church but also attempted to combine the individual's religious life with their social activities. On the basis of papal encyclicals the influence of the Leo XIII social doctrine on the forms of missionary service of the Society of Jesus is determined. It is noted that the social work of the Jesuit order was part of the cultural events taking place in the Roman Catholic Church at that time. A multidisciplinary approach incorporating various research methods, including source analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, has been employed. The principles of historicism, objectivity, comprehensiveness, integrity, and systematicity have also been observed. It is concluded that the establishment of sodalities of Our Lady was an attempt to reduce the barrier between the Catholic Church and laity by involving the latter in more active religious and social activities. Keywords: Sodality of Our Lady, Roman Catholic Church. religious congregations, Society of Jesus, Jesuits, Galicia.

The article deconstructs the discourse of the Russian Orthodox Church as a tool of imperial colonization of Asian Russia based on the materials from the diaries and records of the missionaries of the Altai Ecclesiastical Mission. The long-term experience of historiographical comprehension of missionary activity in Russia and the outskirts is taken into account, while it is noted that outside the research reflection of scientists there were questions of the missionary work of the Russian Orthodox Church in the context of the imperial colonization of the Russian periphery, in which the church performed an important organizing function, which was largely explained as belonging to a significant proportion of subjects the colonization process to the Orthodox branch of the Christian faith, and the ethno-confessional heterogeneity of the developed territories. It is stated that the diaries and notes of the employees of the Altai Ecclesiastical Mission of the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries were an important intellectual “platform” for the discourse of the imperial colonization of the eastern outskirts, not only representing the iconic status and capabilities of the Russian Orthodox Church as a tool for incorporating peripheral regions into the national space, but also broadcasting options for cooperation between the authorities and society, united on religious grounds. In the course of the study, it was found that the diaries of mission workers were an effective “platform” for representing the ideas of church ministers about the meaning and tasks of colonizing the eastern outskirts of the empire in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which were based on the idea of the ability of the missionary community to build long-term models of cultural communication with the Siberian population on the basis of a common religious identity.

ABSTRACT For the first half of the twentieth century Joseph Hugo Wenberg ministered among the Native Americans. He determinedly defended their rights and well-being. He began his ministry as a colporteur of the American Bible Society in Argentina and elsewhere in South America. Early on he was in Bolivia collaborating with the Methodists. He constantly insisted on “Indian work” and called out the racist nature of mission work that concentrated on the minority white population. Notably, while in charge of the Hacienda Guatajata [Huatajata] near Lake Titicaca, he instituted social justice reforms. He finally was dismissed as a missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Returning to the United States, he assumed pastorates in Oklahoma, and then in Wisconsin where for 30 years he served among the Oneida. Wenberg’s life is an example of moral exemplarism, worthy of being emulated.

Studying the history of churches and monasteries in modern conditions is of scientific and practical interest. The purpose of the study is to examine the history of transformation of the Tsivilsk Tikhvin Monastery into a women’s monastery against the background of bourgeois modernization of the Russian society, intensification of the policy and practice of Orthodox missionary work, to show the contribution of spiritual and secular persons to the revival of monastic life in Tsivilsk monastery and to assess its religious and social significance in establishing Orthodoxy among the population of Chuvashia. Materials and methods. The article is based on the analysis of literary and documentary materials. The main sources of the work were archival documents, publications of periodicals, materials of the website of the Chuvash metropolis. Theoretical generalizations and conclusions are made using the chronological, institutional and cultural-anthropological approaches. Study results. Tsivilsk Bogoroditsky Tikhvin Monastery of the Chuvash Metropolis is one of the oldest in the Middle Volga region. It was founded by Tsivilsk inhabitants in memory of the town’s miraculous deliverance in 1671 by the God’s Mother’s intercession from the devastation by S.T. Razin’s detachments. Tsivilsk monastery has gone through different times: it was on the verge of closure more than once, and was abolished during the Soviet period. In this study, based on the study of special literature and a set of sources, the author examined one of the most difficult periods in the history of the monastery. At the end of the 1860s, the monastery’s economy turned out to be in a critical condition. Neither the monastery nor the municipal authorities had the financial means and material resources to restore it. The brethren were small in number, they did not see any prospects for the change for the better, so violations to the rules of monastic life took place among them. The diocesan leadership in the person of Archbishop Anthony of Kazan (Ya.G. Amphiteatrov), having visited the monastery in 1869, made a proposal to the consistory to close it. However, in the conditions of bourgeois reforms and intensification of missionary and educational activities, closure of the monastery in the uyezd, where predominantly the Chuvash population lived, could have negative consequences for Orthodoxy establishment. At the same time, the residents of Tsivilsk and many neighboring villages did not want to lose the monastery, which had not only religious, but also symbolic significance. These circumstances, in the author’s opinion, forced to look for other solutions to its fate. The idea of converting a male monastery into a female one turned out to be promising. The events of the monastery economy’s revival are described in detail, the role of the abbess Kheruvima, the main benefactor V.N. Nikitin is shown, the progress of construction and repair works is covered, the celebrations in honor of the renovated monastery consecration are described in detail, its characteristics at the turn of the XIX–XX centuries are given. Conclusions. One of the ancient centers of Orthodoxy in the territory of Chuvashia, Tsivilsk Bogoroditsky Tikhvin Monastery became a women’s monastery as a result of transformations in 1871–1872. Preservation of the historical monastery became possible thanks to the support of the diocesan leadership, the presence of benefactors, a positive attitude of Tsivilsk residents, as well as believers of Tsivilsk and neighboring uyezds. As a result of the renovation, Tsivilsk Tikhvin Convent turned into a center of missionary educational activities in the Chuvash Region. The modern restoration of the monastery became possible due to preservation of the monastery complex, built mainly in the historical period under consideration.

Pentecostalism as a new wave of Christianity became more pronounced in 1970's and beyond in Nigeria. Since then scholars of Religion, History, Sociology and Political Science have shown keen interest in the study of the Churches known as Pentecostals because of the impact they have made on the society. The Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) was established by Pastor Josiah Akindayomi in Lagos,Nigeria in 1952. After his demise, he was succeeded by Pastor Adeboye Adejare Enock. The problem of study of this research was an examination of the expansion of the Redeemed Christian Church of God to North America, Caribbean and Canada. The missionary activities of the church could be regarded as a reversed mission in the propagation of Christianity by Africans in the Diaspora. The methodology adopted was historical. The primary and secondary sources of information were also germane in the research. The findings of the research indicated that the Redeemed Christian Church of God was founded in North America by Immigrants from Nigeria. Pastor Adeboye Enock Adejare had much influence on the Church within and outside the country because of his charisma. The Church has become a place of refuge for many immigrants. They are also contributing to the economy of the United States of America. However, the members of the Church were faced with some challenges, such as security scrutiny by the security agencies. In conclusion, the RCCGNA was a denomination that had been accepted and embraced by Nigerians and African immigrants in the United States of America.

Henry Gerhard Appenzeller (1858–1902)—along with Horace N. Allen, Horace G. Underwood, William B. Scranton, and Marion F. Scranton— pioneered Protestantism in Korea at the turn of the nineteenth century from about 1885 to 1902. Appenzeller intended to convert Koreans to Methodism, to establish Methodist societies, to reform Korean society in agreement with American Protestant evangelical teachings, and, finally, to help Korea become independent, democratic, and modernized, using the United States as a model. Appenzeller's commitment to “convert the heathen” and to reform Korean society along American Protestant Evangelical lines is easy to understand. But why the commitment to Korean independence, democratic reform, and modernization? Why did a pietistic, evangelical Protestant missionary place political concerns on a par with evangelical concerns in Korea? Appenzeller, and the rest of the small American community in Korea during the late nineteenth century, brought along the partially articulated, partially unconscious agenda to build the late nineteenth-century American evangelical Protestant vision of the City on a Hill. Appenzeller attempted to create a Christian Korea in a manner similar to late nineteenthcentury Protestant efforts to create a Christian America. Appenzeller's concept of a City on a Hill provides the key to understanding his commitment to independence, democracy, and modernization in Korea. Citizens had to hold the evangelical Protestant faith. They had to have Anglo-Saxon manners and customs. They had to live morally. The nation had to maintain independence from foreign powers, maintain a democratic form of government, and enjoy the benefits of modernization. We will consider the development of that vision in American history below.

KoangHyoeNyoWon (廣惠女院, Women's Hospital of Extended Grace) was opened in Pyengyang in 1898. I looked into the process of the dispensary's establishment, and some of its medical service activities, its personnel and financial operations, and the history of the changes KoangHyoeNyoWon had undergone. KoangHyoeNyoWon was established in Pyengyang by the WFMS (Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society) to provide medical services for women as an independent medical enterprise. The first attempt to open a women’s clinic failed in 1894, but in 1898, KoangHyoeNyoWon began operations. It built a system of medical services in cooperation with Giholbyeowon (the Hall Memorial Hospital), which was another clinic established by the Methodist Church. In addition, it tried to extend the medical services not only to women and children, but also to the poor and the disabled; therefore, it had the characteristics of a social welfare center. These facts led KoangHyoeNyoWon to rely on the support of the WFMS. The WFMS had provided KoangHyoeNyoWon with manpower, personnel expenses, medicine, medical facilities, and fees for maintenance, fuel, insurance, etc. In addition, the WFMS had covered the cost of rebuilding and reequipping the dispensary. But Jahye Clinic, a colonial medical center, opened in 1910 and competed with KoangHyoeNyoWon, which explains why the dispensary for women had to make changes. By the 1910s, gender discrimination in Joseon had lessened and women were more likely to use hospitals such as Jahye Clinic and Giholbyeowon; at the same time, demands for KoangHyoeNyoWon to become financially independent increased as the financial situation of the WFMS deteriorated. By 1914, there was talk of closing KoangHyoeNyoWon. However, it began to seek solutions to overcome the crisis and to gain financial independence. Several attempts were made to improve medical facilities, support medical education to supply independent manpower, and diversify medical services. Gradually, KoangHyoeNyoWon became a maternity clinic and offered medical care in conjunction with other clinics. In the 1920s, KoangHyoeNyoWon was merged with other hospitals—Giholbyeowon (Methodist Church) and Caroline Memorial Hospital (Presbyterian Church). It resulted from the willingness of the missionary society in Joseon to build a large and strong Christian hospital in order to compete with the colonial and national hospitals that wereexpanding aggressively. As a result, KoangHyoeNyoWon became the women’s ward of the United Christian Hospital. Through the merger, women were able to receive better and more comprehensive medical services, making KoangHyoeNyoWon the best choice for women in need. Now it was time for the question of why and how there should be a women’s clinic.

Este artigo busca refletir sobre o contexto de uma eventual disputa hegemônica entre Estados Unidos e China. Entretanto, ao invés de traçar um cenário prospectivo, busca-se levantar elementos históricos da formação de ambas as sociedades com vistas a delinear as bases das atuais estratégias internacionais de cada país. Importante característica comum entre ambas é que tanto Estados Unidos e China se veem como excepcionais, resultado de virtudes e de condições históricas específicas que moldaram de cada sociedade. Tal percepção de excepcionalidade está entre os princípios norteadores da inserção externa de Estados Unidos e China, além justificar e solidificar a construção das bases ideológicas que definem a concepção de hegemonia de cada país. Na perspectiva dos Estados Unidos, prevalece a noção de um “Destino Manifesto” – Manifest Destiny, uma visão missionária e religiosa sobre seu papel na ordem mundial. No caso da China, uma civilização milenar autocentrada e pacífica, construída sob o princípio imperial de “Tudo sob o Céu” – Tianxia ??, na qual o imperador chinês exercia o seu mandato celestial por meio da virtude e da benevolência sobre o povo Han e os povos vassalos de todo o mundo. Assim, o objetivo deste artigo é o de analisar a construção da excepcionalidade em ambas as sociedades e relacionar tais características com suas políticas atuais. ABSTRACT: This article seeks to reflect on the context of a possible hegemonic dispute between the United States and China. However, instead of outlining a prospective scenario, it seeks to raise historical elements of the formation of both societies in order to outline the bases of the current international strategies of each country. An important characteristic that United States and China have in common is that both see themselves as exceptional, as result of their own virtues and the specific historical conditions they have shaped from each society. This perception of exceptionality is among the guiding principles of the US and China's external performance and justifies the ideological foundations that define each country's conception of hegemony. From United States perspective´s the notion of "Manifest Destiny” brings with it a missionary and religious vision about its role in the world. In China's case, a self-centered and peaceful ancient civilization, built under the imperial principle of "All Under Heaven" - Tianxia ??, in which the Chinese Emperor exercised his heavenly mandate through virtue and benevolence over the Han people and the vassal peoples of the whole world. Thus, the objective of this article is to analyze the perception of exceptionality in both societies and to relate such characteristics to their current policies. Keywords: United States. China. Hegemony. Exceptionality. Manifest Destiny. All Under Heaven. Recebido em: Agosto/2018. Aprovado em: Novembro/2018.

The internationalization of education has become a defining characteristic of the competitiveness of higher education entities, both externally and internally. It ensures the integration of national, intercultural and global levels of teaching, learning, collaborative research and service delivered by universities and higher education systems. The main actors promoting the idea of internationalization on the outer contour were American and British higher educational entities, which offered their programs and tools to the global educational community. The practice of assessing universities by international rankings, compiled on the basis of unified and western-oriented scientometric databases, contributed to the emergence of such definitions as “world-class universities”, “international quality standards”, etc. All this began to determine the level of financial support of higher education organizations and the accelerated spread of the system of paid educational services in their activities. At the same time, this process contributed to the gradual loss by national educational institutions of their national-historical, social and socio-cultural specifics, which were an integral part of the knowledge of the identity of societies, which was especially acute in non-English-speaking countries. Over time the development of all-consuming globalization in the educational sector, unified approaches of intercultural learning, socialization processes, and the introduction of European values and the basic foundations of Anglo- Saxon culture into ethnic groups of different countries of the world began to dominate. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the existing contradictions in the world community, revealed the fragility (not stable) of the development of the world economy. In this regard, for non-English-speaking and developing countries, ideologists of the internationalization of education propose to strengthen the missionary function of education, focusing on the formation of civil society and its compliance with Western values and visions. For developed economies, primarily the United States, the goal of forming human resources capable of fulfilling the tasks of reindustrializing the economy based on the restoration of engineering education in regional universities is considered, and internationalization is considered exclusively in the context of attracting migrants to rejuvenate the American society Thus, the internationalization of education in the post-pandemic period will undergo changes both as a process in the context of its regulation, based on the national interests of the countries of the world community, and as a factor that determines the competitiveness of the university, transforming the system of quantitative assessments that are acceptable for ensuring sustainable development of countries in the polycentric environment.

In recent years, the subject of dawah has become a topic of considerableinterest among Muslims in North America. A plethora of articles and bookshave appeared, both in English and Arabic, that deal with this subject froma variety of angles? Western writers, both scholarly and popular, have notedthe steady increase in the number of converts to the Muslim faith. An articlein the Wall Street Jouml proclaims in its headline that “Islam is GrowingFast in the U.S., Fighting Fear and Stereotypes.” US. News and World Reporthas observed that “Islamic worship and lifestyles are becoming an increasinglyfamiliar part of the American tableau. It is said to be the nation’s fastestgrowing religion . . .”But what may be said of the future of Islamic dawah in North America?Will Muslim dii ’is become increasingly successful in their missionary work,or do the reports mentioned above represent only a temporary advance?As we attempt to answer these questions, it is important to note at theoutset the differences in orientation and focus of Muslims living in the West.In seeking to classify the five million Muslims currently resident in the UnitedStates and Canada with respect to their beliefs as to how Muslim missionaryactivity should proceed, two general philosophies of dabuh can bedistinguished. These may be called, respectively, the “defensive-pacifist’’ and“offensive-activist’’ approaches. The first characterizes the attitude of thoseMuslims who are concerned solely or primarily with the retention andmaintenance of their own Islamicity and not with the extension of that Islamicityto the non-Muslims around them. The second applies to those who are desirousof converting non-Muslims to Islam and of transforming the surrounding non-Muslim society so that it will reflect Islamic values and beliefs.The defensive-pacifist orientation is a consequence of the factors whichspurred the early waves of Muslim immigration to the United States andCanada. The ideological and theological hindrances to the residence of aMuslim in dar al kufr were mitigated by pragmatic considerations such asthe need to escape the increasingly chaotic conditions of Eastern Europeand the Middle East. Muslim immigrants quickly adopted the spirit ofAmerican individualism, and this enabled them to blend into the communitiesin which they chose to reside. Organizations were established which mainlyreflected the various national origins, ethnic backgrounds, and sectarian beliefsof the different Muslim populations. There have been few concerted effortsto subsume these differences under a larger Islamic umbrella ...

Статья посвящена уникальному опыту практической соборности, который архиеп. Тихон (Беллавин), избранный в ноябре 1917 г. патриархом Московским и Всея Руси, получил во время своего служения в Алеутской и Северо-Американской епархии благодаря общению с православными братствами. Интерес свт. Тихона к путям возрождения соборности был связан с общей ситуацией в Православной российской церкви в начале ХХ в., переживавшей кризис синодальной системы и искавшей возвращения к началам соборного управления и жизнеустройства. С 1898 по 1907 г. свт. Тихон возглавлял Алеутскую и Северо-Американскую епархию — самую большую и отдаленную, а также самую бедную и неукомплектованную епархию Русской церкви. Среди условий, повлиявших на интерес будущего патриарха к таким мирянским движениям, как православные братства, в статье обозначены следующие: другая страна, отсутствие государственной поддержки, паства из разных стран и конфессий, отсутствие финансирования и кадров. В статье рассмотрена история появления православных братств в Северной Америке, их устройство и деятельность. Братства были созданы почти в каждом приходе, а все вместе объединены в Православное общество взаимопомощи, председателем которого являлся правящий архиерей. Среди основных направлений сотрудничества архиерея и братств: социальная поддержка братчиков, межнациональное единство, постройка церквей и содержание клира, выпуск газет, просвещение. Источниковой базой статьи стали материалы отчетов, писем, проповедей архиеп. Тихона, которые позволяют сделать вывод о том, что в братствах будущий патриарх увидел не только эффективный инструмент собирания мирян и церковного управления, но и явление подлинной церковности и соборности. Опыт, приобретенный во время служения в Северной Америке, оказался востребован после революционных событий 1917–1918 гг. в России, когда традиционная связь церкви и государства распалась и возникла острая нужда в добровольных, самостоятельных и ответственных объединениях мирян, на которые патриарх мог бы опереться во время богоборческих большевистских гонений на церковь. The article is dedicated to the unique experience of practical conciliarity, which Archbishop Tikhon (Bellavin), elected in November 1917 as Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, gained during his ministry in the Aleutian and North American Diocese through communion with Orthodox brotherhoods. St. Tikhon’s interest in the ways of the revival of conciliarity was connected with the general situation in the Orthodox Russian Church at the beginning of the twentieth century, which was experiencing a crisis of the Synodal system and was looking for a return to the beginnings of conciliar governance and living arrangements. From 1898 to 1907 St. Tikhon was bishop of the Aleutian and North American diocese, the largest and most remote, as well as the poorest and most understaffed diocese of the Russian Church. Among the conditions that influenced the future patriarch’s interest in lay movements such as Orthodox brotherhoods, the article identifies the following: a different country, lack of state support, flocks from different countries and denominations, lack of funding and personnel. The article considers the history of the emergence of Orthodox brotherhoods in North America, their structure and activities. Fraternities were established in almost every parish, and all were united together in the Orthodox Mutual Aid Society, the chairman of which was the ruling bishop. Among the main areas of co-operation between the bishop and the brotherhoods are such as: social support for the brethren, inter-ethnic unity, building churches and maintaining the clergy, publishing newspapers, and education. The article is based on reports, letters, and sermons of Archbishop Tikhon, which allow us to conclude that in the brotherhoods the future patriarch saw not only an effective tool for gathering the laity and church administration, but also a phenomenon of true churchmanship and conciliarity. The experience gained during his ministry in North America was in demand after the revolutionary events of 1917–1918 in Russia, when the traditional link between church and state broke down and there was an urgent need for voluntary, independent and responsible associations of the laity, on which the patriarch could rely during the Bolshevik persecution of the church.

In Ireland, the Protestant missionary impetus of the early 19th century, known as the 'Second Reformation', coincided with Daniel O’Connell’s movement for the emancipation of Catholics and the Repeal of the Union which concurrently met with resounding success. As the Irish nationalist movement was becoming more and more catholicised, The Irish Society for Promoting the Education of the Native Irish through the Medium of Their Own Language promoted access to the Bible in “the pure Gaelic language and the Irish character” for both the spiritual salvation of “the [poorer] sons of Erin” and “the political repose and moral amelioration of Ireland.” Even if the Second Reformation has often been considered as an attempt at anglicising the Irish through conversion, a reassessment of the reciprocal influences of Protestant missions and Irish nationalism is timely. Therefore, this paper, relying on a wide range of archival material, intends to examine how the discourse of this Protestant society disrupted the status quo of Irish and British identities. Was the Society’s redefinition of Irish identity, which combined a shared Irish culture with loyalty to the British state, perceived by O’Connell’s nationalist movement as a threat or an opportunity? This exploration of the relationship between Christianity and nationalism highlights the complex ties that can be found between several layered identities and disrupts the binaries of the vernacular being promoted by the champions of independence and of native languages being erased by the advocates of imperial rule.

Anchored in the Incarnation as a model for cross-cultural ministry, this “pilgrimage” chronicles my life-long effort to connect anthropological insights with mission practice. I note how a linguist, four anthropologists, and an historian—Eugene Nida, Charles Kraft, Alan Tippett, Paul Hiebert, Louis Luzbetak, and Andrew Walls—contributed to my formation as a missiological anthropologist. Two themes that have been the hallmark of my research, teaching, writing, and training are contextualization and incarnational identification. The venues in which my pilgrimage has occurred have been as a mission volunteer in the Congo, a United Methodist missionary in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, a professor of anthropology in the E. Stanley Jones School of World Mission and Evangelism at Asbury Theological Seminary, a trainer of several thousand missionaries, a member of the American Bible Society Board of Trustees, and various roles in the American Society of Missiology.

The following papers were presented to the Canadian Society of Church History in 2009, but were not made available for publication: Michael Friesen, “Draft Resistance and the Politics of Gender: A Life History Approach to Understanding Mennonites, Anti-Militarism and Masculinity in the United States during the Vietnam War”; Bruce Douville, “Spiritual Midwife? Liberal Christianity and the Origins of the Canadian New Left”; Marlene Epp, “Preachers, Prophets, and Missionaries: The dichotomous religious lives of Mennonite women in Canada”; William Klassen, “Pilgram Marpeck (1495-1556)”; J. Richard Middleton and David Belles, “Variant Eschatologies in the Great Awakenings and the Social Gospel: Case Studies in Jonathan Edwards, Dwight L. Moody and Walter Rauschenbusch”; Darren Schmidt, “Reviving the Past: Eighteenth-Century Evangelical Interpretations of Church History”; Stephen Fai, “St. Michael of Ponass Lakes, Saskatchewan: Icon, Architecture, and Material Imagination”; Iain Edgehill, “The Religious and Theological Elements in Caribbean Slave Revolts”; Brian Froese, “Contrasting Visions of Mission: Mennonite Social Activism and Mennonite Brethren Evangelicalism in Post-War British Columbia”; Andrew Eason, “The Salvation Army and the Sacraments in Victorian England: Retracing the Steps to Non-Observance”; and Donna Kerfoot, “Florence Nightingale’s ‘Way of Perfection’ in Nineteenth-Century England”; presentations by A.B. McKillop and Ian McKay on Richard Allan’s The View from Murney Tower: Salem Bland, the Late Victorian Controversies, and the Search for a New Christianity; and presentations by Linda Ambrose, Sam Reimer, and Robert Choquette on a collection of essays edited by Michael Wilkinson entitled Canadian Pentecostalism: Transition and Transformation.

The following papers were presented to the Canadian Society of Church History in 2010, but were not made available for publication: Bruce Douville, “‘We’re Pushers of Christ’: Yorkville as a Mission Field, 1966-1971″; Chris Miller, “‘We are Christians and we are citizens’: Negotiating the Boundaries of Religious Identity within the United Church of Canada’s China Campaign, 1968-1969″; Marlene Epp, “Recipes for Religion: Foodways, Cookbooks and Mennonite Identity”; Barbara Murison, “‘Shaped by their Scottish education’: Enlightenment, Evangelicalism and the Ministers of Early Nova Scotia”; Robert Dennis, “Faith on the Prairies: Roman Catholic Engagement with the CCF during the 1930s and 1940s”; Richard Allen, “‘God’s truth comes to us in fragments’: Salem Bland and the Stormy Passage of a Liberating Mind, 1903-1950″; Andrew Eason, “A Cradle of Empire? The Salvation Army and Imperialism, 1878-1914″; Richard Enns, “‘Then shall the wilderness be glad and blossom as the rose’: Presbyterian Hopes for Indian Education at Regina, 1891-1910″; Rhonda Semple, “Connecting Through Disconnections: Cultural and Religious Meanings in London Missionary Society Work in Almora, UP, India”; Robynne Rogers Healey, “‘I am getting a considerable of a Canadian they tell me’: Connected Understandings in the Nineteenth-Century Quaker Atlantic”; James Tyler Robertson, McMaster University, “Band of Brothers: Connection and Tension within Methodism during the War of 1812″; Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, “Cross-Cultural Catholic Cooperative Development: From Antigonish to Guatemala”; Catherine LeGrand, “Development, Liberation Theology and the Peasant Movement for Agrarian Reform: Quebec Catholic Missionaries in Honduras, 1955-1975″; Ruth Compton Brouwer, “‘Reason over Passion’: CUSO’s Divided Response to the Nigerian Civil War, 1967-1970″; and Donna Kerfoot, “Caroline Fry: A Practical Theology of the Sacraments.”

Introduction In a 1984 New York Times interview, Germaine Greer discussed the quite different views that have surrounded her supposed attitude towards sex. As she put it, “People seem to think I'm Hugh Hefner and that the reason women started having sex is because I told them to” (qtd. in De Lacy). This view had, however, shifted by the 1980s. As she told reporter Justine De Lacy, “Now they are saying that I'm against sex.” In this article, I tease out Greer’s remarks about the supposed transformation of her political persona. I do so with reference to her work on Suck Magazine, which was billed by its editors as “The First European Sex Paper,” and which was first published in 1969 (cited in Gleeson 86). The article has two key aims. The first is to demonstrate that Greer has not (as it might seem) transformed from a sexual revolutionary to an anti-sex ideologue. This view is too simplistic. The article’s second aim is to explore Greer’s significant but under-acknowledged contribution to feminist debates about pornography. Far from being strictly anti- or pro-porn, Greer’s work on Suck actually aligns with both of these positions, and it appeared before the feminist porn debates really gained traction. Germaine Greer as Sexual Revolutionary and/or Anti-Sex Ideologue? The apparent political transformation that Greer mentioned in 1984 has been particularly apparent since the 1990s. Since that decade, she has criticised pornography on several occasions. For example, in her book The Whole Woman (1999), Greer argued, “Pornography is the flight from woman, men’s denial of sex as a medium of communication . . .” (181). In an article published in The Guardian in 2000, Greer wrote, “Can [pornography] go too far? No, it can't. As far as male sexual fantasy is concerned there is no too far.” In a 2012 episode of the Australian current affairs program Q&A, Greer argued, “Pornography is the advertisement of prostitution.”Greer’s stance on pornography, and particularly her invocation of female sexual subordination, might seem to represent a radical shift from the political persona that she cultivated during the 1960s and 1970s. During that earlier period, Greer was arguing for female sexual empowerment. She posed nude for Suck. In 1971, the US magazine Life described Greer as a “saucy feminist that even men like” (qtd. in Wallace, unpaginated photograph). There is nothing “saucy” about her more recent anti-porn posture; this posture is not concerned with “empowerment” in any obvious way. Yet I would suggest that Greer at least anticipated this posture in her work on Suck. In that magazine, she did not frame sex as being entirely emancipatory. Rather, Greer argued for sexual liberation (particularly for women), but (in doing so) she also invoked the hierarchical gender roles that would later be invoked in anti-porn feminist arguments. Examining some of Greer’s contributions to Suck will make clear the important contribution that she has made to feminist debates about pornography. These are debates which she has not generally been associated with, or at least not to the extent that Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon (both US feminists who have very publicly remonstrated against porn) have (see Dworkin; MacKinnon and Dworkin). The feminist porn debates gained ascendance during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and seem to have been liveliest in North America (see Bronstein; Duggan and Hunter; MacKinnon and Dworkin). These debates are significant because of what they say about the truly complex and contentious relationship between sex, gender, power, and representation. The feminist porn debates have been broad-ranging (Sullivan and McKee 10), though they tend to have been framed as polarised conflicts between anti-pornography feminists and “sex-positive”/“anti-censorship” feminists. For anti-pornography feminists, pornography always symptomatises and perpetuates gender hierarchy. Andrea Dworkin famously defined “pornography” as the graphic, sexually explicit subordination of women in pictures and/or words that also includes women presented dehumanized as sexual objects, things, or commodities; or women presented as sexual objects who enjoy pain or humiliation; or women presented as sexual objects who experience sexual pleasure in being raped; or women presented as sexual objects tied up or cut up or mutilated or bruised or physically hurt; or women presented in postures or positions of sexual submission, servility, or display; or women’s body parts—including but not limited to vaginas, breasts, buttocks—exhibited such that women are reduced to those parts; or women presented as whores by nature . . . (xxxiii) Conversely, sex-positive/anti-censorship feminists tend to assess pornography “on a case by case basis”; porn can range from woman-hating to politically progressive (McKee, Albury, and Lumby 22). For these feminists, attempts to legislate against pornography (for example, via the anti-porn ordinance drawn up in the US during the 1980s by Dworkin and MacKinnon) amount to censorship, and are not in the interest of women, feminism, or sexual liberation (Duggan and Hunter 29–39; and see also MacKinnon and Dworkin). Among the most striking aspects of Greer’s work on Suck is that it actually mobilises aspects of both these (loosely-defined) feminist positions, and appeared almost a decade before pornography became an issue of contention amongst feminists. This work was published not in North America, but in Europe; the Australian-born Greer was living in the United Kingdom at the time of that magazine’s publication, and indeed she has been described as “Britain’s . . . most well-known feminist” (Taylor 759; and see also Gleeson). Does Porn Suck? Greer co-founded Suck in 1969, the year before The Female Eunuch was published. Greer had already established a minor public profile through her journalistic contributions to the London-based Oz Magazine. Several of those contributions were written under the guise of “Dr G—the only groupie with a Ph.D in captivity,” and featured references to “groupiedom” and “cunt power” (qtd. in Gleeson 86). Suck was published in Amsterdam to circumvent “British censorship laws” (Wallace 15). The magazine was very much a product of the then-current sexual revolution, as suggested by the following passage from a 1971 editorial: “Our cause is sexual liberation. Our tactic is the defiance of censorship” (University of Melbourne Archives). Suck comprised sexually-explicit imagery (for example, nudity and shots of (hetero)sexual penetration) and similarly explicit articles. These articles are furnished with the vivid, deliberately provocative prose for which Greer is renowned.In some articles, Greer argues that women’s acceptance of their bodies constitutes a rebellion against patriarchy. In a 1971 article, she writes, “Primitive man feared the vagina . . . as the most magical of magical orifices of the body” (University of Melbourne Archives). The title of this piece is “Lady Love Your Cunt,” and indicates Greer’s view that patriarchal fears—or, as she puts it, the fears of “primitive man”—have contributed to stigma that has surrounded the vagina. Greer concludes thus: “Why not send a photograph of your own cunt, with your names labelled on?” (Whether any readers responded to this invitation remains unclear.) In “Bounce Titty Bounce,” she describes a “Mafia that controls the shapes of [women’s] bodies” (University of Melbourne Archives). This control is particularly evident in the brassiere, which Greer calls “a muzzle, a mask, binding joys and desires with wire and rubber and nylon and clips and cotton.” In a 1970 article entitled “Ladies get on top for better orgasms,” Greer opens with the statement: “The prevalence of the missionary position of fucking in the Western World [sic] seems to mean a widespread unfairness in sex.” She elaborates: Even if women were not . . . slighter than men, the missionary position would have little to commend it. The hands of the man are not free to play with his lover’s breasts or clitoris . . . because he must support himself, at least partially by them . . . The male ismin [sic] full control. Greer concedes that the “female on top position is perhaps the least popular of the alternatives to the missionary position.” The “female on top” position does, however, have advantages for women, one being that a woman “can arrive at a position to accept the cock without having to take her weight on her hands.” Greer’s best-known contribution to Suck is a selection of nude photographs that were published in a 1971 edition. In one shot, Greer is lying on her back, her legs behind her ears, her anus directly in front of the camera. In another shot, she is positioned in the same manner, although her anus and vagina are more central within the frame. In both shots, Greer is gazing directly into the camera and smiling. On one level, the textual and photographic examples described above—and, in fact, the very publication of Suck—suggest a rebellion against sexual repression. This rebellion was characteristic of the sexual revolution (Gleeson 86). Yet, in advocating female sexual empowerment, Greer distanced herself from the masculine bias of that movement. In her 1984 New York Times interview, Greer was quoted as saying that “. . . the sexual revolution never happened. Permissiveness happened, and that’s no better than repressiveness, because women are still being manipulated by men” (qtd. in De Lacy). Here, she anticipates arguments (e.g. Jeffreys) that the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s actually sanctioned (heterosexual) male desire and men’s sexual access to women. In Suck, then, Greer argued that women need to liberate themselves sexually, and not only be seen as instruments for male sexual liberation. Greer did pose nude, but, in doing so, she stared back into the camera/at the spectator—thus returning the gaze, rather than being objectified by this gaze (Mulvey). Greer has described her shots thus: “Face, pubes and anus, nothing decorative about it. Nothing sexy about it either. Confrontation was the name of the game” (qtd. in Gleeson 86). In 2013, Greer wrote of that photo shoot: “Women’s bodies were merchandised. Each week we saw a little more: nipples, then pussy . . . drip-feeding the masturbation fantasies of a [male] generation. My gesture aimed to short-circuit that process.” She has also been quoted as saying that she envisioned Suck as an “antidote to the exploitative papers like Screw and Hustler,” by “developing a new kind of erotic art, away from the tits ‘n’ ass and the peep show syndrome” (qtd. in Gleeson 86). Thus, Greer’s Suck contributions seem to foreshadow the “sex-positive” feminism that would emerge later in the 1970s in North America (e.g. Duggan and Hunter). Her work would also anticipate feminist uses of porn to explore female sexuality from specifically female and feminist perspectives (see Taormino et al.). A closer examination of these contributions, however, suggests a more complex picture. Witness Greer’s reference to the popularity of “missionary sex” as a reason for “widespread unfairness in sex,” or her description of a (presumably) male-dominated “Mafia” who control women’s bodies (for example, via the bra). In a newspaper interview that was published around the time of The Female Eunuch’s 1970 publication, Greer argued that sex needs to be “rescued” from the patriarchy by feminists. This is because sex under patriarchy has been characterised by the dichotomised positions of “powerful and powerless, masterful and mastered.” In this scenario, women are the ones who are “powerless” and “mastered.” The title of that interview is “Author Attacks Dominating Male” (University of Melbourne Archives).The above statements suggest a sexual landscape characterised by “potentially violent, dominant men and subordinated, silenced women” (Duggan and Hunter 7). In this landscape, sex is a site of gender inequality; and even something as apparently innocuous as underwear is used by men to control women. The pervasive sense of patriarchy invoked here would (as scholars such as Duggan and Hunter have argued) be invoked in much anti-pornography feminist writing. And Greer would go on to concur with the anti-porn stance, as the three pronouncements cited at the beginning of this article attest. (In Suck, Greer does not attempt to define “pornography,” and nor does she classify her contributions as being “pornography” or “anti-pornography.”)ConclusionI have argued that it is useful to revisit some of Germaine Greer’s contributions to Suck Magazine in order to reassess her apparent transformation from sexual revolutionary to anti-sex ideologue. These contributions (which include articles and photographs) are celebrations of female sexual empowerment and critiques of what Greer sees as a pervasive gender hierarchy. I have argued that this work is also useful in that it anticipates the feminist debates about pornography that would gain ascendance in North America almost a decade after Suck’s publication. Greer articulates arguments that would come to be aligned with both “sex-positive” and “anti-pornography” feminist discourses. To this extent, she has made an important and thus far largely unacknowledged contribution to these highly polarised feminist debates. ReferencesBronstein, Carolyn. Battling Pornography: The American Feminist Anti-Pornography Movement, 1976–1986. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.De Lacy, Justine. “Germaine Greer’s New Book Stirs a Debate.” The New York Times. 5 Mar. 1984. 21 Oct. 2015 <https://www.nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/greer-debate.html>.Duggan, Lisa, and Nan D. Hunter, eds. “Introduction.” Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture. 10th Anniversary Edition. London: Routledge, 2006. 1–13.Dworkin, Andrea. Pornography: Men Possessing Women. New York: Plume, 1989. Gleeson, Kate. “From Suck Magazine to Corporate Paedophilia: Feminism and Pornograph—Remembering the Australian Way.” Women’s Studies International Forum 38 (2013): 83–96.Greer, Germaine. The Whole Woman. London: Transworld Publishers, 1999. ———. “Gluttons for Porn.” The Guardian 24 Sep. 2000. 21 Oct. 2015 <http://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/sep/24/society>.———. “As Women Bare All in Feminist Protest, Germaine Greer Asks: Is This Feminism?” News.com.au 17 Mar. 2013. 30 July 2016 <http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/as-women-bare-all-in-feminist-protest-germaine-greer-asks-is-this-feminism/story-fneszs56-1226598414628>.Jeffreys, Sheila. Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution. London: The Women’s Press, 1990. MacKinnon, Catharine A., and Andrea Dworkin, eds. In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings. Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1997. McKee, Alan, Katherine Albury, and Catharine Lumby. The Porn Report. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2008. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6–18. Q&A. “Politics and Porn in a Post-Feminist World.” First screened 19 Mar. 2012. 20 May 2016 <http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s3451584.htm>.Suck Magazine. Copies held by Germaine Greer Archive, University of Melbourne. Sullivan, Rebecca, and Alan McKee. Pornography: Structures, Agency and Performance. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015.Taormino, Tristan, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, Constance Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young, eds. The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2013.Taylor, Anthea. “Germaine Greer’s Adaptable Celebrity: Feminism, Unruliness, and Humour on the British Small Screen.” Feminist Media Studies 14.5 (2014): 759–74.University of Melbourne Archives, Germaine Greer archive. Undated. 2014.0038, Unit 216. File name “(Drawer 158) Press clippings about Germaine Greer.” “Author Attacks Dominating Male.” Interview with Germaine Greer. Interviewer and place of publication unknown. Unpaginated. ———. Undated. 2014.0038, Unit 219. File name “Bounce Titty Bounce.” “Bounce Titty Bounce.” Originally published in Suck Magazine. Viewed in unpublished manuscript form. Unpaginated. ———. 1971. 2014.0038, Unit 219. File name “Suck Editorial 1971?” “Editorial.” Suck Magazine. Issue number not provided. Unpaginated. ———. 1971. 2014.0038, Unit 219. File name: “Lady Love Your Cunt Suck.” “Lady Love Your Cunt.” Originally published in Suck Magazine. Viewed in unpublished manuscript form. Unpaginated. ———. Undated. 2014.0038, Unit 219. File name: “Suck Correspondence 73.” Untitled photographs of Germaine Greer. Originally published in Suck Magazine. Unpaginated. Wallace, Christine. Germaine Greer, Untamed Shrew. Sydney: Pan MacMillan, 1997.

When we think of disability today in the Western world, Christopher Reeve most likely comes to mind. A film star who captured people’s imagination as Superman, Reeve was already a celebrity before he took the fall that would lead to his new position in the fame game: the role of super-crip. As a person with acquired quadriplegia, Christopher Reeve has become both the epitome of disability in Western culture — the powerful cultural myth of disability as tragedy and catastrophe — and, in an intimately related way, the icon for the high-technology quest for cure. The case of Reeve is fascinating, yet critical discussion of Christopher Reeve in terms of fame, celebrity and his performance of disability is conspicuously lacking (for a rare exception see McRuer). To some extent this reflects the comparative lack of engagement of media and cultural studies with disability (Goggin). To redress this lacuna, we draw upon theories of celebrity (Dyer; Marshall; Turner, Bonner, & Marshall; Turner) to explore the production of Reeve as celebrity, as well as bringing accounts of celebrity into dialogue with critical disability studies. Reeve is a cultural icon, not just because of the economy, industrial processes, semiotics, and contemporary consumption of celebrity, outlined in Turner’s 2004 framework. Fame and celebrity are crucial systems in the construction of disability; and the circulation of Reeve-as-celebrity only makes sense if we understand the centrality of disability to culture and media. Reeve plays an enormously important (if ambiguous) function in the social relations of disability, at the heart of the discursive underpinning of the otherness of disability and the construction of normal sexed and gendered bodies (the normate) in everyday life. What is distinctive and especially powerful about this instance of fame and disability is how authenticity plays through the body of the celebrity Reeve; how his saintly numinosity is received by fans and admirers with passion, pathos, pleasure; and how this process places people with disabilities in an oppressive social system, so making them subject(s). An Accidental Star Born September 25, 1952, Christopher Reeve became famous for his roles in the 1978 movie Superman, and the subsequent three sequels (Superman II, III, IV), as well as his role in other films such as Monsignor. As well as becoming a well-known actor, Reeve gained a profile for his activism on human rights, solidarity, environmental, and other issues. In May 1995 Reeve acquired a disability in a riding accident. In the ensuing months, Reeve’s situation attracted a great deal of international attention. He spent six months in the Kessler Rehabilitation Institute in New Jersey, and there gave a high-rating interview on US television personality Barbara Walters’ 20/20 program. In 1996, Reeve appeared at the Academy Awards, was a host at the 1996 Paralympic Games, and was invited to speak at the Democratic National Convention. In the same year Reeve narrated a film about the lives of people living with disabilities (Mierendorf). In 1998 his memoir Still Me was published, followed in 2002 by another book Nothing Is Impossible. Reeve’s active fashioning of an image and ‘new life’ (to use his phrase) stands in stark contrast with most people with disabilities, who find it difficult to enter into the industry and system of celebrity, because they are most often taken to be the opposite of glamorous or important. They are objects of pity, or freaks to be stared at (Mitchell & Synder; Thomson), rather than assuming other attributes of stars. Reeve became famous for his disability, indeed very early on he was acclaimed as the pre-eminent American with disability — as in the phrase ‘President of Disability’, an appellation he attracted. Reeve was quickly positioned in the celebrity industry, not least because his example, image, and texts were avidly consumed by viewers and readers. For millions of people — as evident in the letters compiled in the 1999 book Care Packages by his wife, Dana Reeve — Christopher Reeve is a hero, renowned for his courage in doing battle with his disability and his quest for a cure. Part of the creation of Reeve as celebrity has been a conscious fashioning of his life as an instructive fable. A number of biographies have now been published (Havill; Hughes; Oleksy; Wren). Variations on a theme, these tend to the hagiographic: Christopher Reeve: Triumph over Tragedy (Alter). Those interested in Reeve’s life and work can turn also to fan websites. Most tellingly perhaps is the number of books, fables really, aimed at children, again, on a characteristic theme: Learning about Courage from the Life of Christopher Reeve (Kosek; see also Abraham; Howard). The construction, but especially the consumption, of Reeve as disabled celebrity, is consonant with powerful cultural myths and tropes of disability. In many Western cultures, disability is predominantly understood a tragedy, something that comes from the defects and lack of our bodies, whether through accidents of birth or life. Those ‘suffering’ with disability, according to this cultural myth, need to come to terms with this bitter tragedy, and show courage in heroically overcoming their lot while they bide their time for the cure that will come. The protagonist for this this script is typically the ‘brave’ person with disability; or, as this figure is colloquially known in critical disability studies and the disability movement — the super-crip. This discourse of disability exerts a strong force today, and is known as the ‘medical’ model. It interacts with a prior, but still active charity discourse of disability (Fulcher). There is a deep cultural history of disability being seen as something that needs to be dealt with by charity. In late modernity, charity is very big business indeed, and celebrities play an important role in representing the good works bestowed on people with disabilities by rich donors. Those managing celebrities often suggest that the star finds a charity to gain favourable publicity, a routine for which people with disabilities are generally the pathetic but handy extras. Charity dinners and events do not just reinforce the tragedy of disability, but they also leave unexamined the structural nature of disability, and its associated disadvantage. Those critiquing the medical and charitable discourses of disability, and the oppressive power relations of disability that it represents, point to the social and cultural shaping of disability, most famously in the British ‘social’ model of disability — but also from a range of other perspectives (Corker and Thomas). Those formulating these critiques point to the crucial function that the trope of the super-crip plays in the policing of people with disabilities in contemporary culture and society. Indeed how the figure of the super-crip is also very much bound up with the construction of the ‘normal’ body, a general economy of representation that affects everyone. Superman Flies Again The celebrity of Christopher Reeve and what it reveals for an understanding of fame and disability can be seen with great clarity in his 2002 visit to Australia. In 2002 there had been a heated national debate on the ethics of use of embryonic stem cells for research. In an analysis of three months of the print media coverage of these debates, we have suggested that disability was repeatedly, almost obsessively, invoked in these debates (‘Uniting the Nation’). Yet the dominant representation of disability here was the cultural myth of disability as tragedy, requiring cure at all cost, and that this trope was central to the way that biotechnology was constructed as requiring an urgent, united national response. Significantly, in these debates, people with disabilities were often talked about but very rarely licensed to speak. Only one person with disability was, and remains, a central figure in these Australian stem cell and biotechnology policy conversations: Christopher Reeve. As an outspoken advocate of research on embryonic stem-cells in the quest for a cure for spinal injuries, as well as other diseases, Reeve’s support was enlisted by various protagonists. The current affairs show Sixty Minutes (modelled after its American counterpart) presented Reeve in debate with Australian critics: PRESENTER: Stem cell research is leading to perhaps the greatest medical breakthroughs of all time… Imagine a world where paraplegics could walk or the blind could see … But it’s a breakthrough some passionately oppose. A breakthrough that’s caused a fierce personal debate between those like actor Christopher Reeve, who sees this technology as a miracle, and those who regard it as murder. (‘Miracle or Murder?’) Sixty Minutes starkly portrays the debate in Manichean terms: lunatics standing in the way of technological progress versus Christopher Reeve flying again tomorrow. Christopher presents the debate in utilitarian terms: CHRISTOPHER REEVE: The purpose of government, really in a free society, is to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. And that question should always be in the forefront of legislators’ minds. (‘Miracle or Murder?’) No criticism of Reeve’s position was offered, despite the fierce debate over the implications of such utilitarian rhetoric for minorities such as people with disabilities (including himself!). Yet this utilitarian stance on disability has been elaborated by philosopher Peter Singer, and trenchantly critiqued by the international disability rights movement. Later in 2002, the Premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr, invited Reeve to visit Australia to participate in the New South Wales Spinal Cord Forum. A journalist by training, and skilled media practitioner, Carr had been the most outspoken Australian state premier urging the Federal government to permit the use of embryonic stem cells for research. Carr’s reasons were as much as industrial as benevolent, boosting the stocks of biotechnology as a clean, green, boom industry. Carr cleverly and repeated enlisted stereotypes of disability in the service of his cause. Christopher Reeve was flown into Australia on a specially modified Boeing 747, free of charge courtesy of an Australian airline, and was paid a hefty appearance fee. Not only did Reeve’s fee hugely contrast with meagre disability support pensions many Australians with disabilities live on, he was literally the only voice and image of disability given any publicity. Consuming Celebrity, Contesting Crips As our analysis of Reeve’s antipodean career suggests, if disability were a republic, and Reeve its leader, its polity would look more plutocracy than democracy; as befits modern celebrity with its constitutive tensions between the demotic and democratic (Turner). For his part, Reeve has criticised the treatment of people with disabilities, and how they are stereotyped, not least the narrow concept of the ‘normal’ in mainstream films. This is something that has directly effected his career, which has become limited to narration or certain types of television and film work. Reeve’s reprise on his culture’s notion of disability comes with his starring role in an ironic, high-tech 1998 remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (Bleckner), a movie that in the original featured a photojournalist injured and temporarily using a wheelchair. Reeve has also been a strong advocate, lobbyist, and force in the politics of disability. His activism, however, has been far more strongly focussed on finding a cure for people with spinal injuries — rather than seeking to redress inequality and discrimination of all people with disabilities. Yet Reeve’s success in the notoriously fickle star system that allows disability to be understood and mapped in popular culture is mostly an unexplored paradox. As we note above, the construction of Reeve as celebrity, celebrating his individual resilience and resourcefulness, and his authenticity, functions precisely to sustain the ‘truth’ and the power relations of disability. Reeve’s celebrity plays an ideological role, knitting together a set of discourses: individualism; consumerism; democratic capitalism; and the primacy of the able body (Marshall; Turner). The nature of this cultural function of Reeve’s celebrity is revealed in the largely unpublicised contests over his fame. At the same time Reeve was gaining fame with his traditional approach to disability and reinforcement of the continuing catastrophe of his life, he was attracting an infamy within certain sections of the international disability rights movement. In a 1996 US debate disability scholar David T Mitchell put it this way: ‘He’s [Reeve] the good guy — the supercrip, the Superman, and those of us who can live with who we are with our disabilities, but who cannot live with, and in fact, protest and retaliate against the oppression we confront every second of our lives are the bad guys’ (Mitchell, quoted in Brown). Many feel, like Mitchell, that Reeve’s focus on a cure ignores the unmet needs of people with disabilities for daily access to support services and for the ending of their brutal, dehumanising, daily experience as other (Goggin & Newell, Disability in Australia). In her book Make Them Go Away Mary Johnson points to the conservative forces that Christopher Reeve is associated with and the way in which these forces have been working to oppose the acceptance of disability rights. Johnson documents the way in which fame can work in a variety of ways to claw back the rights of Americans with disabilities granted in the Americans with Disabilities Act, documenting the association of Reeve and, in a different fashion, Clint Eastwood as stars who have actively worked to limit the applicability of civil rights legislation to people with disabilities. Like other successful celebrities, Reeve has been assiduous in managing his image, through the use of celebrity professionals including public relations professionals. In his Australian encounters, for example, Reeve gave a variety of media interviews to Australian journalists and yet the editor of the Australian disability rights magazine Link was unable to obtain an interview. Despite this, critiques of the super-crip celebrity function of Reeve by people with disabilities did circulate at the margins of mainstream media during his Australian visit, not least in disability media and the Internet (Leipoldt, Newell, and Corcoran, 2003). Infamous Disability Like the lives of saints, it is deeply offensive to many to criticise Christopher Reeve. So deeply engrained are the cultural myths of the catastrophe of disability and the creation of Reeve as icon that any critique runs the risk of being received as sacrilege, as one rare iconoclastic website provocatively prefigures (Maddox). In this highly charged context, we wish to acknowledge his contribution in highlighting some aspects of contemporary disability, and emphasise our desire not to play Reeve the person — rather to explore the cultural and media dimensions of fame and disability. In Christopher Reeve we find a remarkable exception as someone with disability who is celebrated in our culture. We welcome a wider debate over what is at stake in this celebrity and how Reeve’s renown differs from other disabled stars, as, for example, in Robert McRuer reflection that: ... at the beginning of the last century the most famous person with disabilities in the world, despite her participation in an ‘overcoming’ narrative, was a socialist who understood that disability disproportionately impacted workers and the power[less]; Helen Keller knew that blindness and deafness, for instance, often resulted from industrial accidents. At the beginning of this century, the most famous person with disabilities in the world is allowing his image to be used in commercials … (McRuer 230) For our part, we think Reeve’s celebrity plays an important contemporary role because it binds together a constellation of economic, political, and social institutions and discourses — namely science, biotechnology, and national competitiveness. In the second half of 2004, the stem cell debate is once again prominent in American debates as a presidential election issue. Reeve figures disability in national culture in his own country and internationally, as the case of the currency of his celebrity in Australia demonstrates. In this light, we have only just begun to register, let alone explore and debate, what is entailed for us all in the production of this disabled fame and infamy. Epilogue to “Fame and Disability” Christopher Reeve died on Sunday 10 October 2004, shortly after this article was accepted for publication. His death occasioned an outpouring of condolences, mourning, and reflection. We share that sense of loss. How Reeve will be remembered is still unfolding. The early weeks of public mourning have emphasised his celebrity as the very embodiment and exemplar of disabled identity: ‘The death of Christopher Reeve leaves embryonic-stem-cell activism without one of its star generals’ (Newsweek); ‘He Never Gave Up: What actor and activist Christopher Reeve taught scientists about the treatment of spinal-cord injury’ (Time); ‘Incredible Journey: Facing tragedy, Christopher Reeve inspired the world with hope and a lesson in courage’ (People); ‘Superman’s Legacy’ (The Express); ‘Reeve, the Real Superman’ (Hindustani Times). In his tribute New South Wales Premier Bob Carr called Reeve the ‘most impressive person I have ever met’, and lamented ‘Humankind has lost an advocate and friend’ (Carr). The figure of Reeve remains central to how disability is represented. In our culture, death is often closely entwined with disability (as in the saying ‘better dead than disabled’), something Reeve reflected upon himself often. How Reeve’s ‘global mourning’ partakes and shapes in this dense knots of associations, and how it transforms his celebrity, is something that requires further work (Ang et. al.). The political and analytical engagement with Reeve’s celebrity and mourning at this time serves to underscore our exploration of fame and disability in this article. Already there is his posthumous enlistment in the United States Presidential elections, where disability is both central and yet marginal, people with disability talked about rather than listened to. The ethics of stem cell research was an election issue before Reeve’s untimely passing, with Democratic presidential contender John Kerry sharply marking his difference on this issue with President Bush. After Reeve’s death his widow Dana joined the podium on the Kerry campaign in Columbus, Ohio, to put the case herself; for his part, Kerry compared Bush’s opposition to stem cell research as akin to favouring the candle lobby over electricity. As we write, the US polls are a week away, but the cultural representation of disability — and the intensely political role celebrity plays in it — appears even more palpably implicated in the government of society itself. References Abraham, Philip. Christopher Reeve. New York: Children’s Press, 2002. Alter, Judy. Christopher Reeve: Triumph over Tragedy. Danbury, Conn.: Franklin Watts, 2000. Ang, Ien, Ruth Barcan, Helen Grace, Elaine Lally, Justine Lloyd, and Zoe Sofoulis (eds.) Planet Diana: Cultural Studies and Global Mourning. Sydney: Research Centre in Intercommunal Studies, University of Western Sydney, Nepean, 1997. Bleckner, Jeff, dir. Rear Window. 1998. Brown, Steven E. “Super Duper? The (Unfortunate) Ascendancy of Christopher Reeve.” Mainstream: Magazine of the Able-Disabled, October 1996. Repr. 10 Aug. 2004 http://www.independentliving.org/docs3/brown96c.html>. Carr, Bob. “A Class Act of Grace and Courage.” Sydney Morning Herald. 12 Oct. 2004: 14. Corker, Mairian and Carol Thomas. “A Journey around the Social Model.” Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory. Ed. Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare. London and New York: Continuum, 2000. Donner, Richard, dir. Superman. 1978. Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. London: BFI Macmillan, 1986. Fulcher, Gillian. Disabling Policies? London: Falmer Press, 1989. Furie, Sidney J., dir. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. 1987. Finn, Margaret L. Christopher Reeve. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1997. Gilmer, Tim. “The Missionary Reeve.” New Mobility. November 2002. 13 Aug. 2004 http://www.newmobility.com/>. Goggin, Gerard. “Media Studies’ Disability.” Media International Australia 108 (Aug. 2003): 157-68. Goggin, Gerard, and Christopher Newell. Disability in Australia: Exposing a Social Apartheid. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005. —. “Uniting the Nation?: Disability, Stem Cells, and the Australian Media.” Disability & Society 19 (2004): 47-60. Havill, Adrian. Man of Steel: The Career and Courage of Christopher Reeve. New York, N.Y.: Signet, 1996. Howard, Megan. Christopher Reeve. Minneapolis: Lerner Publications, 1999. Hughes, Libby. Christopher Reeve. Parsippany, NJ.: Dillon Press, 1998. Johnson, Mary. Make Them Go Away: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Reeve and the Case Against Disability Rights. Louisville : Advocado Press, 2003. Kosek, Jane Kelly. Learning about Courage from the Life of Christopher Reeve. 1st ed. New York : PowerKids Press, 1999. Leipoldt, Erik, Christopher Newell, and Maurice Corcoran. “Christopher Reeve and Bob Carr Dehumanise Disability — Stem Cell Research Not the Best Solution.” Online Opinion 27 Jan. 2003. http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=510>. Lester, Richard (dir.) Superman II. 1980. —. Superman III. 1983. Maddox. “Christopher Reeve Is an Asshole.” 12 Aug. 2004 http://maddox.xmission.com/c.cgi?u=creeve>. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Mierendorf, Michael, dir. Without Pity: A Film about Abilities. Narr. Christopher Reeve. 1996. “Miracle or Murder?” Sixty Minutes. Channel 9, Australia. March 17, 2002. 15 June 2002 http://news.ninemsn.com.au/sixtyminutes/stories/2002_03_17/story_532.asp>. Mitchell, David, and Synder, Sharon, eds. The Body and Physical Difference. Ann Arbor, U of Michigan, 1997. McRuer, Robert. “Critical Investments: AIDS, Christopher Reeve, and Queer/Disability Studies.” Journal of Medical Humanities 23 (2002): 221-37. Oleksy, Walter G. Christopher Reeve. San Diego, CA: Lucent, 2000. Reeve, Christopher. Nothing Is Impossible: Reflections on a New Life. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 2002. —. Still Me. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 1998. Reeve, Dana, comp. Care Packages: Letters to Christopher Reeve from Strangers and Other Friends. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 1999. Reeve, Matthew (dir.) Christopher Reeve: Courageous Steps. Television documentary, 2002. Thomson, Rosemary Garland, ed. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New York: New York UP, 1996. Turner, Graeme. Understanding Celebrity. Thousands Oak, CA: Sage, 2004. Turner, Graeme, Frances Bonner, and David P Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 2000. Wren, Laura Lee. Christopher Reeve: Hollywood’s Man of Courage. Berkeley Heights, NJ : Enslow, 1999. Younis, Steve. “Christopher Reeve Homepage.” 12 Aug. 2004 http://www.fortunecity.com/lavender/greatsleep/1023/main.html>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Goggin, Gerard & Newell, Christopher. "Fame and Disability: Christopher Reeve, Super Crips, and Infamous Celebrity." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/02-goggin.php>. APA Style Goggin, G. & Newell, C. (Nov. 2004) "Fame and Disability: Christopher Reeve, Super Crips, and Infamous Celebrity," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/02-goggin.php>.

Cyborgs already walk among us. (“Cures to Come” 76) This essay was begun as a reaction to a Hallmark Hall of Fame television movie called Sweet Nothing in My Ear (2008), which follows the lives of two parents, Dan, who is hearing (played by Jeff Daniels), and Laura, who is deaf (Marlee Matlin), as they struggle to make a decision about whether or not to give their 11-year-old son, Adam (late-deafened), a cochlear implant. Dan and Laura represent different perspectives, hearing and deaf perspectives. The film dramatizes the parents’ conflict and negotiation, exposing audiences to both sides of the cochlear implant debate, albeit in a fairly simplistic way. Nevertheless, it represents the lives of deaf people and gives voice to debates about cochlear implants with more accuracy and detail than most film and television dramas. One of the central scenes in the film is what I call the “activation scene”, quite common to cochlear implant narratives. In the scene, the protagonists witness a child having his implant activated or turned on. The depiction is reminiscent of the WATER scene in the film about Helen Keller, The Miracle Worker, employing a sentimental visual rhetoric. First, the two parents are shown seated near the child, clasping their hands as if in prayer. The audiologist, wielder of technology and therefore clearly the authority figure in the scene, types away furiously on her laptop. At the moment of being “turned on,” the child suddenly “hears” his father calling “David! David!” He gazes angelically toward heaven as piano music plays plaintively in the background. The parents all but fall to their knees and the protagonist of the film, Dan, watching through a window, weeps. It is a scene of cure, of healing, of “miracle,” a hyper-sentimentalised portrait of what is in reality often a rather anti-climactic event. It was certainly anti-climactic in my son, Michael’s case. I was taken aback by how this scene was presented and dismayed overall at some of the inaccuracies, small though they were, in the portrayal of cochlear implants in this film. It was, after all, according to the Nielsen ratings, seen by 8 million people. I began to wonder what kinds of misconceptions my son was going to face when he met people whose only exposure to implants was through media representations. Spurred by this question, I started to research other recent portrayals of people with implants on U.S. television in the past ten years, to see how cochlear implant (hereafter referred to as CI) identity has been portrayed by American media. For most of American history, deaf people have been portrayed in print and visual media as exotic “others,” and have long been the subject of an almost morbid cultural fascination. Christopher Krentz suggests that, particularly in the nineteenth century, scenes pairing sentimentality and deafness repressed an innate, Kristevan “abject” revulsion towards deaf people. Those who are deaf highlight and define, through their ‘lack’, the “unmarked” body. The fact of their deafness, understood as lack, conjures up an ideal that it does not attain, the ideal of the so-called “normal” or “whole” body. In recent years, however, the figure of the “deaf as Other” in the media, has shifted from what might be termed the “traditionally” deaf character, to what Brenda Jo Brueggeman (in her recent book Deaf Subjects: Between Identities and Places), calls “the new deaf cyborg” or the deaf person with a cochlear implant (4). N. Katharine Hailes states that cyborgs are now “the stage on which are performed contestations about the body boundaries that have often marked class, ethnic, and cultural differences” (85). In this essay, I claim that the character with a CI, as portrayed in the media, is now not only a strange, “marked” “Other,” but is also a screen upon which viewers project anxieties about technology, demonstrating both fascination fear. In her book, Brueggeman issues a call to action, saying that Deaf Studies must now begin to examine what she calls “implanting rhetorics,” or “the rhetorical relationships between our technologies and our identity” and therefore needs to attend to the construction of “the new deaf cyborg” (18). This short study will serve, I hope, as both a response to that injunction and as a jumping-off point for more in-depth studies of the construction of the CI identity and the implications of these constructions. First, we should consider what a cochlear implant is and how it functions. The National Association of the Deaf in the United States defines the cochlear implant as a device used to help the user perceive sound, i.e., the sensation of sound that is transmitted past the damaged cochlea to the brain. In this strictly sensorineural manner, the implant works: the sensation of sound is delivered to the brain. The stated goal of the implant is for it to function as a tool to enable deaf children to develop language based on spoken communication. (“NAD Position”) The external portion of the implant consists of the following parts: a microphone, which picks up sound from the environment, which is contained in the behind-the-ear device that resembles the standard BTE hearing aid; in this “hearing aid” there is also a speech processor, which selects and arranges sounds picked up by the microphone. The processor transmits signals to the transmitter/receiver, which then converts them into electric impulses. Part of the transmitter sits on the skin and attaches to the inner portion of the transmitter by means of a magnet. The inner portion of the receiver/stimulator sends the impulses down into the electrode array that lies inside the cochlea, which in turn stimulates the auditory nerve, giving the brain the impression of sound (“Cochlear Implants”). According to manufacturer’s statistics, there are now approximately 188,000 people worldwide who have obtained cochlear implants, though the number of these that are in use is not known (Nussbaum). That is what a cochlear implant is. Before we can look at how people with implants are portrayed in the media, before we examine constructions of identity, perhaps we should first ask what constitutes a “real” CI identity? This is, of course, laughable; pinning down a homogeneous CI identity is no more likely than finding a blanket definition of “deaf identity.” For example, at this point in time, there isn’t even a word or term in American culture for someone with an implant. I struggle with how to phrase it in this essay - “implantee?” “recipient?” - there are no neat labels. In the USA you can call a person deaf, Deaf (the “D” representing a specific cultural and political identity), hearing impaired, hard of hearing, and each gradation implies, for better or worse, some kind of subject position. There are no such terms for a person who gets an implant. Are people with implants, as suggested above, just deaf? Deaf? Are they hard of hearing? There is even debate in the ASL community as to what sign should be used to indicate “someone who has a cochlear implant.” If a “CI identity” cannot be located, then perhaps the rhetoric that is used to describe it may be. Paddy Ladd, in Understanding Deaf Culture, does a brilliant job of exploring the various discourses that have surrounded deaf culture throughout history. Stuart Blume borrows heavily from Ladd in his “The Rhetoric and Counter-Rhetoric of a 'Bionic' Technology”, where he points out that an “essential and deliberate feature” of the history of the CI from the 60s onward, was that it was constructed in an overwhelmingly positive light by the mass media, using what Ladd calls the “medical” rhetorical model. That is, that the CI is a kind of medical miracle that promised to cure deafness. Within this model one may find also the sentimental, “missionary” rhetoric that Krentz discusses, what Ladd claims is a revival of the evangelism of the nineteenth-century Oralist movement in America. Indeed, newspaper articles in the 1980s and 90s hailed the implant as a “breakthrough”, a “miracle”; even a quick survey of headlines shows evidence of this: “Upton Boy Can Hear at Last!”, “Girl with a New Song in Her Heart”, “Children Head Queue for Bionic Ears” (Lane). As recently as January 2010, an issue of National Geographic featured on its cover the headline Merging Man and Machine: The Bionic Age. Sure enough, the second photograph in the story is of a child’s bilateral cochlear implant, with the caption “within months of the surgery (the child) spoke the words his hearing parents longed for: Mama and Dada.” “You’re looking at a real bionic kid,” says Johns Hopkins University surgeon John Niparko, proudly (37). To counter this medical/corporate rhetoric of cure, Ladd and Blume claim, the deaf community devised a counter-rhetoric, a discourse in which the CI is not cast in the language of miracle and life, but instead in terms of death, mutilation, and cultural oppression. Here, the implant is depicted as the last in a long line of sadistic experiments using the deaf as guinea pigs. Often the CI is framed in the language of Nazism and genocide as seen in the title of an article in the British Deaf News: “Cochlear Implants: Oralism’s Final Solution.” So, which of these two “implanting rhetorics” is most visible in the current construction of the CI in American television? Is the CI identity presented by rendering people with CIs impossibly positive, happy characters? Is it delineated using the metaphors of the sentimental, of cure, of miracle? Or is the CI identity constructed using the counter-rhetorical references to death, oppression and cultural genocide? One might hypothesize that television, like other media, cultivating as it does the values of the hearing hegemony, would err on the side of promulgating the medicalised, positivist rhetoric of the “cure” for deafness. In an effort to find out, I conducted a general survey of American television shows from 2000 to now that featured characters with CIs. I did not include news shows or documentaries in my survey. Interestingly, some of the earliest television portrayals of CIs appeared in that bastion of American sentimentality, the daytime soap opera. In 2006, on the show “The Young and the Restless”, a “troubled college student who contracted meningitis” received an implant, and in 2007 “All My Children” aired a story arc about a “toddler who becomes deaf after a car crash.” It is interesting to note that both characters were portrayed as “late-deafened”, or suddenly inflicted with the loss of a sense they previously possessed, thus avoiding any whiff of controversy about early implantation. But one expects a hyper-sentimentalised portrayal of just about everything in daytime dramas like this. What is interesting is that when people with CIs have appeared on several “reality” programs, which purport to offer “real,” unadulterated glimpses into people’s lives, the rhetoric is no less sentimentalized than the soaps (perhaps because these shows are no less fabricated). A good example of this is the widely watched and, I think, ironically named show “True Life” which appears on MTV. This is a series that claims to tell the “remarkable real-life stories of young people and the unusual subcultures they inhabit.” In episode 42, “ True Life: I’m Deaf”, part of the show follows a young man, Chris, born deaf and proud of it (his words), who decides to get a cochlear implant because he wants to be involved in the hearing world. Through an interpreter Chris explains that he wants an implant so he can communicate with his friends, talk with girls, and ultimately fulfill his dreams of having a job and getting married (one has to ask: are these things he can’t do without an implant?). The show’s promo asks “how do you go from living a life in total silence to fully understanding the spoken language?” This statement alone contains two elements common to the “miracle” rhetoric, first that the “tragic” deaf victim will emerge from a completely lonely, silent place (not true; most deaf people have some residual hearing, and if you watch the show you see Chris signing, “speaking” voluminously) to seamlessly, miraculously, “fully” joining and understanding the hearing world. Chris, it seems, will only come into full being when he is able to join the hearing world. In this case, the CI will cure what ails him. According to “True Life.” Aside from “soap opera” drama and so-called reality programming, by far the largest dissemination of media constructions of the CI in the past ten years occurred on top-slot prime-time television shows, which consist primarily of the immensely popular genre of the medical and police procedural drama. Most of these shows have at one time or another had a “deaf” episode, in which there is a deaf character or characters involved, but between 2005 and 2008, it is interesting to note that most, if not all of the most popular of these have aired episodes devoted to the CI controversy, or have featured deaf characters with CIs. The shows include: CSI (both Miami and New York), Cold Case, Law and Order (both SVU and Criminal Intent), Scrubs, Gideon’s Crossing, and Bones. Below is a snippet of dialogue from Bones: Zach: {Holding a necklace} He was wearing this.Angela: Catholic boy.Brennan: One by two forceps.Angela {as Brennan pulls a small disc out from behind the victim’s ear} What is that?Brennan: Cochlear implant. Looks like the birds were trying to get it.Angela: That would set a boy apart from the others, being deaf.(Bones, “A Boy in the Tree”, 1.3, 2005) In this scene, the forensics experts are able to describe significant points of this victim’s identity using the only two solid artifacts left in the remains, a crucifix and a cochlear implant. I cite this scene because it serves, I believe, as a neat metaphor for how these shows, and indeed television media in general, are, like the investigators, constantly engaged in the business of cobbling together identity: in this particular case, a cochlear implant identity. It also shows how an audience can cultivate or interpret these kinds of identity constructions, here, the implant as an object serves as a tangible sign of deafness, and from this sign, or clue, the “audience” (represented by the spectator, Angela) immediately infers that the victim was lonely and isolated, “set apart from the others.” Such wrongheaded inferences, frivolous as they may seem coming from the realm of popular culture, have, I believe, a profound influence on the perceptions of larger society. The use of the CI in Bones is quite interesting, because although at the beginning of the show the implant is a key piece of evidence, that which marks and identifies the dead/deaf body, the character’s CI identity proves almost completely irrelevant to the unfolding of the murder-mystery. The only times the CI character’s deafness is emphasized are when an effort is made to prove that the he committed suicide (i.e., if you’re deaf you are therefore “isolated,” and therefore you must be miserable enough to kill yourself). Zak, one of the forensics officers says, “I didn’t talk to anyone in high school and I didn’t kill myself” and another officer comments that the boy was “alienated by culture, by language, and by his handicap” (odd statements, since most deaf children with or without implants have remarkably good language ability). Also, in another strange moment, the victim’s ambassador/mother shows a video clip of the child’s CI activation and says “a person who lived through this miracle would never take his own life” (emphasis mine). A girlfriend, implicated in the murder (the boy is killed because he threatened to “talk”, revealing a blackmail scheme), says “people didn’t notice him because of the way he talked but I liked him…” So at least in this show, both types of “implanting rhetoric” are employed; a person with a CI, though the recipient of a “miracle,” is also perceived as “isolated” and “alienated” and unfortunately, ends up dead. This kind of rather negative portrayal of a person with a CI also appears in the CSI: New York episode ”Silent Night” which aired in 2006. One of two plot lines features Marlee Matlin as the mother of a deaf family. At the beginning of the episode, after feeling some strange vibrations, Matlin’s character, Gina, checks on her little granddaughter, Elizabeth, who is crying hysterically in her crib. She finds her daughter, Alison, dead on the floor. In the course of the show, it is found that a former boyfriend, Cole, who may have been the father of the infant, struggled with and shot Alison as he was trying to kidnap the baby. Apparently Cole “got his hearing back” with a cochlear implant, no longer considered himself Deaf, and wanted the child so that she wouldn’t be raised “Deaf.” At the end of the show, Cole tries to abduct both grandmother and baby at gunpoint. As he has lost his external transmitter, he is unable to understand what the police are trying to tell him and threatens to kill his hostages. He is arrested in the end. In this case, the CI recipient is depicted as a violent, out of control figure, calmed (in this case) only by Matlin’s presence and her ability to communicate with him in ASL. The implication is that in getting the CI, Cole is “killing off” his Deaf identity, and as a result, is mentally unstable. Talking to Matlin, whose character is a stand-in for Deaf culture, is the only way to bring him back to his senses. The October 2007 episode of CSI: Miami entitled “Inside-Out” is another example of the counter-rhetoric at work in the form of another implant corpse. A police officer, trying to prevent the escape of a criminal en route to prison, thinks he has accidentally shot an innocent bystander, a deaf woman. An exchange between the coroner and a CSI goes as follows: (Alexx Woods): “This is as innocent as a victim gets.”(Calleigh Duquesne): “How so?”AW: Check this out.”CD: “I don’t understand. Her head is magnetized? Steel plate?”AW: “It’s a cochlear implant. Helps deaf people to receive and process speech and sounds.”(CSI dramatization) AW VO: “It’s surgically implanted into the inner ear. Consists of a receiver that decodes and transmits to an electrode array sending a signal to the brain.”CD: “Wouldn’t there be an external component?”AW: “Oh, she must have lost it before she was shot.”CD: “Well, that explains why she didn’t get out of there. She had no idea what was going on.” (TWIZ) Based on the evidence, the “sign” of the implant, the investigators are able to identify the victim as deaf, and they infer therefore that she is innocent. It is only at the end of the program that we learn that the deaf “innocent” was really the girlfriend of the criminal, and was on the scene aiding in his escape. So she is at first “as innocent” as they come, and then at the end, she is the most insidious of the criminals in the episode. The writers at least provide a nice twist on the more common deaf-innocent stereotype. Cold Case showcased a CI in the 2008 episode “Andy in C Minor,” in which the case of a 17-year-old deaf boy is reopened. The boy, Andy, had disappeared from his high school. In the investigation it is revealed that his hearing girlfriend, Emma, convinced him to get an implant, because it would help him play the piano, which he wanted to do in order to bond with her. His parents, deaf, were against the idea, and had him promise to break up with Emma and never bring up the CI again. His body is found on the campus, with a cochlear device next to his remains. Apparently Emma had convinced him to get the implant and, in the end, Andy’s father had reluctantly consented to the surgery. It is finally revealed that his Deaf best friend, Carlos, killed him with a blow to the back of the head while he was playing the piano, because he was “afraid to be alone.” This show uses the counter-rhetoric of Deaf genocide in an interesting way. In this case it is not just the CI device alone that renders the CI character symbolically “dead” to his Deaf identity, but it leads directly to his being literally executed by, or in a sense, excommunicated from, Deaf Culture, as it is represented by the character of Carlos. The “House Divided” episode of House (2009) provides the most problematic (or I should say absurd) representation of the CI process and of a CI identity. In the show, a fourteen-year-old deaf wrestler comes into the hospital after experiencing terrible head pain and hearing “imaginary explosions.” Doctors Foreman and Thirteen dutifully serve as representatives of both sides of the “implant debate”: when discussing why House hasn’t mocked the patient for not having a CI, Thirteen says “The patient doesn’t have a CI because he’s comfortable with who he is. That’s admirable.” Foreman says, “He’s deaf. It’s not an identity, it’s a disability.” 13: “It’s also a culture.” F: “Anything I can simulate with $3 earplugs isn’t a culture.” Later, House, talking to himself, thinks “he’s going to go through life deaf. He has no idea what he’s missing.” So, as usual, without permission, he orders Chase to implant a CI in the patient while he is under anesthesia for another procedure (a brain biopsy). After the surgery the team asks House why he did it and he responds, “Why would I give someone their hearing? Ask God the same question you’d get the same answer.” The shows writers endow House’s character, as they usually do, with the stereotypical “God complex” of the medical establishment, but in doing also they play beautifully into the Ladd and Blume’s rhetoric of medical miracle and cure. Immediately after the implant (which the hospital just happened to have on hand) the incision has, miraculously, healed overnight. Chase (who just happens to be a skilled CI surgeon and audiologist) activates the external processor (normally a months-long process). The sound is overwhelming, the boy hears everything. The mother is upset. “Once my son is stable,” the mom says, “I want that THING out of his head.” The patient also demands that the “thing” be removed. Right after this scene, House puts a Bluetooth in his ear so he can talk to himself without people thinking he’s crazy (an interesting reference to how we all are becoming cyborgs, more and more “implanted” with technology). Later, mother and son have the usual touching sentimental scene, where she speaks his name, he hears her voice for the first time and says, “Is that my name? S-E-T-H?” Mom cries. Seth’s deaf girlfriend later tells him she wishes she could get a CI, “It’s a great thing. It will open up a whole new world for you,” an idea he rejects. He hears his girlfriend vocalize, and asks Thirteen if he “sounds like that.” This for some reason clinches his decision about not wanting his CI and, rather than simply take off the external magnet, he rips the entire device right out of his head, which sends him into shock and system failure. Ultimately the team solves the mystery of the boy’s initial ailment and diagnoses him with sarcoidosis. In a final scene, the mother tells her son that she is having them replace the implant. She says it’s “my call.” This show, with its confusing use of both the sentimental and the counter-rhetoric, as well as its outrageous inaccuracies, is the most egregious example of how the CI is currently being constructed on television, but it, along with my other examples, clearly shows the Ladd/Blume rhetoric and counter rhetoric at work. The CI character is on one hand portrayed as an innocent, infantilized, tragic, or passive figure that is the recipient of a medical miracle kindly urged upon them (or forced upon them, as in the case of House). On the other hand, the CI character is depicted in the language of the counter-rhetoric: as deeply flawed, crazed, disturbed or damaged somehow by the incursions onto their Deaf identity, or, in the worst case scenario, they are dead, exterminated. Granted, it is the very premise of the forensic/crime drama to have a victim, and a dead victim, and it is the nature of the police drama to have a “bad,” criminal character; there is nothing wrong with having both good and bad CI characters, but my question is, in the end, why is it an either-or proposition? Why is CI identity only being portrayed in essentialist terms on these types of shows? Why are there no realistic portrayals of people with CIs (and for that matter, deaf people) as the richly varied individuals that they are? These questions aside, if these two types of “implanting rhetoric”, the sentimentalised and the terminated, are all we have at the moment, what does it mean? As I mentioned early in this essay, deaf people, along with many “others,” have long helped to highlight and define the hegemonic “norm.” The apparent cultural need for a Foucauldian “marked body” explains not only the popularity of crime dramas, but it also could explain the oddly proliferant use of characters with cochlear implants in these particular shows. A person with an implant on the side of their head is definitely a more “marked” body than the deaf person with no hearing aid. The CI character is more controversial, more shocking; it’s trendier, “sexier”, and this boosts ratings. But CI characters are, unlike their deaf predecessors, now serving an additional cultural function. I believe they are, as I claim in the beginning of this essay, screens upon which our culture is now projecting repressed anxieties about emergent technology. The two essentialist rhetorics of the cochlear implant, the rhetoric of the sentimental, medical model, and the rhetoric of genocide, ultimately represent our technophilia and our technophobia. The CI character embodies what Debra Shaw terms a current, “ontological insecurity that attends the interface between the human body and the datasphere” (85). We are growing more nervous “as new technologies shape our experiences, they blur the lines between the corporeal and incorporeal, between physical space and virtual space” (Selfe). Technology either threatens the integrity of the self, “the coherence of the body” (we are either dead or damaged) or technology allows us to transcend the limitations of the body: we are converted, “transformed”, the recipient of a happy modern miracle. In the end, I found that representations of CI on television (in the United States) are overwhelmingly sentimental and therefore essentialist. It seems that the conflicting nineteenth century tendency of attraction and revulsion toward the deaf is still, in the twenty-first century, evident. We are still mired in the rhetoric of “cure” and “control,” despite an active Deaf counter discourse that employs the language of the holocaust, warning of the extermination of yet another cultural minority. We are also daily becoming daily more “embedded in cybernetic systems,” with our laptops, emails, GPSs, PDAs, cell phones, Bluetooths, and the likes. We are becoming increasingly engaged in a “necessary relationship with machines” (Shaw 91). We are gradually becoming no longer “other” to the machine, and so our culturally constructed perceptions of ourselves are being threatened. In the nineteenth century, divisions and hierarchies between a white male majority and the “other” (women, African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans) began to blur. Now, the divisions between human and machine, as represented by a person with a CI, are starting to blur, creating anxiety. Perhaps this anxiety is why we are trying, at least in the media, symbolically to ‘cure’ the marked body or kill off the cyborg. Future examinations of the discourse should, I believe, use these media constructions as a lens through which to continue to examine and illuminate the complex subject position of the CI identity, and therefore, perhaps, also explore what the subject position of the post/human identity will be. References "A Boy in a Tree." Patrick Norris (dir.), Hart Hanson (by), Emily Deschanel (perf.). Bones, Fox Network, 7 Sep. 2005. “Andy in C Minor.” Jeannete Szwarc (dir.), Gavin Harris (by), Kathryn Morris (perf.). Cold Case, CBS Network, 30 March 2008. Blume, Stuart. “The Rhetoric and Counter Rhetoric of a “Bionic” Technology.” Science, Technology and Human Values 22.1 (1997): 31-56. Brueggemann, Brenda Jo. Deaf Subjects: Between Identities and Places. New York: New York UP, 2009. “Cochlear Implant Statistics.” ASL-Cochlear Implant Community. Blog. Citing Laurent Le Clerc National Deaf Education Center. Gallaudet University, 18 Mar. 2008. 29 Apr. 2010 ‹http:/ /aslci.blogspot.com/2008/03/cochlear-implant-statistics.html›. “Cures to Come.” Discover Presents the Brain (Spring 2010): 76. Fischman, Josh. “Bionics.” National Geographic Magazine 217 (2010). “House Divided.” Greg Yaitanes (dir.), Matthew V. Lewis (by), Hugh Laurie (perf.). House, Fox Network, 22 Apr. 2009. “Inside-Out.” Gina Lamar (dir.), Anthony Zuiker (by), David Caruso (perf.). CSI: Miami, CBS Network, 8 Oct. 2007. Krentz, Christopher. Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Chapel Hill: UNC P, 2007. Ladd, Paddy. Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters Limited, 2002. Lane, Harlan. A Journey Into the Deaf-World. San Diego: DawnSignPress, 1996. “NAD Position Statement on the Cochlear Implant.” National Association of the Deaf. 6 Oct. 2000. 29 April 2010 ‹http://www.nad.org/issues/technology/assistive-listening/cochlear-implants›. Nussbaum, Debra. “Manufacturer Information.” Cochlear Implant Information Center. National Deaf Education Center. Gallaudet University. 29 Apr. 2010 < http://clerccenter.gallaudet.edu >. Shaw, Debra. Technoculture: The Key Concepts. Oxford: Berg, 2008. “Silent Night.” Rob Bailey (dir.), Anthony Zuiker (by), Gary Sinise (perf.). CSI: New York, CBS Network, 13 Dec. 2006. “Sweet Nothing in My Ear.” Joseph Sargent (dir.), Stephen Sachs (by), Jeff Daniels (perf.). Hallmark Hall of Fame Production, 20 Apr. 2008. TWIZ TV scripts. CSI: Miami, “Inside-Out.” “What Is the Surgery Like?” FAQ, University of Miami Cochlear Implant Center. 29 Apr. 2010 ‹http://cochlearimplants.med.miami.edu/faq/index.asp›.