Articoli di riviste sul tema "Dark romance, fiction"

While W.E.B. Du Bois’s first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), is set squarely in the USA, his second work of fiction, Dark Princess: A Romance (1928), abandons this national framework, depicting the treatment of African Americans in the USA as embedded into an international system of economic exploitation based on racial categories. Ultimately, the political visions offered in the novels differ starkly, but both employ a Western literary canon – so-called ‘classics’ from Greek, German, English, French, and US American literature. With this, Du Bois attempts to create a new space for African Americans in the world (literature) of the 20th century. Weary of the traditions of this ‘world literature’, the novels complicate and begin to decenter the canon that they draw on. This reading traces what I interpret as subtle signs of frustration over the limits set by the literature that underlies Dark Princess, while its predecessor had been more optimistic in its appropriation of Eurocentric fiction for its propagandist aims.

The article highlights typological features of the English fanfiction. The work offers a brief outline of history, main forms and modern trends in fan fiction studies as a genre of web literature. The relevance of the study of fan fiction is due, above all, to the fact that these works are a bright example of the so called live language. They reflect all modern language trends, express the musical, literary and film preferences of the society. In addition, fan fiction is an understudied phenomenon that has existed in various forms, but has received the greatest impetus in development only in recent decades. The term fan fiction is defined as a kind of creativity of fans of popular works of art, a derivative literary work based on any original work that uses its ideas of the plot and characters. It is the type of mass literature, created on the basis of a work of art by fans of this work, which do not pursue commercial purposes and are intended for reading by other fans. In the course of the research it has been established that the genre of fanfiction is a group of works written on a certain topic: Action; Adventure; Detective; Romance; Fluff; Humour; Dark; Deathfic; Angst; PWP (Plot, What Plot?). To denote all the other characteristic features of the work, the authors use the term "category". Categories classify works according to certain characteristics, in particular, according to the original source (fanfiction that corresponds to the realities of the original world, Alternative Universe and Crossover); according to the presence of a love line (General audience, Heterosexual, Slash); according to the presence of fictional characters (Original character, Self-insertion). A unique form of fan fiction is Songfic - a work based on a single song, which is quoted by the author in the story. The perspective of this study is the analysis of structural, stylistic and pragmatic features of fan fiction discourse.

The article examines the largely forgotten British émigré film Dark Journey, its Swedish setting and Scandinavian release. The spy drama, which tells the story of German and French secret agents in Stockholm during World War I by mixing thriller elements with romance, raises a number of questions regarding the representation of spies in a Scandinavian context, Sweden as a contested film market in the later 1930s and the transnational production strategy of films made at the Denham studios in Britain. It is one of the films that helped the profession of secret agents to change its image from a dingy and unchivalrous activity to an adventurous, illustrious and cosmopolitan enterprise. Interestingly, the film offers a very positive portrayal of its German protagonist, played by Conrad Veidt, that is at odds with other Anglo-American spy films but not at all uncommon for Swedish spy fiction.

This article analyzes Seiffert’s Afterwards (2007), which, in marked contrast to her debut publication, The Dark Room (2001), has received scarce critical attention. Set in anodyne suburbia, Afterwards narrates the fate of two unglamorous ex-combatants and their trauma. Seiffert’s complex narrative binds together romance and PTSD in a double plot that intertwines the fate of a “squaddy” involved in a shooting incident in the Northern Ireland Troubles with that of a former RAF officer stationed in colonial Kenya. This article argues that beyond subjective issues of judgment, Seiffert shows an awareness that modern romance cannot combine with trauma, as the idea of healing is nonsensical in a world ruled by ethical uncertainty. Furthermore, Seiffert’s examination of trauma indicates that in fiction –as in life– author and reader have to confront questions of guilt, responsibility and the absence of forgiveness. Seiffert, drawing on ideas similar to Primo Levi’s, concludes the novel with the tragic irony that the more humane the perpetrator, the more distant closure becomes, leaving her main character locked in trauma and the reader ensnared in uncertainty.

This study explores the complex ways that three well-known novels—Anne Rice's "The Witching Hour," Melissa de la Cruz's "Witches of East End," and Nora Roberts' "Dark Witch"—present gender, sexuality, and cultural viewpoints on witchcraft. Every book is a different fusion of romance, fantasy, and fiction that incorporates witchcraft into a variety of cultural settings. The examination looks at how the writers deal with gender norms in the setting of witchcraft, with a focus on how they represent female protagonists and their autonomy in magical worlds. The study also examines how sexuality is portrayed, looking into how romantic and sexual interactions are portrayed in the context of witchcraft and whether these depictions upend or support conventional standards. A key component of every story is cultural awareness, with an emphasis on the ways in which the writers integrate mythology, folklore, and cultural customs pertaining to witchcraft. The impact of cultural circumstances on the identities and magical practices of the characters, as well as the cultural authenticity and sensitivity with which these elements are portrayed, are all closely examined in this study. This study attempts to provide light on the various ways that modern literature examines and explains gender relations, sexuality, and cultural understanding within the context of witchcraft by contrasting and analyzing these three books. The findings clarify the intricate interactions between fantasy components and actual cultural, gender, and sexual dynamics, adding to the larger conversation on representation and diversity in fiction.

The article highlights lingual features of the English fanfiction. The work offers a brief outline of history, main forms and modern trends in fan fiction studies as a genre of web literature. The relevance of the study of fan fiction is due, above all, to the fact that these works are a bright example of the so called live language. They reflect all modern language trends, express the musical, literary and film preferences of the society. In addition, fan fiction is an understudied phenomenon that has existed in various forms, but has received the greatest impetus in development only in recent decades. The term fan fiction is defined as a kind of creativity of fans of popular works of art, a derivative literary work based on any original work that uses its ideas of the plot and characters. It is the type of mass literature, created on the basis of a work of art by fans of this work, which do not pursue commercial purposes and are intended for reading by other fans. In the course of the research it has been established that the genre of fanfiction is a group of works written on a certain topic: Action; Adventure; Detective; Romance; Fluff; Humour; Dark; Deathfic; Angst; PWP (Plot, What Plot?). The analysis of the linguistic features of the nominative system of English fanfiction showed that it performs a number of important functions: communicative, nominative, emotional-evaluative, expressive, phatic, signalling/identification. The most significant quality/property of fan fiction is the “secondary nature” of fan creativity, in connection with which one of the key research tasks is the study of the relationship between the original text and fan fiction. It is interesting that fanfiction from the standpoint of literary studies/linguistics is initially evaluated as a phenomenon that belongs to the lowest manifestations of paraliterature and therefore does not deserve serious attention. However, determining the place and status of fan fiction in the modern speech process is one of the tasks, the solution of which is relevant for researchers. The perspective of this study is the analysis of structural, stylistic and pragmatic features of fan fiction discourse.

Abstract: In this study, the author examines the literary landscape in Turkey given the new dimension opened by the vertical gradation of fiction. The division of literature into high literature (classic), middle-tier (Belles-lettres), and low-tier literature (for mass consumption) is becoming increasingly prominent. Belles-lettres seems to be the most mobile of those, with its representatives being able to, over time, find themselves both at the top and the bottom rung of this paradigm. Zülfü Livaneli's works straddle the line between the high literature and belles-lettres, while books by Barış Müstecaplıoğlu are a perfect example of mass literature becoming regarded as belles-lettres. Another productive approach is horizontal gradation – dividing modern Turkish literature into genres. This is especially true for mass literature, where a clear classification into genres and subgenres is pretty much a precondition for existence. The study singles out such genres of mass literature as detective novels, women's romance novels, and historical adventure novels. Speculative fiction occupies a special place in this, with its genre affiliation being a topic of major discussions. The Turkish literature of the 2000s features several principal genres of speculative fiction: sci-fi (K. Kutlu, G. Berkkan, H. Balçı) with alternative history being a part of such (G. Dayıoğlu, H. Kakınç); fantasy with its subgenres of urban fantasy (S. Yemni, S. Atasoy, G. Elikbank, F. O. Şeran, C. Yücel), "sword and sorcery" fantasy (B. Müstecaplıoğlu, A. Aras, G. Canbaba) and dark fantasy (S. Ersin, G. Öğüt), as well as the genre of dystopia (A. Şaşa). In conclusion, the author argues that analyzing literary pieces necessitates operating with both the vertical and horizontal paradigms simultaneously.

Resumo: Este é um estudo sobre dois romances do escritor boliviano Edmundo Paz Soldán, Sueños Digitales (2000) e El delirio de Turing (2005 [2003]), destacando os tópicos da (1) urbe dividida entre um centro urbano caótico e uma periferia escura e (2) um governo federal com ares totalitários, aspectos pouco abordados até então pela crítica literária especializada. Objetivamos mostrar como a fictícia cidade de Río Fugitivo, onde transcorrem as histórias de Sueños Digitales e El delirio de Turing, funciona como uma espécie de microcosmo dos centros urbanos latino-americanos que conhecemos ao incorporar, parcialmente, em sua construção e em sua dimensão, características pertencentes a um subgênero da ficção científica contemporânea conhecido como cyberpunk. De acordo com nossa perspectiva, não se trataria de obras de ficção científica, mas sim com ficção científica, – gênero pelo qual o autor sempre demonstrou interesse.Palavras-chave: ficção científica; cyberpunk; distopia; Río Fugitivo; Paz Soldán.Abstract: This is a study of two novels by Bolivian writer Edmundo Paz Soldán, Sueños Digitales (2000) and El delirio de Turing (2005 [2003]), underlining the topics of (1) a city divided between a chaotic urban centre and a dark suburb and (2) a federal government leaning towards totalitarianism, elements that are yet to be widely explored by literary critics. The aim is to point out how the fictional city of Río Fugitivo, where the narratives of Sueños Digitales and El delirio de Turing are set, plays the role of a microcosm of the Latin American centres we know by partially incorporating, in the construction and dimension of the novels, characteristics that belong to the subgenre of contemporary science fiction known as cyberpunk. From this point of view, the books studied here would not be considered science fiction works but works containing the genre, which has always interested Soldán.Keywords: science fiction; Cyberpunk; dystopia; Río Fugitivo; Paz Soldán.

Abstract: Can the archetypal imperial adventurer—the hero of empire's interlinked fictions of discovery and conquest—be brown? This question finds expression in a genre of Bengali literature yet to receive significant scholarly attention. Rather than viewing these novels as a case of Bengal "writing back" to the British genre of the imperial romance, I read them as enquiries into the turbulent shifts of race, migration, and fractured self-fashioning in the age of decolonization. Through a closer look at Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's Chander Pahar or The Mountain of the Moon (1937), the essay demonstrates how traces of indentureship and coolie labor as abject and elided forms of brown/ness fracture both the category of the brown expeditioner and its effect on the stereotypes of the dark continent.

Due to the current history boom in the UK, which manifests itself in the conspicuous popularity of historical novels, costume dramas, and in rising visitor numbers to museums, the study of popular historiography has become a growing and vibrant field. Popular historiography formats such as costume dramas, historical romances, and re-enactments have been recognised as a key influence on the public's knowledge of the past. Consumed informally and voluntarily, entertaining and easily accessible, popular histories are often more significant for the public's perception of ‘historical fact’ than ‘academic’ forms of historiography. This article examines historical crime fiction as a genre of popular historiography with a special focus on recent novels set in the late seventeenth century, a period that has lately been the focus of a number of exciting crime series. As a genre mostly written to a formula, concentrating on a narrow theme (i.e. crime and violence), and typically showing the life of ‘the mean streets’, crime fiction has a genre-specific view of the past. Due to its focus on the everyday, it shows aspects of history which are particularly popular with a wider public. Additionally, as it is frequently preoccupied with history's dark secrets, crime fiction is especially suited to re-writing established images of the past.

This article examines the ways in which Agatha Christie's fictional villages may be interpreted as fundamentally gothic spaces. It makes the case that within the novels The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) and The Moving Finger (1943), outdoor spaces do not offer the potential release from captivity that is set out in more traditional gothic paradigms. Instead, exterior landscapes surrounding and connecting homes function as a continuation of domestic interiority, thus acting as able accomplices in a gothic transformation of ‘home’ into ‘prison’. By examining the shifting meanings of panoptic surveillance present within these villages, and the outward extension of private family romances into more public forms of cruelty and humiliation, this article suggests that far from creating idyllic exemplars of English rurality, Christie's fictional villages work to unmask the dark, ‘unhomely’ core that lies buried at the very heart of the English ‘Home Counties’.

ABSTRACTThis study aimed to analyze students’ reading interest during the learning-from-home policy in the Covid-19 pandemic time, and it was conducted at the English Department of the University of Kutai Kartanegara in Tenggarong. This descriptive study employed a qualitative approach with a survey design that involved 79 students from the second, fourth, and sixth semesters as participants. The data were obtained through a questionnaire and interview, and they were then analyzed descriptively. Results of this study showed that during the learning-from-home policy students liked to read anything but lecture materials. They argued that reading was tedious and difficult. They preferred reading fiction to reading non-fiction and preferred reading online to reading offline. They read 15-30 minutes a day and only read 1-3 books within five months of learning from home. Their reading materials came from online and offline sources, from websites, and print books by using smartphones. The type of material that was mostly read was novels especially romantic ones. This study suggests that teachers should present lecture materials in such a way that students would be interested in reading them for certain reasons academically or personally.ABSTRAKPenelitian ini bertujuan untuk menganalisis minat baca siswa selama belajar dari rumah pada waktu pandemi Covid-19, dan dilakukan di Jurusan Bahasa Inggris Universitas Kutai Kartanegara di Tenggarong. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan kualitatif dengan menggunakan studi deskriptif jenis survei yang melibatkan 79 mahasiswa semester dua, empat, dan enam sebagai partisipan. Data diperoleh melalui angket dan wawancara, kemudian dianalisis secara deskriptif dan disajikan dalam bentuk tabulasi frekuensi dan persentase, serta dalam bentuk naratif. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa siswa suka membaca apa saja kecuali materi perkuliahan selama belajar dari rumah. Mereka berpendapat bahwa membaca itu membosankan dan sulit. Mereka lebih suka membaca fiksi daripada membaca non-fiksi dan lebih suka membaca online daripada membaca offline. Mereka membaca 15-30 menit sehari dan hanya membaca 1-3 buku dalam waktu lima bulan belajar dari rumah. Sumber bacaan mereka berasal dari online dan offline, dari Website dan buku cetak dengan menggunakan smartphone. Jenis materi yang paling banyak dibaca adalah novel terutama novel romance. Studi ini menunjukkan bahwa terdapat berbagai alasan mengapa fenomena tersebut terjadi.

Resumo: Este trabalho é fruto da necessidade de refletir sobre os percursos narrativos ficcionais e de resistência em face do trauma e do esquecimento históricos relacionados à ditadura militar no Brasil. Esta apreciação tem como amostra a obra O corpo interminável (2019), de Claudia Lage, cujas personagens estão inseridas no âmbito da barbárie e da violência de Estado. Na tentativa de alcançar vivências que foram extorquidas pelo autoritarismo político, o romance apresenta a busca por vidas e histórias silenciadas em razão dos anos de barbárie impostos pela ditadura militar brasileira. Alternando vozes narrativas e tempos históricos, perpassa por O corpo interminável a noção de um passado que ainda se faz presente e que, mergulhado no sigilo e no esquecimento, permanece marcado por ausências, vazios, imprecisões, lacunas e memórias fraturadas. Propõe-se a mobilização da narrativa ficcional como instrumento de reconstrução dos destroços desse passado, na luta de evitar que as mesmas violações sejam repetidas no presente. O intuito desta leitura é contribuir para a caracterização política e estética do romance, pois, ao explorar as estratégias narrativas em O corpo interminável, espera-se discutir a relevância e a essencialidade da literatura brasileira contemporânea no processo de recuperação de um passado sombrio. Como base teórico-crítica, serão utilizadas as considerações de Dalcastagnè (2017), Figueiredo (2017), Ginzburg (2000 e 2017), Seligmann-Silva (2003, 2008 e 2016), entre outros.Palavras-chave: narrativa de resistência; escrita do trauma; memória; ditadura militar brasileira; O corpo interminável.Abstract: This work is the result of the need to reflect on fictional narrative paths and resistance in the face of historical trauma and forgetfulness related to the military dictatorship in Brazil. This appreciation has as sample the work O corpo interminável (2019), by Claudia Lage, whose characters are inserted in the scope of barbarism and state violence. In an attempt to reach experiences that were extorted by political authoritarianism, the novel presents the search for lives and histories silenced due to the years of barbarism imposed by the Brazilian military dictatorship. Alternating narrative voices and historical times, the notion of a past that is still present and that, immersed in secrecy and oblivion, remains marked by absences, voids, inaccuracies, gaps, and fractured memories. We propose the mobilization of fictional narrative as an instrument of reconstruction of the debris of this past, in the struggle to prevent the same violations from being repeated in the present. The intention of this reading is to contribute to the political and aesthetic characterization of the novel, because, by exploring the narrative strategies in O corpo interminável, it is hoped to discuss the relevance and essentiality of contemporary Brazilian literature in the process of recovering a dark past. As a theoretical-critical basis, the considerations of Dalcastagnè (2017), Figueiredo (2017), Ginzburg (2000 and 2017), Seligmann-Silva (2003, 2008 and 2016), among others, will be used.Keywords: resistance narrative; trauma writing; memory; Brazilian military dictatorship; O corpo interminável.

Whereas the fields of poetic expression and pragmatist philosophy may seem some distance apart, a closer examination of the poetics literature from the early Greeks onward provides testimony to the more general viability of the pragmatist analysis of community life, particularly as this has come to be associated with pragmatism’s sociological derivative, symbolic interaction. Following a brief overview of the Greek, Roman, and Christian roots of contemporary fictional representations, attention is given to the ways that pragmatist concerns with human activity were addressed within the context of poetic expression in 12th-13th century France. Whereas the pre-Renaissance texts considered here exhibit pronounced attentiveness to Christian theology, they also build heavily on Latin sources (especially Virgil and Ovid [see Prus 2013a]). Among the early French poets who address the matters of human knowing and acting in more direct and consequential terms are: Alan de Lille (c. 1120-1203) who wrote The Plaint of Nature and Anticlaudianus; Andreas Capellanus (text, c. 1185) the author of The Art of Courtly Love; and Guillaume de Lorris (c. 1212-1237) and Jean de Meun (c. 1235-1305) who, in sequence, co-authored The Romance of the Rose. Given our interest in the ways in which those in the poetic community helped sustain an analytic focus on human lived experience, particular consideration is given to these early French authors’ attentiveness to (1) the relationships, identities, activities, and tactical engagements that people develop around romantic relationships; (2) the sense-making activities of those about whom they write, as well as their own interpretive practices as authors and analysts; (3) the ways in which the people within the communities that they portray knowingly grapple with religious and secular morality (and deviance); and (4) more generic features of human standpoints and relationships. Clearly, the poets referenced here are not the first to pursue matters of these sorts. However, their materials are important not only for their popular intrigues, creativity, and effectiveness in “moving poetics out of the dark ages” but also for encouraging a broader interest in considerations of the human condition than that defined by philosophy and rhetoric.

This essay looks at the interconnections between the cultural industry of popular romance and best-selling novels set in an Irish historical context. In particular, it examines two best-selling novels by North American author Karen Robards, which have not yet been examined in academia: Dark of the Moon (1988) and Forbidden Love (2013; originally published in 1983). Although this small selection constitutes only a preliminary study of an expanding popular genre, it is my hope that it will serve as a relevant example of how Ireland is exoticised in the transnational cultural industry of romance. Drawing on several studies on popular romance (Radway 1984; Strehle and Carden 2009; and Roach 2016), and on specific sources devoted to the study of historical romance, in particular when set in exotic locations (Hughes 2005; Philips 2011; Teo 2012; 2016), I intend to demonstrate how these novels by Karen Robards follow the clichés and conventions of the typical romances produced in the 1980s. As I show, the popularity that Robards’ novels still enjoy reflects the supremacy of the genre and the wide reception of this kind of fiction in the global market.Keywords: Cultural industry; popular romance; Irish context; market.

This essay examines the differing generic tropes and sexual politics evident in Supernatural slash and in J2 fan fic. We argue that while some stories within Supernatural fan fiction provide happy endings to the characters that are denied them in the show's canon, dark!fic instead focuses on the intensity and exclusivity of Sam and Dean's love, thus illuminating dangers at the heart of the one-true-love trope. We also argue that RPS written within the Supernatural fan community demonstrates greater adherence to conventional romance tropes and normative sexualities, and thus reveals important ideological constructs of heteronormativity.

Introduction Crime fiction is one of the world’s most popular genres. Indeed, it has been estimated that as many as one in every three new novels, published in English, is classified within the crime fiction category (Knight xi). These new entrants to the market are forced to jostle for space on bookstore and library shelves with reprints of classic crime novels; such works placed in, often fierce, competition against their contemporaries as well as many of their predecessors. Raymond Chandler, in his well-known essay The Simple Art of Murder, noted Ernest Hemingway’s observation that “the good writer competes only with the dead. The good detective story writer […] competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well” (3). In fact, there are so many examples of crime fiction works that, as early as the 1920s, one of the original ‘Queens of Crime’, Dorothy L. Sayers, complained: It is impossible to keep track of all the detective-stories produced to-day [sic]. Book upon book, magazine upon magazine pour out from the Press, crammed with murders, thefts, arsons, frauds, conspiracies, problems, puzzles, mysteries, thrills, maniacs, crooks, poisoners, forgers, garrotters, police, spies, secret-service men, detectives, until it seems that half the world must be engaged in setting riddles for the other half to solve (95). Twenty years after Sayers wrote on the matter of the vast quantities of crime fiction available, W.H. Auden wrote one of the more famous essays on the genre: The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict. Auden is, perhaps, better known as a poet but his connection to the crime fiction genre is undisputed. As well as his poetic works that reference crime fiction and commentaries on crime fiction, one of Auden’s fellow poets, Cecil Day-Lewis, wrote a series of crime fiction novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake: the central protagonist of these novels, Nigel Strangeways, was modelled upon Auden (Scaggs 27). Interestingly, some writers whose names are now synonymous with the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler, established the link between poetry and crime fiction many years before the publication of The Guilty Vicarage. Edmund Wilson suggested that “reading detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking” (395). In the first line of The Guilty Vicarage, Auden supports Wilson’s claim and confesses that: “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol” (406). This indicates that the genre is at best a trivial pursuit, at worst a pursuit that is bad for your health and is, increasingly, socially unacceptable, while Auden’s ideas around taste—high and low—are made clear when he declares that “detective stories have nothing to do with works of art” (406). The debates that surround genre and taste are many and varied. The mid-1920s was a point in time which had witnessed crime fiction writers produce some of the finest examples of fiction to ever be published and when readers and publishers were watching, with anticipation, as a new generation of crime fiction writers were readying themselves to enter what would become known as the genre’s Golden Age. At this time, R. Austin Freeman wrote that: By the critic and the professedly literary person the detective story is apt to be dismissed contemptuously as outside the pale of literature, to be conceived of as a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for consumption by office boys, factory girls, and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste (7). This article responds to Auden’s essay and explores how crime fiction appeals to many different tastes: tastes that are acquired, change over time, are embraced, or kept as guilty secrets. In addition, this article will challenge Auden’s very narrow definition of crime fiction and suggest how Auden’s religious imagery, deployed to explain why many people choose to read crime fiction, can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment. This latter argument demonstrates that a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. Crime Fiction: A Type For Every Taste Cathy Cole has observed that “crime novels are housed in their own section in many bookshops, separated from literary novels much as you’d keep a child with measles away from the rest of the class” (116). Times have changed. So too, have our tastes. Crime fiction, once sequestered in corners, now demands vast tracts of prime real estate in bookstores allowing readers to “make their way to the appropriate shelves, and begin to browse […] sorting through a wide variety of very different types of novels” (Malmgren 115). This is a result of the sheer size of the genre, noted above, as well as the genre’s expanding scope. Indeed, those who worked to re-invent crime fiction in the 1800s could not have envisaged the “taxonomic exuberance” (Derrida 206) of the writers who have defined crime fiction sub-genres, as well as how readers would respond by not only wanting to read crime fiction but also wanting to read many different types of crime fiction tailored to their particular tastes. To understand the demand for this diversity, it is important to reflect upon some of the appeal factors of crime fiction for readers. Many rules have been promulgated for the writers of crime fiction to follow. Ronald Knox produced a set of 10 rules in 1928. These included Rule 3 “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”, and Rule 10 “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them” (194–6). In the same year, S.S. Van Dine produced another list of 20 rules, which included Rule 3 “There must be no love interest: The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar”, and Rule 7 “There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better” (189–93). Some of these directives have been deliberately ignored or have become out-of-date over time while others continue to be followed in contemporary crime writing practice. In sharp contrast, there are no rules for reading this genre. Individuals are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction. There are, however, different appeal factors for readers. The most common of these appeal factors, often described as doorways, are story, setting, character, and language. As the following passage explains: The story doorway beckons those who enjoy reading to find out what happens next. The setting doorway opens widest for readers who enjoy being immersed in an evocation of place or time. The doorway of character is for readers who enjoy looking at the world through others’ eyes. Readers who most appreciate skilful writing enter through the doorway of language (Wyatt online). These doorways draw readers to the crime fiction genre. There are stories that allow us to easily predict what will come next or make us hold our breath until the very last page, the books that we will cheerfully lend to a family member or a friend and those that we keep close to hand to re-read again and again. There are settings as diverse as country manors, exotic locations, and familiar city streets, places we have been and others that we might want to explore. There are characters such as the accidental sleuth, the hardboiled detective, and the refined police officer, amongst many others, the men and women—complete with idiosyncrasies and flaws—who we have grown to admire and trust. There is also the language that all writers, regardless of genre, depend upon to tell their tales. In crime fiction, even the most basic task of describing where the murder victim was found can range from words that convey the genteel—“The room of the tragedy” (Christie 62)—to the absurd: “There it was, jammed between a pallet load of best export boneless beef and half a tonne of spring lamb” (Maloney 1). These appeal factors indicate why readers might choose crime fiction over another genre, or choose one type of crime fiction over another. Yet such factors fail to explain what crime fiction is or adequately answer why the genre is devoured in such vast quantities. Firstly, crime fiction stories are those in which there is the committing of a crime, or at least the suspicion of a crime (Cole), and the story that unfolds revolves around the efforts of an amateur or professional detective to solve that crime (Scaggs). Secondly, crime fiction offers the reassurance of resolution, a guarantee that from “previous experience and from certain cultural conventions associated with this genre that ultimately the mystery will be fully explained” (Zunshine 122). For Auden, the definition of the crime novel was quite specific, and he argued that referring to the genre by “the vulgar definition, ‘a Whodunit’ is correct” (407). Auden went on to offer a basic formula stating that: “a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies” (407). The idea of a formula is certainly a useful one, particularly when production demands—in terms of both quality and quantity—are so high, because the formula facilitates creators in the “rapid and efficient production of new works” (Cawelti 9). For contemporary crime fiction readers, the doorways to reading, discussed briefly above, have been cast wide open. Stories relying upon the basic crime fiction formula as a foundation can be gothic tales, clue puzzles, forensic procedurals, spy thrillers, hardboiled narratives, or violent crime narratives, amongst many others. The settings can be quiet villages or busy metropolises, landscapes that readers actually inhabit or that provide a form of affordable tourism. These stories can be set in the past, the here and now, or the future. Characters can range from Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, from Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple to Kerry Greenwood’s Honourable Phryne Fisher. Similarly, language can come in numerous styles from the direct (even rough) words of Carter Brown to the literary prose of Peter Temple. Anything is possible, meaning everything is available to readers. For Auden—although he required a crime to be committed and expected that crime to be resolved—these doorways were only slightly ajar. For him, the story had to be a Whodunit; the setting had to be rural England, though a college setting was also considered suitable; the characters had to be “eccentric (aesthetically interesting individuals) and good (instinctively ethical)” and there needed to be a “completely satisfactory detective” (Sherlock Holmes, Inspector French, and Father Brown were identified as “satisfactory”); and the language descriptive and detailed (406, 409, 408). To illustrate this point, Auden’s concept of crime fiction has been plotted on a taxonomy, below, that traces the genre’s main developments over a period of three centuries. As can be seen, much of what is, today, taken for granted as being classified as crime fiction is completely excluded from Auden’s ideal. Figure 1: Taxonomy of Crime Fiction (Adapted from Franks, Murder 136) Crime Fiction: A Personal Journey I discovered crime fiction the summer before I started high school when I saw the film version of The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. A few days after I had seen the film I started reading the Raymond Chandler novel of the same title, featuring his famous detective Philip Marlowe, and was transfixed by the second paragraph: The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the visor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying (9). John Scaggs has written that this passage indicates Marlowe is an idealised figure, a knight of romance rewritten onto the mean streets of mid-20th century Los Angeles (62); a relocation Susan Roland calls a “secular form of the divinely sanctioned knight errant on a quest for metaphysical justice” (139): my kind of guy. Like many young people I looked for adventure and escape in books, a search that was realised with Raymond Chandler and his contemporaries. On the escapism scale, these men with their stories of tough-talking detectives taking on murderers and other criminals, law enforcement officers, and the occasional femme fatale, were certainly a sharp upgrade from C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia. After reading the works written by the pioneers of the hardboiled and roman noir traditions, I looked to other American authors such as Edgar Allan Poe who, in the mid-1800s, became the father of the modern detective story, and Thorne Smith who, in the 1920s and 1930s, produced magical realist tales with characters who often chose to dabble on the wrong side of the law. This led me to the works of British crime writers including Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers. My personal library then became dominated by Australian writers of crime fiction, from the stories of bushrangers and convicts of the Colonial era to contemporary tales of police and private investigators. There have been various attempts to “improve” or “refine” my tastes: to convince me that serious literature is real reading and frivolous fiction is merely a distraction. Certainly, the reading of those novels, often described as classics, provide perfect combinations of beauty and brilliance. Their narratives, however, do not often result in satisfactory endings. This routinely frustrates me because, while I understand the philosophical frameworks that many writers operate within, I believe the characters of such works are too often treated unfairly in the final pages. For example, at the end of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry “left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain” after his son is stillborn and “Mrs Henry” becomes “very ill” and dies (292–93). Another example can be found on the last page of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when Winston Smith “gazed up at the enormous face” and he realised that he “loved Big Brother” (311). Endings such as these provide a space for reflection about the world around us but rarely spark an immediate response of how great that world is to live in (Franks Motive). The subject matter of crime fiction does not easily facilitate fairy-tale finishes, yet, people continue to read the genre because, generally, the concluding chapter will show that justice, of some form, will be done. Punishment will be meted out to the ‘bad characters’ that have broken society’s moral or legal laws; the ‘good characters’ may experience hardships and may suffer but they will, generally, prevail. Crime Fiction: A Taste For Justice Superimposed upon Auden’s parameters around crime fiction, are his ideas of the law in the real world and how such laws are interwoven with the Christian-based system of ethics. This can be seen in Auden’s listing of three classes of crime: “(a) offenses against God and one’s neighbor or neighbors; (b) offenses against God and society; (c) offenses against God” (407). Murder, in Auden’s opinion, is a class (b) offense: for the crime fiction novel, the society reflected within the story should be one in “a state of grace, i.e., a society where there is no need of the law, no contradiction between the aesthetic individual and the ethical universal, and where murder, therefore, is the unheard-of act which precipitates a crisis” (408). Additionally, in the crime novel “as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder” (408). Thus, as Charles J. Rzepka notes, “according to W.H. Auden, the ‘classical’ English detective story typically re-enacts rites of scapegoating and expulsion that affirm the innocence of a community of good people supposedly ignorant of evil” (12). This premise—of good versus evil—supports Auden’s claim that the punishment of wrongdoers, particularly those who claim the “right to be omnipotent” and commit murder (409), should be swift and final: As to the murderer’s end, of the three alternatives—execution, suicide, and madness—the first is preferable; for if he commits suicide he refuses to repent, and if he goes mad he cannot repent, but if he does not repent society cannot forgive. Execution, on the other hand, is the act of atonement by which the murderer is forgiven by society (409). The unilateral endorsement of state-sanctioned murder is problematic, however, because—of the main justifications for punishment: retribution; deterrence; incapacitation; and rehabilitation (Carter Snead 1245)—punishment, in this context, focuses exclusively upon retribution and deterrence, incapacitation is achieved by default, but the idea of rehabilitation is completely ignored. This, in turn, ignores how the reading of crime fiction can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment and how a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. One of the ways to explore the connection between crime fiction and justice is through the lens of Emile Durkheim’s thesis on the conscience collective which proposes punishment is a process allowing for the demonstration of group norms and the strengthening of moral boundaries. David Garland, in summarising this thesis, states: So although the modern state has a near monopoly of penal violence and controls the administration of penalties, a much wider population feels itself to be involved in the process of punishment, and supplies the context of social support and valorization within which state punishment takes place (32). It is claimed here that this “much wider population” connecting with the task of punishment can be taken further. Crime fiction, above all other forms of literary production, which, for those who do not directly contribute to the maintenance of their respective legal systems, facilitates a feeling of active participation in the penalising of a variety of perpetrators: from the issuing of fines to incarceration (Franks Punishment). Crime fiction readers are therefore, temporarily at least, direct contributors to a more stable society: one that is clearly based upon right and wrong and reliant upon the conscience collective to maintain and reaffirm order. In this context, the reader is no longer alone, with only their crime fiction novel for company, but has become an active member of “a moral framework which binds individuals to each other and to its conventions and institutions” (Garland 51). This allows crime fiction, once viewed as a “vice” (Wilson 395) or an “addiction” (Auden 406), to be seen as playing a crucial role in the preservation of social mores. It has been argued “only the most literal of literary minds would dispute the claim that fictional characters help shape the way we think of ourselves, and hence help us articulate more clearly what it means to be human” (Galgut 190). Crime fiction focuses on what it means to be human, and how complex humans are, because stories of murders, and the men and women who perpetrate and solve them, comment on what drives some people to take a life and others to avenge that life which is lost and, by extension, engages with a broad community of readers around ideas of justice and punishment. It is, furthermore, argued here that the idea of the story is one of the more important doorways for crime fiction and, more specifically, the conclusions that these stories, traditionally, offer. For Auden, the ending should be one of restoration of the spirit, as he suspected that “the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin” (411). In this way, the “phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law” (412), indicating that it was not necessarily an accident that “the detective story has flourished most in predominantly Protestant countries” (408). Today, modern crime fiction is a “broad church, where talented authors raise questions and cast light on a variety of societal and other issues through the prism of an exciting, page-turning story” (Sisterson). Moreover, our tastes in crime fiction have been tempered by a growing fear of real crime, particularly murder, “a crime of unique horror” (Hitchens 200). This has seen some readers develop a taste for crime fiction that is not produced within a framework of ecclesiastical faith but is rather grounded in reliance upon those who enact punishment in both the fictional and real worlds. As P.D. James has written: [N]ot by luck or divine intervention, but by human ingenuity, human intelligence and human courage. It confirms our hope that, despite some evidence to the contrary, we live in a beneficent and moral universe in which problems can be solved by rational means and peace and order restored from communal or personal disruption and chaos (174). Dorothy L. Sayers, despite her work to legitimise crime fiction, wrote that there: “certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will some time come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks” (108). Of course, many readers have “learnt all the tricks”, or most of them. This does not, however, detract from the genre’s overall appeal. We have not grown bored with, or become tired of, the formula that revolves around good and evil, and justice and punishment. Quite the opposite. Our knowledge of, as well as our faith in, the genre’s “tricks” gives a level of confidence to readers who are looking for endings that punish murderers and other wrongdoers, allowing for more satisfactory conclusions than the, rather depressing, ends given to Mr. Henry and Mr. Smith by Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell noted above. Conclusion For some, the popularity of crime fiction is a curious case indeed. When Penguin and Collins published the Marsh Million—100,000 copies each of 10 Ngaio Marsh titles in 1949—the author’s relief at the success of the project was palpable when she commented that “it was pleasant to find detective fiction being discussed as a tolerable form of reading by people whose opinion one valued” (172). More recently, upon the announcement that a Miles Franklin Award would be given to Peter Temple for his crime novel Truth, John Sutherland, a former chairman of the judges for one of the world’s most famous literary awards, suggested that submitting a crime novel for the Booker Prize would be: “like putting a donkey into the Grand National”. Much like art, fashion, food, and home furnishings or any one of the innumerable fields of activity and endeavour that are subject to opinion, there will always be those within the world of fiction who claim positions as arbiters of taste. Yet reading is intensely personal. I like a strong, well-plotted story, appreciate a carefully researched setting, and can admire elegant language, but if a character is too difficult to embrace—if I find I cannot make an emotional connection, if I find myself ambivalent about their fate—then a book is discarded as not being to my taste. It is also important to recognise that some tastes are transient. Crime fiction stories that are popular today could be forgotten tomorrow. Some stories appeal to such a broad range of tastes they are immediately included in the crime fiction canon. Yet others evolve over time to accommodate widespread changes in taste (an excellent example of this can be seen in the continual re-imagining of the stories of Sherlock Holmes). Personal tastes also adapt to our experiences and our surroundings. A book that someone adores in their 20s might be dismissed in their 40s. A storyline that was meaningful when read abroad may lose some of its magic when read at home. Personal events, from a change in employment to the loss of a loved one, can also impact upon what we want to read. Similarly, world events, such as economic crises and military conflicts, can also influence our reading preferences. Auden professed an almost insatiable appetite for crime fiction, describing the reading of detective stories as an addiction, and listed a very specific set of criteria to define the Whodunit. Today, such self-imposed restrictions are rare as, while there are many rules for writing crime fiction, there are no rules for reading this (or any other) genre. People are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction, and to follow the deliberate or whimsical paths that their tastes may lay down for them. Crime fiction writers, past and present, offer: an incredible array of detective stories from the locked room to the clue puzzle; settings that range from the English country estate to city skyscrapers in glamorous locations around the world; numerous characters from cerebral sleuths who can solve a crime in their living room over a nice, hot cup of tea to weapon wielding heroes who track down villains on foot in darkened alleyways; and, language that ranges from the cultured conversations from the novels of the genre’s Golden Age to the hard-hitting terminology of forensic and legal procedurals. Overlaid on these appeal factors is the capacity of crime fiction to feed a taste for justice: to engage, vicariously at least, in the establishment of a more stable society. Of course, there are those who turn to the genre for a temporary distraction, an occasional guilty pleasure. There are those who stumble across the genre by accident or deliberately seek it out. There are also those, like Auden, who are addicted to crime fiction. So there are corpses for the conservative and dead bodies for the bloodthirsty. There is, indeed, a murder victim, and a murder story, to suit every reader’s taste. References Auden, W.H. “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on The Detective Story, By an Addict.” Harper’s Magazine May (1948): 406–12. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.harpers.org/archive/1948/05/0033206›. Carter Snead, O. “Memory and Punishment.” Vanderbilt Law Review 64.4 (2011): 1195–264. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976/1977. Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. London: Penguin, 1939/1970. ––. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Christie, Agatha. The Mysterious Affair at Styles. London: HarperCollins, 1920/2007. Cole, Cathy. Private Dicks and Feisty Chicks: An Interrogation of Crime Fiction. Fremantle: Curtin UP, 2004. Derrida, Jacques. “The Law of Genre.” Glyph 7 (1980): 202–32. Franks, Rachel. “May I Suggest Murder?: An Overview of Crime Fiction for Readers’ Advisory Services Staff.” Australian Library Journal 60.2 (2011): 133–43. ––. “Motive for Murder: Reading Crime Fiction.” The Australian Library and Information Association Biennial Conference. Sydney: Jul. 2012. ––. “Punishment by the Book: Delivering and Evading Punishment in Crime Fiction.” Inter-Disciplinary.Net 3rd Global Conference on Punishment. Oxford: Sep. 2013. Freeman, R.A. “The Art of the Detective Story.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1924/1947. 7–17. Galgut, E. “Poetic Faith and Prosaic Concerns: A Defense of Suspension of Disbelief.” South African Journal of Philosophy 21.3 (2002): 190–99. Garland, David. Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. London: Random House, 1929/2004. ––. in R. Chandler. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Hitchens, P. A Brief History of Crime: The Decline of Order, Justice and Liberty in England. London: Atlantic Books, 2003. James, P.D. Talking About Detective Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction since 1800: Death, Detection, Diversity, 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2010. Knox, Ronald A. “Club Rules: The 10 Commandments for Detective Novelists, 1928.” Ronald Knox Society of North America. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.ronaldknoxsociety.com/detective.html›. Malmgren, C.D. “Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective and Crime Fiction.” Journal of Popular Culture Spring (1997): 115–21. Maloney, Shane. The Murray Whelan Trilogy: Stiff, The Brush-Off and Nice Try. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1994/2008. Marsh, Ngaio in J. Drayton. Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Auckland: Harper Collins, 2008. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin Books, 1949/1989. Roland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. London: Palgrave, 2001. Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Sayers, Dorothy L. “The Omnibus of Crime.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 71–109. Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction: The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2005. Sisterson, C. “Battle for the Marsh: Awards 2013.” Black Mask: Pulps, Noir and News of Same. 1 Jan. 2014 http://www.blackmask.com/category/awards-2013/ Sutherland, John. in A. Flood. “Could Miles Franklin turn the Booker Prize to Crime?” The Guardian. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/25/miles-franklin-booker-prize-crime›. Van Dine, S.S. “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 189-93. Wilson, Edmund. “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1944/1947. 390–97. Wyatt, N. “Redefining RA: A RA Big Think.” Library Journal Online. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2007/07/ljarchives/lj-series-redefining-ra-an-ra-big-think›. Zunshine, Lisa. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006.

The Harry Potter (HP) Fan Fiction (FF) phenomenon offers an opportunity to explore the nature of fame and the work of fans (including the second author, a participant observer) in creating and circulating cultural products within fan communities. Matt Hills comments (xi) that “fandom is not simply a ‘thing’ that can be picked over analytically. It is also always performative; by which I mean that it is an identity which is (dis-)claimed, and which performs cultural work”. This paper explores the cultural work of fandom in relation to FF and fame. The global HP phenomenon – in which FF lists are a small part – has made creator J K Rowling richer than the Queen of England, according to the 2003 ‘Sunday Times Rich List’. The books (five so far) and the films (three) continue to accelerate the growth in Rowling’s fortune, which quadrupled from 2001-3: an incredible success for an author unknown before the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 1997. Even the on-screen HP lead actor, Daniel Radcliffe, is now Britain’s second wealthiest teenager (after England’s Prince Harry). There are other globally successful books, such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the Narnia collection, but neither of these series has experienced the momentum of the HP rise to fame. (See Endnote for an indication of the scale of fan involvement with HP FF, compared with Lord of the Rings.) Contemporary ‘Fame’ has been critically defined in relation to the western mass media’s requirement for ‘entertaining’ content, and the production and circulation of celebrity as opposed to ‘hard news’(Turner, Bonner and Marshall). The current perception is that an army of publicists and spin doctors are usually necessary, but not sufficient, to create and nurture global fame. Yet the HP phenomenon started out with no greater publicity investment than that garnered by any other promising first novelist: and given the status of HP as children’s publishing, it was probably less hyped than equivalent adult-audience publications. So are there particular characteristics of HP and his creator that predisposed the series and its author to become famous? And how does the fame status relate to fans’ incorporation of these cultural materials into their lives? Accepting that it is no more possible to predict the future fame of an author or (fictional) character than it is to predict the future financial success of a book, film or album, there is a range of features of the HP phenomenon that, in hindsight, helped accelerate the fame momentum, creating what has become in hindsight an unparalleled global media property. J K Rowling’s personal story – in the hands of her publicity machine – itself constituted a magical myth: the struggling single mother writing away (in longhand) in a Scottish café, snatching odd moments to construct the first book while her infant daughter slept. (Comparatively little attention was paid by the marketers to the author’s professional training and status as a teacher, or to Rowling’s own admission that the first book, and the outline for the series, took five years to write.) Rowling’s name itself, with no self-evident gender attribution, was also indicative of ambiguity and mystery. The back-story to HP, therefore, became one of a quintessentially romantic endeavour – the struggle to write against the odds. Publicity relating to the ‘starving in a garret’ background is not sufficient to explain the HP/Rowling grip on the popular imagination, however. Instead it is arguable that the growth of HP fame and fandom is directly related to the growth of the Internet and to the middle class readers’ Internet access. If the production of celebrity is a major project of the conventional mass media, the HP phenomenon is a harbinger of the hyper-fame that can be generated through the combined efforts of the mass media and online fan communities. The implication of this – evident in new online viral marketing techniques (Kirby), is that publicists need to pique cyber-interest as well as work with the mass media in the construction of celebrity. As the cheer-leaders for online viral marketing make the argument, the technique “provides the missing link between the [bottom-up] word-of-mouth approach and the top-down, advertainment approach”. Which is not to say that the initial HP success was a function of online viral marketing: rather, the marketers learned their trade by analysing the magnifier impact that the online fan communities had upon the exponential growth of the HP phenomenon. This cyber-impact is based both on enhanced connectivity – the bottom-up, word-of-mouth dynamic, and on the individual’s need to assume an identity (albeit fluid) to participate effectively in online community. Critiquing the notion that the computer is an identity machine, Streeter focuses upon (649) “identities that people have brought to computers from the culture at large”. He does not deal in any depth with FF, but suggests (651) that “what the Internet is and will come to be, then, is partly a matter of who we expect to be when we sit down to use it”. What happens when fans sit down to use the Internet, and is there a particular reason why the Internet should be of importance to the rise and rise of HP fame? From the point of view of one of us, HP was born at more or less the same time as she was. Eleven years old in the first book, published in 1997, Potter’s putative birth year might be set in 1986 – in line with many of the original HP readership, and the publisher’s target market. At the point that this cohort was first spellbound by Potter, 1998-9, they were also on the brink of discovering the Internet. In Australia and many western nations, over half of (two-parent) families with school-aged children were online by the end of 2000 (ABS). Potter would notionally have been 14: his fans a little younger but well primed for the ‘teeny-bopper’ years. Arguably, the only thing more famous than HP for that age-group, at that time, was the Internet itself. As knowledge of the Internet grew stories about it constituted both news and entertainment and circulated widely in the mass media: the uncertainty concerning new media, and their impact upon existing social structures, has – over time – precipitated a succession of moral panics … Established commercial media are not noted for their generosity to competitors, and it is unsurprising that many of the moral panics circulating about pornography on the Net, Internet stalking, Web addiction, hate sites etc are promulgated in the older media. (Green xxvii) Although the mass media may have successfully scared the impressionable, the Internet was not solely constructed as a site of moral panic. Prior to the general pervasiveness of the Internet in domestic space, P. David Marshall discusses multiple constructions of the computer – seen by parents as an educational tool which could help future-proof their children; but which their children were more like to conceptualise as a games machine, or (this was the greater fear) use for hacking. As the computer was to become a site for the battle ground between education, entertainment and power, so too the Internet was poised to be colonised by teenagers for a variety of purposes their parents would have preferred to prevent: chat, pornography, game-playing (among others). Fan communities thrive on the power of the individual fan to project themselves and their fan identity as part of an ongoing conversation. Further, in constructing the reasons behind what has happened in the HP narrative, and in speculating what is to come, fans are presenting themselves as identities with whom others might agree (positive affirmation) or disagree (offering the chance for engagement through exchange). The genuinely insightful fans, who apparently predict the plots before they’re published, may even be credited in their communities with inspiring J K Rowling’s muse. (The FF mythology is that J K Rowling dare not look at the FF sites in case she finds herself influenced.) Nancy Baym, commenting on a soap opera fan Usenet group (Usenet was an early 1990s precursor to discussion groups) notes that: The viewers’ relationship with characters, the viewers’ understanding of socioemotional experience, and soap opera’s narrative structure, in which moments of maximal suspense are always followed by temporal gaps, work together to ensure that fans will use the gaps during and between shows to discuss with one another possible outcomes and possible interpretations of what has been seen. (143) In HP terms the The Philosopher’s Stone constructed a fan knowledge that J K Rowling’s project entailed at least seven books (one for each year at Hogwarts School) and this offered plentiful opportunities to speculate upon the future direction and evolution of the HP characters. With each speculation, each posting, the individual fan can refine and extend their identity as a member of the FF community. The temporal gaps between the books and the films – coupled with the expanding possibilities of Internet communication – mean that fans can feel both creative and connected while circulating the cultural materials derived from their engagement with the HP ‘canon’. Canon is used to describe the HP oeuvre as approved by Rowling, her publishers, and her copyright assignees (for example, Warner Bros). In contrast, ‘fanon’ is the name used by fans to refer the body of work that results from their creative/subversive interactions with the core texts, such as “slash” (homo-erotic/romance) fiction. Differentiation between the two terms acknowledges the likelihood that J K Rowling or her assignees might not approve of fanon. The constructed identities of fans who deal solely with canon differ significantly from those who are engaged in fanon. The implicit (romantic) or explicit (full-action descriptions) sexualisation of HP FF is part of a complex identity play on behalf of both the writers and readers of FF. Further, given that the online communities are often nurtured and enriched by offline face to face exchanges with other participants, what an individual is prepared to read or not to read, or write or not write, says as much about that person’s public persona as does another’s overt consumption of pornography; or diet of art house films, in contrast to someone else’s enthusiasm for Friends. Hearn, Mandeville and Anthony argue that a “central assertion of postmodern views of consumption is that social identity can be interpreted as a function of consumption” (106), and few would disagree with them: herein lies the power of the brand. Noting that consumer culture centrally focuses upon harnessing ‘the desire to desire’, Streeter’s work (654, on the opening up of Internet connectivity) suggests a continuum from ‘desire provoked’; through anticipation, ‘excitement based on what people imagined would happen’; to a sense of ‘possibility’. All this was made more tantalising in terms of the ‘unpredictability’ of how cyberspace would eventually resolve itself (657). Thus a progression is posited from desire through to the thrill of comparing future possibilities with eventual outcomes. These forces clearly influence the HP FF phenomenon, where a section of HP fans have become impatient with the pace of the ‘official’/canon HP text. J K Rowling’s writing has slowed down to the point that Harry’s initial readership has overtaken him by several years. He’s about to enter his sixth year (of seven) at secondary school – his erstwhile-contemporaries have already left school or are about to graduate to University. HP is yet to have ‘a relationship’: his fans are engaged in some well-informed speculation as to a range of sexual possibilities which would likely take J K Rowling some light years from her marketers’ core readership. So the story is progressing more slowly than many fans would choose and with less spice than many would like (from the evidence of the web, at least). As indicated in the Endnote, the productivity of the fans, as they ‘fill in the gaps’ while waiting for the official narrative to resume, is prodigious. It may be that as the fans outstrip HP in their own social and emotional development they find his reactions in later books increasingly unbelievable, and/or out of character with the HP they felt they knew. Thus they develop an alternative ‘Harry’ in fanon. Some FF authors identify in advance which books they accept as canon, and which they have decided to ignore. For example, popular FF author Midnight Blue gives the setting of her evolving FF The Mirror of Maybe as “after Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and as an alternative to the events detailed in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, [this] is a Slash story involving Harry Potter and Severus Snape”. Some fans, tired of waiting for Rowling to get Harry grown up, ‘are doin’ it for themselves’. Alternatively, it may be that as they get older the first groups of HP fans are unwilling to relinquish their investment in the HP phenomenon, but are equally unwilling to align themselves uncritically with the anodyne story of the canon. Harry Potter, as Warner Bros licensed him, may be OK for pre-teens, but less cool for the older adolescent. The range of identities that can be constructed using the many online HP FF genres, however, permits wide scope for FF members to identify with dissident constructions of the HP narrative and helps to add to the momentum with which his fame increases. Latterly there is evidence that custodians of canon may be making subtle overtures to creators of fanon. Here, the viral marketers have a particular challenge – to embrace the huge market represented by fanon, while not disturbing those whose HP fandom is based upon the purity of canon. Some elements of fanon feel their discourses have been recognised within the evolving approved narrative . This sense within the fan community – that the holders of the canon have complimented them through an intertextual reference – is much prized and builds the momentum of the fame engagement (as has been demonstrated by Watson, with respect to the band ‘phish’). Specifically, Harry/Draco slash fans have delighted in the hint of a blown kiss from Draco Malfoy to Harry (as Draco sends Harry an origami bird/graffiti message in a Defence against the Dark Arts Class in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) as an acknowledgement of their cultural contribution to the development of the HP phenomenon. Streeter credits Raymond’s essay ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’ as offering a model for the incorporation of voluntary labour into the marketplace. Although Streeter’s example concerns the Open Source movement, derived from hacker culture, it has parallels with the prodigious creativity (and productivity) of the HP FF communities. Discussing the decision by Netscape to throw open the source code of its software in 1998, allowing those who use it to modify and improve it, Streeter comments that (659) “the core trope is to portray Linux-style software development like a bazaar, a real-life competitive marketplace”. The bazaar features a world of competing, yet complementary, small traders each displaying their skills and their wares for evaluation in terms of the product on offer. In contrast, “Microsoft-style software production is portrayed as hierarchical and centralised – and thus inefficient – like a cathedral”. Raymond identifies “ego satisfaction and reputation among other [peers]” as a specific socio-emotional benefit for volunteer participants (in Open Source development), going on to note: “Voluntary cultures that work this way are not actually uncommon [… for example] science fiction fandom, which unlike hackerdom has long explicitly recognized ‘egoboo’ (ego-boosting, or the enhancement of one’s reputation among other fans) as the basic drive behind volunteer activity”. This may also be a prime mover for FF engagement. Where fans have outgrown the anodyne canon they get added value through using the raw materials of the HP stories to construct fanon: establishing and building individual identities and communities through HP consumption practices in parallel with, but different from, those deemed acceptable for younger, more innocent, fans. The fame implicit in HP fandom is not only that of HP, the HP lead actor Daniel Radcliffe and HP’s creator J K Rowling; for some fans the famed ‘state or quality of being widely honoured and acclaimed’ can be realised through their participation in online fan culture – fans become famous and recognised within their own community for the quality of their work and the generosity of their sharing with others. The cultural capital circulated on the FF sites is both canon and fanon, a matter of some anxiety for the corporations that typically buy into and foster these mega-media products. As Jim Ward, Vice-President of Marketing for Lucasfilm comments about Star Wars fans (cited in Murray 11): “We love our fans. We want them to have fun. But if in fact someone is using our characters to create a story unto itself, that’s not in the spirit of what we think fandom is about. Fandom is about celebrating the story the way it is.” Slash fans would beg to differ, and for many FF readers and writers, the joy of engagement, and a significant engine for the growth of HP fame, is partly located in the creativity offered for readers and writers to fill in the gaps. Endnote HP FF ranges from posts on general FF sites (such as fanfiction.net >> books, where HP has 147,067 stories [on 4,490 pages of hotlinks] posted, compared with its nearest ‘rival’ Lord of the rings: with 33,189 FF stories). General FF sites exclude adult content, much of which is corralled into 18+ FF sites, such as Restrictedsection.org, set up when core material was expelled from general sites. As an example of one adult site, the Potter Slash Archive is selective (unlike fanfiction.net, for example) which means that only stories liked by the site team are displayed. Authors submitting work are asked to abide by a list of ‘compulsory parameters’, but ‘warnings’ fall under the category of ‘optional parameters’: “Please put a warning if your story contains content that may be offensive to some authors [sic], such as m/m sex, graphic sex or violence, violent sex, character death, major angst, BDSM, non-con (rape) etc”. Adult-content FF readers/writers embrace a range of unexpected genres – such as Twincest (incest within either of the two sets of twin characters in HP) and Weasleycest (incest within the Weasley clan) – in addition to mainstream romance/homo-erotica pairings, such as that between Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy. (NB: within the time frame 16 August – 4 October, Harry Potter FF writers had posted an additional 9,196 stories on the fanfiction.net site alone.) References ABS. 8147.0 Use of the Internet by Householders, Australia. http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/ e8ae5488b598839cca25682000131612/ ae8e67619446db22ca2568a9001393f8!OpenDocument, 2001, 2001>. Baym, Nancy. “The Emergence of Community in Computer-Mediated Communication.” CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community. Ed. S. Jones. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995. 138-63. Blue, Midnight. “The Mirror of Maybe.” http://www.greyblue.net/MidnightBlue/Mirror/default.htm>. Coates, Laura. “Muggle Kids Battle for Domain Name Rights. Irish Computer. http://www.irishcomputer.com/domaingame2.html>. Fanfiction.net. “Category: Books” http://www.fanfiction.net/cat/202/>. Green, Lelia. Technoculture: From Alphabet to Cybersex. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Hearn, Greg, Tom Mandeville and David Anthony. The Communication Superhighway: Social and Economic Change in the Digital Age. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1997. Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures. London: Routledge, 2002. Houghton Mifflin. “Potlatch.” Encyclopedia of North American Indians. http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/naind/html/ na_030900_potlatch.htm>. Kirby, Justin. “Brand Papers: Getting the Bug.” Brand Strategy July-August 2004. http://www.dmc.co.uk/pdf/BrandStrategy07-0804.pdf>. Marshall, P. David. “Technophobia: Video Games, Computer Hacks and Cybernetics.” Media International Australia 85 (Nov. 1997): 70-8. Murray, Simone. “Celebrating the Story the Way It Is: Cultural Studies, Corporate Media and the Contested Utility of Fandom.” Continuum 18.1 (2004): 7-25. Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. 2000. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s11.html>. Streeter, Thomas. The Romantic Self and the Politics of Internet Commercialization. Cultural Studies 17.5 (2003): 648-68. Turner, Graeme, Frances Bonner, and P. David Marshall. Fame Games: The Production of Celebrity in Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge UP. Watson, Nessim. “Why We Argue about Virtual Community: A Case Study of the Phish.net Fan Community.” Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety. Ed. Steven G. Jones. London: Sage, 1997. 102-32. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Green, Lelia, and Carmen Guinery. "Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Phenomenon." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/14-green.php>. APA Style Green, L., and C. Guinery. (Nov. 2004) "Harry Potter and the Fan Fiction Phenomenon," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/14-green.php>.

Welcome to the ‘bubbles’ issue of M/C Journal. When we first pitched the idea of ‘bubbles’ for an issue of M/C Journal it was 2019, several months before COVID-19 was identified in Wuhan, China, and the resulting pandemic that brought the term ‘bubble’ to prominence in ways we had not even imagined. Our pre-pandemic line of enquiry focussed on how bubbles manifested themselves within popular culture and society and how the media reported on these concepts. Thinking about bubbles from bubbly champagne to the ‘political bubble’ we asked researchers to think about the ephemeral nature of bubbles. And indeed some of the articles in this edition reflect this original line of enquiry. COVID-19 however brought to us a whole new meaning of bubbles. Suddenly governments were urging people to ‘stay in their bubbles’ and, in Australia, the idea of ‘travel bubbles’ between countries with similarly low rates of COVID-19 emerged. Mary-Louise McLaws described the ‘germ bubble’ as those we don’t physically distance from, our close contacts. A year ago – in March 2020 – the global community began to exist within a restricted bubble that limited our contact with the wider world. For the most part, that bubble remains 12 months later. Some of the articles for this issue focus on the ways COVID-19 has brought new bubbles to our social and political landscape. Despite the recent prominence of COVID-19, the feature article tackles another bubble that has continued to dominate headlines in Australia. Angelika Heurich and Jo Coghlan examine the ‘Canberra Bubble’ – a toxic culture of sexualised, bullying, hyper-masculinity, that seeks to silence and discredit those who speak out, operating in ways out of line with modern Australia and workplace laws. From claims of rape against the Attorney-General to a Prime Minister who failed to even read the complaint against the highest law officer in Australia, to Brittany Higgins being called a “lying cow” and Grace Tame’s forensic analysis of Morrison’s lack of conscience, Australia’s #MeToo moment threatens to bring down a government. The ‘Canberra Bubble’ may have been the Australian word of the year in 2018, argue Fincina Hopgood and Jodi Brooks, but 2020 belonged to the COVID-19 bubble. Their article takes stock on how the words ‘iso’ and ‘bubble’ came to prominence as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. It follows up with an examination on how the COVID-19 bubble is conceived across different cohorts, and in particular for those of the fourth age – the older generation. The COVID-19 pandemic brought into relief another long-term political and social problem in Australia, how Australians of are taken care of in their twilight years. Hopgood and Brooks interrogate how, despite a Royal Commission into the running of aged care homes that recommended change, the pandemic exacerbated the vulnerability of people in aged care homes. For governments to effectively manage COVID-19 bubbles, they need to rely on pre-existing relationships with the publics they represent. Xiang Gao’s article investigates the role social capital has played in the ability for different governments to manage the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It critically examines how pre-existing social capital has enabled governments to effectively establish social distancing measures and household ‘bubbles’. Examining these concepts in the Chinese and American contexts, Gao finds that the governmental responses to the pandemic were not only reliant on established social capital, but have also changed the relationship between governments and publics. With the USA, Brazil shared the dubious honour of being widely criticised for the governmental response to the pandemic. Filipe Soares and Raquel Recuero tackle the political media landscape of reporting on COVID-19 in Brazil. They interrogate the role of the Brazilian media in the promotion of disinformation around the pandemic through three media case studies, finding that the intersection between traditional mass media and social media can exacerbate erroneous reporting. Managing the pandemic did not solely focus on the need to protect certain populations. Many governments highlighted the need for economic activities to continue. For commercial sports which already existed within a ‘sporting bubble’, the COVID-19 pandemic brought another bubble to the rarefied world of professional sports. The creation of a ‘sporting bubble’ enjoyed wide support from both political and media commentators. Adele Pavlidis and David Rowe consider the social effects of the creation of the ‘sporting bubble’ had both on those who found themselves inside, and on those who were left out. While at times the bubble could feel more like a cage, transgressions by sporting personalities often went unpunished. Further, the ‘sporting bubble’ was highly gendered, with those inside the bubble being predominantly men, which served to intensified pre-existing gender inequalities within professional sports. For those on the outside of the political mainstream, the Canberra bubble can appear to be an impervious boundary to cross. Bronwyn Fredericks and Abraham Bradfield argue that The Uluru Statement of the Heart was treated by politicians as little more than a ‘thought bubble’, destined to disintegrate into nothing, despite it being a culmination of numerous voices within Australian society. Recognition of Indigenous Australians in the Constitution is a measure that enjoys wide support across the Australian community, yet this has not led to meaningful action. Fredericks and Bradfield examine the various contemporary and historical factors that have led to the slow progress on this fundamental and important issue. History has a strong bearing on how we understand social and political matters today. Within popular culture, history provides a rich seam of stories for entertainment, both factual and fictional. Fictional versions of history necessarily blur the lines between reality and fantasy. How history is mediated through fiction is the focus of Lisa J. Hackett and Jo Coghlan’s article. Based upon an international survey carried out amongst historical romance authors and readers, it asked if historical accuracy in fiction matters. It finds that there exists a ‘dance of history and fiction’ that posit that our past can be animated by fiction writers and our historians can bring to life our pasts. It is in the intersections of the ‘historical bubble’ and the ‘fiction bubble’ that we can reflect on the past in meaningful ways that inform our social understanding of the past, its people and practices. Disney heroines are some of the most recognisable romantic fiction characters, often inhabiting a world of magic and true love with charming princes and wicked stepmothers. Yet the heroines' and villains' true natures are often revealed through a physical transformation that Amanda Rutherford and Sarah Baker argue is problematic for the often young audiences who watch these films. Despite story lines that promise more progressive iterations of worthiness, a homogenous physical beauty dominates the ‘princess bubble’. For readers, much like those of historical romance novels, such representations can be hegemonic and hide the patriarchal nature of modern society. While bubbles can often represent closed-in worlds, other bubbles are synonymous with exuberance and fun. The next two articles take their inspiration from frothy champagne bubbles. The first by Anna-Mari Almila examines the history of champagne and how its iconic bubbles were both created and came to be an integral symbol of celebration. It notes how champagne makers are often in dialogue with wider popular culture elements in creating and maintaining meanings associated with the drink. Jenny Wise and Lesley McLean turn their attention to the a specific Australian bubbly brand, Treasury Wines, and how it has positioned its 19 Crimes label, which uses the images of Australian convicts on its bottles to create a unique identity. Whilst ostensibly a celebration of Australia’s convict past, the way this brand ‘celebrates’ the sometimes dark crimes of real criminals suggest a socially acceptable romanticisation of Australia’s past. We close this special edition with Greg Melleuish’s thoughtful essay on the fragility of modern society. Just as in the past when we sought permanence in the face of disease and war again we seek stability in the face of pandemics and climate change, even though we know the ‘bubble’ will burst. Humans have a history of attempting to control change. Our ‘plastic nature’ allows us to adapt to the impermanence of life while we yearn for that which is constant and unchanging. We turn to words to find permanence, claiming their meaning as universal, but even meanings are contested and hence transient. Our pragmatic search for stability, even in a period of prosperity and infinite peace, is worthy, but hanging over us is the Hobbesian ‘state of nature’ bubble in which zombies and pandemics threaten our social being. While in part a dire warning for the future, we are reminded that the bubble of modern life is to be cherished.

Introduction Food has always been an essential component of daily life. Today, thinking about food is a much more complicated pursuit than planning the next meal, with food studies scholars devoting their efforts to researching “anything pertaining to food and eating, from how food is grown to when and how it is eaten, to who eats it and with whom, and the nutritional quality” (Duran and MacDonald 234). This is in addition to the work undertaken by an increasingly wide variety of popular culture researchers who explore all aspects of food (Risson and Brien 3): including food advertising, food packaging, food on television, and food in popular fiction. In creating stories, from those works that quickly disappear from bookstore shelves to those that become entrenched in the literary canon, writers use food to communicate the everyday and to explore a vast range of ideas from cultural background to social standing, and also use food to provide perspectives “into the cultural and historical uniqueness of a given social group” (Piatti-Farnell 80). For example in Oliver Twist (1838) by Charles Dickens, the central character challenges the class system when: “Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger and reckless with misery. He rose from the table, and advancing basin and spoon in hand, to the master, said, somewhat alarmed at his own temerity–‘Please, sir, I want some more’” (11). Scarlett O’Hara in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) makes a similar point, a little more dramatically, when she declares: “As God is my witness, I’m never going to be hungry again” (419). Food can also take us into the depths of another culture: places that many of us will only ever read about. Food is also used to provide insight into a character’s state of mind. In Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (1983) an item as simple as boiled bread tells a reader so much more about Rachel Samstat than her preferred bakery items: “So we got married and I got pregnant and I gave up my New York apartment and moved to Washington. Talk about mistakes [...] there I was, trying to hold up my end in a city where you can’t even buy a decent bagel” (34). There are three ways in which writers can deal with food within their work. Firstly, food can be totally ignored. This approach is sometimes taken despite food being such a standard feature of storytelling that its absence, be it a lonely meal at home, elegant canapés at an impressively catered cocktail party, or a cheap sandwich collected from a local café, is an obvious omission. Food can also add realism to a story, with many authors putting as much effort into conjuring the smell, taste, and texture of food as they do into providing a backstory and a purpose for their characters. In recent years, a third way has emerged with some writers placing such importance upon food in fiction that the line that divides the cookbook and the novel has become distorted. This article looks at cookbooks and cookery in popular fiction with a particular focus on crime novels. Recipes: Ingredients and Preparation Food in fiction has been employed, with great success, to help characters cope with grief; giving them the reassurance that only comes through the familiarity of the kitchen and the concentration required to fulfil routine tasks: to chop and dice, to mix, to sift and roll, to bake, broil, grill, steam, and fry. Such grief can come from the breakdown of a relationship as seen in Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (1983). An autobiography under the guise of fiction, this novel is the first-person story of a cookbook author, a description that irritates the narrator as she feels her works “aren’t merely cookbooks” (95). She is, however, grateful she was not described as “a distraught, rejected, pregnant cookbook author whose husband was in love with a giantess” (95). As the collapse of the marriage is described, her favourite recipes are shared: Bacon Hash; Four Minute Eggs; Toasted Almonds; Lima Beans with Pears; Linguine Alla Cecca; Pot Roast; three types of Potatoes; Sorrel Soup; desserts including Bread Pudding, Cheesecake, Key Lime Pie and Peach Pie; and a Vinaigrette, all in an effort to reassert her personal skills and thus personal value. Grief can also result from loss of hope and the realisation that a life long dreamed of will never be realised. Like Water for Chocolate (1989), by Laura Esquivel, is the magical realist tale of Tita De La Garza who, as the youngest daughter, is forbidden to marry as she must take care of her mother, a woman who: “Unquestionably, when it came to dividing, dismantling, dismembering, desolating, detaching, dispossessing, destroying or dominating […] was a pro” (87). Tita’s life lurches from one painful, unjust episode to the next; the only emotional stability she has comes from the kitchen, and from her cooking of a series of dishes: Christmas Rolls; Chabela Wedding Cake; Quail in Rose Petal Sauce; Turkey Mole; Northern-style Chorizo; Oxtail Soup; Champandongo; Chocolate and Three Kings’s Day Bread; Cream Fritters; and Beans with Chilli Tezcucana-style. This is a series of culinary-based activities that attempts to superimpose normalcy on a life that is far from the everyday. Grief is most commonly associated with death. Undertaking the selection, preparation and presentation of meals in novels dealing with bereavement is both a functional and symbolic act: life must go on for those left behind but it must go on in a very different way. Thus, novels that use food to deal with loss are particularly important because they can “make non-cooks believe they can cook, and for frequent cooks, affirm what they already know: that cooking heals” (Baltazar online). In Angelina’s Bachelors (2011) by Brian O’Reilly, Angelina D’Angelo believes “cooking was not just about food. It was about character” (2). By the end of the first chapter the young woman’s husband is dead and she is in the kitchen looking for solace, and survival, in cookery. In The Kitchen Daughter (2011) by Jael McHenry, Ginny Selvaggio is struggling to cope with the death of her parents and the friends and relations who crowd her home after the funeral. Like Angelina, Ginny retreats to the kitchen. There are, of course, exceptions. In Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), cooking celebrates, comforts, and seduces (Calta). This story of three sisters from South Carolina is told through diary entries, narrative, letters, poetry, songs, and spells. Recipes are also found throughout the text: Turkey; Marmalade; Rice; Spinach; Crabmeat; Fish; Sweetbread; Duck; Lamb; and, Asparagus. Anthony Capella’s The Food of Love (2004), a modern retelling of the classic tale of Cyrano de Bergerac, is about the beautiful Laura, a waiter masquerading as a top chef Tommaso, and the talented Bruno who, “thick-set, heavy, and slightly awkward” (21), covers for Tommaso’s incompetency in the kitchen as he, too, falls for Laura. The novel contains recipes and contains considerable information about food: Take fusilli […] People say this pasta was designed by Leonardo da Vinci himself. The spiral fins carry the biggest amount of sauce relative to the surface area, you see? But it only works with a thick, heavy sauce that can cling to the grooves. Conchiglie, on the other hand, is like a shell, so it holds a thin, liquid sauce inside it perfectly (17). Recipes: Dishing Up Death Crime fiction is a genre with a long history of focusing on food; from the theft of food in the novels of the nineteenth century to the utilisation of many different types of food such as chocolate, marmalade, and sweet omelettes to administer poison (Berkeley, Christie, Sayers), the latter vehicle for arsenic receiving much attention in Harriet Vane’s trial in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Strong Poison (1930). The Judge, in summing up the case, states to the members of the jury: “Four eggs were brought to the table in their shells, and Mr Urquhart broke them one by one into a bowl, adding sugar from a sifter [...he then] cooked the omelette in a chafing dish, filled it with hot jam” (14). Prior to what Timothy Taylor has described as the “pre-foodie era” the crime fiction genre was “littered with corpses whose last breaths smelled oddly sweet, or bitter, or of almonds” (online). Of course not all murders are committed in such a subtle fashion. In Roald Dahl’s Lamb to the Slaughter (1953), Mary Maloney murders her policeman husband, clubbing him over the head with a frozen leg of lamb. The meat is roasting nicely when her husband’s colleagues arrive to investigate his death, the lamb is offered and consumed: the murder weapon now beyond the recovery of investigators. Recent years have also seen more and more crime fiction writers present a central protagonist working within the food industry, drawing connections between the skills required for food preparation and those needed to catch a murderer. Working with cooks or crooks, or both, requires planning and people skills in addition to creative thinking, dedication, reliability, stamina, and a willingness to take risks. Kent Carroll insists that “food and mysteries just go together” (Carroll in Calta), with crime fiction website Stop, You’re Killing Me! listing, at the time of writing, over 85 culinary-based crime fiction series, there is certainly sufficient evidence to support his claim. Of the numerous works available that focus on food there are many series that go beyond featuring food and beverages, to present recipes as well as the solving of crimes. These include: the Candy Holliday Murder Mysteries by B. B. Haywood; the Coffeehouse Mysteries by Cleo Coyle; the Hannah Swensen Mysteries by Joanne Fluke; the Hemlock Falls Mysteries by Claudia Bishop; the Memphis BBQ Mysteries by Riley Adams; the Piece of Cake Mysteries by Jacklyn Brady; the Tea Shop Mysteries by Laura Childs; and, the White House Chef Mysteries by Julie Hyzy. The vast majority of offerings within this female dominated sub-genre that has been labelled “Crime and Dine” (Collins online) are American, both in origin and setting. A significant contribution to this increasingly popular formula is, however, from an Australian author Kerry Greenwood. Food features within her famed Phryne Fisher Series with recipes included in A Question of Death (2007). Recipes also form part of Greenwood’s food-themed collection of short crime stories Recipes for Crime (1995), written with Jenny Pausacker. These nine stories, each one imitating the style of one of crime fiction’s greatest contributors (from Agatha Christie to Raymond Chandler), allow readers to simultaneously access mysteries and recipes. 2004 saw the first publication of Earthly Delights and the introduction of her character, Corinna Chapman. This series follows the adventures of a woman who gave up a career as an accountant to open her own bakery in Melbourne. Corinna also investigates the occasional murder. Recipes can be found at the end of each of these books with the Corinna Chapman Recipe Book (nd), filled with instructions for baking bread, muffins and tea cakes in addition to recipes for main courses such as risotto, goulash, and “Chicken with Pineapple 1971 Style”, available from the publisher’s website. Recipes: Integration and Segregation In Heartburn (1983), Rachel acknowledges that presenting a work of fiction and a collection of recipes within a single volume can present challenges, observing: “I see that I haven’t managed to work in any recipes for a while. It’s hard to work in recipes when you’re moving the plot forward” (99). How Rachel tells her story is, however, a reflection of how she undertakes her work, with her own cookbooks being, she admits, more narration than instruction: “The cookbooks I write do well. They’re very personal and chatty–they’re cookbooks in an almost incidental way. I write chapters about friends or relatives or trips or experiences, and work in the recipes peripherally” (17). Some authors integrate detailed recipes into their narratives through description and dialogue. An excellent example of this approach can be found in the Coffeehouse Mystery Series by Cleo Coyle, in the novel On What Grounds (2003). When the central protagonist is being questioned by police, Clare Cosi’s answers are interrupted by a flashback scene and instructions on how to make Greek coffee: Three ounces of water and one very heaped teaspoon of dark roast coffee per serving. (I used half Italian roast, and half Maracaibo––a lovely Venezuelan coffee, named after the country’s major port; rich in flavour, with delicate wine overtones.) / Water and finely ground beans both go into the ibrik together. The water is then brought to a boil over medium heat (37). This provides insight into Clare’s character; that, when under pressure, she focuses her mind on what she firmly believes to be true – not the information that she is doubtful of or a situation that she is struggling to understand. Yet breaking up the action within a novel in this way–particularly within crime fiction, a genre that is predominantly dependant upon generating tension and building the pacing of the plotting to the climax–is an unusual but ultimately successful style of writing. Inquiry and instruction are comfortable bedfellows; as the central protagonists within these works discover whodunit, the readers discover who committed murder as well as a little bit more about one of the world’s most popular beverages, thus highlighting how cookbooks and novels both serve to entertain and to educate. Many authors will save their recipes, serving them up at the end of a story. This can be seen in Julie Hyzy’s White House Chef Mystery novels, the cover of each volume in the series boasts that it “includes Recipes for a Complete Presidential Menu!” These menus, with detailed ingredients lists, instructions for cooking and options for serving, are segregated from the stories and appear at the end of each work. Yet other writers will deploy a hybrid approach such as the one seen in Like Water for Chocolate (1989), where the ingredients are listed at the commencement of each chapter and the preparation for the recipes form part of the narrative. This method of integration is also deployed in The Kitchen Daughter (2011), which sees most of the chapters introduced with a recipe card, those chapters then going on to deal with action in the kitchen. Using recipes as chapter breaks is a structure that has, very recently, been adopted by Australian celebrity chef, food writer, and, now fiction author, Ed Halmagyi, in his new work, which is both cookbook and novel, The Food Clock: A Year of Cooking Seasonally (2012). As people exchange recipes in reality, so too do fictional characters. The Recipe Club (2009), by Andrea Israel and Nancy Garfinkel, is the story of two friends, Lilly Stone and Valerie Rudman, which is structured as an epistolary novel. As they exchange feelings, ideas and news in their correspondence, they also exchange recipes: over eighty of them throughout the novel in e-mails and letters. In The Food of Love (2004), written messages between two of the main characters are also used to share recipes. In addition, readers are able to post their own recipes, inspired by this book and other works by Anthony Capella, on the author’s website. From Page to Plate Some readers are contributing to the burgeoning food tourism market by seeking out the meals from the pages of their favourite novels in bars, cafés, and restaurants around the world, expanding the idea of “map as menu” (Spang 79). In Shannon McKenna Schmidt’s and Joni Rendon’s guide to literary tourism, Novel Destinations (2009), there is an entire section, “Eat Your Words: Literary Places to Sip and Sup”, dedicated to beverages and food. The listings include details for John’s Grill, in San Francisco, which still has on the menu Sam Spade’s Lamb Chops, served with baked potato and sliced tomatoes: a meal enjoyed by author Dashiell Hammett and subsequently consumed by his well-known protagonist in The Maltese Falcon (193), and the Café de la Paix, in Paris, frequented by Ian Fleming’s James Bond because “the food was good enough and it amused him to watch the people” (197). Those wanting to follow in the footsteps of writers can go to Harry’s Bar, in Venice, where the likes of Marcel Proust, Sinclair Lewis, Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway, and Truman Capote have all enjoyed a drink (195) or The Eagle and Child, in Oxford, which hosted the regular meetings of the Inklings––a group which included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien––in the wood-panelled Rabbit Room (203). A number of eateries have developed their own literary themes such as the Peacocks Tearooms, in Cambridgeshire, which blends their own teas. Readers who are also tea drinkers can indulge in the Sherlock Holmes (Earl Grey with Lapsang Souchong) and the Doctor Watson (Keemun and Darjeeling with Lapsang Souchong). Alternatively, readers may prefer to side with the criminal mind and indulge in the Moriarty (Black Chai with Star Anise, Pepper, Cinnamon, and Fennel) (Peacocks). The Moat Bar and Café, in Melbourne, situated in the basement of the State Library of Victoria, caters “to the whimsy and fantasy of the fiction housed above” and even runs a book exchange program (The Moat). For those readers who are unable, or unwilling, to travel the globe in search of such savoury and sweet treats there is a wide variety of locally-based literary lunches and other meals, that bring together popular authors and wonderful food, routinely organised by book sellers, literature societies, and publishing houses. There are also many cookbooks now easily obtainable that make it possible to re-create fictional food at home. One of the many examples available is The Book Lover’s Cookbook (2003) by Shaunda Kennedy Wenger and Janet Kay Jensen, a work containing over three hundred pages of: Breakfasts; Main & Side Dishes; Soups; Salads; Appetizers, Breads & Other Finger Foods; Desserts; and Cookies & Other Sweets based on the pages of children’s books, literary classics, popular fiction, plays, poetry, and proverbs. If crime fiction is your preferred genre then you can turn to Jean Evans’s The Crime Lover’s Cookbook (2007), which features short stories in between the pages of recipes. There is also Estérelle Payany’s Recipe for Murder (2010) a beautifully illustrated volume that presents detailed instructions for Pigs in a Blanket based on the Big Bad Wolf’s appearance in The Three Little Pigs (44–7), and Roast Beef with Truffled Mashed Potatoes, which acknowledges Patrick Bateman’s fondness for fine dining in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (124–7). Conclusion Cookbooks and many popular fiction novels are reflections of each other in terms of creativity, function, and structure. In some instances the two forms are so closely entwined that a single volume will concurrently share a narrative while providing information about, and instruction, on cookery. Indeed, cooking in books is becoming so popular that the line that traditionally separated cookbooks from other types of books, such as romance or crime novels, is becoming increasingly distorted. The separation between food and fiction is further blurred by food tourism and how people strive to experience some of the foods found within fictional works at bars, cafés, and restaurants around the world or, create such experiences in their own homes using fiction-themed recipe books. Food has always been acknowledged as essential for life; books have long been acknowledged as food for thought and food for the soul. Thus food in both the real world and in the imagined world serves to nourish and sustain us in these ways. References Adams, Riley. Delicious and Suspicious. New York: Berkley, 2010. –– Finger Lickin’ Dead. New York: Berkley, 2011. –– Hickory Smoked Homicide. New York: Berkley, 2011. Baltazar, Lori. “A Novel About Food, Recipes Included [Book review].” Dessert Comes First. 28 Feb. 2012. 20 Aug. 2012 ‹http://dessertcomesfirst.com/archives/8644›. Berkeley, Anthony. The Poisoned Chocolates Case. London: Collins, 1929. Bishop, Claudia. Toast Mortem. New York: Berkley, 2010. –– Dread on Arrival. New York: Berkley, 2012. Brady, Jacklyn. A Sheetcake Named Desire. New York: Berkley, 2011. –– Cake on a Hot Tin Roof. New York: Berkley, 2012. Calta, Marialisa. “The Art of the Novel as Cookbook.” The New York Times. 17 Feb. 1993. 23 Jul. 2012 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/17/style/the-art-of-the-novel-as-cookbook.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm›. Capella, Anthony. The Food of Love. London: Time Warner, 2004/2005. Carroll, Kent in Calta, Marialisa. “The Art of the Novel as Cookbook.” The New York Times. 17 Feb. 1993. 23 Jul. 2012 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/17/style/the-art-of-the-novel-as-cookbook.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm›. Childs, Laura. Death by Darjeeling. New York: Berkley, 2001. –– Shades of Earl Grey. New York: Berkley, 2003. –– Blood Orange Brewing. New York: Berkley, 2006/2007. –– The Teaberry Strangler. New York: Berkley, 2010/2011. Collins, Glenn. “Your Favourite Fictional Crime Moments Involving Food.” The New York Times Diner’s Journal: Notes on Eating, Drinking and Cooking. 16 Jul. 2012. 17 Jul. 2012 ‹http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/16/your-favorite-fictional-crime-moments-involving-food›. Coyle, Cleo. On What Grounds. New York: Berkley, 2003. –– Murder Most Frothy. New York: Berkley, 2006. –– Holiday Grind. New York: Berkley, 2009/2010. –– Roast Mortem. New York: Berkley, 2010/2011. Christie, Agatha. A Pocket Full of Rye. London: Collins, 1953. Dahl, Roald. Lamb to the Slaughter: A Roald Dahl Short Story. New York: Penguin, 1953/2012. eBook. Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist, or, the Parish Boy’s Progress. In Collection of Ancient and Modern British Authors, Vol. CCXXIX. Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1838/1839. Duran, Nancy, and Karen MacDonald. “Information Sources for Food Studies Research.” Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research 2.9 (2006): 233–43. Ephron, Nora. Heartburn. New York: Vintage, 1983/1996. Esquivel, Laura. Trans. Christensen, Carol, and Thomas Christensen. Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Instalments with Recipes, romances and home remedies. London: Black Swan, 1989/1993. Evans, Jeanne M. The Crime Lovers’s Cookbook. City: Happy Trails, 2007. Fluke, Joanne. Fudge Cupcake Murder. New York: Kensington, 2004. –– Key Lime Pie Murder. New York: Kensington, 2007. –– Cream Puff Murder. New York: Kensington, 2009. –– Apple Turnover Murder. New York: Kensington, 2010. Greenwood, Kerry, and Jenny Pausacker. Recipes for Crime. Carlton: McPhee Gribble, 1995. Greenwood, Kerry. The Corinna Chapman Recipe Book: Mouth-Watering Morsels to Make Your Man Melt, Recipes from Corinna Chapman, Baker and Reluctant Investigator. nd. 25 Aug. 2012 ‹http://www.allenandunwin.com/_uploads/documents/minisites/Corinna_recipebook.pdf›. –– A Question of Death: An Illustrated Phryne Fisher Treasury. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2007. Halmagyi, Ed. The Food Clock: A Year of Cooking Seasonally. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2012. Haywood, B. B. Town in a Blueberry Jam. New York: Berkley, 2010. –– Town in a Lobster Stew. New York: Berkley, 2011. –– Town in a Wild Moose Chase. New York: Berkley, 2012. Hyzy, Julie. State of the Onion. New York: Berkley, 2008. –– Hail to the Chef. New York: Berkley, 2008. –– Eggsecutive Orders. New York: Berkley, 2010. –– Buffalo West Wing. New York: Berkley, 2011. –– Affairs of Steak. New York: Berkley, 2012. Israel, Andrea, and Nancy Garfinkel, with Melissa Clark. The Recipe Club: A Novel About Food And Friendship. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. McHenry, Jael. The Kitchen Daughter: A Novel. New York: Gallery, 2011. Mitchell, Margaret. Gone With the Wind. London: Pan, 1936/1974 O’Reilly, Brian, with Virginia O’Reilly. Angelina’s Bachelors: A Novel, with Food. New York: Gallery, 2011. Payany, Estérelle. Recipe for Murder: Frightfully Good Food Inspired by Fiction. Paris: Flammarion, 2010. Peacocks Tearooms. Peacocks Tearooms: Our Unique Selection of Teas. 23 Aug. 2012 ‹http://www.peacockstearoom.co.uk/teas/page1.asp›. Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. “A Taste of Conflict: Food, History and Popular Culture In Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction.” Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 2.1 (2012): 79–91. Risson, Toni, and Donna Lee Brien. “Editors’ Letter: That Takes the Cake: A Slice Of Australasian Food Studies Scholarship.” Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 2.1 (2012): 3–7. Sayers, Dorothy L. Strong Poison. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1930/2003. Schmidt, Shannon McKenna, and Joni Rendon. Novel Destinations: Literary Landmarks from Jane Austen’s Bath to Ernest Hemingway’s Key West. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2009. Shange, Ntozake. Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo: A Novel. New York: St Martin’s, 1982. Spang, Rebecca L. “All the World’s A Restaurant: On The Global Gastronomics Of Tourism and Travel.” In Raymond Grew (Ed). Food in Global History. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1999. 79–91. Taylor, Timothy. “Food/Crime Fiction.” Timothy Taylor. 2010. 17 Jul. 2012 ‹http://www.timothytaylor.ca/10/08/20/foodcrime-fiction›. The Moat Bar and Café. The Moat Bar and Café: Welcome. nd. 23 Aug. 2012 ‹http://themoat.com.au/Welcome.html›. Wenger, Shaunda Kennedy, and Janet Kay Jensen. The Book Lover’s Cookbook: Recipes Inspired by Celebrated Works of Literature, and the Passages that Feature Them. New York: Ballantine, 2003/2005.

AbstractAs an almost exclusively female-dominated medium, the popular romance novel has, throughout its history, allowed women writers to “amplify their political voice” (Teo, 2016, p. 102), especially when they could not actively participate in politics. Commonly, writers fashion storylines that reflect and process concerns from the real world in a fictional context. Using the Regency Romance as an example and based on Jayashree Kamblé’s theory that romance novels have a shared DNA that evolves in response to social and cultural influences, this paper first defines the figure of the romance hero in the pre-Trump era to segue into analysing selected novels published by Tessa Dare in 2011 (A night to surrender) and Sarah MacLean in 2012 (A rogue by any other name). This figure is then compared and contrasted with the incarnations of the hero in these authors’ publications from 2017 (The day of the duchess by MacLean) and 2019 (The wallflower wager by Dare) to map how his phenotype has evolved to reflect a shift in cultural perceptions regarding sex and sexual power dynamics. As I intend to show, in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election and the “#MeToo” movement, the new hero’s phenotype differs specifically in the expression of gendered power and sexuality. He is less forceful than his predecessors and places heavy emphasis on the heroine’s enthusiastic consent and pleasure.

This article argues that the Byzantine romance known as Digenes Akrites has more to offer historians than is often recognized. Regardless of the fictional nature of the story or of the exact date of its composition, the Digenes tale can serve as an exemplar of the kinds of interactions which regularly took place in the frontier regions between the Byzantine and Muslim worlds and the social values and cultural mores that guided such interactions. If taken as a paradigm of otherwise invisible conditions along the frontier regions of southeastern Anatolia, Digenes can shed new light on an otherwise dark and incomplete picture. It is, in fact, a frontier world in and of itself, in which outside powers, both Muslim and Byzantine, are distant images and only occasional players.

My memories are not books. They are only stories that I have been over so many times in my head that I don’t know from one day to the next what’s remembered and what’s made up. Like when you memorize a poem, and for one small unimportant part you supply your own words. The meaning’s the same, the meter’s identical. When you read the actual version you can never get it into your head that it’s right and you’re wrong. What I give you is the day’s edition. Tomorrow it may be different. The Giant’s House: A Romance (8) I am a book lover. Not in the conventional sense. I am a lover who gives books as tokens of my affection. I think my fascination with the exchange of the written word extends back to notes I wrote to my Middle School crushes. Bronwyn Garrity, in her study of the Internet practices of American pre-teen and teenaged girls, asserts, “Adolescence is the societally condoned window in which we may shuffle identities with abandon” (28). This rather utopian description is a stark contrast to the identity fixing that I remember experiencing at the ages of twelve and thirteen, especially in the domestic and corpor(e)al space of those grades between elementary school and high school. Personally, I prefer the term “Middle School” to “Junior High”; it more succinctly describes pre-teen ontology. We were in the middle of everything – in the middle of puberty, principally. The muddle middle of desires we had no language to explain. Desires that some of us – a romantic few – attempted to articulate. We were ridiculed for our efforts; or, at least that is how I remember it. Although I mastered intricate note folding techniques (mimicking origami) from more “experienced” girls and learned abbreviations, codes, nicknames that should have frustrated discovery of the sender’s identification, my purple prose too often found its audience not in the private eyes of my beloveds but in public places – the lunchroom, locker room, playground and bus. It wasn’t so much the humiliation of the revealed secret that I remember; it was the identity to which the notes bound me. I was (and still am) the girl who reveals too much. I came to see my own writing as an inadequate, even clumsy expression of feelings. Undeterred, I thought if I found someone who was a better writer, then my desires would be understood, appreciated, reciprocated. When I entered college, I was prepared. Schooled by another romantic who utilized e.e. cummings’ poetry to seduce me, I became an aficionado of loving by books, poetry, by any words other than my own. Poets, novelists and playwrights became my Cyranos, providing the raw material through which I fashioned love – “She loved the taste of other people’s words in her mouth” (McCracken 13). And like Peggy Cort, the solitary but sensual librarian narrator of Elizabeth McCracken’s A Giant’s House, who loves (through) the words of others, I too believed that “people fall in love based not on good looks or fate but on knowledge. … Knowledge is love” (10). My father is a book lover too. A book lover like me. From my childhood I remember his gifts of books to me and, when I grew old enough to know what to select, my gifts of books back to him. Of course, my mother says we give each other books because it is “easy,” easier than picking out something “more personal.” I wonder if she misreads the depth of our exchanges on purpose, that she deliberately refuses to see that books are the most intimate gifts we give each other because she is not a book lover too. Not in the way we are. An English major in college, she is one of the few people I know who resists reading. She marks what she terms my father’s “antisocial” behavior by criticizing his constant reading. “It’s the way he avoids dealing with people,” she has been known to charge. For my mother, actions and interaction speak whereas the written word is simply fiction. For my father, the written word is interactive, and interaction is a dance he finds too intricate for his clumsy step. It has become a running joke in our family that when we go to the mall it only takes my father five minutes after entering the over-air conditioned, over-stimulating labyrinth to query, “So. Where can I meet you guys and at what time?” He doesn’t bother to tell us anymore that he’s off to prowl the bookstores; we just know that when we meet (hours later) he will be sitting in the food court, cup of coffee in hand, tell-tale plastic shopping bag folded upon his table and a new love in his hand. My father used to gift my mother with books – mostly self-help titles – overtly, to assist her with her Master’s education in counseling and, covertly, to hint at her need to seek help with lifelong depression. For a while I remember these gifts were received with joy. It was a way he could share her studies, and she appreciated his desire to be near her intellectually. After she finished her studies, however, he continued to present her with similar offerings because while the study had been mastered the despair had not. Outside an educational context, she saw these books as coercive hints, pushing her to work on her emotional troubles without talking to her directly. She rebelled. The gifts no longer had what Alphonse Lingis calls the “element of impetuousness, recklessness” in them. She accused him of giving not as “a passionate act” but as a calculated one (Dangerous Emotions 174-5). He was crushed and, to my dismay, stopped the flow of books to both of us, afraid that I too would misunderstand his gestures. Now, in the light of memory, I can understand both his sadness and her anger. I have also been disillusioned by contrived gifts. The teenaged lover who chronicled my heart with cummings’ verse proceeded to give the same gift to another after leaving me. This convenient exchange of love object, while maintaining the same vehicle of desire, made me realize that the words were not specific to me, rather, they were part of a package of romance unfolded and displayed as easily to one consumer as the next. Lingis extols his reader, Gift-giving requires a specific kind of divination of the individual human heart; it is not a matter of just asking someone what he or she wants. For a gift is not a mere gratification of need or want; it involves a grandeur that cannot be measured by itemizing one’s wants; it transfigures the soul of the recipient. (177) I am determined not to be that kind of charlatan. Of course, Lingis also cautions that prowess with giving does not insure proficiency with receiving, “Receiving is as difficult as giving a gift.” I believe it is harder for exactly the reasons he delineates, “deciding to make it in life by oneself, deciding to achieve and to deserve whatever one needs and wants, how many gifts one refuses!” (179). Generosity is something I was schooled in by my father, but only in a way that extended out from self. I trace such proffering back to my Middle School moments of misplaced desire. One way that I soothed myself about a failed gift was by giving even more to the same people who never reciprocated my attentions. The more my generosity continues, the more difficult it becomes to accept gifts given to me. Reciprocity undermines my status as giver and exposes my own needs. To acknowledge those needs would be to acknowledge vulnerability – something a giver does not have because she believes she controls the gift exchange. Her desires are fulfilled not just in the act of giving but in the joy the receiver feels. This desire is risky, subject to failure, not to mention parasitic and fleeting because the giver is only excited again by another exchange, another, and another. Lingis counsels me, “It is the extravagant and passionate heart that can recognize and receive a gift” (175), but as a giver, I convince myself of my passion by insistent repetition, denial of need, and emotional silence. My beloved says it was my generosity that first attracted her to me. I was generous not just with material things but also with my mind, my body and my time. I think she says this to make me feel better about not being able to receive. She allows me to maintain the fiction that my giving is fulfilling. “Sometimes we need people to lie for us,” Peggy Cort reminds me. “That lie was a gift I shouldn’t have accepted: inappropriate, unethical and much too generous. But I did; I took it silently; I nodded” (McCracken 103). I nodded and presented her with … a book. Works Cited Garrity, Bronwyn. “Some Cyberspace of Her Own: Escapes from the Dark, Horrible, Sticking Trail of the Lost Voice.” The Nation. 19 Mar. 2001: 25-30. Lingis, Alphonse. Dangerous Emotions. Berkeley, CA: U of CA Press, 2000. McCracken, Elizabeth. The Giant’s House: A Romance. New York, NY: Bard Books, 1996. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Odendahl, Jules. "Giving and Loving" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.6 (2002). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/givingandloving.php>. APA Style Odendahl, J., (2002, Nov 20). Giving and Loving. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 5,(6). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0211/givingandloving.html

The Malta Exiles issue is the event of exiling patriotic Turkish officers, statesmen, intellectuals and journalists to Malta, without any evidence, in order to implement the provisions of the Mondros Armistice Agreement signed with the British after the First World War, which prepared them for an easy invasion of Anatolia. Acting with a colonial understanding, the main purpose of the British and their allies is to apply the provisions of the Mondros Armistice Agreement as they wish by judging these people who might support the possible national resistance in Anatolia. For this, the Istanbul Government cooperates with the Armenians and Greeks. With the fabricated documents of their collaborators, they accuse and arrest the Maltese exiles with the allegation of "Armenian genocide" Meanwhile, the activities of the Committee of Union and Progress, which believed that the war was not over, abroad and inside, he success of the Kuva-yı Milliye in the national struggle, led by Mustafa Kemal, ensures that the Maltese exiles are liberated from Malta. The transfer of the Malta exiles to the fictional world, in line with the historical reality, has led to the examination of the novel in question. The aim is to bring to light a dark page of history through examination. While doing this, scientific studies related to the subject were applied.

The labyrinth is probably the most universal trope of complexity. Deriving from pre-Greek labyrinthos, a word denoting “maze, large building with intricate underground passages”, and possibly related to Lydian labrys, which signifies “double-edged axe,” symbol of royal power, the notion of the labyrinth primarily evokes the Minoan Palace in Crete and the myth of the Minotaur. According to this myth, the Minotaur, a monster with the body of a man and the head of a bull, was born to Pesiphae, king Minos’s wife, who mated with a bull when the king of Crete was besieging Athens. Upon his return, Minos commanded the artist Daedalus to construct a monumental building of inter-connected rooms and passages, at the center of which the King sought to imprison the monstrous sign of his disgrace. The Minotaur required human sacrifice every couple of years, until it was defeated by the Athenian prince Theuseus, who managed to extricate himself from the maze by means of a clue of thread, given to him by Minos’s enamored daughter, Ariadne (Parandowski 238-43). If the Cretan myth establishes the labyrinth as a trope of complexity, this very complexity associates labyrinthine design not only with disorientation but also with superb artistry. As pointed out by Penelope Reed Doob, the labyrinth is an inherently ambiguous construct (39-63). It presumes a double perspective: those imprisoned inside, whose vision ahead and behind is severely constricted, are disoriented and terrified; whereas those who view it from outside or from above – as a diagram – admire its structural sophistication. Labyrinths thus simultaneously embody order and chaos, clarity and confusion, unity (a single structure) and multiplicity (many paths). Whereas the modern, reductive view equates the maze with confusion and disorientation, the labyrinth is actually a signifier with two contradictory signifieds. Not only are all labyrinths intrinsically double, they also fall into two distinct, though related, types. The paradigm represented by the Cretan maze is mainly derived from literature and myth. It is a multicursal model, consisting of a series of forking paths, each bifurcation requiring new choice. The second type is the unicursal maze. Found mainly in the visual arts, such as rock carvings or coin ornamentation, its structural basis is a single path, twisting and turning, but entailing no bifurcations. Although not equally bewildering, both paradigms are equally threatening: in the multicursal construct the maze-walker may be entrapped in a repetitious pattern of wrong choices, whereas in the unicursal model the traveler may die of exhaustion before reaching the desired end, the heart of the labyrinth. In spite of their differences, the basic similarities between the two paradigms may explain why they were both included in the same linguistic category. The labyrinth represents a road-model, and as such it is essentially teleological. Most labyrinths of antiquity and of the Middle Ages were designed with the thought of reaching the center. But the fact that each labyrinth has a center does not necessarily mean that the maze-walker is aware of its existence. Moreover, reaching the center is not always to be desired (in case it conceals a lurking Minotaur), and once the center is reached, the maze-walker may never find the way back. Besides signifying complexity and ambiguity, labyrinths thus also symbolically evoke the danger of eternal imprisonment, of inextricability. This sinister aspect is intensified by the recursive aspect of labyrinthine design, by the mirroring effect of the paths. In reflecting on the etymology of the word ‘maze’ (rather than the Greek/Latin labyrinthos/labyrinthus), Irwin observes that it derives from the Swedish masa, signifying “to dream, to muse,” and suggests that the inherent recursion of labyrinthine design offers an apt metaphor for the uniquely human faculty of self-reflexitivity, of thought turning upon itself (95). Because of its intriguing aspect and wealth of potential implications, the labyrinth has become a category that is not only formal, but also conceptual and symbolic. The ambiguity of the maze, its conflation of overt complexity with underlying order and simplicity, was explored in ideological systems rooted in a dualistic world-view. In the early Christian era, the labyrinth was traditionally presented as a metaphor for the universe: divine creation based on a perfect design, perceived as chaotic due to the shortcomings of human comprehension. In the Middle-Ages, the labyrinthine attributes of imprisonment and limited perception were reflected in the view of life as a journey inside a moral maze, in which man’s vision was constricted because of his fallen nature (Cazenave 348-350). The maze was equally conceptualized in dynamic terms and used as a metaphor for mental processes. More specifically, the labyrinth has come to signify intellectual confusion, and has therefore become most pertinent in literary contexts that valorize rational thought. And the rationalistic genre par excellence is detective fiction. The labyrinth may serve as an apt metaphor for the world of detective fiction because it accurately conveys the tacit assumptions of the genre – the belief in the existence of order, causality and reason underneath the chaos of perceived phenomena. Such optimistic belief is ardently espoused by the putative detective in Paul Auster’s metafictional novella City of Glass: He had always imagined that the key to good detective work was a close observation of details. The more accurate the scrutiny, the more successful the results. The implication was that human behavior could be understood, that beneath the infinite façade of gestures, tics and silences there was finally a coherence, an order, a source of motivation. (67) In this brief but eloquent passage Auster conveys, through the mind of his sleuth, the central tenets of classical detective fiction. These tenets are both ontological and epistemological. The ontological aspect is subsumed in man’s hopeful reliance on “a coherence, an order, a source of motivation” underlying the messiness and blood of the violent deed. The epistemological aspect is aptly formulated by Michael Holquist, who argues that the fictional world of detective stories is rooted in the Scholastic principle of adequatio rei et intellectus, the adequation of mind to things (157). And if both human reality and phenomenal reality are governed by reason, the mind, given enough time, can understand everything. The mind’s representative is the detective. He is the embodiment of inquisitive intellect, and his superior powers of observation and deduction transform an apparent mystery into an incontestable solution. The detective sifts through the evidence, assesses the relevance of data and the reliability of witnesses. But, first of foremost, he follows clues – and the clue, the most salient element of the detective story, links the genre with the myth of the Cretan labyrinth. For in its now obsolete spelling, the word ‘clew’ denotes a ball of thread, and thus foregrounds the similarity between the mental process of unraveling a crime mystery and the traveler’s progress inside the maze (Irwin 179). The chief attributes of the maze – circuitousness, enclosure, and inextricability – associate it with another convention of detective fiction, the trope of the locked room. This convention, introduced in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” a text traditionally regarded as the first analytic detective story, establishes the locked room as the ultimate affront to reason: a hermetically sealed space which no one could have penetrated or exited and in which a brutal crime has nevertheless been committed. But the affront to reason is only apparent. In Poe’s ur-text of the genre, the violent deed is committed by an orangutan, a brutal and abused beast that enters and escapes from the seemingly locked room through a half-closed window. As accurately observed by Holquist, in the world of detective fiction “there are no mysteries, there is only incorrect reasoning” (157). And the correct reasoning, dubbed by Poe “ratiocination”, is the process of logical deduction. Deduction is an enchainment of syllogisms, in which a conclusion inevitably follows from two valid premises; as Dupin elegantly puts it, “the deductions are the sole proper ones and … the suspicion arises inevitably from them as a single result” (Poe 89). Applying this rigorous mental process, the detective re-arranges the pieces of the puzzle into a coherent and meaningful sequence of events. In other words – he creates a narrative. This brings us back to Irwin’s observation about the recursive aspect of the maze. Like the labyrinth, detective fiction is self-reflexive. It is a narrative form which foregrounds narrativity, for the construction of a meaningful narrative is the protagonist’s and the reader’s principal task. Logical deduction, the main activity of the fictional sleuth, does not allow for ambiguity. In classical detective fiction, the labyrinth is associated with the messiness and violence of crime and contrasted with the clarity of the solution (the inverse is true of postmodernist detective mysteries). The heart of the labyrinth is the solution, the vision of truth. This is perhaps the most important aspect of the detective genre: the premise that truth exists and that it can be known. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the initially insoluble puzzle is eventually transformed into a coherent narrative, in which a frantic orangutan runs into the street escaping the abuse of its master, climbs a rod and seeks refuge in a room inhabited by two women, brutally slashes them in confusion, and then flees the room in the same way he penetrated it. The sequence of events reconstructed by Dupin is linear, unequivocal, and logically satisfying. This is not the case with the ‘hard boiled’, American variant of the detective genre, which influenced the inception of film noir. Although the novels of Hammett, Chandler or Cain are structured around crime mysteries, these works problematize most of the tacit premises of analytic detective fiction and re-define its narrative form. For one, ‘hard boiled’ fiction obliterates the dualism between overt chaos and underlying order, between the perceived messiness of crime and its underlying logic. Chaos becomes all-encompassing, engulfing the sleuth as well as the reader. No longer the epitome of a superior, detached intellect, the detective becomes implicated in the mystery he investigates, enmeshed in a labyrinthine sequence of events whose unraveling does not necessarily produce meaning. As accurately observed by Telotte, “whether [the] characters are trying to manipulate others, or simply hoping to figure out how their plans went wrong, they invariably find that things do not make sense” (7). Both ‘hard-boiled’ fiction and its cinematic progeny implicitly portray the dissolution of social order. In film noir, this thematic pursuit finds a formal equivalent in the disruption of traditional narrative paradigm. As noted by Bordwell and Telotte, among others, the paradigm underpinning classical Hollywood cinema in the years 1917-1960 is characterized by a seemingly objective point of view, adherence to cause-effect logic, use of goal-oriented characters and a progression toward narrative closure (Bordwell 157, Telotte 3). In noir films, on the other hand, the devices of flashback and voice-over implicitly challenge conventionally linear narratives, while the use of the subjective camera shatters the illusion of objective truth (Telotte 3, 20). To revert to the central concern of the present paper, in noir cinema the form coincides with the content. The fictional worlds projected by the ‘hard boiled’ genre and its noir cinematic descendent offer no hidden realm of meaning underneath the chaos of perceived phenomena, and the trope of the labyrinth is stripped of its transcendental, comforting dimension. The labyrinth is the controlling visual metaphor of the Coen Brothers’ neo-noir film The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). The film’s title refers to its main protagonist: a poker-faced, taciturn barber, by the name of Ed Crane. The entire film is narrated by Ed, incarcerated in a prison cell. He is writing his life story, at the commission of a men’s magazine whose editor wants to probe the feelings of a convict facing death. Ed says he is not unhappy to die. Exonerated of a crime he committed and convicted of a crime he did not, Ed feels his life is a labyrinth. He does not understand it, but he hopes that death will provide the answer. Ed’s final vision of life as a bewildering maze, and his hope of seeing the master-plan after death, ostensibly refer to the inherent dualism of the labyrinth, the notion of underlying order manifest through overt chaos. They offer the flicker of an optimistic closure, which subscribes to the traditional Christian view of the universe as a perfect design, perceived as chaos due to the shortcomings of human comprehension. But this interpretation is belied by the film’s final scene. Shot in blindingly white light, suggesting the protagonist’s revelation, the screen is perfectly empty, except for the electric chair in the center. And when Ed slowly walks towards the site of his execution, he has a sudden fantasy of the overhead lights as the round saucers of UFOs. The film’s visual metaphors ironically subvert Ed’s metaphysical optimism. They cast a view of human life as a maze of emptiness, to borrow the title of one of Borges’s best-known stories. The only center of this maze is death, the electric chair; the only transcendence, faith in God and in after life, makes as much sense as the belief in flying saucers. The Coen Brothers thus simultaneously construct and deconstruct the traditional symbolism of the labyrinth, evoking (through Ed’s innocent hope) its promise of underlying order, and subverting this promise through the images that dominate the screen. The transcendental dimension of the trope of the labyrinth, its promise of a hidden realm of meaning and value, is consistently subverted throughout the film. On the level of plot, the film presents a crisscrossed pattern of misguided intentions and tragi-comic misinterpretations. The film’s protagonist, Ed Crane, is estranged from his own life; neither content nor unhappy, he is passive, taking things as they come. Thus he condones Doris’s, his wife’s, affair with her employer, Big Dave, reacting only when he perceives an opportunity to profit from their liason. This opportunity presents itself in the form of Creighton Tolliver, a garrulous client, who shares with Ed his fail-proof scheme of making big money from the new invention of dry cleaning. All he needs to carry out his plan, confesses Creighton, is an investment of ten thousand dollars. The barber decides to take advantage of this accidental encounter in order to change his life. He writes an anonymous extortion letter to Big Dave, threatening to expose his romance with Doris and wreck his marriage and his financial position (Dave’s wife, a rich heiress, owns the store that Dave runs). Dave confides in Ed about the letter; he suspects the blackmailer is a con man that tried to engage him in a dry-cleaning scheme. Although reluctant to part with the money, which he has been saving to open a new store to be managed by Doris, Big Dave eventually gives in. Obviously, although unbeknownst to Big Dave, it is Ed who collects the money and passes it to Creighton, so as to become a silent partner in the dry cleaning enterprise. But things do not work out as planned. Big Dave, who believes Creighton to be his blackmailer, follows him to his apartment in an effort to retrieve the ten thousand dollars. A fight ensues, in which Creighton gets killed, not before revealing to Dave Ed’s implication in his dry-cleaning scheme. Furious, Dave summons Ed, confronts him with Creighton’s story and physically attacks him. Ed grabs a knife that is lying about and accidentally kills Big Dave. The following day, two policemen arrive at the barbershop. Ed is certain they came to arrest him, but they have come to arrest Doris. The police have discovered that she has been embezzling from Dave’s store (Doris is an accountant), and they suspect her of Dave’s murder. Ed hires Freddy Riedenschneider, the best and most expensive criminal attorney, to defend his wife. The attorney is not interested in truth; he is looking for a version that will introduce a reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury. At some point, Ed confesses that it is he who killed Dave, but Riedenschneider dismisses his confession as an inadequate attempt to save Doris’s neck. He concocts a version of his own, but does not get the chance to win the trial; the case is dismissed, as Doris is found hanged in her cell. After his wife’s death, Ed gets lonely. He takes interest in Birdy, the young daughter of the town lawyer (whom he initially approached for Doris’s defense). Birdy plays the piano; Ed believes she is a prodigy, and wants to become her agent. He takes her for an audition to a French master pianist, who decides that the girl is nothing special. Disenchanted, they drive back home. Birdy tells Ed, not for the first time, that she doesn’t really want to be a pianist. She hasn’t been thinking of a career; if at all, she would like to be a vet. But she is very grateful. As a token of her gratitude, she tries to perform oral sex on Ed. The car veers; they have an accident. When he comes to, Ed faces two policemen, who tell him he is arrested for the murder of Creighton Tolliver. The philosophical purport of the labyrinth metaphor is suggested in a scene preceding Doris’s trial, in which her cocky attorney justifies his defense strategy. To support his argument, he has recourse to the theory of some German scientist, called either Fritz or Werner, who claimed that truth changes with the eye of the beholder. Science has determined that there is no objective truth, says Riedenschneider; consequently, the question of what really happened is irrelevant. All a good attorney can do, he concludes, is present a plausible narrative to the jury. Freddy Riedenschneider’s seemingly nonchalant exposition is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Succinctly put, the principle postulates that the more precisely the position of a subatomic particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa. What follows is that concepts such as orbits of electrons do not exist in nature unless and until we measure them; or, in Heisenberg’s words, “the ‘path’ comes into existence only when we observe it” (qtd. in Cassidy). Heisenberg’s discovery had momentous scientific and philosophical implications. For one, it challenged the notion of causality in nature. The law of causality assumes that if we know the present exactly, we can calculate the future; in this formulation, suggests Heisenberg, “it is not the conclusion that is wrong, but the premises” (qtd. in Cassidy). In other words, we can never know the present exactly, and on the basis of this exact knowledge, predict the future. More importantly, the uncertainty principle seems to collapse the distinction between subjective and objective reality, between consciousness and the world of phenomena, suggesting that the act of perception changes the reality perceived (Hofstadter 239). In spite of its light tone, the attorney’s confused allusion to quantum theory conveys the film’s central theme: the precarious nature of truth. In terms of plot, this theme is suggested by the characters’ constant misinterpretation: Big Dave believes he is blackmailed by Creighton Tolliver; Ed thinks Birdy is a genius, Birdy thinks that Ed expects sex from her, and Ann, Dave’s wife, puts her faith in UFOs. When the characters do not misjudge their reality, they lie about it: Big Dave bluffs about his war exploits, Doris cheats on Ed and Big Dave cheats on his wife and embezzles from her. And when the characters are honest and tell the truth, they are neither believed nor rewarded: Ed confesses his crime, but his confession is impatiently dismissed, Doris keeps her accounts straight but is framed for fraud and murder; Ed’s brother in law and partner loyally supports him, and as a result, goes bankrupt. If truth cannot be known, or does not exist, neither does justice. Throughout the film, the wires of innocence and guilt are constantly crossed; the innocent are punished (Doris, Creighton Tolliver), the guilty are exonerated of crimes they committed (Ed of killing Dave) and convicted of crimes they did not (Ed of killing Tolliver). In this world devoid of a metaphysical dimension, the mindless processes of nature constitute the only reality. They are represented by the incessant, pointless growth of hair. Ed is a barber; he deals with hair and is fascinated by hair. He wonders how hair is a part of us and we throw it to dust; he is amazed by the fact that hair continues to grow even after death. At the beginning of the film we see him docilely shave his wife’s legs. In a mirroring scene towards the end, the camera zooms in on Ed’s own legs, shaved before his electrocution. The leitmotif of hair, the image of the electric chair, the recurring motif of UFOs – all these metaphoric elements convey the Coen Brothers’ view of the human condition and build up to Ed’s final vision of life as a labyrinth. Life is a labyrinth because there is no necessary connection between cause and effect; because crime is dissociated from accountability and punishment; because what happened can never be ascertained and human knowledge consists only of a maze of conflicting, or overlapping, versions. The center of the existential labyrinth is death, and the exit, the belief in an after-life, is no more real than the belief in aliens. The labyrinth is an inherently ambiguous construct. Its structural attributes of doubling, recursion and inextricability yield a wealth of ontological and epistemological implications. Traditionally used as an emblem of overt complexity concealing underlying order and symmetry, the maze may aptly illustrate the tacit premises of the analytic detective genre. But this purport of the maze symbolism is ironically inverted in noir and neo-noir films. As suggested by its title, the Coen Brothers’ movie is marked by absence, and the absence of the man who wasn’t there evokes a more disturbing void. That void is the center of the existential labyrinth. References Auster, Paul. City of Glass. The New York Trilogy. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1990. 1-132. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: Wisconsin UP, 1985. Cassidy, David. “Quantum Mechanics, 1925-1927.” Werner Heisenberg (1901-1978). American Institute of Physics, 1998. 5 June 2007 http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08c.htm>. Cazenave, Michel, ed. Encyclopédie des Symboles. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1996. Coen, Joel, and Ethan Coen, dirs. The Man Who Wasn’t There. 2001. Doob, Penelope Reed. The Idea of the Labyrinth. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992. Hofstadter, Douglas. I Am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books, 2007. Holquist, Michael. “Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction.” The Poetics of Murder. Eds. Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. 149-174. Irwin, John T. The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges and the Analytic Detective Story. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. Parandowski, Jan. Mitologia. Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1960. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Illustrated Stories and Poems. London: Chancellor Press, 1994. 103-114. Telotte, J.P. Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir. Urbana: Illinois UP, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Shiloh, Ilana. "A Vision of Complex Symmetry: The Labyrinth in The Man Who Wasn’t There." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/09-shiloh.php>. APA Style Shiloh, I. (Jun. 2007) "A Vision of Complex Symmetry: The Labyrinth in The Man Who Wasn’t There," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/09-shiloh.php>.

Writing a historical novel is one of an author’s attempts to engage readers emotionally. A history written in the form of a story can prove to be more interesting since it consists of beautifully arranged words that can vividly draw the past. Even though both novels and textbooks issue certain life of communities, historical novels may encourage their readers to see a phenomenon found in history from different perspectives than those of historians’. For example, a romance novel entitled “Bekasi River” was written based on Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s experience of being isolated during the war against the British army. The problem discussed in this article is about the representation of Indonesia’s history during the war of independence in the novel “Di Tepi Kali Bekasi?”. This study used a qualitative content analysis method to understand and present ideas and examine historical elements within the novel. This study used content analysis to describe the details and characteristics of historical narratives. The historical narratives were then compared with historians’ study of the revolution in Bekasi. This comparison will show the relationship between the facts and the fiction found in the novel. There are five patterns of the relationship between those facts and fiction: first, the fictionalization of the characters is an imitation of the reality observed by the author. Second, the historians’ description clarifies the novel’s depiction of historical facts. Third, the historians’ narration is depicted in much more detail in the novel; Fourth, the description of facts in the novel consists of historical facts that historians also revealed; Fifth, the novel brings emotional elements to life, which are difficult to be found in historians’ work.Menulis novel sejarah adalah salah satu upaya penulis untuk melibatkan pembaca secara emosional. Sebuah sejarah yang ditulis dalam bentuk cerita bisa menjadi lebih menarik karena terdiri dari kata-kata yang disusun dengan indah yang dapat menggambarkan masa lalu dengan jelas. Meskipun baik novel maupun buku teks mengangkat kehidupan masyarakat tertentu, novel sejarah dapat mendorong pembacanya untuk melihat fenomena yang ditemukan dalam sejarah dari perspektif yang berbeda dari sejarawan. Sebagai contoh, sebuah novel roman berjudul “Sungai Bekasi” ditulis berdasarkan pengalaman Pramoedya Ananta Toer yang diisolasi selama perang melawan tentara Inggris. Masalah yang dibahas dalam artikel ini adalah tentang representasi sejarah Indonesia pada masa perang kemerdekaan dalam novel “Di Tepi Kali Bekasi?”. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode analisis isi kualitatif untuk memahami dan menyajikan gagasan serta mengkaji unsur-unsur sejarah dalam novel. Penelitian ini menggunakan analisis isi untuk mendeskripsikan detail dan karakteristik narasi sejarah. Narasi sejarah tersebut kemudian dibandingkan dengan studi sejarawan tentang revolusi di Bekasi. Perbandingan ini akan menunjukkan hubungan antara fakta dan fiksi yang ditemukan dalam novel. Ada lima pola hubungan antara fakta dan fiksi tersebut: pertama, fiktifisasi tokoh merupakan tiruan dari realitas yang diamati oleh pengarang. Kedua, deskripsi sejarawan memperjelas penggambaran novel tentang fakta sejarah. Ketiga, narasi sejarawan digambarkan lebih detail dalam novel; Keempat, deskripsi fakta dalam novel terdiri dari fakta sejarah yang juga diungkapkan sejarawan; Kelima, novel menghidupkan unsur-unsur emosional yang sulit ditemukan dalam karya sejarawan.

Game of Thrones (GoT) has become the most popular way of referring to a universe that was previously known under the title A Song of Ice and Fire by fans of fantasy novels. Indeed, thanks to its huge success, the TV series is now the most common entry into what is today a complex narrative constellation. Game of Thrones began as a series of five novels written by George R. R. Martin (first published in 1996). It was adapted as a TV series by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss for HBO in 2011, as a comic book series (2011—2014), several video games (Blood of Dragons, 2007; A Game of Thrones: Genesis, 2011; Game of Thrones, 2012; Game of Thrones Ascent, 2013; Game of Thrones, 2014), as well as several prequel novellas, a card game (A Game of Thrones: The Card Game, 2002), and a strategy board game (2003), not to mention the promotional transmedia developed by Campfire to bring the novels’ fans to the TV series. Thus, the GoT ensemble does indeed look like a form of transmedia, at least at first sight.Game of Thrones’ UniverseGenerally, definitions of transmedia assemble three elements. First, transmedia occurs when the content is developed on several media, “with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. … Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained so you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game, and vice versa” (Jenkins 97-98). The second component is the narrative world. The authors of Transmédia Dans Tous Ses États notice that transmedia stories “are in some cases reduced to a plain link between two contents on two media, with no overall vision” (Collective 4). They consider these ensembles weak. For Gambarato, the main point of transmedia is “the worldbuilding experience, unfolding content and generating the possibilities for the story to evolve with new and pertinent content,” what Jenkins called “worldmaking” (116). The third ingredient is the audience. As the narrative extends itself over several platforms, consumers’ participation is essential. “To fully experience any fictional world, consumers must assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels” (Jenkins 21).The GoT constellation does not precisely match this definition. In the canonical example examined by Jenkins, The Matrix, the whole was designed from the beginning of the project. That was not the case for GoT, as the transmedia development clearly happened once the TV series had become a success. Not every entry in this ensemble unfolds new aspects of the world, as the TV series is an adaptation of the novels (until the sixth season when it overtook the books). Not every component is self-contained, as the novels and TV series are at the narrative system’s centre. This narrative ensemble more closely matches the notion of “modèle satellitaire” conceived by Saint-Gelais, where one element is the first chronologically and hierarchically. However, this statement does not devalue the GoT constellation, as the canonical definition is rarely actualized (Sepulchre “La Constellation Transmédiatique,” Philipps, Gambarato “Transmedia”), and as transmedia around TV series are generally developed after the first season, once the audience is stabilized. What is most noticeable about GoT is the fact that the TV series has probably replaced the novels as the centre of the ensemble.Under the influence of Jenkins, research on transmedia has often come to be related to fan studies. In this work, he describes very active and connected users. Research in game studies also shows that gamers are creative and form communities (Berry 155-207). However, the majority of these studies focused on hardcore fans or hardcore gamers (Bourdaa; Chen; Davis; Jenkins; Peyron; Stein). Usual users are less studied, especially for such transmedia practices.Main Question and MethodologyDue to its configuration, and the wide spectrum of users’ different levels of involvement, the GoT constellation offers an occasion to confront two audiences and their practices. GoT transmedia clearly targets both fiction lovers and gamers. The success of the franchise has led to heavy consumption of transmedia elements, even by fans who had never approached transmedia before, and may allow us to move beyond the classical analysis. That’s why, in that preliminary research, by comparing TV series viewers in general with a quite specific part of them, ordinary gamers of the videogame GOT Ascent, we aim to evaluate transmedia use in the GOT community. The results on viewers are part of a broader research project on TV series and transmedia. The originality of this study focuses on ordinary viewers, not fans. The goal is to understand if they are familiar with transmedia, if they develop transmedia practices, and why. The paper is based on 52 semi-structured interviews conducted in 2012 (11) and 2013 (41). Consumers of fictional extensions of TV series and fans of TV series were selected. The respondents are around twenty years old, university students, white, mostly female (42 women, 10 men), and are not representative outside the case study. Therefore, the purpose of this first empirical sample was simply to access ordinary GOT viewers’ behaviours, and to elaborate an initial landscape of their use of different media in the same world.After that, we focused our analysis on one specific community, a subset of the GOT’s universe’s users, that is, players of the GoT Ascent videogame (we use “gamers” as synonym for “players” and “users”). Through this online participative observation, we try to analyse the players’ attitudes, and evaluate the nature of their involvement from a user perspective (Servais). Focusing on one specific medium in the GOT constellation should allow us to further flesh out the general panorama on transmedia, by exploring involvement in one particular device more deeply. Our purpose in that is to identify whether the players are transmedia users, and so GoT fans, or if they are firstly players. During a three month in-game ethnography, in June-August 2013, we played Aren Gorn, affiliated to House Tyrell, level 91, and member of “The Winter is Dark and Full of Terrors” Alliance (2500 members). Following an in-game ethnography (Boellstorff 123-134), we explored gamers’ playing attitudes inside the interface.The Users, TV Series, and TransmediaThe respondents usually do not know what transmedia is, even if a lot of them (36) practice it. Those who are completely unaware that a narrative world can be spread over several media are rare. Only ten of them engage in fan practices (cosplay, a kind of costuming community, fan-fiction, and fan-vidding, that is fans who write fiction or make remix videos set in the world they love), which tends to show that transmedia does not only concern fans.Most of the ordinary viewers are readers, as 23 of them cite books (True Blood, Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, Les Piliers de la Terre), one reads a recipe book (Plus Belle la Vie), and seven consume comics (The Walking Dead, Supernatural). They do not distinguish between novelisation (the novel adapted from a TV series) and the original book. Other media are also consumed, however a lot less: animation series, special episodes on the Internet, music, movies, websites (blogs, fictional websites), factual websites (about the story, the production, actors), fan-fiction, and cosplay.Transmedia does not seem to be a strong experience. Céline and Ioana respectively read the novels adapted from Plus Belle la Vie and Gossip Girl, but don’t like them. “It is written like a script … There’s no description, only the dialogues between characters” (Ioana). Lora watched some webisodes of Cougar Town but didn’t find them funny. Aurélie has followed the Twitter of Sookie Stackouse (True Blood) and Guilleaume D. sometimes consumes humoristic content on 9gag, but irregularly. “It’s not my thing” (Aurélie). The participants are even more critical of movies, especially the sequels of Sex and the City.That does not mean the respondents always reject transmedia components. First, they enjoy elements that are not supposed to belong to the world. These may be fan productions or contents they personally inject into the universe. Several have done research on the story’s topic: Alizée investigated mental disorders to understand United States of Tara; Guilleaume G. wandered around on Google Earth to explore Albuquerque (Breaking Bad); for Guilleaume D., Hugh Laurie’s music album is part of the character of Gregory House; Julie adores Peter Pan and, for her, Once Upon A Time, Finding Neverland, and Hook are part of the same universe. Four people particularly enjoy when the fictional characters’ couples are duplicated by real relationships between actors (which may explain all the excitement surrounding Kit Harrington and Rose Leslie’s real-life love story, paralleling their characters’ romance on GOT). If there is a transmedia production, it seems that there is also a kind of “transmedia reception,” as viewers connect heteroclite elements to build a coherent world of their own. Some respondents even develop a creative link to the world: writing fan-fiction, poetry, or building scale models (but that is not this paper’s topic, see Sepulchre “Les Constellations Narratives”, “Editorial”).A second element they appreciate is the GOT TV series. Approximately half of the respondents cite GoT (29/52). They are not fundamentally different from the other viewers except that more of them have fan practices (9 vs. 1), and a few more develop transmedia consumption (76% against 61%). To the very extent that there is consensus over the poor quality of the novels (in general), A Song of Ice and Fire seems to have seduced every respondent. Loic usually hates reading; his relatives have pointed out to him that he has read more with GoT than in his entire lifetime. Marie D. finds the novels so good that she stopped watching the TV series. Marine insists she generally reads fan-fiction because she hates the novelisations, but the GoT books are the only good ones. The novels apparently allow a deeper immersion into the world and that is the manifest benefit of consuming them. Guilleaume G. appreciates the more detailed descriptions. Céline, Florentin, Ioana, and Marine like to access the characters’ thoughts. Julie thinks she feels the emotions more deeply when she reads. Sometimes, the novels can change their opinions on a character. Emilie finds Sansa despicable in the TV series, but the books led her to understand her sensibility.Videogames & TransmediaThe vast majority of transmedia support from the GoT universe primarily targets “world lovers,” that is, users involved in media uses because they love the fantasy of the universe. However, only video games allow a personalized incarnation as a hero over a long term of time, and thus a customized active appropriation. This is in fact undoubtedly why the GoT universe’s transmedia galaxy has also been deployed in video games. GOT Ascent is a strategy game edited by Disruptor Beam, an American company specialising in TV games. Released in February 2013, the franchise attracted up to 9,000,000 players in 2014, but only 295,107 monthly active users. This significant difference between the accumulated number of players and those actually active (around 3 %) may well testify that those investing in this game are probably not a community of gamers.Combining role playing and strategy game, GoT Ascent is designed in a logic that deeply integrates the elements, not only from the TV series, but also from books and other transmedia extensions. In GoT Ascent, gamers play a small house affiliated to one of the main clans of Westeros. During the immersive game experience, the player participates in all the GoT stories from an insider’s point of view. The game follows the various GoT books, resulting in an extension whenever a new volume is published. The player interacts with others by PVE (Player versus Environment) or PVP (Player versus Player) alliances with a common chat and the possibility of sending goods to other members. With a fair general score (4,1 on 10), the game is evaluated weakly by the players (JeuxOnLine). Hence a large majority of them are probably not looking for that kind of experience.If we focus on the top players in GoT Ascent, likely representing those most invested, it is interesting to examine the names they choose. Indeed, that choice often reveals the player’s intention, either to refer to a gamer logic or the universe of GoT. During our research, we clearly distinguished two types of names, self-referential ones or those referring to the player’s general pseudonym. In concrete terms, the name is a declination of a pseudonym of more general avatars, or else refers to other video game worlds than GoT. In GoT Ascent, the second category of names, those very clearly anchored in the world of Martin, are clearly dominant.Is it possible to correlate the name chosen and the type of player? Can we affirm that people who choose a name not related to the GoT universe are players and that the others are GoT fans? Probably not obviously, but the consistency of a character’s name with the universe is, in the GoT case, very important for an immersive experience. The books’ author has carefully crafted his surnames and, in the game, assuming a name is therefore very clearly a symbolically important act in the desire to roleplay in that universe. Choosing one that is totally out of sync with the game world clearly means you are not there to immerse yourself in the spirit of GoT, but to play. In short, the first category is representative of the gamers, but the players are not restricted to those naming their avatar out of the world’s spirit.This intuition is confirmed by a review of the names related to the rank of the players. When we studied high-level players, we realized that most of them use humorous names, which are totally out of the mood of the GoT universe. Thus, in 2013, the first ranked player in terms of power was called Flatulence, a French term that is part of a humorous semantics. Yet this type of denomination is not limited to the first of the list. Out the top ten players, only two used plausible GoT names. However, as soon as one leaves the game’s elite’s sphere, the plausible names are quickly in the majority. There is a sharp opposition between the vast majority of players, who obviously try to match the world, and pure gamers.We found the same logic for the names of the Alliances, the virtual communities of players varying from a few to hundreds. Three Alliances have achieved the #1 rank in the game in the game’s first two years: Hear Me Roar (February 2013), Fire and Blood (January 2014), and Kong's Landing (September 2014). Two of those Alliances are of a more humoristic bent. However, an investigation into the 400 alliances demonstrates that fewer than 5 % have a clear humoristic signification. We might estimate that in GoT Ascent the large majority of players increase their immersive experience by choosing a GoT role play related Alliance name. We can conclude that they are mainly GoT fans playing the game, and that they seek to lend the world coherence. The high-level players are an exception. Inside GOT Ascent, the dominant culture remains connected to the GoT world.ConclusionA transmedia story is defined by its networked configuration, “worldmaking,” and users’ involvement. The GoT constellation is clearly a weak ensemble (Sepulchre, 2012). However, it has indeed developed on several platforms. Furthermore, the relationship between the novels and the TV series is quite unprecedented. Indeed, both elements are considered as qualitative, and the TV series has become the main entry for many fans. Thus, both of them acquire an equal authority.The GoT transmedia storyworld also unfolds a fictional world and depends on users’ activities, but in a peculiar way. If the viewers and gamers are analysed from fan or game studies perspectives, they appear to be weak users. Indeed, they do not seek new components; they are mainly readers and do not enjoy the transmedia experience; the players are not regular ones; and they are much less creative and humorous than high-level gamers.These weak practices have, however, one function: to prolong the pleasure of the fictional world, which is the third characteristic of transmedia. The players experiment with GoT Ascent by incarnating characters inserted into Alliances whose names may exist in the original world. This appears to be a clear attempt to become immersed in the universe. The ordinary viewers appreciate the deeper experience the novels allow. When they feed the world with unexpected elements, it is also to improve the world.Thus, transmedia appropriation by users is a reality, motivated by a taste for the universe, even if it is a weak consumption in comparison with the demanding, creative, and sometimes iconoclastic practices gamers and fans usually develop. It is obvious, in both fields, that they are new TV series fans (they quote mainly recent shows) and beginners in the world of games. For a significant part of them, GoT was probably their first time developing transmedia practices.However, GoT Ascent is not well evaluated by gamers and many of them do not repeat the experience (as the monthly number of gamers shows). Likewise, the ordinary viewers neglect the official transmedia components as too marketing oriented. The GoT novels are the exception proving the rule. They demonstrate that users are quite selective: they are not satisfied with weak elements. The question that this paper cannot answer is: was GoT a first experience? Will they persevere in the future? Yet, in this preliminary research, we have seen that studying ordinary users’ weak involvement (series viewers or gamers) is an interesting path in elaborating a theory of transmedia user’s activities, which takes the public’s diversity into account.ReferencesBerry, Vincent. L’Expérience Virtuelle: Jouer, Vivre, Apprendre Dans un Jeu Video. Rennes: UP Rennes, 2012.Boellstorff, Tom. “A Typology of Ethnographic Scales for Virtual Worlds.” Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and the Virtual. Ed. William Sim Bainbridge. London: Springer, 2009.Bourdaa, Mélanie. “Taking a Break from All Your Worries: Battlestar Galactica et Les Nouvelles Pratiques Télévisuelles des Fans.” Questions de Communication 22 (2012) 2014. <http://journals.openedition.org/questionsdecommunication/6917>.Chen, Mark. Leet Noobs: The Life and Death of An Expert Player Group in World of Warcraft. New York: Peter Lang, 2012.Collective. Le Transmédia Dans Tous Ses États: Les Cahiers de Veille de la Fondation Télécom. Paris: Fondation Télécom, 2012. 29 Dec. 2017 <https://www.fondation-mines-telecom.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2012-cahier-veille-transmedia.pdf\>.Davis, C.H. “Audience Value and Transmedia Products.” Media Innovations. Eds. T. Storsul and A. Krumsvik. Gothenburg: Nordicom, 2013. 179-190.Gambarato, Renira. “How to Analyze Transmedia Narratives?” Conference New Media: Changing Media Landscapes. Saint Petersburg, 2012. 2017 <http://prezi.com/fovz0jrlfsn0/how-to-analyze-transmedia-narratives>.Gambarato, Renira. “Transmedia Storytelling.” Serious Science, 2016. 2017 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thZnd_K8Vfs>.Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide. Updated ed. New York: New York UP, 2006.JeuxOnLine. “Game of Thrones Ascent.” 2013. <http://www.jeuxonline.info/jeu/Game_of_Thrones_Ascent>.Peyron, David. Culture Geek. Limoges: FYP Editions, 2013.Philipps, Andrea. A Creator’s Guide to Transmedia Storytelling: How to Captivate and Engage Audiences across Multiple Platforms. New York: McGraw-Hill Education, 2012.Saint-Gelais, Richard. Fictions Transfuges. La Transfictionnalité et Ses Enjeux. Paris: Seuil, 2011.Sepulchre, S. Le Transmédia Dans Tous Ses États: Les Cahiers de Veille de la Fondation Télécom. Paris: Fondation Télécom, 2012. 29 Dec. 2017 <https://www.fondation-mines-telecom.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2012-cahier-veille-transmedia.pdf>.———. “La Constellation Transmédiatique de Breaking Bad: Analyse de la Complémentarité Trouvée entre la Télévision et Internet.” ESSACHESS-Journal for Communication 4.1 (2011). 29 Dec. 2017 <http://www.essachess.com/index.php/jcs/article/view/111>. ———. “Les Constellations Narratives: Que Font les Téléspectateurs des Adaptations Multimédiatiques des Séries Télévisées?” TV/Series 3 (2013). 29 Dec. 2017 <http://journals.openedition.org/tvseries/729>. ———. “Editorial.” Inter Pares: Revue Électronique de Jeunes Chercheurs en Sciences Humains et Sociales 6 (2016). 29 Dec. 2017 <https://epic.univ-lyon2.fr/medias/fichier/inter-pares-6-maquette-v8web_1510576660265-pdf>.Servais, Olivier. “Funerals in the “World of Warcraft”: Religion, Polemic, and Styles of Play in a Videogame Universe.” Social Compass 62.3 (2015): 362-378.Stein, Louisa Ellen, and Kristina Busse. Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC series. Jefferson: McFarland, 2014.

If Continental social theory emerges from a climate of intensely cold winters and short mild summers, how does Australia (or any nation defined by its large masses of aridity) function as an environment in which to produce critical theory and new knowledge? Climate and weather are intrinsic to ambience, but what impact might they have on the conditions of producing academic work? How is ambience relevant to thinking and writing and research? Is there an ambient epistemology? This paper argues that the ambient is an unacknowledged factor in the production of critical thinking, and draws on examples of academics locating their writing conditions as part of their thinking. This means paying attention to the embodied work of thinking, and so I locate myself in order to explore what it might mean to acknowledge the conditions of intellectual work. Consequently I dwell on the impact of heat and light as qualities specific to where I work, but (following Bolt) I also argue that they are terms that are historically associated with new knowledge. Language, then, is already a factor in shaping the way we can think through such conditions, and the narratives available to write about them. Working these conditions into critical narratives may involve mobilising fictional tropes, and may not always be ambient, but they are potent in the academic imaginary and impact the ways in which we can think through location. Present Tense As I sit in Perth right now in a balmy 27 degrees Celsius with the local afternoon sea-breeze (fondly known as the Fremantle Doctor) clearing the stuffiness and humidity of the day, environmental conditions are near perfect for the end of summer. I barely notice them. Not long ago though, it was over 40 degrees for three days in a row. These were the three days I had set aside to complete an academic paper, the last days available before the university opened and normal work would resume. I’d arranged to have the place to myself, but I hadn’t arranged for cooling technologies. As I immersed myself in photocopies and textbooks the intellectual challenges and excitement were my preoccupation. It was hot, but I was almost unreceptive to recognising the discomforts of the weather until sweat began to drip onto pages and keyboards. A break in the afternoon for a swim at the local beach was an opportunity to clarify and see the bigger picture, and as the temperature began to slide into the evening cool it was easier to stay up late working and then sleep in late. I began to work around the weather. What impact does this have on thinking and writing? I remember it as a haze. The paper though, still seems clear and reasoned. My regimen might be read as working despite the weather, but I wonder if the intensity of the heat extends thinking in different directions—to go places where I wouldn’t have imagined in an ambiently cooled office (if I had one). The conditions of the production of knowledge are often assumed to be static, stable and uninteresting. Even if your work is located in exciting Other places, the ‘writing up’ is expected to happen ‘back home’, after the extra-ordinary places of fieldwork. It can be written in the present tense, for a more immediate reading experience, but the writing cannot always happen at the same time as the events being described, so readers accept the use of present tense as a figment of grammar that cannot accommodate the act of writing. When a writer becomes aware of their surroundings and articulates those conditions into their narrative, the reader is lifted out of the narrative into a metaframe; out of the body of writing and into the extra-diegetic. In her essay “Me and My Shadow” (1987), Jane Tompkins writes as if ‘we’ the reader are in the present with her as she makes connections between books, experiences, memories, feelings, and she also provides us with a writing scene in which to imagine her in the continuous present: It is a beautiful day here in North Carolina. The first day that is both cool and sunny all summer. After a terrible summer, first drought, then heat-wave, then torrential rain, trees down, flooding. Now, finally, beautiful weather. A tree outside my window just brushed by red, with one fully red leaf. (This is what I want you to see. A person sitting in stockinged feet looking out of her window – a floor to ceiling rectangle filled with green, with one red leaf. The season poised, sunny and chill, ready to rush down the incline into autumn. But perfect, and still. Not going yet.) (128)This is a strategy, part of the aesthetics and politics of Tompkins’s paper which argues for the way the personal functions in intellectual thinking and writing even when we don’t recognise or acknowledge it. A little earlier she characterises herself as vulnerable because of the personal/professional nexus: I don’t know how to enter the debate [over epistemology] without leaving everything else behind – the birds outside my window, my grief over Janice, just myself as a person sitting here in stockinged feet, a little bit chilly because the windows are open, and thinking about going to the bathroom. But not going yet. (126)The deferral of autumn and going to the bathroom is linked through the final phrase, “not going yet”. This is a kind of refrain that draws attention to the aesthetic architecture of locating the self, and yet the reference to an impending toilet trip raised many eyebrows. Nancy Millar comments that “these passages invoke that moment in writing when everything comes together in a fraction of poise; that fragile moment the writing in turn attempts to capture; and that going to the bathroom precisely, will end” (6). It spoils the moment. The aesthetic green scene with one red leaf is ruptured by the impending toilet scene. Or perhaps it is the intimacy of bodily function that disrupts the ambient. And yet the moment is fictional anyway. There must surely always be some fiction involved when writing about the scene of writing, as writing usually takes more than one take. Gina Mercer takes advantage of this fictional function in a review of a collection of women’s poetry. Noting the striking discursive differences between the editor’s introduction and the poetry collected in the volume, she suggestively accounts for this by imagining the conditions under which the editor might have been working: I suddenly begin to imagine that she wrote the introduction sitting at her desk in twin-set and pearls, her feet constricted by court shoes – but that the selection took place at home with her lying on a large beautifully-linened bed bestrewn by a cat and the poems… (4)These imaginary conditions, Mercer implies, impact on the ways we do our intellectual work, or perhaps different kinds of work require different conditions. Mercer not only imagines the editor at work, but also suggests her own preferred workspace when she mentions that “the other issue I’ve been pondering as I lay on my bed in a sarong (yes it’s hot here already) reading this anthology, has been the question of who reads love poetry these days?” (4). Placing herself as reader (of an anthology of love poetry) on the bed in a sarong in a hot climate partially accounts for the production of the thinking around this review, but probably doesn’t include the writing process. Mercer’s review is written in epistolary form, signaling an engagement with ‘the personal’, and yet that awareness of form and setting performs a doubling function in which scenes are set and imagination is engaged and yet their veracity doesn’t seem important, and may even be part of the fiction of form. It’s the idea of working leisurely that gains traction in this review. Despite the capacity for fiction, I want to believe that Jane Tompkins was writing in her study in North Carolina next to a full-length window looking out onto a tree. I’m willing to suspend my disbelief and imagine her writing in this place and time. Scenes of Writing Physical conditions are often part of mythologising a writer. Sylvia Plath wrote the extraordinary collection of poems that became Ariel during the 1962/63 London winter, reputed to have been the coldest for over a hundred years (Gifford 15). The cold weather is given a significant narrative role in the intensity of her writing and her emotional desperation during that period. Sigmund Freud’s writing desk was populated with figurines from his collection of antiquities looking down on his writing, a scene carefully replicated in the Freud Museum in London and reproduced in postcards as a potent staging of association between mythology, writing and psychoanalysis (see Burke 2006). Writer’s retreats at the former residences of writers (like Varuna at the former home of Eleanor Dark in the Blue Mountains, and the Katherine Susannah Pritchard Centre in the hills outside of Perth) memorialise the material conditions in which writers wrote. So too do pilgrimages to the homes of famous writers and the tourism they produce in which we may gaze in wonder at the ordinary places of such extraordinary writing. The ambience of location is one facet of the conditions of writing. When I was a doctoral student reading Continental feminist philosophy, I used anything at hand to transport myself into their world. I wrote my dissertation mostly in Townsville in tropical Queensland (and partly in Cairns, even more tropical), where winter is blue skies and mid-twenties in temperature but summers are subject to frequent build-ups in pressure systems, high humidity, no breeze and some cyclones. There was no doubt that studying habits were affected by the weather for a student, if not for all the academics who live there. Workplaces were icily air-conditioned (is this ambient?) but outside was redolent with steamy tropical evenings, hot humid days, torrential downpours. When the weather breaks there is release in blood pressure accompanying barometer pressure. I was reading contemporary Australian literature alongside French feminist theories of subjectivity and their relation through écriture féminine. The European philosophical and psychoanalytic tradition and its exquisitely radical anti-logical writing of Irigaray, Cixous and Kristeva seemed alien to my tropical environs but perversely seductive. In order to get ‘inside’ the theoretical arguments, my strategy was to interpolate myself into their imagined world of writing, to emulate their imagined conditions. Whenever my friend went on a trip, I caretook her 1940s unit that sat on a bluff and looked out over the Coral Sea, all whitewashed and thick stone, and transformed it into a French salon for my intellectual productivity. I played Edith Piaf and Grace Jones, went to the grocer at the bottom of the hill every day for fresh food and the French patisserie for baguettes and croissants. I’d have coffee brewing frequently, and ate copious amounts of camembert and chocolate. The Townsville flat was a Parisian salon with French philosophers conversing in my head and between the piles of book lying on the table. These binges of writing were extraordinarily productive. It may have been because of the imagined Francophile habitus (as Bourdieu understands it); or it may have been because I prepared for the anticipated period of time writing in a privileged space. There was something about adopting the fictional romance of Parisian culture though that appealed to the juxtaposition of doing French theory in Townsville. It intensified the difference but interpolated me into an intellectual imaginary. Derrida’s essay, “Freud and the Scene of Writing”, promises to shed light on Freud’s conditions of writing, and yet it is concerned moreover with the metaphoric or rather intellectual ‘scene’ of Freudian ideas that form the groundwork of Derrida’s own corpus. Scenic, or staged, like Tompkins’s framed window of leaves, it looks upon the past as a ‘moment’ of intellectual ferment in language. Peggy Kamuf suggests that the translation of this piece of Derrida’s writing works to cover over the corporeal banishment from the scene of writing, in a move that privileges the written trace. In commenting, Kamuf translates Derrida herself: ‘to put outside and below [metre dehors et en bas] the body of the written trace [le corps de la trace écrite].’ Notice also the latter phrase, which says not the trace of the body but the body of the trace. The trace, what Derrida but before him also Freud has called trace or Spur, is or has a body. (23)This body, however, is excised, removed from the philosophical and psychoanalytic imaginary Kamuf argues. Australian philosopher Elizabeth Grosz contends that the body is “understood in terms that attempt to minimize or ignore altogether its formative role in the production of philosophical values – truth, knowledge, justice” (Volatile 4): Philosophy has always considered itself a discipline concerned primarily or exclusively with ideas, concepts, reason, judgment – that is, with terms clearly framed by the concept of mind, terms which marginalize or exclude considerations of the body. As soon as knowledge is seen as purely conceptual, its relation to bodies, the corporeality of both knowers and texts, and the ways these materialities interact, must become obscure. (Volatile 4)In the production of knowledge then, the corporeal knowing writing body can be expected to interact with place, with the ambience or otherwise in which we work. “Writing is a physical effort,” notes Cixous, and “this is not said often enough” (40). The Tense Present Conditions have changed here in Perth since the last draft. A late summer high pressure system is sitting in the Great Australian Bite pushing hot air across the desert and an equally insistent ridge of low pressure sits off the Indian Ocean, so the two systems are working against each other, keeping the weather hot, still, tense, taut against the competing forces. It has been nudging forty degrees for a week. The air conditioning at work has overloaded and has been set to priority cooling; offices are the lowest priority. A fan blasts its way across to me, thrumming as it waves its head from one side to the other as if tut-tutting. I’m not consumed with intellectual curiosity the way I was in the previous heatwave; I’m feeling tired, and wondering if I should just give up on this paper. It will wait for another time and journal. There’s a tension with chronology here, with what’s happening in the present, but then Rachel Blau DuPlessis argues that the act of placing ideas into language inevitably produces that tension: Chronology is time depicted as travelling (more or less) in a (more or less) forward direction. Yet one can hardly write a single sentence straight; it all rebounds. Even its most innocent first words – A, The, I, She, It – teem with heteroglossias. (16)“Sentences structure” DuPlessis points out, and grammar necessitates development, chronological linearity, which affects the possibilities for narrative. “Cause and effect affect” DuPlessis notes (16), as do Cixous and Irigaray before her. Nevertheless we must press on. And so I leave work and go for a swim, bring my core body temperature down, and order a pot of tea from the beach café while I read Barbara Bolt in the bright afternoon light. Bolt is a landscape painter who has spent some time in Kalgoorlie, a mining town 800km east of Perth, and notes the ways light is used as a metaphor for visual illumination, for enlightening, and yet in Kalgoorlie light is a glare which, far from illuminating, blinds. In Kalgoorlie the light is dangerous to the body, causing cancers and cataracts but also making it difficult to see because of its sheer intensity. Bolt makes an argument for the Australian light rupturing European thinking about light: Visual practice may be inconceivable without a consideration of light, but, I will argue, it is equally ‘inconceivable’ to practice under European notions of light in the ‘glare’ of the Australian sun. Too much light on matter sheds no light on the matter. (204)Bolt frequently equates the European notions of visual art practice that, she claims, Australians still operate under, with concomitant concepts of European philosophy, aesthetics and, I want to add, epistemology. She is particularly adept at noting the material impact of Australian conditions on the body, arguing that, the ‘glare’ takes apart the Enlightenment triangulation of light, knowledge, and form. In fact, light becomes implicated bodily, in the facts of the matter. My pterygiums and sun-beaten skin, my mother and father’s melanomas, and the incidence of glaucoma implicate the sun in a very different set of processes. From my optic, light can no longer be postulated as the catalyst that joins objects while itself remaining unbent and unimplicated … (206).If new understandings of light are generated in Australian conditions of working, surely heat is capable of refiguring dominant European notions as well. Heat is commonly associated with emotions and erotics, even through ideas: heated debate, hot topics and burning issues imply the very latest and most provocative discussions, sizzling and mercurial. Heat has a material affect on corporeality also: dehydrating, disorienting, dizzying and burning. Fuzzy logic and bent horizons may emerge. Studies show that students learn best in ambient temperatures (Pilman; Graetz), but I want to argue that thought and writing can bend in other dimensions with heat. Tensions build in blood pressure alongside isometric bars. Emotional and intellectual intensities merge. Embodiment meets epistemology. This is not a new idea; feminist philosophers like Donna Haraway have been emphasizing the importance of situated knowledge and partial perspective for decades as a methodology that challenges universalism and creates a more ethical form of objectivity. In 1987 Haraway was arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people’s lives. I am arguing for the view from a body, always a complex contradictory structuring and structured body versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity. (Haraway 588)Working in intellectual conditions when the specificities of ambience is ignored, is also, I suggest, to work in a privileged space, in which there are no distractions like the weather. It is also to work ‘from nowhere, from simplicity’ in Haraway’s words. It is to write from within the pure imaginary space of the intellect. But to write in, and from, weather conditions no matter what they might be is to acknowledge the affect of being-in-the-world, to recognise an ontological debt that is embodied and through which we think. I want to make a claim for the radical conditions under which writing can occur outside of the ambient, as I sit here sweating over theory again. Drawing attention to the corporeal conditions of the scene of writing is a way of situating knowledge and partial perspective: if I were in Hobart where snow still lies on Mount Wellington I may well have a different perspective, but the metaphors of ice and cold also need transforming into productive and generative conditions of particularised knowledge. To acknowledge the location of knowledge production suggests more of the forces at work in particular thinking, as a bibliography indicates the shelf of books that have inflected the written product. This becomes a relation of immanence rather than transcendence between the subject and thought, whereby thinking can be understood as an act, an activity, or even activism of an agent. This is proposed by Elizabeth Grosz in her later work where she yokes together the “jagged edges” (Time 165) of Deleuze and Irigaray’s work in order to reconsider the “future of thought”. She calls for a revision of meaning, as Bolt does, but this time in regard to thought itself—and the task of philosophy—asking whether it is possible to develop an understanding of thought that refuses to see thought as passivity, reflection, contemplation, or representation, and instead stresses its activity, how and what it performs […] can we deromanticize the construction of knowledges and discourses to see them as labor, production, doing? (Time 158)If writing is to be understood as a form of activism it seems fitting to conclude here with one final image: of Gloria Anzaldua’s computer, at which she invites us to imagine her writing her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), a radical Chicana vision for postcolonial theory. Like Grosz, Anzaldua is intent on undoing the mind/body split and the language through which the labour of thinking can be articulated. This is where she writes her manifesto: I sit here before my computer, Amiguita, my altar on top of the monitor with the Virgen de Coatalopeuh candle and copal incense burning. My companion, a wooden serpent staff with feathers, is to my right while I ponder the ways metaphor and symbol concretize the spirit and etherealize the body. (75) References Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Bolt, Barbara. “Shedding Light for the Matter.” Hypatia 15.2 (2000): 202-216. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity, 1990. [1980 Les Edition de Minuit] Burke, Janine. The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud’s Art Collection. Milsons Point: Knopf, 2006. Cixous, Hélène, and Mireille Calle-Gruber. Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. London: Routledge, 1997. [1994 Photos de Racine]. Derrida, Jacques, and Jeffrey Mehlman. "Freud and the Scene of Writing." Yale French Studies 48 (1972): 74-117. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work. Tuscaloosa: Alabama UP, 2006. Gifford, Terry. Ted Hughes. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009. Graetz, Ken A. “The Psychology of Learning Environments.” Educause Review 41.6 (2006): 60-75. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1994. Grosz, Elizabeth. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 2005. Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988): 575-99. Kamuf, Peggy. “Outside in Analysis.” Mosaic 42.4 (2009): 19-34. Mercer, Gina. “The Days of Love Are Lettered.” Review of The Oxford Book of Australian Love Poems, ed. Jennifer Strauss. LiNQ 22.1 (1995): 135-40. Miller, Nancy K. Getting Personal: Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts. New York: Routledge, 1991. Pilman, Mary S. “The Effects of Air Temperature Variance on Memory Ability.” Loyola University Clearinghouse, 2001. ‹http://clearinghouse.missouriwestern.edu/manuscripts/306.php›. Tompkins, Jane. “Me and My Shadow.” New Literary History 19.1 (1987): 169-78.

Among the sub-genres of science fiction, one of the most traditional and most machine-laden is space opera. The name is dismissive and was coined in parallel with the now little recognised 'horse opera' (for westerns) in the wake of the success of the term 'soap opera' (for romantic serials). Space operas were adventure sagas across the galaxies with space ships carrying intrepid crews on voyages of discovery, into glorious battles and terrifying encounters with aliens. The 'opera' part presumably refers to their seriality and overstated melodrama. At various times during the last fifty years space opera has seemed as doomed as the horse type, but sufficient examples were published to keep the sub-genre puttering along until new authors could invigorate it. This has now happened and I want in this brief note to see the change, through looking at one current writer's series to see what has been done, how it has been received and how observing the role of a particular novum (Darko Suvin's term for the imaginative invention that characterises sf) -- a machine in this case, of course -- illuminates what has happened. Because this begins with a consideration of sf history, I want to start with one of the key distinctions that has long operated in both popular and academic analysis of science fiction (though admittedly it has more currency now in the popular); that between hard and soft sf. Unsurprisingly, given how loaded those terms are, it is a gendered distinction. Hard sf is the boys' playground; technologically driven, its allegiances are to physics and engineering. From nano-widgets to space ships as big as planets, it loves machines. The boysiness of hard sf was sedimented in popular sf through the generic hegemony achieved by Hugo Gernsback in his US pulp magazine empire starting with Astounding in 1926. Space opera was the quintessential type of hard sf in the early years, though it came to be challenged if not displaced by colonisation narratives that concentrated on engineering. Soft sf, of necessity the girly stuff, has the squishy bits -- biology certainly, but also the social sciences. Both New Wave and feminist sf, the innovative sub-genres of sf in the 60s and 70s, used soft rather than hard tropes in their subsequently incorporated revisions of the genre. In the 80s, cyberpunk presented itself as the hard stuff, but this was pretty disingenuous (all that voodoo, those drugs, the excursions into various social sciences), not to mention, as Samuel Delany among others has pointed out, the way this could only be managed by denying its feminist foremothers. These days, the traces of space opera's pulp-laden past are there to be read in the way that the more serious American writers like Kim Stanley Robinson prefer sober space colonisation narratives while the truly innovative work (as well as the quality writing) is done outside the US, by a Scot -- Iain M. Banks. In addition to Banks's wondrous novels of the Culture, the revivified field includes more traditional series like Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan saga, David Weber's Honor Harrington sequence and Colin Greenland's tracing of the career of Tabitha Jute. It would not be possible to examine how Banks has remapped the field in a note such as this, but dealing with some of the more traditional examples can provide an interesting case study in the hardness of the sub-genre, as well as pointing to wider movements in the sf world. It is the latter that is evident in the way in which the male writers produce female lead and the female the male (by and large, Bujold does occasional female leads). Not that Weber makes any attempt to make Honor credible as a female, she's laughably improbable and only needs to be placed near Greenland's Tabitha Jute for the disparity to become evident. (I'm using this comparison not just for its power but also because it stops the suggestion that male writers can't produce decent female action heroes.) For the more detailled part of this I want to concentrate on Bujold's series in part to mull over why it might be that her books are dismissed as too soft and 'girly' to be good space opera. There is something of a problem in that I find the whole hard:soft distinction more than a bit juvenile and value it primarily for its power in understanding sf history. The moves to broaden the field beyond what it was so artificially limited to in early to mid-twentieth century America seem to me to be a move to a more integrated adulthood rather than the imposition of a line of squishy feminine referents to be denied or repelled. I don't see 'softness' as a negative quality (nor 'hardness' for that matter), but I am interested in why and how a space opera series with space ships, space weaponry, gadgets galore and large quantities of prime quality derring-do should be deemed soft. Bujold has written a long series of space operas set in an Earth-colonised far-future that centre on the deformed figure of Lord Miles Vorkosigan. A few other fictions are set in the same universe and link in various ways to the core texts. Not all are set on spaceships though the majority require their presence as significant features of the plot while others rely on such standards of space narrative as space stations, terra-forming and the hardware of space warfare. To dismiss Bujold's world as one where the hardness of space opera technology is subsumed in girliness, it is necessary to overlook not just great passages of certain texts, but to dismiss whole novels. The Vor Game for instance follows a long sequence at an arctic weather station which culminates in the necessary destruction of outdated toxic weaponry with an escapade across great reaches of space in a whole range of ships displaying, selling and eventually using all manner of wonderful weaponry climaxing in a battle for control of a wormhole nexus. The only woman of any narrative prominence is a evil mercenary leader ("face of an angel, mind of a rabid mongoose"). One would think that it all sounds rather a sitter as a hard piece of space opera fare written for a readership of boys of all ages. My description though so far fails to convey where it is that Bujold has updated the sub-genre. It could be that the problem lies in the same place as the updating -- in the nuancing of the character of the hero Miles Vorkosigan and the continuing delineation of the interweaving of his double life as mercenary Admiral and loyal Imperial lieutenant. Traditionally the space opera hero comes into the world if not fully formed, then at least ready for a coming-of-age tale. Bujold shows us the formation of the hero, ensuring that he remains located within his extended family. It could be that complaints come from those who would prefer their heroes not to have mothers. But then again it could be about the humour. Bujold doesn't see earnestness as desirable and writes a fantastical adventure romp. It seems to me that this is one core difference between her and fellow Baen writer David Weber. There is no predicting what a descriptive passage about technology will lead to in Bujold; it could be a novel way to win hand to hand combat or a comic sequence making a moral point about abuse of power. For Weber, a sequence of space ships and weaponry is sufficient in itself, being an opportunity to talk of model numbers and ballistic capabilities with all the narrative brio of Tom Clancy (i.e. none), but at least Clancy is usually talking about something that has an existence in the real world. When both the machine and the science it operates by are more than speculative, labouring the trainspotters'-guide-to-hyperspace-technology talk can only delight anoraks. Machines are ends in themselves for Weber, means to a narrative or characterological point in Bujold. As well as why the machine is mentioned, there is also the question of what kind of machines are favoured. Maybe over the whole sequence, Bujold pays more attention to biologically-based technologies; when she focusses on engineering it is more often as a means to a biological end (usually terraforming), though in Falling Free, the least closely linked of the novels, the biology which enables the creation of the 'quads' -- freefall workers with four arms rather than arms and legs -- is in the service of engineering advantage. The passion in her work, and despite the humour and invention, there is considerable ideologically driven passion, is reserved for her biologically based beliefs -- that physical difference should be no barrier to achievement. As is common in sf, race is incidental and not part of the argument (it is rare for any but black writers of sf to see race as a meaningful issue for the future), but sex and ability are primary. Thus Miles, whose bones were damaged while a foetus and who is short and hunched, Bel Thorne, the hermaphrodite, Taura, the genetically engineered 'perfect soldier' eight foot tall with claws and fangs, Mark, Miles's clone brother and many others who appear less frequently carry the story of difference that must not be allowed to make a difference. Where gender is concerned, the popular spread of feminism means that forceful statements of position are read as political, not as some more woolly bit of being 'nice to the afflicted'. Bujold's feminism may be old-fashioned liberal rather than radical or post-modern, but it doesn't operate by parachuting women in to narratively significant positions of power. You buy the book and you get the argument and with Cordelia, Miles's mother, inscribed as the figure of rationality, the bases are loaded. The machine around which the discourse of liberation is organised, Bujold's novum and the machine which is the focus of complaint, is the uterine replicator -- an artificial womb. In the Bujold universe this is the ultimate good machine. It was a replicator that enabled Miles to survive after teratogenic damage in utero; his first love and his mother both issued from them; and it seems like the key test of a man is his willingness or otherwise to have his wife reproduce in vitro. I suppose I can see why this offends those wedded to old-fashioned hard space opera. Traditionally, the machines that tell the men from the girls/boys/lesser beings are the ships and their weaponry, but here the machines that count replicate the uterus (ultimate squishiness) and so, far from delivering death, deliver babies. Furthermore, their entry into the narrative is almost always the cue for a disquisition on the inequities of the patriarchal society within which Bujold sets almost all her action. InMirror Dance Miles's clone brother Mark finally meets the senior Vorkosigans. He is taken to a court ball by his 'mother' who explains the dynamics of the evening in terms of the political agenda of the old men and the genetic one of the old women. The men imagine theirs is the only one but that's just an ego-serving self-delusion. ... The old men in government councils spend their lives arguing against or scheming to fund this or that piece of off-planet military hardware. Meanwhile the uterine replicator is creeping in past their guard. (296) In the most recent book,Komarr, the main female character is an abused wife with a young son and the fact that her husband required her to bear the child herself is presented as just one of the many abuses he subjects her to. When you read the various passages which discuss the uterine replicators across the books, it can be surprising to discover the insistence with which barbarity and male oppression are figured in the refusal to countenance the machine and good men are revealed by their regarding it as a valuable device. It seems almost to verge on the excessive (but then this is not how such ephemeral texts as popular space opera are read, and if one put together a collection of the passages of 'best bits of weapons admiration' that would look a bit strange too). One could, if so minded, easily dismiss the Vorkosigan adventures as a bit girly on the basis of their enjoyment of interpersonal relations, character development, or romance. If, though, one were willing to admit that only certain pieces of hardware had generically usable hardness, it might rather be possible to observe that the carping at the centrality of the wrong kind of machine identifies much more accurately what is really worrying about the whole popularity of the series -- that this machine is a Trojan Horse for the incorporation through hard technology of 'hard' feminist politics. References Bujold, Lois McMaster. Komarr. Earthlight, 1998. ---. Mirror Dance Riverdale: Baen, 1994. ---. The Vor Game. Riverdale: Baen, 1990. Delany, Samuel R. Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction and Some Comics. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1994. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Frances Bonner. "The Hard Question of Squishy Machines." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.6 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/bujold.php>. Chicago style: Frances Bonner, "The Hard Question of Squishy Machines," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 6 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/bujold.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Frances Bonner. (1999) The hard question of squishy machines. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(6). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/bujold.php> ([your date of access]).

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

She leant lazily across the picnic hamper and reached for my hearing aid in my open-palmed hand. I jerked away from her, batting her hand away from mine. The glare of the summer sun blinded me. I struck empty air. Her tendril-fingers seized the beige seashell curve of my hearing aid and she lifted the cargo of sound towards her eyes. She peered at the empty battery-cage before flicking it open and shut as if it was a cigarette lighter, as if she could spark hearing-life into this trick of plastic and metal that held no meaning outside of my ear. I stared at her. A band of horror tightened around my throat, strangling my shout: ‘Don’t do that!’ I clenched my fist around the new battery that I had been about to insert into my hearing aid and imagined it speeding like a bullet towards her heart. This dream arrived as I researched my anthology of memoir-style essays on deafness, The Art of Being. I had already been reflecting and writing for several years about my relationship with my deaf-self and the impact of my deafness on my life, but I remained uneasy about writing about my deaf-life. I’ve lived all my adult life entirely in the hearing world, and so recasting myself as a deaf woman with something pressing to say about deaf people’s lives felt disturbing. The urgency to tell my story and my anxiety to contest certain assumptions about deafness were real, but I was hampered by diffidence. The dream felt potent, as if my deaf-self was asserting itself, challenging my hearing persona. I was the sole deaf child in a family of five muddling along in a weatherboard war commission house at The Grange in Brisbane during the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties. My father’s resume included being in the army during World War Two, an official for the boxing events at the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games and a bookie with a gift for telling stories. My mother had spent her childhood on a cherry orchard in Young, worked as a nurse in war-time Sydney and married my father in Townsville after a whirlwind romance on Magnetic Island before setting up home in Brisbane. My older sister wore her dark hair in thick Annie-Oakley style plaits and my brother took me on a hike along the Kedron Brook one summer morning before lunchtime. My parents did not know of any deaf relatives in their families, and my sister and brother did not have any friends with deaf siblings. There was just me, the little deaf girl. Most children are curious about where they come from. Such curiosity marks their first foray into sexual development and sense of identity. I don’t remember expressing such curiosity. Instead, I was diverted by my mother’s story of her discovery that I was deaf. The way my mother tells the story, it is as if I had two births with the date of the diagnosis of my deafness marking my real arrival, over-riding the false start of my physical birth three years earlier. Once my mother realized that I was deaf, she was able to get on with it, the ‘it’ being to defy the inevitability of a constrained life for her deaf child. My mother came out swinging; by hook or by crook, her deaf daughter was going to learn to speak and to be educated and to take her place in the hearing world and to live a normal life and that was that. She found out about the Commonwealth Acoustics Laboratory (now known as Australian Hearing Services) where, after I completed a battery of auditory tests, I was fitted with a hearing aid. This was a small metal box, to be worn in a harness around my body, with a long looping plastic cord connected to a beige ear-mould. An instrument for piercing silence, it absorbed and conveyed sounds, with those sounds eventually separating themselves out into patterns of words and finally into strings of sentences. Without my hearing aid, if I am concentrating, and if the sounds are made loudly, I am aware of the sounds at the deeper end of the scale. Sometimes, it’s not so much that I can hear them; it’s more that I know that those sounds are happening. My aural memory of the deep-register sounds helps me to “hear” them, much like the recollection of any tune replays itself in your imagination. With and without my hearing aids, if I am not watching the source of those sounds – for example, if the sounds are taking place in another room or even just behind me – I am not immediately able to distinguish whether the sounds are conversational or musical or happy or angry. I can only discriminate once I’ve established the rhythm of the sounds; if the rhythm is at a tearing, jagged pace with an exaggerated rise and fall in the volume, I might reasonably assume that angry words are being had. I cannot hear high-pitched sounds at all, with and without my hearing aids: I cannot hear sibilants, the “cees” and “esses” and “zeds”. I cannot hear those sounds which bounce or puff off from your lips, such as the letters “b” and “p”; I cannot hear that sound which trampolines from the press of your tongue against the back of your front teeth, the letter “t”. With a hearing-aid I can hear and discriminate among the braying, hee-hawing, lilting, oohing and twanging sounds of the vowels ... but only if I am concentrating, and if I am watching the source of the sounds. Without my hearing aid, I might also hear sharp and sudden sounds like the clap of hands or crash of plates, depending on the volume of the noise. But I cannot hear the ring of the telephone, or the chime of the door bell, or the urgent siren of an ambulance speeding down the street. My hearing aid helps me to hear some of these sounds. I was a pupil in an oral-deaf education program for five years until the end of 1962. During those years, I was variously coaxed, dragooned and persuaded into the world of hearing. I was introduced to a world of bubbles, balloons and fingers placed on lips to learn the shape, taste and feel of sounds, their push and pull of air through tongue and lips. By these mechanics, I gained entry to the portal of spoken, rather than signed, speech. When I was eight years old, my parents moved me from the Gladstone Road School for the Deaf in Dutton Park to All Hallows, an inner-city girls’ school, for the start of Grade Three. I did not know, of course, that I was also leaving my world of deaf friends to begin a new life immersed in the hearing world. I had no way of understanding that this act of transferring me from one school to another was a profound statement of my parents’ hopes for me. They wanted me to have a life in which I would enjoy all the advantages and opportunities routinely available to hearing people. Like so many parents before them, ‘they had to find answers that might not, for all they knew, exist . . . How far would I be able to lead a ‘normal’ life? . . . How would I earn a living? You can imagine what forebodings weighed on them. They could not know that things might work out better than they feared’ (Wright, 22). Now, forty-four years later, I have been reflecting on the impact of that long-ago decision made on my behalf by my parents. They made the right decision for me. The quality of my life reflects the rightness of their decision. I have enjoyed a satisfying career in social work and public policy embedded in a life of love and friendships. This does not mean that I believe that my parents’ decision to remove me from one world to another would necessarily be the right decision for another deaf child. I am not a zealot for the cause of oralism despite its obvious benefits. I am, however, stirred by the Gemini-like duality within me, the deaf girl who is twin to the hearing persona I show to the world, to tell my story of deafness as precisely as I can. Before I can do this, I have to find that story because it is not as apparent to me as might be expected. In an early published memoir-essay about my deaf girlhood, I Hear with My Eyes (in Schulz), I wrote about my mother’s persistence in making sure that I learnt to speak rather than sign, the assumed communication strategy for most deaf people back in the 1950s. I crafted a selection of anecdotes, ranging in tone, I hoped, from sad to tender to laugh-out-loud funny. I speculated on the meaning of certain incidents in defining who I am and the successes I have enjoyed as a deaf woman in a hearing world. When I wrote this essay, I searched for what I wanted to say. I thought, by the end of it, that I’d said everything that I wanted to say. I was ready to move on, to write about other things. However, I was delayed by readers’ responses to that essay and to subsequent public speaking engagements. Some people who read my essay told me that they liked its fresh, direct approach. Others said that they were moved by it. Friends were curious and fascinated to get the inside story of my life as a deaf person as it has not been a topic of conversation or inquiry among us. They felt that they’d learnt something about what it means to be deaf. Many responses to my essay and public presentations had relief and surprise as their emotional core. Parents have cried on hearing me talk about the fullness of my life and seem to regard me as having given them permission to hope for their own deaf children. Educators have invited me to speak at parent education evenings because ‘to have an adult who has a hearing impairment and who has developed great spoken language and is able to communicate in the community at large – that would be a great encouragement and inspiration for our families’ (Email, April 2007). I became uncomfortable about these responses because I was not sure that I had been as honest or direct as I could have been. What lessons on being deaf have people absorbed by reading my essay and listening to my presentations? I did not set out to be duplicitous, but I may have embraced the writer’s aim for the neatly curved narrative arc at the cost of the flinty self-regarding eye and the uncertain conclusion. * * * Let me start again. I was born deaf at a time, in the mid 1950s, when people still spoke of the ‘deaf-mute’ or the ‘deaf and dumb.’ I belonged to a category of children who attracted the gaze of the curious, the kind, and the cruel with mixed results. We were bombarded with questions we could either not hear and so could not answer, or that made us feel we were objects for exploration. We were the patronized beneficiaries of charitable picnics organized for ‘the disadvantaged and the handicapped.’ Occasionally, we were the subject of taunts, with words such as ‘spastic’ being speared towards us as if to be called such a name was a bad thing. I glossed over this muddled social response to deafness in my published essay. I cannot claim innocence as my defence. I knew I was glossing over it but I thought this was right and proper: after all, why stir up jagged memories? Aren’t some things better left unexpressed? Besides, keep the conversation nice, I thought. The nature of readers’ responses to my essay provoked me into a deeper exploration of deafness. I was shocked by the intensity of so many parents’ grief and anxiety about their children’s deafness, and frustrated by the notion that I am an inspiration because I am deaf but oral. I wondered what this implied about my childhood deaf friends who may not speak orally as well as I do, but who nevertheless enjoy fulfilling lives. I was stunned by the admission of a mother of a five year old deaf son who, despite not being able to speak, has not been taught how to Sign. She said, ‘Now that I’ve met you, I’m not so frightened of deaf people anymore.’ My shock may strike the average hearing person as naïve, but I was unnerved that so many parents of children newly diagnosed with deafness were grasping my words with the relief of people who have long ago lost hope in the possibilities for their deaf sons and daughters. My shock is not directed at these parents but at some unnameable ‘thing out there.’ What is going on out there in the big world that, 52 years after my mother experienced her own grief, bewilderment, anxiety and quest to forge a good life for her little deaf daughter, contemporary parents are still experiencing those very same fears and asking the same questions? Why do parents still receive the news of their child’s deafness as a death sentence of sorts, the death of hope and prospects for their child, when the facts show – based on my own life experiences and observations of my deaf school friends’ lives – that far from being a death sentence, the diagnosis of deafness simply propels a child into a different life, not a lesser life? Evidently, a different sort of silence has been created over the years; not the silence of hearing loss but the silence of lost stories, invisible stories, unspoken stories. I have contributed to that silence. For as long as I can remember, and certainly for all of my adult life, I have been careful to avoid being identified as ‘a deaf person.’ Although much of my career was taken up with considering the equity dilemmas of people with a disability, I had never assumed the mantle of advocacy for deaf people or deaf rights. Some of my early silence about deaf identity politics was consistent with my desire not to shine the torch on myself in this way. I did not want to draw attention to myself by what I did not have, that is, less hearing than other people. I thought that if I lived my life as fully as possible in the hearing world and with as little fuss as possible, then my success in blending in would be eloquence enough. If I was going to attract attention, I wanted it to be on the basis of merit, on what I achieved. Others would draw the conclusions that needed to be drawn, that is, that deaf people can take their place fully in the hearing world. I also accepted that if I was to be fully ‘successful’ – and I didn’t investigate the meaning of that word for many years – in the hearing world, then I ought to isolate myself from my deaf friends and from the deaf culture. I continued to miss them, particularly one childhood friend, but I was resolute. I never seriously explored the possibility of straddling both worlds, despite the occasional invitation to do so. For example, one of my childhood deaf friends, Damien, visited me at my parents’ home once, when we were both still in our teens. He was keen for me to join him in the Deaf Theatre, but I couldn’t muster the emotional dexterity that I felt this required. Instead, I let myself to be content to hear news of my childhood deaf friends through the grape-vine. This was, inevitably, a patchy process that lent itself to caricature. Single snippets of information about this person or that person ballooned into portrait-size depictions of their lives as I sketched the remaining blanks of their history with my imagination as my only tool. My capacity to be content with my imagination faltered. * * * Despite the construction of public images of deafness around the highly visible performance of hand-signed communication, the ‘how-small-can-we-go?’ advertorials of hearing aids and the cochlear implant with its head-worn speech processor, deafness is often described as ‘the invisible disability.’ My own experience bore this out. I became increasingly self-conscious about the singularity of my particular success, moderate in the big scheme of things though that may be. I looked around me and wondered ‘Why don’t I bump into more deaf people during the course of my daily life?’ After all, I am not a recluse. I have broad interests. I have travelled a lot, and have enjoyed a policy career for some thirty years, spanning the three tiers of government and scaling the competitive ladder with a reasonable degree of nimbleness. Such a career has got me out and about quite a bit: up and down the Queensland coast and out west, down to Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide and Hobart, and to the United Kingdom. And yet, not once in those thirty years did I get to share an office or a chance meeting or a lunch break with another deaf person. The one exception took place in the United Kingdom when I attended a national conference in which the keynote speaker was the Chairman of the Audit Commission, a man whose charisma outshines his profound deafness. After my return to Australia from the United Kingdom, a newspaper article about an education centre for deaf children in a leafy suburb of Brisbane, prompted me into action. I decided to investigate what was going on in the world of education for deaf children and so, one warm morning in 2006, I found myself waiting in the foyer for the centre’s clinical director. I flicked through a bundle of brochures and newsletters. They were loaded with images of smiling children wearing cochlear implants. Their message was clear: a cochlear implant brought joy, communication and participation in all that the world has to offer. This seemed an easy miracle. I had arrived with an open mind but now found myself feeling unexpectedly tense, as if I was about to walk a high-wire without the benefit of a safety net. Not knowing the reason for my fear, I swallowed it and smiled at the director in greeting upon her arrival. She is physically a small person but her energy is large. Her passion is bracing. That morning, she was quick to assert the power of cochlear implants by simply asking me, ‘Have you ever considered having an implant?’ When I shook my head, she looked at me appraisingly, ‘I’m sure you’d benefit from it’ before ushering me into a room shining with sun-dappled colour and crowded with a mess of little boys and girls. The children were arrayed in a democracy of shorts, shirts, and sandals. Only the occasional hair-ribbon or newly pressed skirt separated this girl from that boy. Some young mothers and fathers, their faces stretched with tension, stood or sat around the room’s perimeter watching their infant children. The noise in the room was orchestral, rising and falling to a mash of shouts, cries and squeals. A table had been set with several plastic plates in which diced pieces of browning apple, orange slices and melon chunks swam in a pond of juice. Some small children clustered around it, waiting to be served. When they finished their morning fruit, they were rounded up to sit at the front of the room, before a teacher poised with finger-puppets of ducks. I tripped over a red plastic chair – its tiny size designed to accommodate an infant’s bottom and small-sausage legs – and lowered myself onto it to take in the events going on around me. The little boys and girls laughed merrily as they watched their teacher narrate the story of a mother duck and her five baby ducks. Her hands moved in a flurry of duck-billed mimicry. ‘“Quack! Quack! Quack!” said the mother duck!’ The parents trilled along in time with the teacher. As I watched the children at the education centre that sunny morning, I saw that my silence had acted as a brake of sorts. I had, for too long, buried the chance to understand better the complex lives of deaf people as we negotiate the claims and demands of the hearing world. While it is true that actions speak louder than words, the occasional spoken and written word must surely help things along a little. I also began to reflect on the apparent absence of the inter-generational transfer of wisdom and insights born of experience rather than academic studies. Why does each new generation of parents approach the diagnosis of their newborn child’s disability or deafness with such intensity of fear, helplessness and dread for their child’s fate? I am not querying the inevitability of parents experiencing disappointment and shock at receiving unexpected news. I accept that to be born deaf means to be born with less than perfect hearing. All the same, it ought not to be inevitable that parents endure sustained grief about their child’s prospects. They ought to be illuminated as quickly as possible about all that is possible for their child. In particular, they ought to be encouraged to enjoy great hopes for their child. I mused about the power of story-telling to influence attitudes. G. Thomas Couser claims that ‘life writing can play a significant role in changing public attitudes about deafness’ (221) but then proceeds to cast doubt on his own assertion by later asking, ‘to what degree and how do the extant narratives of deafness rewrite the discourse of disability? Indeed, to what degree and how do they manage to represent the experience of deafness at all?’ (225). Certainly, stories from the Deaf community do not speak for me as my life has not been shaped by the framing of deafness as a separate linguistic and cultural entity. Nor am I drawn to the militancy of identity politics that uses terms such as ‘oppression’ and ‘oppressors’ to deride the efforts of parents and educators to teach deaf children to speak (Lane; Padden and Humphries). This seems to be unhelpfully hostile and assumes that deafness is the sole arbitrating reason that deaf people struggle with understanding who they are. It is the nature of being human to struggle with who we are. Whether we are deaf, migrants, black, gay, mentally ill – or none of these things – we are all answerable to the questions: ‘who am I and what is my place in the world?’ As I cast around for stories of deafness and deaf people with which I could relate, I pondered on the relative infrequency of deaf characters in literature, and the scarcity of autobiographies by deaf writers or biographies of deaf people by either deaf or hearing people. I also wondered whether written stories of deafness, memoirs and fiction, shape public perceptions or do they simply respond to existing public perceptions of deafness? As Susan DeGaia, a deaf academic at California State University writes, ‘Analysing the way stories are told can show us a lot about who is most powerful, most heard, whose perspective matters most to society. I think if we polled deaf/Deaf people, we would find many things missing from the stories that are told about them’ (DeGaia). Fighting my diffidence in staking out my persona as a ‘deaf woman’ and mustering the ‘conviction as to the importance of what [I have] to say, [my] right to say it’ (Olsen 27), I decided to write The Art of Being Deaf, an anthology of personal essays in the manner of reflective memoirs on deafness drawing on my own life experiences and supported by additional research. This presented me with a narrative dilemma because my deafness is just one of several life-events by which I understand myself. I wanted to find fresh ways of telling stories of deaf experiences while fashioning my memoir essays to show the texture of my life in all its variousness. A.N.Wilson’s observation about the precarious insensitivity of biographical writing was my guiding pole-star: the sense of our own identity is fluid and tolerant, whereas our sense of the identity of others is always more fixed and quite often edges towards caricature. We know within ourselves that we can be twenty different persons in a single day and that the attempt to explain our personality is doomed to become a falsehood after only a few words ... . And yet ... works of literature, novels and biographies depend for their aesthetic success precisely on this insensitive ability to simplify, to describe, to draw lines around another person and say, ‘This is she’ or ‘This is he.’ I have chosen to explore my relationship with my deafness through the multiple-threads of writing several personal essays as my story-telling vehicle rather than as a single-thread autobiography. The multiple-thread approach to telling my stories also sought to avoid the pitfalls of identity narrative in which I might unwittingly set myself up as an exemplar of one sort or another, be it as a ‘successful deaf person’ or as an ‘angry militant deaf activist’ or as ‘a deaf individual in denial attempting to pass as hearing.’ But in seeking to avoid these sorts of stories, what autobiographical story am I trying to tell? Because, other than being deaf, my life is not otherwise especially unusual. It is pitted here with sadness and lifted there with joy, but it is mostly a plateau held stable by the grist of daily life. Christopher Jon Heuer recognises this dilemma when he writes, ‘neither autobiography nor biography nor fiction can survive without discord. Without it, we are left with boredom. Without it, what we have is the lack of a point, a theme and a plot’ (Heuer 196). By writing The Art of Being Deaf, I am learning more than I have to teach. In the absence of deaf friends or mentors, and in the climate of my own reluctance to discuss my concerns with hearing people who, when I do flag any anxieties about issues arising from my deafness tend to be hearty and upbeat in their responses, I have had to work things out for myself. In hindsight, I suspect that I have simply ignored most of my deafness-related difficulties, leaving the heavy lifting work to my parents, teachers, and friends – ‘for it is the non-deaf who absorb a large part of the disability’ (Wright, 5) – and just got on with things by complying with what was expected of me, usually to good practical effect but at the cost of enriching my understanding of myself and possibly at the cost of intimacy. Reading deaf fiction and memoirs during the course of this writing project is proving to be helpful for me. I enjoy the companionability of it, but not until I got over my fright at seeing so many documented versions of deaf experiences, and it was a fright. For a while there, it was like walking through the Hall of Mirrors in Luna Park. Did I really look like that? Or no, perhaps I was like that? But no, here’s another turn, another mirror, another face. Spinning, twisting, turning. It was only when I stopped searching for the right mirror, the single defining portrait, that I began to enjoy seeing my deaf-self/hearing-persona experiences reflected in, or challenged by, what I read. Other deaf writers’ recollections are stirring into fresh life my own buried memories, prompting me to re-imagine them so that I can examine my responses to those experiences more contemplatively and less reactively than I might have done originally. We can learn about the diversity of deaf experiences and the nuances of deaf identity that rise above the stock symbolic scripts by reading authentic, well-crafted stories by memoirists and novelists. Whether they are hearing or deaf writers, by providing different perspectives on deafness, they have something useful to say, demonstrate and illustrate about deafness and deaf people. I imagine the possibility of my book, The Art of Being Deaf, providing a similar mentoring role to other deaf people and families.References Couser, G. Thomas. Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disablity, and Life Writing. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Heuer, Christopher Jon. ‘Deafness as Conflict and Conflict Component.’ Sign Language Studies 7.2 (Winter 2007): 195-199. Lane, Harlan. When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf. New York: Random House, 1984 Olsen, Tillie. Silences. New York: Delta/Seymour Lawrence. 1978. Padden, Carol, and Tom Humphries. Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. Schulz, J. (ed). A Revealed Life. Sydney: ABC Books and Griffith Review. 2007 Wilson, A.N. Incline Our Hearts. London: Penguin Books. 1988. Wright, David. Deafness: An Autobiography. New York: Stein and Day, 1969.

IntroductionWe five friends clinked glasses in our favourite wine and cocktail bar, and considered our next collaborative writing project. We had seen M/C Journal’s call for articles for a special issue on ‘regional’ and when one of us mentioned the television program, Escape from the City, we began our critique:“They haven’t featured Armidale yet, but wouldn’t it be great if they did?”“Really? I mean, some say any publicity is good publicity but the few early episodes I’ve viewed seem to give little or no screen time to the sorts of lifestyle features I most value in our town.”“Well, seeing as we all moved here from the city ages ago, let’s talk about what made us stay?”We had found our next project.A currently popular lifestyle television show (Escape from the City) on Australia’s national public service broadcaster, the ABC, highlights the limitations of popular cultural representations of life in a regional centre. The program is targeted at viewers interested in relocating to regional Australia. As Raymond Boyle and Lisa Kelly note, popular television is an important entry point into the construction of public knowledge as well as a launching point for viewers as they seek additional information (65). In their capacity to construct popular perceptions of ‘reality’, televisual texts offer a significant insight into our understandings and expectations of what is going on around us. Similar to the concerns raised by Esther Peeren and Irina Souch in their analysis of the popular TV show Farmer Wants a Wife (a version set in the Netherlands from 2004–present), we worry that these shows “prevent important aspects of contemporary rural life from being seen and understood” (37) by the viewers, and do a disservice to regional communities.For the purposes of this article, we interrogate the episodes of Escape from the City screened to date in terms of the impact they may have on promoting regional Australia and speculate on how satisfied (or otherwise) we would be should the producers direct their lens onto our regional community—Armidale, in northern NSW. We start with a brief précis of Escape from the City and then, applying an autoethnographic approach (Butz and Besio) focusing on our subjective experiences, we share our reflections on living in Armidale. We blend our academic knowledge and knowledge of everyday life (Klevan et al.) to argue there is greater cultural diversity, complexity, and value in being in the natural landscape in regional areas than is portrayed in these representations of country life that largely focus on cheaper real estate and a five-minute commute.We employ an autoethnographic approach because it emphasises the socially and politically constituted nature of knowledge claims and allows us to focus on our own lives as a way of understanding larger social phenomena. We recognise there is a vast literature on lifestyle programs and there are many different approaches scholars can take to these. Some focus on the intention of the program, for example “the promotion of neoliberal citizenship through home investment” (White 578), while others focus on the supposed effect on audiences (Tsay-Vogel and Krakowiak). Here we only assert the effects on ourselves. We have chosen to blend our voices (Gilmore et al.) in developing our arguments, highlighting our single voices where our individual experiences are drawn on, as we argue for an alternative representation of regional life than currently portrayed in the regional ‘escapes’ of this mainstream lifestyle television program.Lifestyle TelevisionEscape from the City is one of the ‘lifestyle’ series listed on the ABC iview website under the category of ‘Regional Australia’. Promotional details describe Escape from the City as a lifestyle series of 56-minute episodes in which home seekers are guided through “the trials and tribulations of their life-changing decision to escape the city” (iview).Escape from the City is an example of format television, a term used to describe programs that retain the structure and style of those produced in another country but change the circumstances to suit the new cultural context. The original BBC format is entitled Escape to the Country and has been running since 2002. The reach of lifestyle television is extensive, with the number of programs growing rapidly since 2000, not just in the United Kingdom, but internationally (Hill; Collins). In Australia, they have completed, but not yet screened, 60 episodes of Escape from the City. However, with such popularity comes great potential to influence audiences and we argue this program warrants critical attention.Like House Hunters, the United States lifestyle television show (running since 1997), Escape from the City follows “a strict formula” (Loof 168). Each episode uses the same narrative format, beginning with an introduction to the team of experts, then introducing the prospective house buyers, briefly characterising their reasons for leaving the city and what they are looking for in their new life. After this, we are shown a map of the region and the program follows the ‘escapees’ as they view four pre-selected houses. As we leave each property, the cost and features are reiterated in the written template on the screen. We, the audience, wait in anticipation for their final decision.The focus of Escape from the City is the buying of the house: the program’s team of experts is there to help the potential ‘escapees’ find the real estate gem. Real estate value for money emerges as the primary concern, while the promise of finding a ‘life less ordinary’ as highlighted in the opening credits of the program each week, seems to fall by the wayside. Indeed, the representation of regional centres is not nuanced but limited by the emphasis placed on economics over the social and cultural.The intended move of the ‘escapees’ is invariably portrayed as motivated by disenchantment with city life. Clearly a bigger house and a smaller mortgage also has its hedonistic side. In her study of Western society represented in lifestyle shows, Lyn Thomas lists some of the negative aspects of city life as “high speed, work-dominated, consumerist” (680), along with pollution and other associated health risks. While these are mentioned in Escape from the City, Thomas’s list of the pleasures afforded by a simpler country life including space for human connection and spirituality, is not explored to any satisfying extent. Further, as a launching point for viewers in the city (Boyle and Kelly), we fear the singular focus on the price of real estate reinforces a sense of the rural as devoid of creative arts and cultural diversity with a focus on the productive, rather than the natural, landscape. Such a focus does not encourage a desire to find out more and undersells the richness of our (regional) lives.As Australian regional centres strive to circumvent or halt the negative impacts of the drift in population to the cities (Chan), lifestyle programs are important ‘make or break’ narratives, shaping the appeal and bolstering—or not—a decision to relocate. With their focus on cheaper real estate prices and the freeing up of the assets of the ‘escapees’ that a move to the country may entail, the representation is so focused on the economics that it is almost placeless. While the format includes a map of the regional location, there is little sense of being in the place. Such a limited representation does not do justice to the richness of regional lives as we have experienced them.Our TownLike so many regional centres, Armidale has much to offer and is seeking to grow (Armidale Regional Council). The challenges regional communities face in sustaining their communities is well captured in Gabriele Chan’s account of the city-country divide (Chan) and Armidale, with its population of about 25,000, is no exception. Escape from the City fails to emphasise cultural diversity and richness, yet this is what characterises our experience of our regional city. As long-term and satisfied residents of Armidale, who are keenly aware of the persuasive power of popular cultural representations (O’Sullivan and Sheridan; Sheridan and O’Sullivan), we are concerned about the trivialising or reductive manner in which regional Australia is portrayed.While we acknowledge there has not been an episode of Escape from the City featuring Armidale, if the characterisation of another, although larger, regional centre, Toowoomba, is anything to go by, our worst fears may be realised if our town is to feature in the future. Toowoomba is depicted as rural landscapes, ‘elegant’ buildings, a garden festival (the “Carnival of the Flowers”) and the town’s history as home of the Southern Cross windmill and the iconic lamington sponge. The episode features an old shearing shed and a stock whip demonstration, but makes no mention of the arts, or of the University that has been there since 1967. Summing up Toowoomba, the voiceover describes it as “an understated and peaceful place to live,” and provides “an attractive alternative” to city life, substantiated by a favourable comparison of median real estate prices.Below we share our individual responses to the question raised in our opening conversation about the limitations of Escape from the City: What have we come to value about our own town since escaping from city life?Jane: The aspects of life in Armidale I most enjoy are, at least in part, associated with or influenced by the fact that this is a centre for education and a ‘university town’. As such, there is access to an academic library and an excellent town library. The presence of the University of New England, along with independent and public schools, and TAFE, makes education a major employer, attracting a significant student population, and is a major factor in Armidale being one of the first towns in the roll-out of the NBN/high-speed broadband. University staff and students may also account for the thriving cafe culture, along with designer breweries/bars, art house cinema screenings, and a lively classical and popular music scene. Surely the presence of a university and associated spin-offs would deserve coverage in a prospective episode about Armidale.Alison: Having grown up in the city, and now having lived more than half my life in an inner-regional country town, I don’t feel I am missing out ‘culturally’ from this decision. Within our town, there is a vibrant arts community, with the regional gallery and two local galleries holding regular art exhibitions, theatre at a range of venues, and book launches at our lively local book store. And when my children were younger, there was no shortage of sporting events they could be involved with. Encountering friends and familiar faces regularly at these events adds to my sense of belonging to my community. The richness of this life does not make it to the television screen in episodes of Escape from the City.Kerry: I greatly value the Armidale community’s strong social conscience. There are many examples of successful programs to support diverse groups. Armidale Sanctuary and Humanitarian Settlement sponsored South Sudanese refugees for many years and is currently assisting Ezidi refugees. In addition to the core Sanctuary committee, many in the local community help families with developing English skills, negotiating daily life, such as reading and responding to school notes and medical questionnaires. The Backtrack program assists troubled Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal youth. The program helps kids “to navigate their relationships, deal with personal trauma, take responsibility […] gain skills […] so they can eventually create a sustainable future for themselves.” The documentary film Backtrack Boys shows what can be achieved by individuals with the support of the community. Missing from Escape from the City is recognition of the indigenous experience and history in regional communities, unlike the BBC’s ‘original’ program in which medieval history and Vikings often get a ‘guernsey’. The 1838 Myall Creek massacre of 28 Wirrayaraay people, led to the first prosecution and conviction of a European for killing Aboriginals. Members of the Indigenous and non-Indigenous community in Armidale are now active in acknowledging the past wrongs and beginning the process of reconciliation.Josie: About 10am on a recent Saturday morning I was walking from the car park to the shopping complex. Coming down the escalator and in the vestibule, there were about thirty people and it occurred to me that there were at least six nationalities represented, with some of the people wearing traditional dress. It also struck me that this is not unusual—we are a diverse community as a result of our history and being a ‘university city’. The Armidale Aboriginal Cultural Centre and Keeping Place was established in 1988 and is being extended in 2019. Diversity is apparent in cultural activities such as an international film festival held annually and many of the regular musical events and stalls at the farmers’ market increasingly reflect the cultural mix of our town. As a long-term resident, I appreciate the lifestyle here.Wendy: It is early morning and I am walking in a forest of tall trees, with just the sounds of cattle and black cockatoos. I travel along winding pathways with mossy boulders and creeks dry with drought. My dog barks at rabbits and ‘roos, and noses through the nooks and crannies of the hillside. In this public park on the outskirts of town, I can walk for two hours without seeing another person, or I can be part of a dog-walking pack. The light is grey and misty now, the ranges blue and dark green, but I feel peaceful and content. I came here from the city 30 years ago and hated it at first! But now I relish the way I can be at home in 10 minutes after starting the day in the midst of nature and feeling part of the landscape, not just a tourist—never a possibility in the city. I can watch the seasons and the animals as they come and go and be part of a community which is part of the landscape too. For me, the first verse of South of My Days, written by a ‘local’ describing our New England environment, captures this well:South of my days’ circle, part of my blood’s country,rises that tableland, high delicate outlineof bony slopes wincing under the winter,low trees, blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite-clean, lean, hungry country. The creek’s leaf-silenced,willow choked, the slope a tangle of medlar and crabapplebranching over and under, blotched with a green lichen;and the old cottage lurches in for shelter. (Wright 20)Whilst our autoethnographic reflections may not reach the heady heights of Judith Wright, they nevertheless reflect the experience of living in, not just escaping to the country. We are disappointed that the breadth of cultural activities and the sense of diversity and community that our stories evoke are absent from the representations of regional communities in Escape from the City.Kate Oakley and Jonathon Ward argue that ‘visions of the good life’, in particular cultural life in the regions, need to be supported by policy which encourages a sustainable prosperity characterised by both economic and cultural development. Escape from the City, however, dwells on the material aspects of consumption—good house prices and the possibility of a private enterprise—almost to the exclusion of any coverage of the creative cultural features.We recognise that the lifestyle genre requires simplification for viewers to digest. What we are challenging is the sense that emerges from the repetitive format week after week whereby differences between places are lost (White 580). Instead what is conveyed in Escape from the City is that regions are homogenous and monocultural. We would like to see more screen time devoted to the social and cultural aspects of the individual locations.ConclusionWe believe coverage of a far richer and more complex nature of rural life would provide a more ‘realistic’ preview of what could be ahead for the ‘escapees’ and perhaps swing the decision to relocate. Certainly, there is some evidence that viewers gain information from lifestyle programs (Hill 106). We are concerned that a lifestyle television program that purports to provide expert advice on the benefits and possible pitfalls of a possible move to the country should be as accurate and all-encompassing as possible within the constraints of the length of the program and the genre.So, returning to what may appear to have been a light-hearted exchange between us at our local bar, and given the above discussion, we argue that television is a powerful medium. We conclude that a popular lifestyle television program such as Escape from the City has an impact on a large viewing audience. For those city-based viewers watching, the message is that moving to the country is an economic ‘no brainer’, whereas the social and cultural dimensions of regional communities, which we posit have sustained our lives, are overlooked. Such texts influence viewers’ perceptions and expectations of what escaping to the country may entail. Escape from the City exploits regional towns as subject matter for a lifestyle program but does not significantly challenge stereotypical representations of country life or does not fully flesh out what escaping to the country may achieve.ReferencesArmidale Regional Council. Community Strategic Plan 2017–2027. Armidale: Armidale Regional Council, 2017.“Backtrack Boys.” Dir. Catherine Scott. Sydney: Umbrella Entertainment, 2018.Boyle, Raymond, and Lisa W. Kelly. “Television, Business Entertainment and Civic Culture.” Television and New Media 14.1 (2013): 62–70.Butz, David, and Kathryn Besio. “Autoethnography.” Geography Compass 3.5 (2009): 1660–74.Chan, Gabrielle. Rusted Off: Why Country Australia Is Fed Up. Australia: Vintage, 2018.Collins, Megan. Classical and Contemporary Social Theory: The New Narcissus in the Age of Reality Television. Routledge, 2018.Gilmore, Sarah, Nancy Harding, Jenny Helin, and Alison Pullen. “Writing Differently.” Management Learning 50.1 (2019): 3–10.Hill, Annette. Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television. London: Routledge, 2004.iview. “Escape from the City.” Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2019.Klevan, Trude, Bengt Karlsson, Lydia Turner, Nigel Short, and Alec Grant. “‘Aha! ‘Take on Me’s’: Bridging the North Sea with Relational Autoethnography.” Qualitative Research Journal 18.4 (2018): 330–44.Loof, Travis. “A Narrative Criticism of Lifestyle Reality Programs.” Journal of Media Critiques 1.5 (2015): 167–78.O’Sullivan, Jane, and Alison Sheridan. “The King Is Dead, Long Live the King: Tall Tales of New Men and New Management in The Bill.” Gender, Work and Organization 12.4 (2005): 299–318.Oakley, Kate, and Jonathon Ward. “The Art of the Good Life: Culture and Sustainable Prosperity.” Cultural Trends 27.1 (2018): 4–17.Peeren, Esther, and Irina Souch. “Romance in the Cowshed: Challenging and Reaffirming the Rural Idyll in the Dutch Reality TV Show Farmer Wants a Wife.” Journal of Rural Studies 67.1 (2019): 37–45.Sheridan, Alison, and Jane O’Sullivan. “‘Fact’ and ‘Fiction’: Enlivening Health Care Education.” Journal of Health Orgnaization and Management 27.5 (2013): 561–76.Thomas, Lyn. “Alternative Realities: Downshifting Narratives in Contemporary Lifestyle Television.” Cultural Studies 22.5 (2008): 680–99.Tsay-Vogel, Mina, and K. Maja Krakowiak. “Exploring Viewers’ Responses to Nine Reality TV Subgenres.” Psychology of Popular Media Culture 6.4 (2017): 348–60.White, Mimi. “‘A House Divided’.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 20.5 (2017): 575–91.Wright, Judith. Collected Poems: 1942–1985. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1994.

Many films of the Australian New Wave (or Australian film renaissance) of the 1970s and 1980s can be defined as gothic, especially following Jonathan Rayner’s suggestion that “Instead of a genre, Australian Gothic represents a mode, a stance and an atmosphere, after the fashion of American Film Noir, with the appellation suggesting the inclusion of horrific and fantastic materials comparable to those of Gothic literature” (25). The American comparison is revealing. The 400 or so film productions of the Australian New Wave emerged, not in a vacuum, but in an increasingly connected and inter-mixed international space (Godden). Putatively discrete national cinemas weave in and out of each other on many levels. One such level concerns the reception critics give to films. This article will drill down to the level of the reception of two examples of Australian gothic film-making by two well-known American critics. Rayner’s comparison of Australian gothic with American film noir is useful; however, it begs the question of how American critics such as Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris influentially shaped the reception of Australian gothic in America and in other locations (such as Australia itself) where their reviews found an audience either at the time or afterwards. The significance of the present article rests on the fact that, as William McClain observes, following in Rick Altman’s footsteps, “critics form one of the key material institutions that support generic formations” (54). This article nurtures the suggestion that knowing how Australian gothic cinema was shaped, in its infancy, in the increasingly important American market (a market of both commerce and ideas) might usefully inform revisionist studies of Australian cinema as a national mode. A more nuanced, globally informed representation of the origins and development of Australian gothic cinema emerges at this juncture, particularly given that American film reviewing in the 1970s and 1980s more closely resembled what might today be called film criticism or even film theory. The length of individual reviews back then, the more specialized vocabulary used, and above all the tendency for critics to assume more knowledge of film history than could safely be assumed in 2014—all this shows up the contrast with today. As Christos Tsiolkas notes, “in our age… film reviewing has been reduced to a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down” (56)! The 1970s and 1980s is largely pre-Internet, and critical voices such as Kael and Sarris dominated in print. The American reviews of Australian gothic films demonstrate how a different consciousness suffuses Kael’s and Sarris’s engagements with “Antipodean” (broadly Australian and New Zealand) cinema. Rayner’s locally specific definition of Australian gothic is distorted in their interpretations of examples of the genre. It will be argued that this is symptomatic of a particular blindspot, related to the politics and art of place, in the American reception of Wake in Fright (initially called Outback in America), directed by the Canadian Ted Kotcheff (1971) and The Year of Living Dangerously, directed by Peter Weir (1982). Space and argument considerations force this article to focus on the reviews of these films, engaging less in analysis of the films themselves. Suffice to say that they all fit broadly within Rayner’s definition of Australian gothic cinema. As Rayner states, three thematic concerns which permeate all the films related to the Gothic sensibility provide links across the distinctions of era, environment and character. They are: a questioning of established authority; a disillusionment with the social reality that that authority maintains; and the protagonist’s search for a valid and tenable identity once the true nature of the human environment has been revealed. (25) “The true nature of the human environment….” Here is the element upon which the American reviews of the Australian gothic founder. Explicitly in many films of this mode, and implicitly in nearly all of them, is the “human environment” of the Australian landscape, which operates less as a backdrop and more as a participating element, even a character, in the drama, saturating the mise-en-scène. In “Out of Place: Reading (Post) Colonial Landscapes as Gothic Space in Jane Campion’s Films,” Eva Rueschmann quotes Ross Gibson’s thesis from South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia that By featuring the land so emphatically… [Australian] films stake out something more significant than decorative pictorialism. Knowingly or unknowingly, they are all engaging with the dominant mythology of white Australia. They are all partaking of the landscape tradition which, for two hundred years, has been used by white Australians to promote a sense of the significance of European society in the “Antipodes”. (Rueschmann) The “emphatic” nature of the land in films like Wake in Fright, Mad Max 2 and Picnic at Hanging Rock actively contributes to the “atmosphere” of Australian gothic cinema (Rayner 25). This atmosphere floats across Australian film and literature. Many of the films mentioned in this article are adaptations from books, and Rayner himself stresses the similarity between Australian gothic and gothic literature (25). Significantly, the atmosphere of Australian gothic also floats across the fuzzy boundary between the gothic and road movies or road literature. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is obviously a road movie as well as a gothic text; so is Wake in Fright in its way; even Picnic at Hanging Rock contains elements of the road movie in all that travelling to and from the rock. Roads, then, are significant for Australian gothic cinema, for the road traverses the Australian (gothic) landscape and, in the opportunity it provides for moving through it at speed, tantalizes with the (unfulfillable) promise of an escape from its gothic horror. Australian roads are familiar, part of White European culture referencing the geometric precision of Roman roads. The Australian outback, by contrast, is unfamiliar, uncanny. Veined with roads, the outback invites the taming by “the landscape tradition” that it simultaneously rejects (Rueschmann). In the opening 360° pan of Wake in Fright the land frightens with its immensity and intensity, even as the camera displays the land’s “conquering” agent: not a road, but the road’s surrogate—a railway line. Thus, the land introduces the uncanny into Australian gothic cinema. In Freudian terms, the uncanny is that unsettling combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar. R. Gray calls it “the class of frightening things that leads us back to what is known and familiar” (Gray). The “frightening” land is the very condition of the “comforting” road; no roads without a space for roads, and places for them to go. In her introduction to The Penguin Book of the Road, Delia Falconer similarly sutures the land to the uncanny, linking both of these with the first peoples of the Australian land: "Of course there is another 'poetry of the earth' whispering from the edges of our roads that gives so many of our road stories an extra charge, and that is the history of Aboriginal presence in this land. Thousands of years of paths and tribal boundaries also account for the uncanny sense of being haunted that dogs our travellers on their journeys (xvii). White Australia, as the local saying goes, has a black past, played out across the land. The film The Proposition instances this, with its gothic portrayal of the uncanny encroachments of the Australian “wilderness” into the domain of “civilization”. Furthermore, “our” overweening literal and metaphoric investment in the traditional quarter-acre block, not to mention in our roads, shows that “we” haven’t reconciled either with the land of Australia or with its original inhabitants: the Aboriginal peoples. Little wonder that Kael and Sarris couldn’t do so, as White Americans writing some forty years ago, and at such a huge geographic remove from Australia. As will be seen, the failure of these American film critics to comprehend the Australian landscape comes out—as both a “critical reaction” and a “reactive compensation”—in two, interwoven strands of their interpretations of Australian New Wave gothic cinema. A repulsion from, and an attraction to, the unrecognized uncanny is evidenced. The first strand is constituted in the markedly anthropological aspect to the film reviews: anthropological elements of the text itself are either disproportionately magnified or longed for. Here, “anthropological” includes the sociological and the historical. Secondly, Kael and Sarris use the films they review from Australian gothic cinema as sites upon which to trial answers to the old and persistent question of how the very categories of art and politics relate. Initially sucked out of the reviews (strand one), politics and art thus rush back in (strand two). In other words, the American failure to engage deeply with the land triggers an initial reading of films like Wake in Fright less as films per se and more as primary texts or one-to-one documentations of Australia. Australia presents for anthropological, even scientific atomization, rather than as a place in active, creative and complex relationship with its rendering in mise-en-scène. Simultaneously though, the absence of the land nags—eats away at the edges of critical thinking—and re-emerges (like a Freudian return of the repressed) in an attempt by the American critics to exploit their film subjects as an opportunity for working out how politics and art (here cinema) relate. The “un-seen” land creates a mis-reading amongst the American critics (strand one), only to force a compensatory, if somewhat blindsided, re-reading (strand two). For after all, in this critical “over-looking” of the land, and thus of the (ongoing) Aboriginal existence in and with the land, it is politics and art that is most at stake. How peoples (indigenous, settler or hybrid peoples) are connected to and through the land has perhaps always been Australia’s principal political and artistic question. How do the American reviews speak to this question? Sarris did not review Wake in Fright. Kael reviewed it, primarily, as a text at the intersection of fiction and documentary, ultimately privileging the latter. Throughout, her critical coordinates are American and, to a degree, literary. Noting the “stale whiff of Conrad” she also cites Outback’s “additional interest” in its similarity with “recent American movies [about] American racism and capitalist exploitation and the Vietnam war” (415). But her most pointed intervention comes in the assertion that there is “enough narrative to hold the social material together,” as if this were all narrative were good for: scaffolding for sociology (416). Art and culture are left out. Even as Kael mentions the “treatment of the Aborigines,” she misses the Aboriginal cultural moment of the opening shot of the land; this terrain, she writes, is “without a trace of culture” (416). Then, after critiquing what she sees as the unconvincing lesson of the schoolteacher’s moral demise, comes this: “But a more serious problem is that (despite the banal photography) the semi-documentary aspects of the film are so much more vivid and authentic and original than the factitious Conradian hero that we want to see more of that material—we want to learn more” (416-417). Further on, in this final paragraph, Kael notes that, while “there have been other Australian films, so it’s not all new” the director and scriptwriter “have seen the life in a more objective way, almost as if they were cultural anthropologists…. Maybe Kotcheff didn’t dare to expand this vision at the expense of the plot line, but he got onto something bigger than the plot” (417). Kael’s “error”, as it were, is to over-look how the land itself stretches the space of the film, beyond plot, to occupy the same space as her so-called “something bigger”, which itself is filled out by the uncanniness of the land as the intersections of both indigenous and settler (road-based) cultures and their representations in art (417). The “banal photography” might be better read as the film’s inhabitation of these artistic/cultural intersections (416). Kael’s Wake in Fright piece illustrates the first strand of the American reviews of Australian gothic cinema. Missing the land’s uncanniness effectively distributes throughout the review an elision of culture and art, and a reactive engagement with the broadly anthropological elements of Kotcheff’s film. Reviews of The Year of Living Dangerously by Kael and Sarris also illustrate the first strand of the American-Australian reviewing nexus, with the addition, also by each critic, of the second strand: the attempt to reconnect and revitalize the categories of politics and art. As with Wake in Fright, Kael introduces an anthropological gambit into Weir’s film, privileging its documentary elements over its qualities as fiction (strand one). “To a degree,” she writes, “Weir is the victim of his own skill at creating the illusion of authentic Third World misery, rioting, and chaos” (454). By comparison with “earlier, studio-set films” (like Casablanca [452]), where such “backgrounds (with their picturesque natives) were perfectly acceptable as backdrops…. Here… it’s a little obscene” (454). Kael continues: “Documentaries, TV coverage, print journalism, and modern history itself have changed audiences’ responses, and when fake dilemmas about ‘involvement’ are cooked up for the hero they’re an embarrassment” (454-455). Film is pushed to cater to anthropology besides art. Mirroring Kael’s strand-one response, Sarris puts a lot of pressure on Weir’s film to “perform” anthropologically—as well as, even instead of, artistically. The “movie”, he complains “could have been enjoyed thoroughly as a rousingly old-fashioned Hollywood big-star entertainment were it not for the disturbing vistas of somnolent poverty on view in the Philippines, the location in which Indonesian poverty in 1965 was simulated” (59). Indeed, the intrusive reality of poverty elicits from Sarris something very similar to Kael’s charge of the “obscenity of the backdrop” (454): We cannot go back to Manderley in our movie romances. That much is certain. We must go forward into the real world, but in the process, we should be careful not to dwarf our heroes and heroines with the cosmic futility of it all. They must be capable of acting on the stage of history, and by acting, make a difference in our moral perception of life on this planet. (59) Sarris places an extreme, even outrageous, strand-one demand on Weir’s film to re-purpose its fiction (what Kael calls “romantic melodrama” [454]) to elicit the categories of history and anthropology—that last phrase, “life on this planet”, sounds like David Attenborough speaking! More so, anthropological atomization is matched swiftly to a strand-two demand, for this passage also anticipates the rapprochement of politics and art, whereby art rises to the level of politics, requiring movie “heroes and heroines” to make a “moral difference” on a historical if not on a “cosmic” level (59). It is precisely in this, however, that Weir’s film falls down for Sarris. “The peculiar hollowness that the more perceptive reviewers have noted in The Year of Living Dangerously arises from the discrepancy between the thrilling charisma of the stars and the antiheroic irrelevance of the characters they play to the world around them” (59). Sarris’s spatialized phrase here (“peculiar hollowness”) recalls Kael’s observation that Wake in Fright contains “something bigger than the plot” (417). In each case, the description is doubling, dis-locating—uncanny. Echoing the title of Eva Rueschmann’s article, both films, like the Australian landscape itself, are “out of place” in their interpretation by these American critics. What, really, does Sarris’s “peculiar hollowness” originate in (59)? In what “discrepancy” (59)? There is a small but, in the context of this article, telling error in Sarris’s review of Weir’s film. Kael, correctly, notes that “the Indonesian settings had to be faked (in the Philippines and Australia)” (inserted emphasis) (452). Sarris mentions only the Philippines. From little things big things grow. Similar to how Kael overlooks the uncanny in Wake in Fright’s mise-en-scène, Sarris “sees” a “peculiar hollowness” where the land would otherwise be. Otherwise, that is, in the perspective of a cinema (Kotcheff’s, Weir’s) that comprehends “the true nature of the [Australian, gothic] human environment” (Rayner 25). Of course, it is not primarily a matter of how much footage Weir shot in Australia. It is the nature of the cinematography that matters most. For his part, Sarris damns it as “pretentiously picturesque” (59). Kael, meanwhile, gets closer perhaps to the ethics of the uncanny cinematography of The Year of Living Dangerously in her description of “intimations, fragments, hints and portents… on a very wide screen” (451). Even so, it will be remembered, she does call the “backgrounds… obscene” (454). Kael and Sarris see less than they “see”. Again like Sarris, Kael goes looking in Weir’s film for a strand-two rapprochement of politics and art, as evidenced by the line “The movie displays left-wing attitudes, but it shows no particular interest in politics” (453). It does though, only Kael is blind to it because she is blind to the land and, equally, to the political circumstances of the people of the land. Kael likely never realized the “discrepancy” in her critique of The Year of Living Dangerously’s Billy Kwan as “the same sort of in-on-the-mysteries-of-the-cosmos character that the aborigine actor Gulpilil played in Weir’s 1977 The Last Wave” (455). All this, she concludes, “might be boiled down to the mysticism of L.A.: ‘Go with the flow’” (455)! Grouping characters and places together like this, under the banner of L.A. mysticism, brutally erases the variations across different, uncanny, gothic, post-colonial landscapes. It is precisely here that politics and art do meet, in Weir’s film (and Kotcheff’s): in the artistic representation of the land as an index of the political relations of indigenous, settler and hybrid communities. (And not down the rabbit hole of the “specifics” of politics that Kael claims to want [453]). The American critics considered in this article are not in “bad faith” or a-political. Sarris produced a perceptive, left-leaning study entitled Politics and Cinema, and many of Kael’s reviews, along with essays like “Saddle Sore: El Dorado, The War Wagon, The Way West,” contain sophisticated, liberalist analyses of the political circumstances of Native Americans. The crucial point is that, as “critics form[ing] one of the key material institutions that support generic formations,” Sarris and Kael impacted majorly on the development of Australian gothic cinema, in the American context—impacted especially, one could say, on the (mis-)understanding of the land-based, uncanny politics of this mode in its Australian setting (McClain 54). Kael’s and Sarris’s reviews of My Brilliant Career, along with Judith Maslin’s review, contain traits similar to those considered in depth in the reviews studied above. Future research might usefully study this significant impact more closely, weaving in an awareness of the developing dynamics of global film productions and co-productions since the 1970s, and thereby focusing on Australian gothic as international cinema. Was, for example, the political impact of later films like The Proposition influenced, even marginally, by the (mis-)readings of Sarris and Kael? In conclusion here, it suffices to note that, even as the American reviewers reduced Australian cinema art to “blank” documentary or “neutral” anthropology, nevertheless they evidenced, in their strand-two responses, the power of the land (as presented in the cinematography and mise-en-scène) to call out—across an increasingly globalized domain of cinematic reception—for the fundamental importance of the connection between politics and art. Forging this connection, in which all lands and the peoples of all lands are implicated, should be, perhaps, the primary and ongoing concern of national and global cinemas of the uncanny, gothic mode, or perhaps even any mode. References Casablanca. Dir. Michael Curtiz. Warner Bros, 1942. Falconer, Delia. “Introduction.” The Penguin Book of the Road. Ed. Delia Falconer. Melbourne: Viking-Penguin Books, 2008. xi-xxvi. Gibson, Ross. South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992. Godden, Matt. “An Essay on Australian New Wave Cinema.” 9 Jan. 2013. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.golgotha.com.au/2013/01/09/an-essay-on-australian-new-wave-cinema/›. Gray, R. “Freud, ‘The Uncanny.’” 15 Nov. 2013. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://courses.washington.edu/freudlit/Uncanny.Notes.html›. Kael, Pauline. “Australians.” Review of My Brilliant Career. 15 Sep. 1980. Taking It All In. London: Marion Boyars, 1986. 54-62. Kael, Pauline. “Literary Echoes—Muffled.” Review of Outback [Wake in Fright]. 4 March 1972. Deeper into Movies. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press-Little, Brown and Company, 1973. 413-419. Kael, Pauline. “Saddle Sore: El Dorado, The War Wagon, The Way West.” Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. London: Arrow Books, 1987. 38-46. Kael, Pauline. “Torrid Zone.” Review of The Year of Living Dangerously. 21 Feb. 1983. Taking It All In. London: Marion Boyars, 1986. 451-456. Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. Dir. George Miller. Warner Bros, 1981. Maslin, Janet. “Film: Australian ‘Brilliant Career’ by Gillian Armstrong.” Review of My Brilliant Career. New York Times (6 Oct. 1979.): np. McClain, William. “Western, Go Home! Sergio Leone and the ‘Death of the Western’ in American Film Criticism.” Journal of Film and Video 62.1-2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 52-66. My Brilliant Career. Dir. Gillian Armstrong. Peace Arch, 1979. Picnic at Hanging Rock. Dir. Peter Weir. Picnic Productions, 1975. Rayner, Jonathan. Contemporary Australian Cinema: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Rueschmann, Eva. “Out of Place: Reading (Post) Colonial Landscapes as Gothic Space in Jane Campion’s Films.” Post Script (22 Dec. 2005). 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Out+of+place%3A+reading+%28post%29+colonial+landscapes+as+Gothic+space+in...-a0172169169›. Sarris, Andrew. “Films in Focus.” Review of My Brilliant Career. Village Voice (4 Feb. 1980): np. Sarris, Andrew. “Films in Focus: Journalistic Ethics in Java.” Review of The Year of Living Dangerously. Village Voice 28 (1 Feb. 1983): 59. Sarris, Andrew. “Liberation, Australian Style.” Review of My Brilliant Career. Village Voice (15 Oct. 1979): np. Sarris, Andrew. Politics and Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. The Last Wave. Dir. Peter Weir. Ayer Productions, 1977. The Proposition. Dir. John Hillcoat. First Look Pictures, 2005. The Year of Living Dangerously. Dir. Peter Weir. MGM, 1982. Tsiolkas, Christos. “Citizen Kael.” Review of Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark by Brian Kellow. The Monthly (Feb. 2012): 54-56. Wake in Fright. Dir. Ted Kotcheff. United Artists, 1971.

Despite numerous critics describing him as an auteur (i.e. a film-maker who ‘does’ everything and fulfils every production role [Bordwell and Thompson 37] and/or with a signature “world-view” detectable in his/her work [Caughie 10]), Rolf de Heer appears to have declined primary authorship of Dance Me to My Song (1997), his seventh in an oeuvre of twelve feature films. Indeed, the opening credits do not mention his name at all: it is only with the closing credits that the audience learns de Heer has directed the film. Rather, as the film commences, the viewer is informed by the titles that it is “A film by Heather Rose”, thus suggesting that the work is her singular creation. Direct and uncompromising, with its unflattering shots of the lead actor and writer (Heather Rose Slattery, a young woman born with cerebral palsy), the film may be read as a courageous self-portrait which finds the grace, humanity and humour trapped inside Rose’s twisted body. Alternatively, it may be read as yet another example of de Heer’s signature interest in foregrounding a world view which gives voice to marginalised characters such as the disabled or the disadvantaged. For example, the developmentally retarded eponyme of Bad Boy Bubby (1993) is eventually able to make art as a singer in a band and succeeds in creating a happy family with a wife and two kids. The ‘mute’ girl in The Quiet Room (1996) makes herself heard by her squabbling parents through her persistent activism. In Ten Canoes (2006) the Indigenous Australians cast themselves according to kinship ties, not according to the director’s choosing, and tell their story in their own uncolonised language. A cursory glance at the films of Rolf de Heer suggests he is overtly interested in conveying to the audience the often overlooked agency of his unlikely protagonists. In the ultra-competitive world of professional film-making it is rare to see primary authorship ceded by a director so generously. However, the allocation of authorship to a member of a marginalized population re-invigorates questions prompted by Andy Medhurst regarding a film’s “authorship test” (198) and its relationship to a subaltern community wherein he writes that “a biographical approach has more political justification if the project being undertaken is one concerned with the cultural history of a marginalized group” (202-3). Just as films by gay authors about gay characters may have greater credibility, as Medhurst posits, one might wonder would a film by a person with a disability about a character with the same disability be better received? Enabling authorship by an unknown, crippled woman such as Rose rather than a famous, able-bodied male such as de Heer may be cynically regarded as good (show) business in that it is politically correct. This essay therefore asks if the appellation “A film by Heather Rose” is appropriate for Dance Me to My Song. Whose agency in telling the story (or ‘doing’ the film-making), the able bodied Rolf de Heer or the disabled Heather Rose, is reflected in this cinematic production? In other words, whose voice is enabled when an audience receives this film? In attempting to answer these questions it is inevitable that Paul Darke’s concept of the “normality drama” (181) is referred to and questioned, as I argue that Dance Me to My Song makes groundbreaking departures from the conventions of the typical disability narrative. Heather Rose as Auteur Rose plays the film’s heroine, Julia, who like herself has cerebral palsy, a group of non-progressive, chronic disorders resulting from changes produced in the brain during the prenatal stages of life. Although severely affected physically, Rose suffered no intellectual impairment and had acted in Rolf de Heer’s cult hit Bad Boy Bubby five years before, a confidence-building experience that grew into an ongoing fascination with the filmmaking process. Subsequently, working with co-writer Frederick Stahl, she devised the scenario for this film, writing the lead role for herself and then proactively bringing it to de Heer’s attention. Rose wrote of de Heer’s deliberate lack of involvement in the script-writing process: “Rolf didn’t even want to read what we’d done so far, saying he didn’t want to interfere with our process” (de Heer, “Production Notes”). In 2002, aged 36, Rose died and Stahl reports in her obituary an excerpt from her diary: People see me as a person who has to be controlled. But let me tell you something, people. I am not! And I am going to make something real special of my life! I am going to go out there and grab life with both hands!!! I am going to make the most sexy and honest film about disability that has ever been made!! (Stahl, “Standing Room Only”) This proclamation of her ability and ambition in screen-writing is indicative of Rose’s desire to do. In a guest lecture Rose gave further insights into the active intent in writing Dance Me to My Song: I wanted to create a screenplay, but not just another soppy disability film, I wanted to make a hot sexy film, which showed the real world … The message I wanted to convey to an audience was “As people with disabilities, we have the same feelings and desires as others”. (Rose, “ISAAC 2000 Conference Presentation”) Rose went on to explain her strategy for winning over director de Heer: “Rolf was not sure about committing to the movie; I had to pester him really. I decided to invite him to my birthday party. It took a few drinks, but I got him to agree to be the director” (ibid) and with this revelation of her tactical approach her film-making agency is further evidenced. Rose’s proactive innovation is not just evident in her successfully approaching de Heer. Her screenplay serves as a radical exception to films featuring disabled persons, which, according to Paul Darke in 1998, typically involve the disabled protagonist struggling to triumph over the limitations imposed by their disability in their ‘admirable’ attempts to normalize. Such normality dramas are usually characterized by two generic themes: first, that the state of abnormality is nothing other than tragic because of its medical implications; and, second, that the struggle for normality, or some semblance of it in normalization – as represented in the film by the other characters – is unquestionably right owing to its axiomatic supremacy. (187) Darke argues that the so-called normality drama is “unambiguously a negation of ascribing any real social or individual value to the impaired or abnormal” (196), and that such dramas function to reinforce the able-bodied audience’s self image of normality and the notion of the disabled as the inferior Other. Able-bodied characters are typically portrayed positively in the normality drama: “A normality as represented in the decency and support of those characters who exist around, and for, the impaired central character. Thus many of the disabled characters in such narratives are bitter, frustrated and unfulfilled and either antisocial or asocial” (193). Darke then identifies The Elephant Man (David Lynch, 1980) and Born on the Fourth of July (Oliver Stone, 1989) as archetypal films of this genre. Even in films in which seemingly positive images of the disabled are featured, the protagonist is still to be regarded as the abnormal Other, because in comparison to the other characters within that narrative the impaired character is still a comparatively second-class citizen in the world of the film. My Left Foot is, as always, a prime example: Christy Brown may well be a writer, relatively wealthy and happy, but he is not seen as sexual in any way (194). However, Dance Me to My Song defies such generic restrictions: Julia’s temperament is upbeat and cheerful and her disability, rather than appearing tragic, is made to look healthy, not “second class”, in comparison with her physically attractive, able-bodied but deeply unhappy carer, Madelaine (Joey Kennedy). Within the first few minutes of the film we see Madelaine dissatisfied as she stands, inspecting her healthy, toned and naked body in the bathroom mirror, contrasted with vision of Julia’s twisted form, prostrate, pale and naked on the bed. Yet, in due course, it is the able-bodied girl who is shown to be insecure and lacking in character. Madelaine steals Julia’s money and calls her “spastic”. Foul-mouthed and short-tempered, Madelaine perversely positions Julia in her wheelchair to force her to watch as she has perfunctory sex with her latest boyfriend. Madelaine even masquerades as Julia, commandeering her voice synthesizer to give a fraudulently positive account of her on-the-job performance to the employment agency she works for. Madelaine’s “axiomatic supremacy” is thoroughly undermined and in the most striking contrast to the typical normality drama, Julia is unashamedly sexual: she is no Christy Brown. The affective juxtaposition of these two different personalities stems from the internal nature of Madelaine’s problems compared to the external nature of Julia’s problems. Madelaine has an emotional disability rather than a physical disability and several scenes in the film show her reduced to helpless tears. Then one day when Madelaine has left her to her own devices, Julia defiantly wheels herself outside and bumps into - almost literally - handsome, able-bodied Eddie (John Brumpton). Cheerfully determined, Julia wins him over and a lasting friendship is formed. Having seen the joy that sex brings to Madelaine, Julia also wants carnal fulfilment so she telephones Eddie and arranges a date. When Eddie arrives, he reads the text on her voice machine’s screen containing the title line to the film ‘Dance me to my song’ and they share a tender moment. Eddie’s gentleness as he dances Julia to her song (“Kizugu” written by Bernard Huber and John Laidler, as performed by Okapi Guitars) is simultaneously contrasted with the near-date-rapes Madelaine endures in her casual relationships. The conflict between Madeline and Julia is such that it prompts Albert Moran and Errol Vieth to categorize the film as “women’s melodrama”: Dance Me to My Song clearly belongs to the genre of the romance. However, it is also important to recognize it under the mantle of the women’s melodrama … because it has to do with a woman’s feelings and suffering, not so much because of the flow of circumstance but rather because of the wickedness and malevolence of another woman who is her enemy and rival. (198-9) Melodrama is a genre that frequently resorts to depicting disability in which a person condemned by society as disabled struggles to succeed in love: some prime examples include An Affair to Remember (Leo McCarey, 1957) involving a paraplegic woman, and The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) in which a strong-spirited but mute woman achieves love. The more conventional Hollywood romances typically involve attractive, able-bodied characters. In Dance Me to My Song the melodramatic conflict between the two remarkably different women at first seems dominated by Madelaine, who states: “I know I’m good looking, good in bed ... better off than you, you poor thing” in a stream-of-consciousness delivery in which Julia is constructed as listener rather than converser. Julia is further reduced to the status of sub-human as Madelaine says: “I wish you could eat like a normal person instead of a bloody animal” and her erstwhile boyfriend Trevor says: “She looks like a fuckin’ insect.” Even the benevolent Eddie says: “I don’t like leaving you alone but I guess you’re used to it.” To this the defiant Julia replies; “Please don’t talk about me in front of me like I’m an animal or not there at all.” Eddie is suitably chastised and when he treats her to an over-priced ice-cream the shop assistant says “Poor little thing … She’ll enjoy this, won’t she?” Julia smiles, types the words “Fuck me!”, and promptly drops the ice-cream on the floor. Eddie laughs supportively. “I’ll just get her another one,” says the flustered shop assistant, “and then get her out of here, please!” With striking eloquence, Julia wheels herself out of the shop, her voice machine announcing “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me”, as she departs exultantly. With this bold statement of independence and defiance in the face of patronising condescension, the audience sees Rose’s burgeoning strength of character and agency reflected in the onscreen character she has created. Dance Me to My Song and the films mentioned above are, however, rare exceptions in the many that dare represent disability on the screen at all, compliant as the majority are with Darke’s expectations of the normality drama. Significantly, the usual medical-model nexus in many normality films is ignored in Rose’s screenplay: no medication, hospitals or white laboratory coats are to be seen in Julia’s world. Finally, as I have described elsewhere, Julia is shown joyfully dancing in her wheelchair with Eddie while Madelaine proves her physical inferiority with a ‘dance’ of frustration around her broken-down car (see Starrs, "Dance"). In Rose’s authorial vision, audience’s expectations of yet another film of the normality drama genre are subverted as the disabled protagonist proves superior to her ‘normal’ adversary in their melodramatic rivalry for the sexual favours of an able-bodied love-interest. Rolf de Heer as Auteur De Heer does not like to dwell on the topic of auteurism: in an interview in 2007 he somewhat impatiently states: I don’t go in much for that sort of analysis that in the end is terminology. … Look, I write the damn things, and direct them, and I don’t completely produce them anymore – there are other people. If that makes me an auteur in other people’s terminologies, then fine. (Starrs, "Sounds" 20) De Heer has been described as a “remarkably non-egotistical filmmaker” (Davis “Working together”) which is possibly why he handed ownership of this film to Rose. Of the writer/actor who plied him with drink so he would agree to back her script, de Heer states: It is impossible to overstate the courage of the performance that you see on the screen. … Heather somehow found the means to respond on cue, to maintain the concentration, to move in the desired direction, all the myriad of acting fundamentals that we take for granted as normal things to do in our normal lives. (“Production NHotes”) De Heer’s willingness to shift authorship from director to writer/actor is representative of this film’s groundbreaking promotion of the potential for agency within disability. Rather than being passive and suffering, Rose is able to ‘do.’ As the lead actor she is central to the narrative. As the principle writer she is central to the film’s production. And she does both. But in conflict with this auteurial intent is the temptation to describe Dance Me to My Song as an autobiographical documentary, since it is Rose herself, with her unique and obvious physical handicap, playing the film’s heroine, Julia. In interview, however, De Heer apparently disagrees with this interpretation: Rolf de Heer is quick to point out, though, that the film is not a biography.“Not at all; only in the sense that writers use material from their own lives.Madelaine is merely the collection of the worst qualities of the worst carers Heather’s ever had.” Dance Me to My Song could be seen as a dramatised documentary, since it is Rose herself playing Julia, and her physical or surface life is so intense and she is so obviously handicapped. While he understands that response, de Heer draws a comparison with the first films that used black actors instead of white actors in blackface. “I don’t know how it felt emotionally to an audience, I wasn’t there, but I think that is the equivalent”. (Urban) An example of an actor wearing “black-face” to portray a cerebral palsy victim might well be Gus Trikonis’s 1980 film Touched By Love. In this, the disabled girl is unconvincingly played by the pretty, able-bodied actress Diane Lane. The true nature of the character’s disability is hidden and cosmeticized to Hollywood expectations. Compared to that inauthentic film, Rose’s screenwriting and performance in Dance Me to My Song is a self-penned fiction couched in unmediated reality and certainly warrants authorial recognition. Despite his unselfish credit-giving, de Heer’s direction of this remarkable film is nevertheless detectable. His auteur signature is especially evident in his technological employment of sound as I have argued elsewhere (see Starrs, "Awoval"). The first distinctly de Heer influence is the use of a binaural recording device - similar to that used in Bad Boy Bubby (1993) - to convey to the audience the laboured nature of Julia’s breathing and to subjectively align the audience with her point of view. This apparatus provides a disturbing sound bed that is part wheezing, part grunting. There is no escaping Julia’s physically unusual life, from her reliance on others for food, toilet and showering, to the half-strangled sounds emanating from her ineffectual larynx. But de Heer insists that Julia does speak, like Stephen Hawkings, via her Epson RealVoice computerized voice synthesizer, and thus Julia manages to retain her dignity. De Heer has her play this machine like a musical instrument, its neatly modulated feminine tones immediately prompting empathy. Rose Capp notes de Heer’s preoccupation with finding a voice for those minority groups within the population who struggle to be heard, stating: de Heer has been equally consistent in exploring the communicative difficulties underpinning troubled relationships. From the mute young protagonist of The Quiet Room to the aphasic heroine of Dance Me to My Song, De Heer’s films are frequently preoccupied with the profound inadequacy or outright failure of language as a means of communication (21). Certainly, the importance to Julia of her only means of communication, her voice synthesizer, is stressed by de Heer throughout the film. Everybody around her has, to varying degrees, problems in hearing correctly or understanding both what and how Julia communicates with her alien mode of conversing, and she is frequently asked to repeat herself. Even the well-meaning Eddie says: “I don’t know what the machine is trying to say”. But it is ultimately via her voice synthesizer that Julia expresses her indomitable character. When first she meets Eddie, she types: “Please put my voice machine on my chair, STUPID.” She proudly declares ownership of a condom found in the bathroom with “It’s mine!” The callous Madelaine soon realizes Julia’s strength is in her voice machine and withholds access to the device as punishment for if she takes it away then Julia is less demanding for the self-centred carer. Indeed, the film which starts off portraying the physical superiority of Madelaine soon shows us that the carer’s life, for all her able-bodied, free-love ways, is far more miserable than Julia’s. As de Heer has done in many of his other films, a voice has been given to those who might otherwise not be heard through significant decision making in direction. In Rose’s case, this is achieved most obviously via her electric voice synthesizer. I have also suggested elsewhere (see Starrs, "Dance") that de Heer has helped find a second voice for Rose via the language of dance, and in doing so has expanded the audience’s understandings of quality of life for the disabled, as per Mike Oliver’s social model of disability, rather than the more usual medical model of disability. Empowered by her act of courage with Eddie, Julia sacks her uncaring ‘carer’ and the film ends optimistically with Julia and her new man dancing on the front porch. By picturing the couple in long shot and from above, Julia’s joyous dance of triumph is depicted as ordinary, normal and not deserving of close examination. This happy ending is intercut with a shot of Madeline and her broken down car, performing her own frustrated dance and this further emphasizes that she was unable to ‘dance’ (i.e. communicate and compete) with Julia. The disabled performer such as Rose, whether deliberately appropriating a role or passively accepting it, usually struggles to placate two contrasting realities: (s)he is at once invisible in the public world of interhuman relations and simultaneously hyper-visible due to physical Otherness and subsequent instantaneous typecasting. But by the end of Dance Me to My Song, Rose and de Heer have subverted this notion of the disabled performer grappling with the dual roles of invisible victim and hyper-visible victim by depicting Julia as socially and physically adept. She ‘wins the guy’ and dances her victory as de Heer’s inspirational camera looks down at her success like an omniscient and pleased god. Film academic Vivian Sobchack writes of the phenomenology of dance choreography for the disabled and her own experience of waltzing with the maker of her prosthetic leg, Steve, with the comment: “for the moment I did displace focus on my bodily immanence to the transcendent ensemble of our movement and I really began to waltz” (65). It is easy to imagine Rose’s own, similar feeling of bodily transcendence in the closing shot of Dance Me to My Song as she shows she can ‘dance’ better than her able-bodied rival, content as she is with her self-identity. Conclusion: Validation of the Auteurial OtherRolf de Heer was a well-known film-maker by the time he directed Dance Me to My Song. His films Bad Boy Bubby (1993) and The Quiet Room (1996) had both screened at the Cannes International Film Festival. He was rapidly developing a reputation for non-mainstream representations of marginalised, subaltern populations, a cinematic trajectory that was to be further consolidated by later films privileging the voice of Indigenous Peoples in The Tracker (2002) and Ten Canoes (2006), the latter winning the Special Jury prize at Cannes. His films often feature unlikely protagonists or as Liz Ferrier writes, are “characterised by vulnerable bodies … feminised … none of whom embody hegemonic masculinity” (65): they are the opposite of Hollywood’s hyper-masculine, hard-bodied, controlling heroes. With a nascent politically correct worldview proving popular, de Heer may have considered the assigning of authorship to Rose a marketable idea, her being representative of a marginalized group, which as Andy Medhurst might argue, may be more politically justifiable, as it apparently is with films of gay authorship. However, it must be emphasized that there is no evidence that de Heer’s reticence about claiming authorship of Dance Me to My Song is motivated by pecuniary interests, nor does he seem to have been trying to distance himself from the project through embarrassment or dissatisfaction with the film or its relatively unknown writer/actor. Rather, he seems to be giving credit for authorship where credit is due, for as a result of Rose’s tenacity and agency this film is, in two ways, her creative success. Firstly, it is a rare exception to the disability film genre defined by Paul Darke as the “normality drama” because in the film’s diegesis, Julia is shown triumphing not simply over the limitations of her disability, but over her able-bodied rival in love as well: she ‘dances’ better than the ‘normal’ Madelaine. Secondly, in her gaining possession of the primary credits, and the mantle of the film’s primary author, Rose is shown triumphing over other aspiring able-bodied film-makers in the notoriously competitive film-making industry. Despite being an unpublished and unknown author, the label “A film by Heather Rose” is, I believe, a deserved coup for the woman who set out to make “the most sexy and honest film about disability ever made”. As with de Heer’s other films in which marginalised peoples are given voice, he demonstrates a desire not to subjugate the Other, but to validate and empower him/her. He both acknowledges their authorial voices and credits them as essential beings, and in enabling such subaltern populations to be heard, willingly cedes his privileged position as a successful, white, male, able-bodied film-maker. In the credits of this film he seems to be saying ‘I may be an auteur, but Heather Rose is a no less able auteur’. References Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction, 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993. Capp, Rose. “Alexandra and the de Heer Project.” RealTime + Onscreen 56 (Aug.-Sep. 2003): 21. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue56/7153›. Caughie, John. “Introduction”. Theories of Authorship. Ed. John Caughie. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 9-16. Darke, Paul. “Cinematic Representations of Disability.” The Disability Reader. Ed. Tom Shakespeare. London and New York: Cassell, 1988. 181-198. Davis, Therese. “Working Together: Two Cultures, One Film, Many Canoes.” Senses of Cinema 2006. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/06/41/ten-canoes.html›. De Heer, Rolf. “Production Notes.” Vertigo Productions. Undated. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.vertigoproductions.com.au/information.php?film_id=10&display=notes›. Ferrier, Liz. “Vulnerable Bodies: Creative Disabilities in Contemporary Australian Film.” Australian Cinema in the 1990s. Ed. Ian Craven. London and Portland: Frank Cass and Co., 2001. 57-78. Medhurst, Andy. “That Special Thrill: Brief Encounter, Homosexuality and Authorship.” Screen 32.2 (1991): 197-208. Moran, Albert, and Errol Veith. Film in Australia: An Introduction. Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 2006. Oliver, Mike. Social Work with Disabled People. Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1983. Rose Slattery, Heather. “ISAAC 2000 Conference Presentation.” Words+ n.d. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.words-plus.com/website/stories/isaac2000.htm›. Sobchack, Vivian. “‘Choreography for One, Two, and Three Legs’ (A Phenomenological Meditation in Movements).” Topoi 24.1 (2005): 55-66. Stahl, Frederick. “Standing Room Only for a Thunderbolt in a Wheelchair,” Sydney Morning Herald 31 Oct. 2002. 6 June 2008 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/10/30/1035683471529.html›. Starrs, D. Bruno. “Sounds of Silence: An Interview with Rolf de Heer.” Metro 152 (2007): 18-21. ———. “An avowal of male lack: Sound in Rolf de Heer’s The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2003).” Metro 156 (2008): 148-153. ———. “Dance Me to My Song (Rolf de Heer 1997): The Story of a Disabled Dancer.” Proceedings Scopic Bodies Dance Studies Research Seminar Series 2007. Ed. Mark Harvey. University of Auckland, 2008 (in press). Urban, Andrew L. “Dance Me to My Song, Rolf de Heer, Australia.” Film Festivals 1988. 6 June 2008. ‹http://www.filmfestivals.com/cannes98/selofus9.htm›.

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

Introduction For some time now there has been a strong critical framework that identifies a significant shift in the politics of homosexuality in the Anglo-oriented West over the last fifteen to twenty years. In this article I draw on this framework to describe the current moment in the Australian cultural politics of homosexuality. I focus on the issue of same-sex marriage as a key indicator of the currently emerging era. I then turn to two Australian texts about marriage that were produced in “the period before” this time, with the aim of recovering what has been partially lost from current formations of GLBT politics and from available memories of the past. Critical Histories Lisa Duggan’s term “the new homonormativity” is the frame that has gained widest currency among writers who point to the incorporation of certain versions of homosexuality into the neo-liberal (U.S.) mainstream. She identifies a sexual politics that “does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (50). More recently, writing of the period inaugurated by the so-called “war on terror” and following Duggan, Jasbir Puar has introduced the term “homonationalism” to refer to “a collusion between homosexuality and American nationalism that is generated both by national rhetorics of patriotic inclusion and by gay and queer subjects themselves” (39). Damien Riggs adds the claims of Indigenous peoples in ongoing colonial contexts to the ground from which contemporary GLBT political claims can be critiqued. He concludes that while “queer people” will need to continue to struggle for rights, it is likely that cultural intelligibility “as a subject of the nation” will be extended only to those “who are established through the language of the nation (i.e., one that is founded upon the denial of colonial violence)” (97). Most writers who follow these kinds of critical analyses refer to the discursive place of homosexual couples and families, specifically marriage. For Duggan it was the increasing focus on “full gay access to marriage and military service” that defined homonormativity (50). Puar allows for a diversity of meanings of same-sex marriage, but claims that for many it is “a demand for reinstatement of white privileges and rights—rights of property and inheritance in particular” (29; see also Riggs 66–70). Of course not all authors locate the political focus on same-sex marriage and its effects as a conservative affair. British scholar Jeffrey Weeks stresses what “we” have gained and celebrates the rise of the discourse of human rights in relation to sexuality. “The very ordinariness of recognized same-sex unions in a culture which until recently cast homosexuality into secret corners and dark whispers is surely the most extraordinary achievement of all” (198), he writes. Australian historian Graham Willett takes a similar approach in his assessment of recent Australian history. Noting the near achievement of “the legal equality agenda for gay people” (“Homos” 187), he notes that “the gay and lesbian movement went on reshaping Australian values and culture and society through the Howard years” (193). In his account it did this in spite of, and untainted by, the dominance of Howard's values and programs. The Howard period was “littered with episodes of insult and discrimination … [as the] government tried to stem the tide of gay, lesbian and transgender rights that had been flowing so strongly since 1969”, Willett writes (188). My own analysis of the Howard years acknowledges the significant progress made in law reform relating to same-sex couples and lesbian and gay parents but draws attention to its mutual constitution with the dominance of the white, patriarchal, neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideologies which dominated social and political life (2013 forthcoming). I argue that the costs of reform, fought for predominantly by white and middle class lesbians and gay men deploying homonormative discourses, included the creation of new identities—single lesbians and gays whose identity did not fit mainstream notions, non-monogamous couples and bad mothers—which were positioned on the illegitimate side of the newly enfranchised. Further the success of the reforms marginalised critical perspectives that are, for many, necessary tools for survival in socially conservative neoliberal times. Same-Sex Marriage in Australia The focus on same-sex marriage in the Australian context was initiated in April 2004 by then Prime Minister Howard. An election was looming and two same-sex couples were seeking recognition of their Canadian marriages through the courts. With little warning, Howard announced that he would amend the Federal Marriage Act to specify that marriage could only take place between a man and a woman. His amendment also prevented the recognition of same-sex marriages undertaken overseas. Legislation was rushed through the parliament in August of that year. In response, Australian Marriage Equality was formed in 2004 and remains at the centre of the GLBT movement. Since that time political rallies in support of marriage equality have been held regularly and the issue has become the key vehicle through which gay politics is understood. Australians across the board increasingly support same-sex marriage (over 60% in 2012) and a growing majority of gay and lesbian people would marry if they could (54% in 2010) (AME). Carol Johnson et al. note that while there are some critiques, most GLBT people see marriage “as a major equality issue” (Johnson, Maddison and Partridge 37). The degree to which Howard’s move changed the terrain of GLBT politics cannot be underestimated. The idea and practice of (non-legal) homosexual marriage in Australia is not new. And some individuals, publicly and privately, were calling for legal marriage for same-sex couples before 2004 (e.g. Baird, “Kerryn and Jackie”). But before 2004 legal marriage did not inspire great interest among GLBT people nor have great support among them. Only weeks before Howard’s announcement, Victorian legal academic and co-convenor of the Victorian Gay & Lesbian Rights Lobby Miranda Stewart concluded an article about same-sex relationship law reform in Victoria with a call to “begin the debate about gay marriage” (80, emphasis added). She noted that the growing number of Australian couples married overseas would influence thinking about marriage in Australia. She also asked “do we really want to be part of that ‘old edifice’ of marriage?” (80). Late in 2003 the co-convenors of the NSW Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby declared that “many members of our community are not interested in marriage” and argued that there were more pressing, and more practical, issues for the Lobby to be focused on (Cerise and McGrory 5). In 2001 Jenni Millbank and Wayne Morgan, two leading legal academics and activists in the arena of same-sex relationship politics in Australia, wrote that “The notion of ‘same-sex marriage’ is quite alien to Australia” (Millbank and Morgan, 295). They pointed to the then legal recognition of heterosexual de facto relationships as the specific context in Australia, which meant that marriage was not viewed as "paradigmatic" (296). In 1998 a community consultation conducted by the Equal Opportunity Commission in Victoria found that “legalising marriage for same-sex couples did not enjoy broad based support from either the community at large or the gay and lesbian community” (Stewart 76). Alongside this general lack of interest in marriage, from the early-mid 1990s gay and lesbian rights groups in each state and territory began to think about, if not campaign for, law reform to give same-sex couples the same entitlements as heterosexual de facto couples. The eventual campaigns differed from state to state, and included moments of high profile public activity, but were in the main low key affairs that met with broadly sympathetic responses from state and territory ALP governments (Millbank). The previous reforms in every state that accorded heterosexual de facto couples near equality with married couples meant that gay and lesbian couples in Australia could gain most of the privileges available to heterosexual couples without having to encroach on the sacred territory (and federal domain) of marriage. In 2004 when Howard announced his marriage bill only South Australia had not reformed its law. Notwithstanding these reforms, there were matters relating to lesbian and gay parenting that remained in need of reform in nearly every jurisdiction. Further, Howard’s aggressive move in 2004 had been preceded by his dogged refusal to consider any federal legislation to remove discrimination. But in 2008 the new Rudd government enacted legislation to remove all discrimination against same-sex couples in federal law, with marriage and (ironically) the lack of anti-discrimination legislation on the grounds of sexuality the exceptions, and at the time of writing most states have made or will soon implement the reforms that give full lesbian and gay parenting rights. In his comprehensive account of gay politics from the 1950s onwards, published in 2000, Graham Willett does not mention marriage at all, and deals with the moves to recognise same-sex relationships in one sixteen line paragraph (Living 249). Willett’s book concludes with the decriminalisation of sex between men across every state of Australia. It was written just as the demand for relationship reform was becoming the central issue of GLBT politics. In this sense, the book marks the end of one era of homosexual politics and the beginning of the next which, after 2004, became organised around the desire for marriage. This understanding of the recent gay past has become common sense. In a recent article in the Adelaide gay paper blaze a young male journalist wrote of the time since the early 1970s that “the gay rights movement has shifted from the issue of decriminalising homosexuality nationwide to now lobbying for full equal rights for gay people” (Dunkin 3). While this (reductive and male-focused) characterisation is not the only one possible, I simply note that this view of past and future progress has wide currency. The shift of attention in this period to the demand for marriage is an intensification and narrowing of political focus in a period of almost universal turn by state and federal governments to neoliberalism and an uneven turn to neo-conservatism, directions which have detrimental effects on the lives of many people already marginalised by discourses of sexuality, race, class, gender, migration status, (dis)ability and so on. While the shift to the focus on marriage from 2004 might be understood as the logical final step in gaining equal status for gay and lesbian relationships (albeit one with little enthusiasm from the GLBT political communities before 2004), the initiation of this shift by Prime Minister Howard, with little preparatory debate in the LGBT political communities, meant that the issue emerged onto the Australian political agenda in terms defined by the (neo)conservative side of politics. Further, it is an example of identity politics which, as Lisa Duggan has observed in the US case, is “increasingly divorced from any critique of global capitalism” and settles for “a stripped-down equality, paradoxically imagined as compatible with persistent overall inequality” (xx). Brides before Marriage In the last part of this article I turn to two texts produced early in 1994—an activist document and an ephemeral performance during the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade. If we point only to the end of the era of (de)criminalisation, then the year 1997, when the last state, Tasmania, decriminalised male homosex, marks the shift from one era of the regulation of homosexuality to another. But 1994 bore the seeds of the new era too. Of course attempts to identify a single year as the border between one era and the next are rhetorical devices. But some significant events in 1994 make it a year of note. The Australian films Priscilla: Queen of the Desert and The Sum of Us were both released in 1994, marking particular Australian contributions to the growing presence of gay and lesbian characters in Western popular culture (e.g. Hamer and Budge). 1994 was the UN International Year of the Family (IYF) and the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras chose the theme “We are Family” and published endorsement from both Prime Minister Keating and the federal opposition leader John Hewson in their program. In 1994 the ACT became the first Australian jurisdiction to pass legislation that recognised the rights and entitlements of same-sex couples, albeit in a very limited and preliminary form (Millbank 29). The NSW Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby's (GLRL) 1994 discussion paper, The Bride Wore Pink, can be pinpointed as the formal start to community-based activism for the legal recognition of same-sex relationships. It was a revision of an earlier version that had been the basis for discussion among (largely inner Sydney) gay and lesbian communities where there had been lively debate and dissent (Zetlein, Lesbian Bodies 48–57). The 1994 version recommended that the NSW government amend the existing definition of de facto in various pieces of legislation to include lesbian and gay relationships and close non-cohabiting interdependent relationships as well. This was judged to be politically feasible. In 1999 NSW became the first state to implement wide ranging reforms of this nature although these were narrower than called for by the GLRL, “including lesser number of Acts amended and narrower application and definition of the non-couple category” (Millbank 10). My concern here is not with the politics that preceded or followed the 1994 version of The Bride, but with the document itself. Notwithstanding its status for some as a document of limited political vision, The Bride bore clear traces of the feminist and liberationist thinking, the experiences of the AIDS crisis in Sydney, and the disagreements about relationships within lesbian and gay communities that characterised the milieu from which it emerged. Marriage was clearly rejected, for reasons of political impossibility but also in light of a list of criticisms of its implication in patriarchal hierarchies of relationship value (31–2). Feminist analysis of relationships was apparent throughout the consideration of pros and cons of different legislative options. Conflict and differences of opinion were evident. So was humour. The proliferation of lesbian and gay commitment ceremonies was listed as both a pro and a con of marriage. On the one hand "just think about the prezzies” (31); on the other, “what will you wear” (32). As well as recommending change to the definition of de facto, The Bride recommended the allocation of state funds to consider “the appropriateness or otherwise of bestowing entitlements on the basis of relationships,” “the focusing on monogamy, exclusivity and blood relations” and the need for broader definitions of “relationships” in state legislation (3). In a gesture towards a political agenda beyond narrowly defined lesbian and gay interests, The Bride also recommended that “the lesbian and gay community join together with other groups to lobby for the removal of the cohabitation rule in the Social Security Act 1991” (federal legislation) (34). This measure would mean that the payment of benefits and pensions would not be judged in the basis of a person’s relationship status. While these radical recommendations may not have been energetically pursued by the GLRL, their presence in The Bride records their currency at the time. The other text I wish to excavate from 1994 is the “flotilla of lesbian brides” in the 1994 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. These lesbians later appeared in the April 1994 issue of Sydney lesbian magazine Lesbians on the Loose, and they have a public afterlife in a photo by Sydney photographer C Moore Hardy held in the City of Sydney archives (City of Sydney). The group of between a dozen and twenty lesbians (it is hard to tell from the photos) was dressed in waist-to-ankle tulle skirts, white bras and white top hats. Many wore black boots. Unshaven underarm hair is clearly visible. Many wore long necklaces around their necks and the magazine photo makes clear that one bride has a black whip tucked into the band of her skirt. In an article about lesbians and legal recognition of their relationships published in 1995, Sarah Zetlein referred to the brides as “chicks in white satin” (“Chicks”). This chick was a figure that refused the binary distinction between being inside and outside the law, which Zetlein argued characterised thinking about the then emerging possibilities of the legal recognition of lesbian (and gay) relationships. Zetlein wrote that “the chick in white satin”: Represents a politics which moves beyond the concerns of one’s own identity and demands for inclusion to exclusion to a radical reconceptualisation of social relations. She de(con)structs and (re) constructs. … The chick in white satin’s resistance often lies in her exposure and manipulation of her regulation. It is not so much a matter of saying ‘no’ to marriage outright, or arguing only for a ‘piecemeal’ approach to legal relationship regulation, or lobbying for de facto inclusion as was recommended by The Bride Wore Pink, but perverting the understanding of what these legally-sanctioned sexual, social and economic relationships mean, hence undermining their shaky straight foundations.(“Chicks” 56–57) Looking back to 1994 from a time nearly twenty years later when (straight) lesbian brides are celebrated by GLBT culture, incorporated into the mainstream and constitute a market al.ready anticipated by “the wedding industrial complex” (Ingraham), the “flotilla of lesbian brides” can be read as a prescient queer negotiation of their time. It would be a mistake to read the brides only in terms of a nascent interest in legally endorsed same-sex marriage. In my own limited experience, some lesbians have always had a thing for dressing up in wedding garb—as brides or bridesmaids. The lesbian brides marching group gave expression to this desire in queer ways. The brides were not paired into couples. Zetlein writes that “the chick in white satin … [has] a veritable posse of her girlfriends with her (and they are all the brides)” (“Chicks” 63, original emphasis). Their costumes were recognisably bridal but also recognisably parodic and subverting; white but hardly innocent; the tulle and bras were feminine but the top hats were accessories conventionally worn by the groom and his men; the underarm hair a sign of feminist body politics. The whip signalled the lesbian underground sexual culture that flourished in Sydney in the early 1990s (O’Sullivan). The black boots were both lesbian street fashion and sensible shoes for marching! Conclusion It would be incorrect to say that GLBT politics and lesbian and gay couples who desire legal marriage in post-2004 Australia bear no trace of the history of ambivalence, critique and parody of marriage and weddings that have come before. The multiple voices in the 2011 collection of “Australian perspectives on same-sex marriage” (Marsh) put the lie to this claim. But in a climate where our radical pasts are repeatedly forgotten and lesbian and gay couples increasingly desire legal marriage, the political argument is hell-bent on inclusion in the mainstream. There seems to be little interest in a dance around the margins of inclusion/exclusion. I add my voice to the concern with the near exclusive focus on marriage and the terms on which it is sought. It is not a liberationist politics to which I have returned in recalling The Bride Wore Pink and the lesbian brides of the 1994 Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, but rather an attention to the differences in the diverse collective histories of non-heterosexual politics. The examples I elaborate are hardly cases of radical difference. But even these instances might remind us that “we” have never been on a single road to equality: there may be incommensurable differences between “us” as much as commonalities. They also remind that desires for inclusion and recognition by the state should be leavened with a strong dose of laughter as well as with critical political analysis. References Australian Marriage Equality (AME). “Public Opinion Nationally.” 22 Oct. 2012. ‹http://www.australianmarriageequality.com/wp/who-supports-equality/a-majority-of-australians-support-marriage-equality/›. Baird, Barbara. “The Politics of Homosexuality in Howard's Australia.” Acts of Love and Lust: Sexuality in Australia from 1945-2010. Eds. Lisa Featherstone, Rebecca Jennings and Robert Reynolds. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013 (forthcoming). —. “‘Kerryn and Jackie’: Thinking Historically about Lesbian Marriages.” Australian Historical Studies 126 (2005): 253–271. Butler, Judith. “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” Differences 13.1 (2002): 14–44. Cerise, Somali, and Rob McGrory. “Why Marriage Is Not a Priority.” Sydney Star Observer 28 Aug. 2003: 5. City of Sydney Archives [061\061352] (C. Moore Hardy Collection). ‹http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org//image/40440?zoom_highlight=c+moore+hardy›. Duggan Lisa. The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press, 2003. Dunkin, Alex. “Hunter to Speak at Dr Duncan Memorial.” blaze 290 (August 2012): 3. Hamer, Diane, and Belinda Budege, Eds. The Good Bad And The Gorgeous: Popular Culture's Romance With Lesbianism. London: Pandora, 1994. Ingraham, Chrys. White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture, 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2008. Johnson, Carol, and Sarah Maddison, and Emma Partridge. “Australia: Parties, Federalism and Rights Agendas.” The Lesbian and Gay Movement and the State. Ed. Manon Tremblay, David Paternotte and Carol Johnson. Surrey: Ashgate, 2011. 27–42. Lesbian and Gay Legal Rights Service. The Bride Wore Pink, 2nd ed. Sydney: GLRL, 1994. Marsh, Victor, ed. Speak Now: Australian Perspectives on Same-Sex Marriage. Melbourne: Clouds of Mgaellan, 2011. Millbank Jenni, “Recognition of Lesbian and Gay Families in Australian Law—Part one: Couples.” Federal Law Review 34 (2006): 1–44Millbank, Jenni, and Wayne Morgan. “Let Them Eat Cake and Ice Cream: Wanting Something ‘More’ from the Relationship Recognition Menu.” Legal Recognition of Same-Sex Partnerships: A Study of National, European and International Law. Ed. Robert Wintermute and Mads Andenaes. Portland: Hart Publishing, 2001. 295–316. O'Sullivan Kimberley. “Dangerous Desire: Lesbianism as Sex or Politics.” Ed. Jill Julius Matthews. Sex in Public: Australian Sexual Cultures Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1997. 120–23. Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke UP, 2007 Stewart, Miranda, “It’s a Queer Thing: Campaigning for Equality and Social Justice for Lesbians and Gay Men”. Alternative Law Journal 29.2 (April 2004): 75–80. Walker, Kristen. “The Same-Sex Marriage Debate in Australia.” The International Journal of Human Rights 11.1–2 (2007): 109–130. Weeks, Jeffrey. The World We Have Won: The Remaking of Erotic and Intimate Life. Abindgdon: Routledge, 2007. Willett, Graham. Living Out Loud: A History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2000. Willett, Graham. “Howard and the Homos.” Social Movement Studies 9.2 (2010): 187–199. Zetlein, Sarah. Lesbian Bodies Before the Law: Intimate Relations and Regulatory Fictions. Honours Thesis, University of Adelaide, 1994. —. “Lesbian Bodies before the Law: Chicks in White Satin.” Australian Feminist Law Journal 5 (1995): 48–63.

The autobiographical documentary film “18q – a valuable life”, is one attempt to redefine the place of disability in contemporary western society. My work presents some key moments in my life and that of my family since the birth of my youngest child, Allycia in 1995. Allycia was born with a rare genetic condition affecting the 18th chromosome resulting in her experiencing the world somewhat differently to the rest of the family. The condition, which manifests in a myriad of ways with varying levels of severity, affects individuals’ physical and intellectual development (Chromosome 18, n. pag.). While the film outlines the condition and Allycia’s medical history, the work is primarily concerned with the experiences of the family and offering an alternate story of disability as “other”. Drawing on Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s notion of shape structuring story ("Shape") and Margrit Shildrick’s discussion of becoming vulnerable as theoretical foundations, I reflect on how the making of the film has challenged my previously held views about disability and ultimately about myself. The Film & Disability “18q – a valuable life” introduces a new, previously “invisible” shape in the form of bodies coded as Chromosome 18 to the screen. The initial impulse to make the film was driven by a need to provide a media presence for a rare genetic condition known collectively as Chromosome 18 (Chromosome 18, n. pag.) where previously there was none. This impulse was fuelled by a desire to tell a different story, our story; a story about what life can be like when a child with intellectual and physical impairment is born into one’s family. This different story is, in Garland Thompson’s terms, one that “insists that shape structures story” (114) and endeavours to contribute to recasting disability “as an occasion for exuberant flourishing” (Garland Thompson 114). The categorisation and depiction of people with disability in western society’s media have been scrutinised by many writers including Mitchell and Snyder ("Representations"; "Visual"), Oliver and Norden who point out that negatively charged stereotypical representations of the disabled continue to proliferate in the mediasphere. Englandkennedy for example examines the portrayal of the new disability classification Attention Deficit Disorder and is highly critical of its representation in programs such as The Simpsons (1989-2008) and films such as Pecker (1998). She asserts, “few media representations of ADD exist and most are inaccurate; they reflect and reinforce social concerns and negative stereotypes” (117) to the detriment of the condition being better understood by their audiences. However, Englandkennedy also identifies the positive possibilities for informed media representations that offer new models and stories about disability, citing works such as Children of a Lesser God (1986) and The Bone Collector (1999) as examples of shifts in fictional story telling modes. There are also shifts in recent documentary films such as My Flesh and Blood (2004), Tarnation (2003) and Murderball (2005) which provide insightful, powerful and engaging stories about disability. I suggest however that they still rely upon the stereotypical modes identified by numerous disability studies scholars. For example, Darke’s (n. pag.) heroic mother figure and disabled outsider and victim are depicted in the extreme in My Flesh and Blood and Tarnation respectively, whilst Murderball, as powerful as it is, still constructs disability as “something” to be overcome and is celebrated via the character construction of the “super-crip” (Englandkennedy 99). These stories are vital and insightful developments in challenging and re-shaping the many stigmas associated with disability, but they remain, for the most part, inaccessible to me in terms of my place in the world as a person parenting a little girl with physical and intellectual impairment. Able to Live The opening of the film features footage of my two older children Adam and Kristina, as “normal”, active children. These idyllic images are interrupted by an image of me by Allycia’s bedside where, as an infant, she is attached to life saving machines. She is at once “othered” to her active, healthy siblings. Her survival was reliant, and remains so, albeit to a much lesser extent, upon the intrusion of machines, administering of medication and the intervention of strangers. The prospect of her dying rendered me powerless, vulnerable; I lacked the means to sustain her life. To hand over my child to strangers, knowing they would carve her tiny chest open, suspend the beating of her already frail heart and attempt to repair it, was to surrender to the unknown without guarantees; the only surety being she would cease to be if I did not. Allycia survived surgery. This triumph however, was recast in the shadow of abnormality as outlined in the film when genetic screening of her DNA revealed she had been born with a rare genetic abnormality coded as 18q23 deletion. This information meant she was missing a part of her eighteenth chromosome and the literature available at that time (in 1997) gave little cause for hope – she was physically and intellectually retarded. This news, delivered to me by a genetic counsellor, was coupled with advice to ensure my daughter enjoyed “quality of life”. The words, “rare genetic abnormality” and “retarded” succeeded in effectively “othering” Allycia to me, to my other two children and the general population. My knowledge and experience with people with genetic abnormalities was minimal and synonymous with loss, sadness, suffering and sacrifice and had little to do with quality of life. She was frail and I was confronted with the loss of a “normal” child that would surely result in the “loss” of my own life when framed within this bleak, imagined life that lay before me; her disability, her otherness, her vulnerability signalled my own. As unpalatable as it is for me to use the word monstrous with reference to my daughter, Shildrick’s work, aligning the disabled experience with the monstrous and the possibility of becoming via a refiguring of vulnerability, resonates somewhat with my encounter with my vulnerable self. Schildrick proposes that “any being who traverses the liminal spaces that evade classification takes on the potential to confound normative identity” (6). As Allycia’s mother, I find Shildrick’s assertion that the monstrous “remains excessive of any category, it always claims us, always touches us and implicates us in its own becoming” (6) is particularly pertinent. This is not to say that Schildrick’s notion of the monstrous is an unproblematic one. Indeed Kaul reminds us that: to identify disabled bodies too closely with the monstrous seems to risk leaving us out of universal, as well as particular, experience, entirely in the figurative. (11) Schildrick’s notion of the universality of vulnerability however is implicit in her reference to that which confounds and disturbs us, and it is an important one. Clearly Allycia’s arrival has claimed me, touched me; I am intimately implicated in her becoming. I could not have anticipated however the degree to which she has been intertwined with my own becoming. Her arrival, in retrospect crystallised for me Shildrick’s proposition that “we are already without boundaries, already vulnerable” (6). The film does not shy away from the difficulties confronting Allycia and my family and other members of the chromosome 18 community. I have attempted however to portray our environment and culture as contributing factors and challenge the myth of medicine as a perfect science or answer to the myriad of challenges of navigating life with a disability in contemporary society. This was a difficult undertaking as I did not want the work to degenerate into one that was reliant on blame or continued in the construction of people with disability as victims. I have been mindful of balancing the sometimes painful reality of our lives with those moments that have brought us a sense of accomplishment or delight. Part of the delight of our lives is exemplified when my sister Julie articulates the difference in Allycia’s experiences as compared to her own nine year old daughter, Lydia. Julie succeeds in valorising Allycia’s freedom to be herself by juxtaposing her own daughter’s preoccupation with “what others think” and her level of self consciousness in social contexts. Julie also highlights Lydia’s awareness of Allycia’s difference, via narration over footage of Lydia assisting Allycia, and asserts that this role of becoming a helper is a positive attribute for Lydia’s development. Able to Laugh Including humour in the film was a vital ingredient in the reframing of disability in our lives and is employed as a device to enhance the accessibility of the text to an audience. The film is quite dialogue driven in furnishing background knowledge and runs the risk at times, when characters reveal some of their more painful experiences, of degenerating into a tale of despair. Humour acts as device to lift the overall mood of the film. The humour is in part structured by my failures and incompetence – particularly in reference to my command (or rather lack) of public transport both in Australia and overseas. While the events depicted did occur – my missing a ferry and losing our way in the United States – their inclusion in the film is used as a device to show me, as the able bodied person; the adult ‘able’ mother, with flaws and all. This deliberate act endeavours to re-shape the “heroic mother” stereotype. A wistful form of humour also emerges when my vulnerability becomes apparent in a sequence where I break down and cry, feeling the burden in that moment of the first eleven years of Allycia’s life. Here Allycia as carer emerges as she uses our favourite toy to interrupt my crying, succeeding in turning my tears into a gentle smile. Her maturity and ability to connect with my sadness and the need to make me feel better are apparent and serve to challenge the status of intellectual impairment as burden. This sequence also served to help me laugh at myself in quite a different way after spending many hours confronted with the many faces that are mine during the editing process. I experienced a great deal of discomfort in front of the camera due to feelings of self-consciousness and being on display. That discomfort paled into insignificance when I then had to watch myself on the monitor and triggered a parallel journey alongside the making of the film as I continued to view myself over time. Those images showing my distress, my face contorted with tears as I struggled to maintain control made me cry for quite a while afterwards. I felt a strange empathy for myself – as if viewing someone else’s pain although it was mine, simultaneously the same and other. Chris Sarra’s “notion of a common core otherness as constituting the essence of human being” is one that resonates closely with these aspects. Sarra reinterprets Bhaskar (5) arguing that “we should regard the same as a tiny ripple on the sea of otherness”, enabling us “to enshrine the right to be other” capturing “something of the wonder and strangeness of being” (5). Over time I have become used to seeing these images and have laughed at myself. I believe becoming accustomed to seeing myself, aging as I have during these years, has been a useful process. I have become "more" comfortable with seeing that face, my face in another time. In essence I have been required to sit with my own vulnerabilities and have gained a deeper acceptance of my own fragility and in a sense, my own mortality. This idea of becoming “used to”, and more accepting of the images I was previously uncomfortable with has given me a renewed hope for our community in particular, the disability community in general. My experience I believe indicates the potential for us, as we become more visible, to be accepted in our difference. Critical to this is the need for us to be seen in the fullness of human experience, including our capacity to experience laughter and love and the delight these experiences bring to our lives and those around us. These experiences are captured exquisitely when Allycia sees her newfound chromosome 18 friends, Martin and Kathryn kissing one another. She reacts in much the same way I expect other little girls might in a similar situation. She is simultaneously “grossed out” and intrigued, much to our delight. It is a lovely spontaneous moment that says much in the space of a minute about Martin and Kathryn, and about Allycia’s and my relationship. For me there is a beauty, there is honesty and there is transparency. Able to Love My desire for this film is similar to Garland Thomson’s desire for her writing to “provide access to some elements of my community to both disabled and non disabled audiences alike” (122). I felt part of the key to making the film “work” was ensuring it remained accessible to as wide an audience as possible and began with a naive optimism that the film could defy stereotypical story lines. I discovered this accessibility I desired was reliant upon the traditions of storytelling; language, the construction of character and the telling of a journey demanded an engagement in ways we collectively identify and understand (Campbell). I found our lives at times, became stereotypical. I had moments of feeling like a victim; Allycia as a dancer could well be perceived as a “supercrip” and the very act of making a film about my daughter could be viewed as a heroic one. The process resulted in my surrendering to working within a framework that relies upon, all too often, character construction that is stereotypical. I felt despondent many times upon realising the emergence of these in the work, but held onto the belief that something new could be shown by exposing “two narrative currents which are seldom included in the usual stories we tell about disability: sexuality and community” (Garland Thompson 114). The take on sexuality is a gentle one, concerned with emerging ideologies surrounding sexuality in our community. This is a new phenomenon in terms of the “place” of sexuality and intimacy within our community. One of our parents featured in the film makes this clear when he explains that the community is watching a new romance blossom “with interest” (18q) and that this is a new experience for us as a whole. In focussing on sexuality, my intention is to provoke discussion about perceptions surrounding people categorised as intellectually impaired and their capacity to love and build intimate relationships and the possibilities this presents for the chromosome 18 community. The theme of community features significantly in the film as audiences become privy to conferences attended by, in one instance, 300 people. My intention here is to “make our mark”. There has been no significant filmic presence of Chromosome 18. The condition is rare, but when those affected by it are gathered together, a significantly “bigger picture” of is presented where previously there was none. The community is a significant support network for families and is concerned with becoming empowered by knowledge, care and advocacy. The transcendence of global and cultural boundaries becomes apparent in the film as these differences become diminished in light of our greater need to connect with each others’ experiences in life as, or with, people born with genetic difference. The film highlights the supportive, educated and joyful “shape” of our community. In presenting our community I hope too that western society’s preoccupation with normativity and ableism (Goggin) is effectively challenged. In presenting a version of life that “destabilises the system and points up its inadequacy as a model of existential relations”, I am also demonstrating what Shildrick calls “unreflected excess, that which is other than the same” (105). The most significant shift for me has been to refigure my ideas about Allycia as an adult. When I was given her medical prognosis I believed she would be my responsibility for the rest of my life. I did not hold a lot of hope for the future and could not have possibly entertained the idea that she may live independently or heaven forbid, she may enter into an intimate adult relationship; such was my experience with the physically and intellectually impaired. Thankfully I have progressed. This progression has been, in part, due to attending a Chromosome 18 conference in Boston in 2007 where we met Kathryn and Martin, a young couple in the early stages of building a relationship. This is a new phenomenon in our community. Kathryn and Martin were born with chromosome 18 deletions. Meeting them and their families has signalled new possibilities for our children and their opportunities and their right to explore intimate adult relationships. Their relationship has given me confidence to proceed with an open mind regarding Allycia’s adulthood and sexuality. Conclusion The very act of making the film was one that would inevitably render me vulnerable. Placing myself before the camera has given me a new perspective on vulnerability as a state that simultaneously disempowers and empowers me. I could argue this process has given me a better understanding of Allycia’s place in the world, but to do this is to deny our differences. Instead I believe the experience has given me a renewed perspective in embracing our differences and has also enabled me to see how much we are alike. My understanding of myself as both “able” and “othered”, and the ensuing recognition of, and encounter with, my vulnerable self have in some measure, come as a result of being continually confronted with images of myself in the editing process. But more than this, reflecting upon the years since Allycia’s birth I have come to a more intimate understanding and acceptance of myself as a consequence of knowing Allycia. Whereas my experience has been a matter of will, Allycia’s contribution is in the fact that she simply is. These experiences have given me renewed hope of acceptance of people of difference - that over time we as a society may become used to seeing the different face and the different behaviours that often accompany the experience of people living with genetic difference. References Bhaskar, R. Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. London: Verso, 1993. Campbell, J. The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work. California: New World Library, 2003 Caouette, J. Tarnation. Dir. J. Caouette. DVD. 2004. Chromosome 18. "Chromosome 18 Research & Registry Society." 2008. 3 March 2008 ‹http://www.chromosome18.org/›. Darke, P. 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